Soil Quotes

“Every person who finds herself constantly navigating political spaces—by which I mean every person who regularly finds herself demoralized and exhausted by the everyday patterns of life in America—should have access to such a garden.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“The green of growing things calms me. Plants stabilize me. And I am interested in the patience that is required as I wait for growth. For the politically engaged person—any of us—such patience is a key to survival. Patience is a kindness that carries me through long days and longer nights.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn't easy.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“But I also saw shiny little dots of red and black. Lady beetles, or lady bugs, which can eat as many as 5,000 aphids in a lifetime, came to feast on the prairie project’s plenty. Some studies suggest that the milkweed sends a chemical message on the breeze to request the tiny predators’ assistance. Nymph and adult lady beetles are among the few predators who are unbothered by the fact that the aphids engorge themselves on milkweed’s noxious gluey sap. I can’t stop thinking about what it means to build a sustainable, mutually supportive community, and I can’t stop thinking about who I want beside me as I undertake this project of connection.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“Faith is the belief in things not seen. Or it is the hope that what has not yet materialized might, someday, manifest. I am loosely quoting Hebrews 11:1, in which people hope for some future when a crucial promise might somehow be fulfilled. One of the hallmarks of faith is to believe in a promise and—though the promise has yet to come to pass, and may never in my lifetime be fully fulfilled—to find a way to carry on. To discover and honor what has come to fruition.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“My ideas need to be broken down into manageable sections.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“But to be first is often lonely and vulnerable.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“Origin Story

Outside my window is the beginning of half my poems.
The others start outside my door. In cach case the window
is my body. I am always on the other side of the door. All summer
every place around me caught fire.
The flames orange haze spilled into my blood.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“Part of my drive to think so deeply about the greater-than-human world in direct relationship with my personal and cultural history comes from a desire to construct meaning from and connection with what is beyond me and also what binds me to the rest of the world. It's a spiritual question--and a practical one.

Aren't humans also animals-not set apart from but, rather, a part of the natural world? And an insistence on asserting the importance of those of us who are so often erased from or maligned in books held up as environmental masterpieces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“Our garden regularly ruptures my sense of progress and process and time. There is the forward trajectory of days into months, seasons into years. June's tight rosebuds will lead to July's full-crowned blooms. Evident and irreversible change, straight forward as an arrow toward its mark. But there is revolution in the garden as well. And reversals. Months and seasons and days turning so far forward they bend backward. I stand in the past and in the future when I stand in the present of our garden. Just as with grief, neatly outlined stages double back and return well after or long before I expect them to appear or be over.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“The poetry reading promoted an anthology celebrating the varied voices of the United States. The evening's readers represented several races and ethnicities, a kind of attention to inclusivity I admired. But a few days before my flight, I found out that I was the roster's only woman. I brought this to the attention of the event coordinators, and they said it was too late to correct the lack of gender equity. As a concession, they said that I and the other readers should make a point of reading others' poems to that end.

When I joined the seven male readers at the venue, the organizers reminded us of our time limit and suggested I read first. I read my poem from the anthology, as well as one poem each by two other women: a wry, pointed poem by Jane Mead and a focused, hopeful poem by Audre Lorde. I kept to the specified time limit. Then I sat down. Like an obedient girl.

The men at the podium, every one, read over their times. They read their own poems from the anthology. Then they read others. Not others as in other people's - women's - poems, which was the idea conveyed to me. No. These men read other poems of their own.

I'd flown to New York to read a single poem of my own and watch men drown out my voice and the voices of all the other women in the book.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“Helen told me she didn’t change her last name when she and Paul married because women artists too frequently disappear inside the names of the men to whom they are legally bound.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a Black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence

Two miles into
the sky, the snow builds a mountain
unto itself.
Some drifts can be
thirty feet high
Picture a house.
Then bury it.
Plows come from both
ends of the road, foot by foot, month by month. This year
they didn't meet in the middle until mid-June.
Maybe I'm not expressing this well. Every year,
snow erases
the highest road.
We must start near
the bottom and
plow toward each other again.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“Here's a simple complication: What do I mean when I say the word nature?
Even as I build it, my answer shifts. I picture the simultaneously increasing and decreasing heft at the tops of the sand dunes Edward Abbey describes in Desert Solitaire. The instability that is the only stable truth beyond the angle of repose.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“I've seen dogwoods bloom in the Virginia springtime. Their nearly excessive displays. Those notched crosses of white and pink petals. I've seen redbuds shoot out unrepentant bright buds, like a calendar, around Easter. Azaleas bursting out in technicolor purple and gold and magenta flower. Forsythia mimicking the sun, golden and dazzling. The plants in Virginia alone are enough to encourage a seeing person's site fidelity. Those plants grow up from land that generations of Black people carefully cultivated and tended and loved.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“let grow more winter fat wine-cup western wild rose
so little open prairie left little waves of bluestem little
fuzzy tongue penstemon the golden currant
nodding onion quieter now as well
only a few clusters of Colorado butterfly plant still yawn into the night
where there once was prairie
a few remaining fireflies abstract themselves
over roads and concrete paths
prairie wants to stretch full out again and sigh-
purple prairie clover prairie zinnia
prairie dropseed nodding into solidago
bee balm brushing rabbitbrush-prairie wants prairie wants
prairie wants”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden