On a trip to the library a short time ago I noticed a short, stout looking man in his forties working outside the library redoing flower beds and planting new scrubs. A local landscaper employed him to do the really dirty hands-on-work of the business, supplying him with all the tools and a truck to use as he diligently was making a difference in the appeal of the old library building.

I avidly went through an armful of books every week and had been doing so for years. It was on my next visit, as I returned the armful of books and checked out another armful, that the man had worked his way around to the entrance. As I was leaving, he looked up from his scrub planting, grinned and shook his head as he noticed my bounty of books. Wondering what the grin and the head shaking was all about I deposited the books in my car and wandered over to the landscaper and struck up a conversation.

He was actually very friendly, telling me that he once was like me, read all the time, but was now enjoying his work with plants so much that he had not read much in years. I explained that I thoroughly enjoyed reading and could not imagine a life without books. He replied with a very friendly encouragement to do what makes me happy.

As a matter of fact he explained we were both doing something similar. I was digging into books and creating a mindscape that was very rewarding as I viewed the amalgam of many years of reading. He was digging into soil and with the help of plants and rain and sun was creating a landscape that rewarded him and others with beautiful scenes of flowers and greenery. So we were both diggers.

All these years, he noted, I had culled whatever I’d learned that didn’t go toward the best of my mental imagery and had cultivated and fertilized with thought that which I had wanted to keep. An especially good work, he added, if I shared with others what I’d put together. I agreed with him that there were many similarities in what we were doing. I bragged on his skills and told him the library grounds were in the best shape I’d ever seen them.

Then my new found friend went a little deeper into talking and thinking, much deeper than he’d went all day with his digging. As he leaned on his shovel and wiped sweat from his face with a towel hanging from around his neck, he began to talk about dirt . I eventually realized he was rendering to me a philosophy of dirt.

My friendly landscaper’s philosophy was that everything around us came from dirt. The materials in the library building had an origin in dirt. The books, the ink printed on the books, the newspapers and the magazines had their start as dirt . All the matter about us and in our very bodies, the very raw materials of our existence, either grew from dirt or consists of matter that is mined from minerals or elements hidden in the dirt. So his philosophy made sense if you broadened the word dirt to be earth.

I stood dumbfounded, trying to think of something that I might claim did not spring from dirt or what was found within dirt. How about the air we breathe, or the sunlight, or the water we drink. He protested, saying that even the gases of the air, the oxygen we breathe, and the water we drink are natural resources that spring from earth. Sunlight is not actually seen, but allows us to see and even it is stored as energy within the organic and inorganic matter that is a part of the earth. From dirt we came and to dirt we return. Nothing of formed matter is permanent.

I’d never thought of existence in this way. I pondered with my fellow digger that since everything in both our worlds, landscaped and mindscaped, is impermanent and has a destiny of ground zero, what, if anything, would be the lasting fruit of our labors? No matter the education, social status, or material wealth everyone would eventually fall back to the equalizing dirt. Well, my fellow digger offered the thought that since we make and was made by something unseen and unmade that maybe some part of us, unmade, might have a future in the unmade. Wow! I really thought seriously about returning my books and starting to just read the dirt.

I invited the landscaper to my home for the evening where we might pursue his philosophy of dirt further. After telling him I was really digging this stuff he accepted the invitation and asked me where I lived . I gave him directions to my place out in the county on Gold Mine Road. As I drove home, I thought about how a mine and a mind are both places where one can dig into the source of all things.