World Soil Day
“’Do you pray?’ a good friend asked me recently. ‘I just wondered where you get your hope from?’ It’s a bit of an odd question to ask someone who doesn’t believe in God…
‘I don’t pray in the way that I grew up praying but I suppose I do pray,’ I tell my friend. To sow, plant, harvest and eat, for me, is an act of worship. I kneel to the ground and bow down to the forces and rhythms of the natural world. I honour them with my reverence and offer them my trust. I trust that the cycles will turn and that, even when they don’t conform to my wants or perform as I expect, there is a lesson to be learned from it. It is prayer to move in step with the seasons as they turn and with the weather as it changes, especially in these dark times of the year when memories of light and warmth and verdant growth are hard to conjure. It is prayer to remember and believe that they will return again. It is prayer to trust in the profundity of small acts – of growing and gardening and loving and feeding – and to trust that they are happening in tandem with the many other small acts of wholehearted people, and that they will, and do, add up to something meaningful.
I trust where I sit as being infinitesimal within the great elemental shifts across our planet, a planet that sits within a universe amongst universes, under a sun and moon amongst many suns and moons. I sit within this knowledge and believe it gives my modest acts more meaning, not less. That this knowing shows my existence to be both miraculous and profoundly unremarkable. From this understanding, I feel able to participate in these great flows of energy that move us all to worship at the altar of the forces of nature. So yes, I suppose I do pray. Growing plants is how I pray.”
From Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong by Claire Ratinon
Chorlton Unitarians 