The soil is the bones of billions

The soil is the bones of billions 9th December 2008
Has anyone thought of what one does when they take a handful of soil?
We gardeners know such things.
Soil ain't soil but the skeletons of billions...
Sure, what we see as humus is the combined breakdown of trees and water mixed from generations and the millenia of turbulent and moon fed movements of life.
And this mixing into the soil of blood and bone is the manure of earth, the perpetual mixing of our ancestors we place into the pots and beds beneath the roots of plants and seedlings.
Look closely and you can see the white slivers of bone, the granules of the infinite ancestral umbilical chords connected to the umpteen lives of people and the things that inspired them.
The soil we walk over we too will become.
The soil speaks to those who still to listen.
"These fingers that turn me over and over I have felt before"
"Not so long ago I felt the wooden waana that turned the soil and dug the goanna from its burrow"
"And these white grains, you would not know it, but I have heard the cry of the humpback and the clicks of the sperm whale, and felt the soft touch of a starfish and felt the explosion of the wave near the shore.
And so, as you plant that rose or petunia, or kangaroo paw remember... it has been planted before, this soil, all of us, but not by you...