Gone Digging

Digging. Hesitance and anticipation come with it.

Hesitance: In knowing once ground is broken, squirmy things will appear. We’re taught in childhood that their purpose is to break down what’s in the dirt and turn it into nourishment for future growth. Visceral, sometimes unsettling, but necessary.

Hesitance. It’s a stutter in the throat; starting with a hollow leak of breath. It gets caught on your teeth as it’s spoken. It wants to stay inside.

Anticipation: There’s the positive kind; pulling at the strings of why you’re digging in the first place; to find something worthwhile. Affirming.

And then, there’s the dreadful kind. The blunt intrusion of uncovering something you’d hoped not to. Destabilizing.

Anticipation. It’s hurried in pronunciation. Slowing the syllables truncates it. It can’t help but tumble out of your mouth. 

When was the last time you decided to

Leave something? 

Take something? 

Toss something? 

What made you do it? Did you end up regretting it?

We dig, we find, but rarely ask why we pick things up, or why we’re afraid to leave them behind.

Maybe the squirmy things are there for natural intervention.

The idea of possession should invite a moment of pause. A hand that never opens becomes a fist. If we never let anything go, what would there be to turn over to the soil, to enrich it? We’d starve the ground we stand on.

Look at us. Aren’t we getting ready for the ground right now? 

Some say loving is deciding to pick something up and care for it over time, while knowing you don’t really possess it at all. While that might be true, it matters what we choose to extract, and how we treat it for it before it goes back.

Not everything nourishes the soil.

Hesitance, anticipation… the secret third thing? Intention. Checking in with yourself can make a world of difference. It could mean less time spent with things you regret picking up, and more time dreaming about what might grow.