Leaping by Brian Doyle

Author:Brian Doyle [Doyle, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012040, RELIGION / Christian Life/Inspirational, REL012030, RELIGION / Christian Life/Family, BIO026000, BIOGRAPHY ' AUTOBIOGRAPHY /Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780829439045
Publisher: Loyola Press
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Revelations & Epiphanies

I believe that the fingerprints of the Maker are everywhere: children, hawks, water . . .

eating dirt

I have a small daughter and two smaller sons, twins. They are all three in our miniscule garden at the moment, my sons eating dirt as fast as they can get it off the planet and down their gullets. They are two years old, they were seized with dirt-fever an instant ago, and as admirably direct and forceful young men, quick to act, true sons of the West, they are going to eat some dirt, boy, and you’d better step aside.

My daughter and I step aside.

The boys are eating so much dirt so fast that much of it is missing their maws and sliding muddily down their chicken chests. It is thick moist dirt, slightly more solid than liquid. I watch a handful as it travels toward the sun. It’s rich brown stuff, almost black, crumbly. In it there are a couple of tiny pebbles, the thin lacy bones of a former leaf (alder? hawthorn?), the end of a worm, the tiny green elbows of bean sprouts. In a moment I will pull the boys over and issue a ticket and a stern speech about eating beans before their time, but right now I watch with interest as one boy inserts the dirt, chews meditatively, emits a wriggling worm, stares at it—and eats it again.

“Dad, they’re eating the garden,” says my daughter.

So they are. I’ll stop them soon, before they eat more of the world than they should, but for this rare minute in life we are all absorbed by dirt, our faces to the ground, and I feel, inarticulately, that there’s something simple and true going on here, some lesson they should absorb, so I let them absorb dirt.

It occurs to me that we all eat dirt. Fruits and vegetables are dirt transformed by light and water. Animals are vigorous dirt, having dined on fruit or vegetables or other animals who dine on flora. Our houses and schools and offices are cupped by dirt and made of wood and stone and brick—former dirt. Glass is largely melted sand, a kind of clean dirt. Our clothing used to be dirt. Paper was trees was dirt. We shape dirt into pots, plates, mugs, vases. We breathe dirt suspended in the air, we crunch it between our teeth on spinach leaves and fresh carrots, we wear it in the lines of our hands and the folds of our faces, we catch it in the linings of our noses and eyes and ears. Some people are driven by private fires to eat dirt, often during pregnancy—the condition is called pica, from the Latin word for magpie.

In short we swim in an ocean of dirt, yet we hardly ever consider it closely, except to plumb it for its treasures, or furrow it for seed, or banish it from our persons, clothes, houses. We’re suckers for dramatic former dirt—cougars, lilies, bears, redwoods—but don’t often reflect on the basic stuff itself: good old simple regular normal orthodox there-it-sits-under-everything dirt.

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