While nothing can replace our wonderful modern medicine, the smell of live forest soil is a wonderful “drug” of its own. The complexity of its smell, somehow familiar, can be incredibly soothing, and earthing. And the soil is where we all connect.
When you smell the dirt you receive a call. Kind of a reminder of a world we are often a bit isolated from. It may seem discomforting and confusing at first, but pick it up and follow the call of the soil. For it is the call of your brain, the system you are most closely connected to, trying to make you realize the connections beyond the fringe of “you”. Why would it do that? Who knows, but there is an evolutionary advantage to feeling in peace with your environment, and apart from that an interconnected whole can not really divide itself, remaining connected despite all imaginably most diverse entanglement of its parts. It is the call of what is more than you. The call that makes evident to the you of your perspective the you that is all perspectives which is the you of your perspective. Suddenly you find yourself and you wonder what you where doing all along before that.
The soil is a reminder that there is a deeper soil beneath our human societies. And that the soil is a symbol of the real soil, as much as the real soil is the soil which is the symbol. A soil we can never loose touch with, but can merely be in illusion of having lost touch with. And when we happen to do so, it calls us. Or rather it calls itself to its senses. Nature outside of you, nature inside of you. What is you? You are the ocean, and you is a wave in the ocean.
You know why you love the nonhuman animals (assuming you don’t eat them). Because they feel the soil very clearly and don’t get mixed up in the abstractions of language (sometimes they do, but not as often).
We human apes live in a human society, but this human society lives in a bigger society. The soil is a reminder that we are not separate, but that we are always part of nature, and our societies are no different than anthills. The soil extends beyond the anthill.
