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Making
things happen - with integrity. A Weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, March 27, 2000 Volume II Number 13
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FOCUS - Decomposing Granite
For many years, Carolyn’s parents lived in a small farming town with a descriptive name – Black Earth.
Tucked away in the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin along Highway 14, that black earth of Black Earth produces grains and corn and wide grassland pastures in abundance. Meandering creeks and rivers winding through the meadows, the forested hills on the horizon, the split rail fences and red barns and tall navy blue silos and Gothic white farm houses and winding country roads and circular wagon wheeled irrigation systems spraying water on crops like fire hoses and Holstein cows turning their heads and methodically grinding cud – makes one grateful for the rich black earth.
No
wonder they named the town after it.
After a decade or so of pastoral ministry in Black Earth, my father-in-law retired to another Wisconsin town with an equally descriptive name. Spring Green. Just a few miles down the highway. In springtime, the town makes its name proud. You’ve never seen deeper, more brilliant or more pervasive shades of green. Against a deep blue sky, everything is green. It even smells green.
Black Earth. Spring Green.
Couldn’t be a more stark contrast to the soil in our California garden. In fact, “soil” is a misnomer. We call it decomposing granite. “DG.”
It’s a kind of fine gravel. Coarser than sand. It started as massive granite boulders sprinkled all over our hills and valleys like chunks of feta cheese atop a green salad. Wind and rain and moss and sun cause erosion over the centuries, the breaking up of huge chunks of rock, reducing massive boulders to tiny pebbles. The quartz in the granite glistens in the sunlight. Fissures create cracks. Scaling peels back layers of rock like an onion. The moss does the rest.
When DG is wet, it’s slippery. A slick red clay mud. Then under the summer sun, it bakes into an adobe brick hardness. If you want to break it up, a shovel is useless. Better to get an air-hammer down at the U-Rent.
If you want to grow plants in it, you need to “amend.” Our soil needs a gardening additive. Without some help, our DG would kill off the heartiest of plant life. Cactus? Maybe. Manzanita? Will grow just about anywhere. Tumbleweed? Probably. Sagebrush? That too.
But if you want tomatoes or cucumbers or onions sweet peas or peppers - if you want roses, or pansies, or marigolds or daisies - edible vegetables or the bright colors of blooming flowers - you’ve got to amend.
Out here we call it compost. It’s terrific soil amendment. If you identify at all with thriving plants, you will eventually come to love the smell and the feel of compost. Compost is the aphrodisiac of the garden. It’s the viagra of fertile soil.
If the harvest of compost is tasty and fragrant and pleasing to the eye, the composition of compost isn’t. Au contraire, compost in its natural state is anything but pleasing. You will recoil at the list of ingredients. Compost is a mixture of decaying organic matter. Dead leaves. Dead insects. The abandoned waste of animals and insects. The dark chemical paste oozing from the bowels of the earthworm. Discarded scraps from the kitchen. Grinds. Peels. Cores. Skins. Shells. All blended together, mixed and dried and piled up in a backyard pit, rotting and crumbling as a collection of rich nutrients.
It all gets wheel barrowed and spread and tilled until our DG looks just a little more like Black Earth than Death Valley.
* * * * * * * *
I checked out of the office on Wednesday. I blocked the day out months ago. The master calendar says “NO APPOINTMENTS.” I cleared it as a second annual day of rest, reflection, inspirational reading and prayer. No TV. No e-mail. No telephone. No business. No computer. No freeway. No newspaper.
A day of solitude. Air out the brain. Pump up the heart. Take a long walk. Work a few hours in the garden.
It was a second annual event for me. I did the same thing last year. I forgot how much I liked it. I think I’ll do it once a quarter instead of once a year. Maybe once a month.
Coincidentally, it was a crystal clear, breezy Southern California seventy two degree spectacular day. I took some pictures on the walk through the fragrant orange groves up the hill through the avocadoes to the place I call Inspiration Rock. I looked out on Palomar Mountain. I sang worship songs. Out loud.
The older I get, the more I recognize the needs of my own soul. The spiritual dimension of my life deepens. I become less interested in things and more interested in the quality of my day. The meaning of my life. The genuine and powerful connections in my relationships.
I wrote letters to our kids. I told them how proud they make me and how much I love them. How much I believe in their abilities. How I anticipate watching their successes multiply, and I remind them that I’ll be there at every turn with a hug and a high five.
I thought about the value of meal times. So I stepped out of character and, for that matter, out of my comfort zone, and prepared dinner that night for Carolyn and me. We took a couple hours to consume it. Light classical music always creates a welcome sense of serene orderliness. Candlelight sets the mood. We talked and laughed and enjoyed our dining room, together.
It was a day to amend the DG of my soul.
* * * * * * * *
Ken Gire achieved his dream. He is a full time professional writer. He is a wordsmith. A crafter of the pregnant phrase. He makes a blank white page come alive with his sentences and paragraphs and short potent exhortations. Paper and ink are his brick and mortar. With them, he creates unforgettable images.
His word pictures rival cinematography.
Ken Gire engages your mind. But early on you’ll be deeply moved. Ken writes from the heart.
I met Ken some fifteen years ago. We struck up a friendship. I read some of his stuff early on. From the first paragraph, I knew this guy had talent. All of us predicted that he would eventually find a flock of eager readers. He has.
I picked up one of his most recent books off the Internet a few weeks ago. It’s called The Reflective Life – Becoming More Spiritually Sensitive to the Every Day Moments of Life. It’s a tribute to Ken’s writing skill that a book so obscurely titled could become a best seller.
Ken argues that most of us admit to our need for a deeper and richer and more satisfying spirituality. But so much of our pre-occupations are artificial and harried and over-stimulated and flippant and hollow. We long for meaning.
Ken reminds us that we are surrounded by rich possibilities every day. Our spiritual appetites can be satisfied. But we are not prepared. We are unaware. We are distracted.
He draws from a Gospel parable. It’s like a seed looking for a place to germinate and grow, Ken says. If it lands on fertile, prepared soil, the seed will drop it’s roots, absorb the nutrients and moisture, send a shoot skyward in search of sunlight, spread its leaves and create its fruit. But in the absence of fertile soil, the seed doesn’t have a chance. It’ll fail to penetrate a hard surface. It’ll be picked up by a hungry bird… and maybe become someone else’s compost.
So, if we want a fruitful life, says Ken Gire, we need fertile soil. But who of us, Ken asks, wants to go through the nasty process of making that soil fertile? Not many.
To produce crops like that, the soil would have to be plowed, its clods broken up, its embedded resistance removed a rock at a time, the competing tendrils rooted out weed by weed. And to nourish the crops with the minerals they need, certain things in and around the soil would have to surrender their lives. Leaves. Twigs. Bark. Each in its own time and in its own way would have to be broken off and fall to the ground. All of it would have to die and crumble into compost. Mixed with manure left behind from passing animals. Rotted by the moisture and the mold and the mildew. Mulched by insects. Eaten by bacteria. Stirred by the slow tunneling of earthworms.
All of us wants a fruitful life, but who wants to go through that to get it?
So it’s a fundamental principle… for the seeds of meaning to grow, one needs good fertile soil. Where does it come from? Brokenness. Humility. Shattered dreams. Hardship. Disappointment. Abandonment. Vulnerability. Goofs. Rejections.
But who wants those things? Ken goes on to admit…
I do not. I want a roof over my head with a thirty-year guarantee on the shingles and a home-owner’s policy to back it up. I want a door that closes out the outside world. A door with a lock. A lock with a deadbolt. And a deadbolt with a security system. I want a relationship with God, but without the risk. I want a religious fling, not a marriage I have to work at. I want the Cliff Notes to the faith, not the novel.
My own reflections go on. How true it is. The DG of my own heart wants to hang on to the appearance of success. Wants to find a hiding place from the pressures. Wants to block out the hardships. Wants to cover up the shortcomings, the errors in judgment, the violations of my own code of ethics.
But the barrenness of it all causes me to long for a soil amendment. Allowing the spoils of all those experiences to penetrate and enrich the soil of my life.
New seeds will grow and produce a rich, abundant crop. Enough to nourish not only me, but others as well.
* * * * * * * *
I always thought Black Earth was a funny name for a town. Now I realize that if I really want this life to turn spring green, I need good black earth.
As a leader, at night when your head hits the pillow, or when the door’s closed and no one else is around, you may have to admit that sometimes your life feels like stark decomposing granite.
Let the old stuff turn to compost. Let it penetrate and enrich the soil of your soul. Let new seeds find a home. You provide water. And sunlight.
Step back, and watch what happens.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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