Last week, we shared The Soil, a powerful song that has become an anthem for the Hazelnut Community by David Benjamin Blower. This week, We get to hear directly form the artist! David reflects on the song’s origins and deeper meaning—offering insight into the story, spirit, and soil from which it grew.
I write this piece with a little embarrassment. I first connected with Hazelnut Community because they'd caught wind of a song I wrote called The Soil. I’m told it had become a sort of community anthem. John White asked me if I would write a little bit about it. So here we are. I am a very minor artist and The Soil is my very minor hit song: the one a few people might sing along to when I go and play here or there. I've naturally fallen in and out of love with it a few times. I feel both awkward to be writing about it, and also a little bit pleasantly indulged.
I wrote the song in 2018. Along with so many others, I was taking in what it meant to live in a time of climate emergency. I saw that I didn’t have a good place in my thought or my heart for this information. The scale is too big. The situation asked me to think in time frames, both desperately short and also geologically vast. It called me to a story in which the more-than-human world is not just a backdrop, it’s everything. There is no human story without the story of All Things. I was wanting some embodied practice that would open me to these creaturely truths that Modernity had no space for.
“Put your hands in the soil
Feel the groan and feel the joy
All sit with the hurt
Stare into the dirt..”
There's a rather mystical sounding text in Paul's letter to the Romans, in which it is said that the creation itself is groaning and praying and longing for liberation from its being subjected to systems of death. Paul calls this human community to join in with this wordless prayer of creation. The humans are not the centre here. They're joining in with everything else
Everything we eat comes from the soil, whether we eat plants, or meat and dairy from animals that eat plants. It's all from the soil. In the Creation story, humans also are made of the soil. The first human is called Adam, meaning “soil-creature”. None of this sounds untrue, exactly, to the Modern imagination; it just sounds distant and strange. Between myself and the soil there has always been a huge carbon-burning industrial food system. I've always been able to live from what the soil gives, without ever needing to touch it, or be with it.
Someone once sent me a video from their very big church. They were playing my song and people would take it in turns to come up to the stage and put their hands into a plastic bag of compost which had been cut open. Well. I was glad that someone had resonated with my desire for a prayerful practice with the soil. But I was looking for something rather less packaged and managed. I was wanting to prayerfully resituate my life, outside, on the land. I wanted to relativise myself amidst everything God has made. This hasn’t been very easy. I'm not actually very green fingered. I haven't always had access to gardening space. With some guidance here and there I've learned to forage some things. Changing how I view my place in the world is slow work.
I read a while ago that there are more living organisms in a teaspoon of soil than there are human beings on the planet. Ironically, this statistic might only deepen a muck-averse imagination. Moving things under a microscope are everything a sanitised world wishes to avoid (nevermind the trillions of bacterial organisms that live in any one human body). This is the miracle of creation. We are part of a living planet. The only one we know about. The life that permeates the soil is the reason we are here. Pure gift. Pure grace. Pure wonder. The soil is a good place for awe, worship and gratitude, in a time when we have no good choices left but to reconcile ourselves to All Things once again, in what Paul called systenazo: the prayer of groaning.