My grade 10 science teacher was the one who introduced me to the mystery of soil. Now I’m a farm kid so I already had a pretty good awareness of the soil, but what struck me in class was the image of the world’s arable land covered with about 8” of soil, compared to the kilometres of rock and magma beneath it. It is such a tiny thin film of life-giving, crop producing, forest making, animal-feeding, microbiological mass of mystery that remains powerful and vulnerable all at the same time. The image has stayed with me while I rototill the garden and drive past grain-fields and pastures. When I go back to where I was born, I am aware that it is the soil there that fundamentally brought forth my life, provided for my family, for chickens, and our family’s dairy herd. We are creatures of the soil. Now I actually find comfort in that. If we take the literal Hebrew root of Adam’s name it means earth creature. There is a part of me who claims home as the soil. It’s where I come from and where I will return.