We are dirt personified; and dirt is us. Universal is the wisdom that we rose from the soil. Ancient Egyptians believed the god Khnum molded humans on a potter's wheel. Ancient Greeks also imagined Prometheus shaping men out of water and clay. Zoroastrians speak of the first human, Gayomart, being created from mud. The Chinese goddess Nüwa formed humans from the yellow earth. In Genesis, Adam was made from ground dust (*adamah*). Even non-believers know that the atoms that make us —the calcium, the carbon, the hydrogen, the nitrogen, the oxygen— all come from the earth beneath our feet. Then, for our whole bipedal lives, to the ground we remain firmly tethered; except for brief stints of propelling ourselves into the air by igniting an ancient ichor excavated from the ground and made of dead animals. When it is our turn to pass, to the ground we return, thus repaying the debt of breath. Our ritual for that homecoming has a name (interment, from *inter* and *terra*, literally "going into the ground") as well as its own incantation: "For dust you are and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). Speaking of Terra: we give the same name to our spinning rock of dirt, Earth, and to the actual dirt, earth, that comprises it; for they (and us) are one and the same. The ground truth is that dirt is the alpha and omega of our physical existence. And perhaps of our mental one, too. Don't we harbor dirty thoughts? After all, we are not angels fallen from above; we are risen apes pretending to stand tall. We might soap, scrub, and sanitize our dusty bodies in dissonance of what we are. Yet every monk, saint, and shaman knows to kneel to the ground when praying. Our machines mine the earth and turn sand into concrete walls, but even that is just momentarily shuffling dirt around. For everything eventually dissolves back to the earth, and when it does, it is not a fall but a reunion. ![[Pasted image 20251226181644.png]]