There are more organisms, living in a teaspoon of rich, healthy soil, than humans in this world, research has found. I can’t tell you how “healthy” has been defined, or how rigorous the research was, but either way, I find it wonderful. Humble, not so humble, dirt.
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And then there’s dust. Since learning that it’s made from cells of human skin—and, according to one study, also paint, pollen, fibres, minerals, mould; hair and viruses and ash and soot; insect body parts, bacteria, material, bits of soil—I see it differently. It contains traces of families, history, life. It’s almost sacred when you think of it this way. And isn’t it, poetically, from dust and dirt we came?
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I still recall, cannot forget, the moment I first saw a life beginning, beating in my body, just weeks after conception. You could call the sight “cardiac tissue with a pulse”. Or beautiful, remarkable; beyond belief.
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A more recent memory: cleaning out our washing machine’s filters; noticing within a felted mat of lint, an unexpected sight: seeds had somehow stuck to fabric, or been stowed in pockets by young boys. Which, I couldn’t tell, but I could see they’d survived multiple cold washes—not because I saw them, nestled in the lint, but because they had begun to send out roots, to send up tiny sprouts of luminescent green. The machine’s designers put a window in the lid; not with this intention, but enabling this result. It let light into the darkness—warm, nutrient-rich, life-giving light.
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I was walking before dawn last week, along a country road. I was struck by how effectively the waning moon still lit my way—and by how quickly and completely I was blinded, when a car drove into view. I thought about the fact that light can make us see—and do the opposite. ‘Too much of a good thing’… If you measured light in teaspoons, just one might, albeit softly, reach from a room’s centre, to each wall.
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Thinking about seeing got me thinking about glass—the kind we put on faces, inside frames. How can a substance made from something that is gritty and opaque be made so smooth? How can it let light stream straight through in such a way that what seemed soft can become sharp? Stars appear in sky; black marks become words. A limitation is forgotten, overcome. Then the magical contraption is removed and gently folded, set aside; as heavy lids descend to end the day.
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We’re so used to it we don’t think twice when marks we make on paper, type on screens, evoke images and feelings, create meaning and make sense. The smallest of them all—a seed-like dot—is not the least. It ends sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, books. It makes us pause, it helps us think.
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Sometimes that which seems too commonplace to be of note, or declare “beautiful”, is mighty in its way.
That teaspoon of dirt; this tiny dot.
