Mono Monday : : Earth

OilMan leaves buckets of the stuff all over the place; probably because we have very little of it to plant in. It almost requires a jackhammer to dig a big enough hole in the rocks to fit a gopher basket and fill with soil in which to plant a single plant.

As I looked around for a blip today I started thinking about the subject of "earth". Such a simple, common word, yet how many variations, comments, metaphors and sayings are taken from it. 

There is the earth one puts in a wheelbarrow, but there is also the planet earth. It is ground, dirt, soil. It is solid or crumbly, sandy or clay. It is the foundation of everything. 

From earth the tallest mountains rise, yet it also contains the sea. It is the foundation upon which we build our cities and the substance that nurtures and nourishes our crops. We humans are all firmly connected to earth by gravity which requires monumental amounts of energy and money to escape.

An American astronaut, Scott Kelly, was launched on a yearlong mission aboard an international space station last month. The goal of the mission was to better understand the effects of the harsh environment of space on the human body. He and his Russian counterpart are among the few humans I can think of who have "escaped" the earth's gravitational pull.