When we first met, I told you that I am not as old as Dirt. Of course, none of us are. But what is this Dirt? How old is it and where does it come from? Scientists say the whole thing started with a gigantic cloud of space dust. Disturbed by some unknown cosmic energy, the cloud began to swirl and twirl around for untold amounts of time until the center slowly accumulated into a spinning ball of fire that we call the Sun. Around the Sun, the remaining material began to clump together and eventually became the planets we know and love. You can’t wrap your head around the kind of time scientists attribute to this process. I don’t have a real understanding of something that took billions of years to happen. In fact, scientists often get away with using gigantic amounts of unknowns in their theories and explanations. Of course, the only ones who dispute them are other scientists who are explaining the same unknowns. There is just too much that is unaccounted for.

Like a baby with a bad temper, newborn Earth was hot mess full of fire and brimstone when she was born. Four billion years ago, volcanoes blew hot methane, ammonia and sulfur gas a mile high into the air. Geysers of water and hydrochloric acid spewed forth while molten lava flowed as if a gigantic chocolate fountain had gone berserk. The whole place was kind of like a big ball of crazy hot asphalt. As it cooled, the molten rock became hard rock which is the Great-great-great- triple great ancestor of today’s Dirt.

Regolith is the geological/scientific name used to describe all of the loose surface material on the planet, from dust to sand to soil to silt to gravel to rocks to boulders to Dirt. The Dirt under your feet is a mixture of things. It is made of ground up rock from way back, sand, clay and more recently decayed organic material known as humus. Some Dirt is incredibly old. Soil found at the bottom of a 10,000 ft long ice core under the ice caps of Greenland dates back 2.4 million years. Other Dirt was created during the last ice age as glaciers ice cut though mountains some 12,000 years ago. Dirt created in the compost bin in my back yard is a few months old. Most of what you dig up in your back yard is probably 10,000 to 2,000 years old. Most of the planet is made of hard rock and in many places, you don’t have to dig too deep to get through the relatively thin blanket of Dirt and hit rock bottom.

There is great satisfaction in building an imperfect wall. Working with this kind of stone is a chance to slow down. I like to build walls using irregular stone. I love a sandstone wall. Using irregular stone relieves me of the pressure to be perfect – perfectly level, perfectly in line.

It takes time to fit the pieces together because each piece is different. The edges don’t match and there are bumps, ridges, notches, curves, ledges and knots. Somehow the right stones find their way to the proper place in the wall. But only if you go slowly. And as you try to find the right stone, none fit perfectly. So you go through a process of compromise. You settle for small defects, lines that are not straight, variance in the level line, oddly shaped spaces; things that do not fit nicely with your human nature to control every little detail.

But as you lay them, the stones settle into place and you begin to see these little defects turning into small destinies in a perfect whole. It is the perfection of imperfection. It is the perfection inherent in nature and not the kind imposed by the human mind.

 

Tim Time

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