With the idea of tending a small garden, I built a raised bed in the side yard last year, as I had the year before. The one I built earlier was better, taller, sturdier, but it was too far from the water, and the weeds around it grew wild and tall, making it difficult to reach. So I made another, closer this time, near the tap.
My wife came home with some perilla leaves and insisted they had to be planted that very day. At dusk, under a light drizzle, I began pulling out weeds and grass. But the soil clung stubbornly to the roots, thick, wet, unwilling to let go. If we pulled everything out now, the soil level would sink far too low. I tried to persuade her: let’s wait until tomorrow, when the rain has stopped and the earth has had a chance to dry.
And today became that tomorrow. I worked the soil, mixing in the fertilizer I had bought the day before. As I pulled the grass and turned the ground with a shovel, just a few centimeters down the blade began to strike more than stones. It was as though I were digging through the remains of something once built and broken apart— bricks, concrete, wire, rusted nails, plastic, glass, slabs, insulation.
Two years ago, I had spread sand over this ground. And now, above it, weeds and grass had already tangled themselves into something thick and alive. Beneath it, the refuse of a civilization.
Kneeling there, working the soil, I began to look more closely. Roots had taken hold in what once seemed hard and useless ground. Earthworms moved quietly beneath the surface. Spiders and small, nameless insects made their way through the soil. I don’t know whether they will harm what we plant. But I could see this much: countless unseen lives were already at work, breaking down what had been buried, softening what had hardened, returning it, slowly, to earth. Where we had poured concrete, built, and torn down again, where the land had been scarred and polluted, nature was, even now, patiently restoring it. Perhaps, so long as we do not destroy beyond repair, it finds a way to heal.
I had never thought of worms in the soil, or insects moving through the earth, as signs of restoration. But as I worked this small patch of ground, no bigger than my two hands, a faint light fell- a glimpse of restoration.