Thoughts While Harvesting Clay
There’s a collective need for the human right now: the dirt, the flesh, the tangible, the mess. I want to read words that a human wrote; alive and imperfect. It hits differently than words synthesized and churned out by a machine. I want to hear the cadence of a human voice, the imperfections of human grammar, feel emotion that moved up and through a feeling human body. I want to interact with art that holds fingerprints and eat food farmed by suntanned hands. I’m craving the depth of human soulfulness that only humans can embody.
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Quantum physicist and environmental activist Dr. Vandana Shiva shared, in an interview I recently came across, that the Latin word for living soil is humus— and that human, and humility, are both derived from it. To be truly human then, is to be of the soil. To be truly human is to be humble.
And I think, too, to be truly human is to know, deep in our bones, that we are derived from living earth.
I often find myself acutely aware of my own craving for nature immersion— often a primal type of immersive experience; digging, clawing, low to the ground and barefoot with the childlike wonder of it all. Maybe in part, I lean into this to boldly resist the false narrative that we are separate from nature, separate from one another.
As I dig for clay, I interact with root systems and mycelial networks and am reminded how trees tap into the deep underground for connection and communication. I wonder if, on some conscious or subconscious level, we’re all craving the safety to experience that depth with other people- to be vulnerable, to expose our mess and imperfections, our rough edges and tender spaces- because when that’s met with love and acceptance, we access deeper connection, and might know ourselves as part of a greater whole.
Might we, as a species, be craving the human and craving the humus? Because deep in our bones, we know that there’s a specific kind of aliveness only accessed when immersed in either? And isn’t the human experience just that, anyway? To seek out experiences that remind us that we were never actually separate to begin with?
