The soil is all of the earth that is really ours. The seasons, with their heat and their cold make the soil. The storms make the soil, with water, the most powerful substance on Earth. The winds make the soil, spreading dust across thousands of miles. The tides make the soil, stirring the river deltas and their fertile slimes. And above all, the trees and the plants, the dead and the digested, the eaters and the eaten, make the soil…We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. ‘It must be somewhere up there on the horizon,’ we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet.

~ An Excerpt from Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, by William Bryant Logan

Athabasca River, Jasper National Park, photo by Devadana Sanctuary