I'm pulling weeds from the vegetable patch before planting spring seedlings. My bare soles sink into cool dirt and the damp clumps tickle as they roll over my toes. There's dirt ingrained under my nails and in the creases in my skin. It makes me think about conversations with my ex-Mother-in-law, Pei-Lian, and knowledge passed from mothers to daughters across generations. I still call her Amu (Mum). She still calls me Ying (Flower). She declares that all living things contain a soul; plants, animals and sometimes even the rocks and bones of the land. Pei-Lian believes that the human soul enters and leaves our bodies through our feet, that a baby gains a soul upon touching their feet to the ground for the first time and, after death, it departs again through the soles of the feet.

 

The layers of soil crumbling over my skin seem to vibrate with an unseen energy and I think about that conversation with Pei-Lian, about her soul, and feet. Her internal space encompasses a full sense of her existence as intrinsically a part of this earth. I think about what happens when we place our feet upon the ground. I wonder, how deep does the connection go? The life of the soil I am digging over is dependent upon the intricacies  of its invisible microbiome-a mixture of living fungi, nematodes, bacteria and protozoa-unceasingly weaving together or breaking apart organic and inorganic fragments. The complex biological systems beneath me release conductive minerals that convey electrical impulses from microbes, which are then detected and taken up by the roots of plants. Their electro-chemical signals transmit communications between the plants and microbes, conducting through water in damp soil to root systems, and rising up above the surface through the plant bodies, where evaporation vapours release the secret languages of scent into the air.

 

Maybe they are signaling to me too.

 

In the garden my bare feet connect to the living soil, and this teeming multitude sits upon a layer of porous white sand; the remnants of an ancient dune deposited when sea levels were much higher. Below that, is a layer of limestone where the remains of billions of shellfish and corals have melted like ice-cream into homogenised, calcified rock. Somewhere deep below the limestone, there will be a layer of granite, or some other form of volcanic rock, over which precious artesian waters lie still and silent in the darkness. Moving further down the layers, the thick hot blood of Earth's mantle of magma shifts and agitates under the surface crust as its astronomical weight bears down over the planet's dense iron heart.

 

Back on the surface, the ground holds ephemeral memories in the marks and footprints of those passing through. The touch of my feet creates the connection. Feet, soil, sand, rocks and water. Continuing down through all the layers, my feet will eventually connect to the core, and from there the connection might radiate outward from that central point, linking this pair of soles and, according to Pei-Lian, this soul to the whole of the Earth that hosts our existences.

 

She told me once, that in the darkest and quietest time of the night, when we are in the depths of unconscious sleep, the soul slips away from the confines of our temporal body to take a walk outside-visiting relatives, other locations or the past-then it comes back, returning through our feet, bringing visions of where it has been and releasing them to inhabit our dreams.

 

Pei-Lian never wears sox in bed.

 

 

Author Bio: Theresa Wilks

Theresa is an emerging writer/illustrator living in the Southwest.

She has a B.A. Honours from E.C.U., won the Talus Prize 2020 for Prose and Poetry and

is published in Night Parrot Press' Ourselves (2024) and Follow the Salt (2025), and 

in the journal magazine Westerly 69.2 (2025).