The ceremony was tactile, rooted in the realities of the lives of the procession of people who came forward, each pouring Soil from their farms into a wooden tub bound with iron bands. Each handful of soil represented the life of a loved one who had died on the land on which they lived. “Earth to earth . . .”
Soil reaches deep into our psyche, into the sub-conscious. “Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return;” soil speaks of mortality, but also of new life, of new growth. …