On place, ancestry, and rootedness
Beneath our feet lies an archive older than any library, though part of it has been burned. Every step presses against layers of story: leaf mould that was once forest canopy, bones that were once breathing creatures, stones worn smooth by waters that have long since been dammed or diverted. Industrial agriculture has depleted much of this memory, turning living soil into sterile dirt, but what remains still holds more stories than we can read.
The soil holds everything, literally and selectively. It digests death into life, transforms endings into beginnings, carries forward the molecular memory of all that has walked, grown, fallen, and decomposed in each particular patch of earth. But it also holds toxins, pollutants, the chemical traces of violence done to land and life. Lead from old petrol, pesticides from decades of monoculture, radioactive isotopes from weapons testing. The soil remembers our harm as well as our care.
Stand still long enough in any place and something shifts: the subtle pull of belonging, the sense that this ground knows something we've forgotten about ourselves, or the uneasy awareness that we don't belong here at all. This is biochemical fact: the minerals in bones are borrowed from rock, the carbon in cells recycled from countless other lives. We are temporary arrangements of the earth's substance, though some arrangements are more temporary than others, some more welcomed by the land than others.
We move through landscapes as if they were backdrops to human dramas, forgetting that the ground beneath is alive, holding its own stories, its own intelligence. Development plans see only empty land waiting for improvement, rarely acknowledging that this "emptiness" might be fullness in a language they don't speak. Estate agents sell views and square footage while the soil beneath holds the bones of those who were displaced to make those views profitable. But some cultures understand this differently, they speak of country as relative, land as ancestor, soil as the foundation that holds all relationships together, until those relationships are severed by colonisation, enclosed by ownership, poisoned by extraction.
Every field holds fragments of former lives, though archaeologists aren't always welcome to excavate them. Pottery shards, metal tools, bones of the countless who worked this ground, unmarked graves of those whose labour was stolen, sacred sites that were supposed to remain hidden. Ancient hedgerows grew from soil enriched by ancestral ploughs, tended by hands we'll never know, hands that were free and hands that were enslaved, hands that were gentle and hands that were forced. Their labour lives on in the earthworms that still turn this dirt, the birds that still nest in these trees, the rain that still follows patterns established before history began.
This continuity offers something capitalism tries to destroy: the recognition that we belong to something larger than individual ambition. We are part of an ongoing conversation between land and life that has been going on for millennia, though colonisation silences many voices in that conversation. Our cells will return to this soil, join the slow chorus of decomposition and renewal that makes new life possible, regardless of what we own or what owns us. Death, at least, remains a commons.
To walk the same path in different seasons is to participate in this conversation, if we have access to paths we can walk safely, if we can afford the time for walking freely, if our bodies can walk at all. To notice which plants return each year, to feel how the ground changes beneath our feet, to witness things grow and die and grow again. These are practices of belonging that resist the extractive logic telling us we're separate from the systems that sustain us, though belonging itself can become a privilege when access to land is enclosed, when green spaces are privatised, when the very ground we stand on becomes a commodity.
The soil remembers buffalo that once grazed, though their bones also remember the bullets that killed them to starve Indigenous peoples into surrender. It remembers forests that once stood, though their stumps also remember the clearcuts that fed industrial expansion. It remembers rivers that once flowed, though their beds also remember the dams that redirected their water to distant cities. It remembers through chemistry, through the microscopic networks of fungi that connect root to root across vast distances, networks that roads and development break apart, that herbicides poison, that tillage destroys.
The soil holds our cruelty and our care in the same embrace. Industrial runoff and ancestral composting. Sacred plantings and chemical spills. The patient work of regeneration and the violent speed of extraction. It transforms everything eventually, but some things take longer to heal, and some wounds may be permanent.
We can learn this kind of memory, this kind of holding that includes the difficult alongside the beautiful. The kind that holds without grasping, that transforms without discarding, that makes every ending a beginning, every death a donation to life. The kind that reminds us we are participants in something infinitely larger than ourselves, something that continues regardless of whether we remember to participate consciously or kindly.
The question becomes: how do we participate? Do we add to the soil's store of care or its burden of harm? Do we remember that we belong to the land, or pretend that it belongs to us? Do we listen to what the soil remembers, or keep adding to its collection of sorrows?