Whenever our world is turned upside down, wherever there is a wound, or things go black and all is unknown, the veil thins. Wherever there is a vulnerability, a crack in our defenses, in our sureties and our normalcies, the veil thins. Whenever there is a dying of something, our lives as we knew them, our old selves, our bodies, a loved one, the veil thins. In this liminal, broken open place, the world and its interconnections seem to come alive in ways unexplainable. Here th

Suffering brings us to our knees pulls us down into the dirt, into the earth, into the ground of our being Low, lower still into the fertile depths, where our humanness is born -- human, coming from the root humus coming from the word soil: We are the People of the Soil. And what is soil, but a decomposition of what has gone before has already lived with the potential of what is to come invisibly, patiently waiting. It *hum*bles us to be there in that dark and damp knowing,