It’s the story, the biography of the field beneath my feet…English settlers imposed their acres on a land that before they arrived had flowed from sea to sea, joyfully free of measurement. (…) The acre’s residents; plants, trees and animals are familiar miracles but while their story unfolds above ground, there is another running concurrently, in the soil beneath vision…microscopic solarless system of bacteria, fungi, and tiny invertebrates on their billions… unfamiliar wonders beneath our feet. To go into soil, the real thing, not the sterile pool that modern agriculture has turned into a parking lot for crops is to step into the word land. Soil is a living mat. An ounce of the acre’s dirt, hardly enough to fill a child’s palm, is a nation of relationship that we no more understand than we know the people in a city we fly over. There is not such thing as an individual in nature. Inside every seeming bit of independence, life is a colony of co-dependents
From An acre of time, Phil Jenkins, p. 26