Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. and spirituality. Jay Griffiths is the author of numerous books, including an archipelago, wild and elemental journey, and a love letter from a stray moon.

In this essay, Jay explores the abundance of soil as the ultimate

source of our nourishment. Marvelling at fungi, worms, roots, and ancient water bears, she

wonders if giving our attention to what dwells beneath our feet might help us tread more

lightly with care and humility.

The earth of my garden is the heart of my home. All summer my garden is the hub of my life. I read here, eat here, talk here, drink here. My friends spill out of the house merrily onto the grass with candles and drinks. There are other characters here too. The rain, the wind and sun. The rain is

sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce. The wind is eloquent and sometimes angry. The sun,

sometimes soft, but often strong.

Beneath them all, the soil, shyest of all.

The garden links all these elements, earth, air, fire and water.

Just so, soil, the pedosphere, is at the heart of the biosphere. As the English diarist and scientist John Evelyn wrote of soil in Terra in 1675,

the best and sweetest is enriched with all that the air, dews, showers and celestial influences can contribute to it.

It uniquely intersects with the water of the hydrosphere, the air of the atmosphere and the rock of the lithosphere.

Soil is the source of our sustenance during our lifetimes. Harvests upon harvests, sheaves of corn piled together reaching the skies,

mountains of apricots, grapes a mile deep.

The soil provides sheer bounty, plenty and abundance.

This is the overground beneficence of earth's soil, but it holds subterranean beauties as well.

Sand, silt and clay particles combine to form soil, and the clay carries a surface electric charge.

Good earth contains air too pores for roots and water.

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