When people are grounded, they feel a strong sense of presence, standing upon the earth and knowing, confidently, that they are in accord with that place and time. What is it like, though, when people feel not just close to the earth, but identify with the soil, feeling like dirt?
There are many ways to interpret dirty feelings, but today I’ll focus on just one, the feeling of humiliation, because it is within the grimy grip of such emotions that we are most human.
When we experience the sensation of our humanity, we feel feel connected, mixed in with the world, in touch with our surroundings. We aren’t merely on the earth. We’re in it, part of the muck of it all.
The word human comes from the same linguistic ancestor as the richest word for soil, humus. Humus isn’t just the ground beneath us, the pulverized remains of dead things, reduced to dust. A mixture of minerals, moisture, and organic material, humus is alive. A teaspoon of it can contain over a billion living things.
To feel human is to be immersed in the vital humus of the world, and yet, it can also involve the feeling of having been brought low. It’s all a matter of perspective.
We live in a time when the dominant mythology places us beneath the exalted machines of digital technology. The most we can hope for, in the new silicon schemes, is to have our consciousness uploaded into a computer database, to achieve union with the great transcendent circuitry of the Singularity.
The software uncenters us. It’s nowhere in particular, constantly mobile, perpetually homeless.
We can’t live in the digital, but it’s become so pervasive that we forget that the world still exists. When we’re reacquainted with it, we feel humbled, or even humiliated, two more word cousins of humanity and the humus from which we are born and must return.
We aren’t disembodied spirits. We aren’t ghosts in a machine. We aren’t brains trapped in servant bodies.
We humans are creatures of the humus, and our health depends upon the preservation of this connection. Those of us who live in environments cleansed of humus are sickly and struggling. When we can’t get our hands dirty, we develop asthma, allergies, immune disorders, nutritional deficiencies, and depressions.
Our bodies only work well when they are host to trillions of microorganisms that we take in from the living soil. Within us, they outnumber the cells carrying the DNA of Homo sapiens. They digest our food and stimulate our serotonin.
To be human is to be smeared thickly with the earth, inside and out. With our lives of daily showers, face masks, and disinfectant hand gels, we are becoming something else, something inhuman.
