Lisa Bowden
Friends,
Any good farmer knows her soil must be tended carefully—tilled, fertilized, watered, weeded—before it can receive seeds and be a means of growth.
I’ve been contemplating the tangled mesquite bosque in our back yard and the ground that has supported it for nearly 100 years. The weather changed a couple weeks ago, the angle of sunlight is friendlier and has been beckoning me. There’s a deep pile of various sized, broken, white rocks clustered in a ring inside what once looks to have been a large garden bed. At the center is ash from years of fires. It’s taking days to roll heavy wagons full of rock elsewhere in the yard, making pathways with them, creating spaces that weren’t there before. It’s heavy, dusty work to just get to the compacted dirt underneath the rocky upper layer, but gratifying to imagine it a wildflower meadow come February.
In Matthew today, “Jesus tells of a farmer who sows seed indiscriminately. Some seed falls on the path with no soil, some on rocky ground with little soil, some on soil which contains thorns, and some on good soil. In the first case, the seed is taken away; in the second and third soils, the seed fails to produce a crop; but when it falls on good soil, it grows and yields thirty-, sixty-, or a hundred-fold.”
The Parable of the Sower is also known as the Parable of the Soils.
Soil, at its core, is a complex and vibrant natural resource—the foundation upon which terrestrial life thrives. It’s far more than just broken-down rock; it’s a dynamic system teeming with life and constantly evolving. Dirt is the consequence of soil degradation. It represents a loss of ecological viability. It is the absence of life.
I’m wondering how to cultivate a heart teeming, evolving with life like Good Soil when things feel next level hard all around? How to tend the life-giving ecosystems of the hours given us? St Francis reminds, “The result of prayer is life. Prayer irrigates the earth and the heart.”
Is that active listening, contemplation, silent meditation? Or, perhaps practices that keep attention-robbing distractions at bay?
For me, it’s losing my phone, camping, sitting in candlelight before everyone wakes. And a softer ground that receives, understands, internalizes Christ—for fruit that glorifies God, blesses those all around me; for deep and yielding rootedness.
What is your irrigating prayer practice, dear sibling?
—Lisa
