My Finger Is In The Soil Again

Three times before lunch.

You know the motion without thinking about it. Two fingers, first knuckle, into the soil near the edge of the pot, hold for a second, out, rub the thumb across them.

And the answer is nearly always the same, because you checked ninety minutes ago and soil does not change in ninety minutes.

So the checking is not producing information. It has not produced any new information in weeks.

What it produces is about four seconds of relief, and then the question comes back, and then the finger goes in again.

So let me name what is actually happening, and it is not a technique problem.

Your hand is asking a question that your hand cannot answer, and it is asking it every ninety minutes.

As a child that is weaned

David writes a very short psalm about a particular kind of quiet, and the image in it is precise.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. (Psalm 131:2, King James Version)

As a child that is weaned of his mother.

You are being shown a quiet that has to be arrived at rather than felt, and no man has ever once been able to produce it by deciding to. Psalm 131:2 says surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a man with two fingers in a pot for the third time before lunch.

Look at the image he chose, because it is strange and it is exact.

A weaned child is not a child who has stopped wanting comfort. It is a child who is beside its mother and not demanding anything, which is a completely different and much later thing than a child who has been fed.

And weaning is a process. It takes time, it goes in stages, and there is a period where the reaching still happens and is not answered, and the child learns that the reaching is not required. That is what is being described. Not a man who is naturally calm. A man whose reaching has been quieted over time.

You were never asked to feel settled before your hand could be still, and the quieting in that psalm has never once been something anybody produced instantly. The Spirit of God is what carries a man through the middle of that, and Psalm 131 is where the weaning is written down.

The finger is not the problem

Now the practical half, and it is honest about how small this is.

Testing soil with a finger is a perfectly good method. It is what most people should do and it costs nothing. Once a week. The method is fine and the frequency is the whole issue, and frequency is not a technical matter. It is not corrected by learning a better method, because you already have the right method.

What has happened is that a reasonable act has been recruited by something else, and is now running every ninety minutes to answer a question that is not about soil.

You are using the right method at a rate no method was ever designed for, and nothing about your technique has ever once been the thing going wrong. What is written in Psalm 131:2 describes a quieting rather than a correction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a good method from an anxious rate.

And there is a second, smaller cost that is worth knowing.

Fingers in soil every ninety minutes compacts the surface, and compacted surface soil dries and wets unevenly, so the readings become less reliable the more often they are taken.

You are running an honest test that gets less honest each time, and none of that has ever once been the fault of the man taking it. Psalm 131:2 describes a quieting rather than a correction, and the Spirit of God is the one who says a plain fact plainly.

Which means the checking is slowly making the checking less useful. That is not a moral point, it is just a fact about soil.

You are running an instrument that gets worse the more you use it, and the unreliability of those readings has never once been a fault in the man taking them. The Spirit of God is the one who says that plainly, and Psalm 131 is the ground under the quieting.

Put a coin on it

So here is the instruction and it is a substitution rather than a prohibition.

Put a coin flat on the surface of the soil today. And the rule: do not touch the soil again until the coin has visibly settled or sunk slightly, or a week has passed. Whichever comes first.

Here is why a coin. Because telling a hand not to do something does not work, and giving a hand a different thing to look at does. Now the question has an answer that can be got by looking, which costs nothing and compacts nothing, and the reaching has somewhere to go.

You will look at the coin far more often than you need to. That is completely fine. Looking is free.

You are allowed to look thirty times a day, and an eye that keeps going back has never once been the same as a hand that keeps going in. Psalm 131:2 describes a quieted reaching, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets the looking stay and the touching stop.

You are giving your hand something to do that does not require touching anything, and looking at a coin has never once been the same as not caring what the soil is doing. Psalm 131:2 describes a man who has quieted himself over time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man while the reaching goes unanswered.