“By the time I started writing I was in such a state of grief that the only thing that sustained me was that I could go outside and just lie facedown on the earth,” said Alice Walker, describing in a talk in San Francisco how she survived the trauma of writing Possessing the Secret of Joy, a book about genital mutilation in Africa. “Somehow I got the energy that I always get from the earth directly….It gives me everything, including peace of mind. Just by being underneath my feet, just by lying on it.”
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Not only do I not have a place to press my body against the earth, but these days I rarely touch it at all. Last fall I tried to keep track of how often I walked on the ground. Not on concrete, asphalt, gravel, carpeting, or the boards of someone’s backyard deck, but on real live dirt. I kept a log in a small notebook I was carrying around at the time, which I ran across the other day. On three lines I had written, “10/2 shortcut across park, 45 seconds; 10/4 walked beside bike path, 5 min; 10/12 vacant lot, 15 seconds.” That’s all I’d recorded. I’ve walked on grass since October, but the amount of time was so negligible I forgot to record it.
The difference between soil and concrete is the difference between life and death. Soil writhes with living organisms: A single gram– an amount that wouldn’t even fill your cupped palm–holds at least 1,000,000 bacteria, 1,000 algae, 1,000 protozoa, and anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 actinomycetes, an organism that’s sort of a cross between algae and bacteria. I asked Bob Darmody, a scientist from the University of Illinois whose expertise is in soils, how many different species of these microorganisms would be living in Illinois earth. He laughed like I was nuts. “A tremendous number,” he said. “Soil is one of the most dynamic ecosystems in the world. It’s incredibly diverse.”
Last week I interviewed someone at the Chicago Academy of Sciences in Lincoln Park. I was dressed up in a skirt and blouse and jacket, but after I walked out of the museum I went into the park to lie down in the grass. It was now or never–or at least not for a long time. I spread my jacket out in a jagged patch of sunlight edged by the shade of two maples and lay back.
