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.