The Earth Remembers

We build our lives on the skin of giants. We plow the ash, we plant our seeds, and we wait for the harvest as if the ground beneath us were permanent. It is a quiet arrogance, this belief that the soil belongs to us. In the north, the frost heaves the stones upward every spring, a slow, grinding reminder that the earth is never truly still. It is merely waiting. We are guests here, passing through the brief window of a season, tending to things that grow only because the mountain allows it. There is a profound humility in the act of bending over a furrow, hands stained by the dust of something that once burned. We work, we eat, we sleep, and all the while, the mountain breathes in the rhythm of centuries we will never see. What remains when the hands stop moving and the ash settles once more?

Greg Goodman has taken this image titled Volcanic Onion Fields. It captures the weight of that labor against the silence of the mountain. Does the earth feel the touch of the spade?