Why Soil and Peace

The question comes in the valley, networking, workshops, summer camps, in letters from Germany and from Canada. Why Ukraine. Why soil and peace.

Before this ground, twelve weeks on another — a certified "organic" hotel, for some a retreat, for me — a pilgrimage — a fitness plan of another kind, on the Baltic coast, the west wind, walking. The road turned east from there.

I have an answer. I give it. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it is the one I wrote at a desk in Brandenburg before I came.

It is not the one.

In the city, at a desk with a stamp, the question is a line on a form. Jets over the city and around it. The answer that satisfies the form is one word: volunteer. It took a day — papers corrected, reprinted, carried back, until the word was accepted. By evening I had answered the question more times at that desk than in seventy days in the valley.

I say: I did not want to come home to a table alone. No one to make coffee for. No one to hug before school. Thirty-one years in Germany, surrounded by life — children, parents, grandparents, noise, comfort. And now …

The week before I left, a coffee went over and two people looked up at the same time. Behind that half-second, a door. Behind the door, a country I had half forgotten, a war in someone's story, a country building out of its ruins — and a light I had not seen in years.

I went through the door. The light went east ahead of me. Some of it came along.

A man on the train from Lviv, no language between us, paid my ticket up the valley before I could reach my pocket.

On a bridge, a man came home. Thirty cars behind him, an ambulance third in the line. Two flags on every car. I did not know him. I stood.

Up on the mountainside the trough stopped dripping. Water for the animals for generations. Below, the town shut off the taps. The hospital took its water from tanker trucks. Wells sank.

At the creek, a reservoir. Rock and mud, moved by hand. Now a table with my host, and children playing, a baby crying.

Nobody in any of this asked why.

And I cannot yet say what soil and peace is in a day, with hands. Seventy days, and it is still forming.

After dark I sit at a table too. I think of the family I left behind, and whether we will sit at the kitchen table again. I ask it going to sleep. I ask it again before the day begins.

Neither has answered yet. Neither may.

Day 70 — Kompostieren — Soil and Peace
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | Soil and Peace | CC BY-SA 4.0
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