I follow his thin tall frame into the forest. His white t-shirt already smeared with soil, orange tones blending into his jeans. He knows exactly where we have to dig, in this region where geomorphologies collided leaving behind several types of soil within walking distance of one another. The rain drips off the leaves onto my skin, and I pause in the verdant green. The water brings out the tones, even to my colorblind eyes. There is music in the pulse of an undisturbed forest, especially in the silence. “Can we stop here for a bit?” I ask and we stand together. I hold several clean zip-lock bags in my left hand and he holds the auger. We breathe.

We settle on our first spot, looking like any other. The leaves of last fall cover the darkened top soil. He digs the first hole and water immediately rises to fill it. “See how the rain can’t percolate here, it’s because of the thickness of the clay, so we’re seeing the high water table,” he begins telling me. I love how all my friends come with a different perspective on the world. For him, the world is divided by soils. Although I’ve made my way through countless science courses, science only fascinates me in moments when it comes alive. And here, in this rainy forest, with my soil scientist friend, we pull out orange clay through the high water table. He drops the first batch of soil of out the auger onto the ground, it’s the darker topsoil. On the second round, we are into the oranges. With our fingers, we push the clay into my ziplock bags, immediately smearing the oranges onto the inside of the bag. I wonder why he wears a white t-shirt for this work, but I don’t ask. I suppose any color would get dirty.

As he digs deeper, the soil becomes so sticky that it clings to the inside of the auger. He walks over to a nearby log and pounds the metal auger to loosen the soil. The sound reverberates off the trees. A small box turtle nearby retreats into itself. I’ve never before seen how the soils change as we work deeper into the earth. How little I know about this ball I live on.

Leaving the first batch of water-logged soil at my car, we walk along an ordinary sidewalk with cars passing us. I’ve driven past this spot countless times without noticing it. Now I am in its space. I feel the topography as we walk on the earth, heading down. “Once we’re at the lowest point, that’s where we’ll find the lighter soil that you want.” I think in terms of watersheds, and today I begin thinking in terms of soils. We cross the street into the forested area. It looks identical to my eyes, but I know we’re lower in elevation. He begins to dig the first hole. I find an upturned tree with its roots reaching into the sky. “This soil is beautiful, this works,” I tell him as he continues to dig. I press my fingertips into the light beige soil wrapped around the roots, loosening it. It falls away in clumps that crumble at my touch. I fill my bag and sit down on a fallen log. He was unable to find the soil where he had dug, so he wandered off. I feel alone in the forest and I sift the light soil and press it into a fine powder. The log below me fits into my body and I sit alone preparing soil for my art project.

Gaze down onto the reddish earth, with clay beads escaping onto the broken shard of old glass as it freezes one tiny image: a purple flower pedal pressed in its death into a white lily of the valley bell. And for a moment, all that exists of the natural world is this one image: precious, ephemeral, dead. Will preserved images someday be all that remain of our vibrant nature?

Vidoczki were my first introduction to the natural world. The creation of vidoczki was a common childhood past-time in Communist Poland, consisting of finding a broken piece of glass (simple task in a post-war city) and a natural object (usually a plant), then pressing the glass over the natural object to form an image in the soil.

As a young child, my first contact with nature was in a large sandbox filled with remnants of seashells and broken glass, shaded by a leaning willow. Sand was brought in straight from the beach so it contained a range of treasures awaiting discovery. I lived in a world where people stood in lines for days to purchase a small chuck of chocolate, and in later years, to purchase flour and milk. Few worried about what accompanied the sand in children’s sandboxes. When we lack food, other things become far less important.

But I didn’t worry about food. I played. I loved how by pressing one item under glass, so that it was frozen, unmoving; its beauty emerged for me. I could sit and look down at the greenish glass image of a now-dead flower, and somehow that flower was more beautiful in its death than it had been in its life. I began to appreciate it more in its death. I would pick petals off vibrant plants, not conscious of my role as a murderess, and press them under glass. I’d admire my handiwork. My talent increased as I began to mix colors and textures, pressing in a yellow sunflower petal with purple lavender. I liked my natural world to be frozen in place and dead. I didn’t have to worry about it hurting me.

I stopped making vidoczki when I moved to Nigeria. I didn’t have the nerve to kill the natural world there. The Polish natural world seemed to be there for my taking, already broken and dying. Yet Nigerian land was fecund, breathing, screaming, vehemently growing. I would throw a stick into the earth and it would grow. I wasn’t brave enough to take on that type of earth, with its scorpions and pulse. I used my window instead as the glass, and would spend hours looking out into a natural world that still fluttered with hairy moths and vines that crawled into my window. The natural world found me, the tiny murderess who no longer even wanted to squish one ant of the million that crawled in the open window one day. No, here, in Nigeria, I became one with the earth. The red dust of the Harmattan blew into my lungs and settled. One day, I was no longer an outsider to the earth; I was one of the earth. Instead of feeling like I had the power to murder as I wanted, I instead craved being enveloped into the pulsating life-force. I don’t remember the day it happened, but somehow I sank into the earth.

And today, as an environmental scientist, I feel like I’m holding up a broken piece of glass anywhere I look. Oh we need those scientists to study and document and analyze, but if we want people to really awaken, then we need to reach into their earthen soul. If we want people to care about this planet that we sit on, lean on, spit on; then we need to help them actually realize that we are sitting, leaning, and spitting on a planet that is a part of ourselves. Our planet has a heartbeat, has a breath – and if you take the time to listen, you too will hear it. You’ll hear how the pulse is skipping a beat or two, how some breaths are labored. What will you do? Will you simply make vidoczki and appreciate her in her death? Or will you try to let her leak into your soul?