SOIL. Where life begins.
Nothing is more clear to me than this: the health of humanity is what’s at stake. It is only up to us to take rein of the narrative and stop allowing distractions like viruses and war. We are being poisoned every single day by the people who tell us what they want us to think. There are countless examples of such betrayal from our fellow humans, and that is in part the focus of this platform. But everything is connected! And that is what I’d like to show you. The soil is where life starts, and it is most important for the future of civilization. Yet we’ve been deceived to believe that killing what lives in the soil is how we manage our way forward. Perhaps this started out as an innocent prospect in order to survive hard times and support our expansive population, and we did benefit from aspects of this structure. But when you kill the things that provide life, the life you are attempting to sustain will eventually suffer the consequences of the broken systems it once relied upon. Which is why we see more people each and every year with chronic illness. The soil is part of our existence, whether we choose to think about it or not. We have the ability to change how we treat our planet, which has a direct impact on our own physical bodies; the reverse is also true.
Soil is our foundation
Bigger picture: our society is sick. And it is deeply related to how we’ve been treating our soil, which grows the food that we eat. We have been killing the life that is literally within our planet, and removed ourselves from the acquisition of our own fuel, which has allowed this to perpetuate. Now is the time to end harmful practices that pollute and destroy the resources that we are dependent on, and it is much simpler than “they” want you to believe. The only thing is, we all have to participate. But I can promise you, you and your kin are worth it. And there is no one else to do it but us!
For Nature’s Sake… Leave Your Leaves!
When you don’t rake your leaves, bag them up, and send them off to an undisclosed location, many beautiful things can happen year after year in your yard…
The leaves will break down and decompose, feeding all the organisms within the soil that help life above it thrive.
The insects that we rely on to keep pests at bay and pollinate all our vegetation, so that we can breathe and eat and enjoy nature’s beauty, get to sleep through the winter and reemerge in the spring.
You’re one step closer to creating an ecosystem in your yard, rather than the possibility of just part-time habitat for wildlife.
Our yards are part of the wild. They are not meant to be ‘tidy’, they are supposed to be a place for life to be supported. Whoever decided and propagated the idea that we need to live in emptiness was ultimately convincing us of our own demise.
Many of the practices that are mainstream in our culture these days are actually harmful to the ecosystem, yet we are not taught this! We are conditioned to compete with our neighbors for the least amount of ‘debris’. We believe our social status and housing values increase when our yards are sterile and clean. Rather than continuing to perpetuate this insanity, we have the ability to regenerate our ecosystems and bring back the creatures that help us thrive.
We’ve been lied to about what a healthy neighborhood actually looks like. Debris from our vegetation is part of the overall system; the web of life! It all feeds the organisms in the soil, the insects, the birds, the small animals, and eventually the larger fauna as well (including us)! When you take away the ‘dead’ stuff, you are removing the nutrients for next year’s life. The trees and shrubs are brilliant enough to feed themselves, over and over! But we are the ones making it harder for them to survive with their innate resilience, and then we wonder why we have unwanted bugs, and many species of our plants are struggling over time.
Even if you have to tidy your lawn, per some ordinance, try to find a place on your property where you can keep your yard waste and leaf litter. Find a corner or an area where you can have your own compost patch. That way, you can save some of the insects that went into hibernation for the winter, and they can survive and reawaken very close to where they had intended. And then they will be ready to do their hard work for your landscape!! As nature designed them to! This helps create a closed-loop ecosystem, right in your own habitat! You can co-exist with the wildlife, and it is mutually beneficial. You will get to see more butterflies and birds and cool bugs, your plants will flourish, and you have less labor in your spare time. So don’t give away your own organic matter! Keep it for yourself!
There is so much we each can do to benefit our own little slice of Mother Earth. It is not only up to corporations to stop decimating and poisoning. It is up to us to learn about our impact on the parts of the earth that we literally touch: where our homes sit, where our feet meander… that is step number one! Awareness of our existence, and how we can improve, little by little.
I live on ⅓ of an acre. I’ve never raked my leaves in the 12 Falls I’ve lived here. Granted, I am not living amongst a ton of oak trees, but their leaves get blown over from neighboring yards… The only time I rake is in late spring, after the creatures sleeping in the leaf litter have a chance to come out of their slumber. I just move the leftover leaves and pinecones in my backyard, so that the little bits of sun back there can get to greening the groundcovers of my otherwise muddy, clay soil. Everything else spends the winter and early spring breaking down, feeding the life that cycles through my property. I also have a section of my yard, under the canopy of my tree line, where I build up piles of branches, cut vegetation, sod, and so forth. This provides shelter for little creatures to raise their young and do their magic on my property, and it is part of the process of breaking down organic matter to be rebirthed as new life.
I usually don’t cut back the stalks on my shrubs and weeds either. If I do, I bundle them into large bouquets and place them around the yard, to still offer as food through the winter. And because of this, we are blessed with so many species of wild plants and insects in the spring, and we get incredible amounts of birds throughout the entire year. I don’t use bird feeders; I provide vegetation to support the wildlife, and the seeds left behind help to sustain them through the winter as well.
We do need to manage the wildlife to an extent, but we don’t need to sterilize it. Just leave your leaves, so that they can partake in their natural life cycle. Or at least find a way to keep your plants’ nutrients on your property in order to recycle them back to themselves!! We humans must stop with the literal overkill! Nature is brilliant and beautiful. The more we get in touch with being part of the cycles, the more we can realize how the earth supports us in our everyday lives.