I went outside
to dig in the dirt
grown weary
from the incessant buzzing
of machines.
I found worms and
tiny insects that looked real,
but I knew they were escaped
from the nearby farm, the rectory.
They’re amazing,
those tiny things
all they do is dig,
and dig and dig,
and so their earth
is always fertile
and fertile and fertile.
I stopped making sense when I
left the farm, the rectory,
to lie in the dirt
and the dirt dug from the dirt, and when I arrived here I thought,
“I might be onto something.”
I started to dig and it all
began to make sense.
Not much was left of the farm, the rectory, that place so empty and empty, but from the holes in
the dirt I could see the houses, the farm, even the cars. The farm, the rectory, became a town, a town with many buildings, a town on the whole that had a distinct, manufactured, agricultural character.
We called the town “Bishop Rock” but it wasn’t a real town. It was a giant open land with a dream. I never thought of bishop as a word, so the name of the town didn’t come to me until I began to take pictures of the town I was seeing and shared the pictures on the internet.
What I found when sharing the pictures was that Bishop Rock was actually a city. The whole town and its suburbs came together to form one massive walled city with a distinct manufactured, agricultural, yet cosmopolitan, style.
When I walked out of the farm, the rectory, with the dirt covering me in layers of clay and soil and clay, it was obvious I had been digging under the ground to get an idea of what the layers of dirt would look like upon me, and my mind began to believe in the layers like seven layers of skin.
I didn’t know what I was digging for, so I began searching for a better, more detailed diagram of how the layers might align. I was amazed at the beauty of geology and agriculture and architecture and diagrams and protocols and deep time.
After I reached the last layer, which was of dirt and clay again, I decided to build a new town where the walls were really close together and I began to piece together how to build the interior of the town so that no one would be forced to talk to anyone else.
I was guided by the patterns in the land, and there was a circle in the land. I thought “that’s the center” and it made perfect sense.
I walked over to the circle and noticed a small garden inside of the circle. I went to take a closer look and noticed that the garden was built of small dirt towns.
I expected I would have to go inside, wash up, then come back out and start over.
