The Healing Earth

Have a bad cut on your hand?  If it's summer and you have soil to work with, you have no worries! Just go out there and garden.  Why?  Good question.  There she was, Marash Girl, with a pot full of Lily of the Valley cuttings that had to go into the ground, but she had a bad cut on her index finger. . . Vaht to do . . . Plant the cuttings . . . she could always clean up the cut afterwards.  And plant she did.  But what happened to the finger?  It actually looked better after it had worked with the soil.  But that didn't make sense.  She washed the cut, dried it, bandaged it, and later that day, planted again.  Same thing. Soil in cut; cut looked and felt better.  Then she remembered.  Her father used to tell her that in the old country, in Marash, if folks had a cut, the old ladies would put dirt on the cut.  Was it dirt?  Well, for sure they would put moldy bread on the cut and that would heal it.  But in another version of this tale, Marash girl remembers her father saying that they packed the cut with dirt and then bandaged it.  And they put dirt in babies diapers to absorb the poop (the ecologically friendly precursor to ecologically unfriendly Pampers).  What is it that Marash Girl is remembering?  Are there any confirmations out there?  Marash Boy?

Okay.  Marash Boy remembers his grandmother packing mud on a hornet sting.  And we all certainly remember the mud packs of yore placed on the face to beautify the skin.  And Marash boy, yes, he remembers working  at the greenhouse (Mt. Tom Greenhouse, Holyoke, Massachusetts) planting, and noticing that any cuts he may have had on his hands would heal up faster after working with the soil.

The spiritual uplifting (and muscle workout) we get when we work in the garden is well known.  But the healing of cuts?  

Have you, dear reader, experienced healing, physical or spiritual, when working with the soil?