Be Soil, Soul

Salvador Pérez

28 December 2025.

I open the window and look up at the sky—a sky that is gradually darkening. It's a familiar warning. Almost automatically, I check the weather apps to see what’s coming. Then I look beyond our immediate surroundings, toward the mountains that encircle us... and further still, to geographies in the south, where—already—torrential rains are falling.

Concern has become a constant feeling in these lands, where nature raises its voice in protest against the harm inflicted by a portion of humanity. Not all of us are complicit. Many of us know, or try to remember, that the life of Everything matters more than the wealth defined by the narrow economic lens that dominates our society. That dominant perspective, often cloaked in comfort and perceived neutrality, is a position of privilege rooted in deception, misinformation, and ignorance.

What does it mean to create wealth if it is not shared? It is theft—appropriation of what belongs to others. An industrial estate rises where fertile farmland once lived. A system of drip irrigation, sold as an innovation, depletes the soil, all in service of an illusion of improved profits. The European Union authorizes poisons that kill everything, including us, and their use is accepted as normal—as if this were the cost of progress. These are symptoms of the decay of a society unable to sustain itself, still expecting those responsible for pushing its head into the mud to somehow be the ones to save it.

As I search for understanding—of how, collectively, we have become so disconnected from each other, and more tragically, from nature itself—I try to locate small points of contact with life. With the foundations of life. With water. With soil. With the beauty that holds us, and that today has become something we fear. Sometimes I find connection in a book. Other times, in meditation. In a song that softens the tightness in my chest. In a conversation that calls me back into my body.

Small gestures. Subtle reminders that we are still here. That it is still possible to reweave connection with what truly matters. Or at least that’s what we want to believe. We don’t really understand why this is happening, and yet we rush to find solutions—running faster and faster along the very path that led us to the abyss in the first place. All while the techno-saviors promise, again and again, that the abyss is far away, that there’s still time to build bridges and escape. But these are lies—comforting lies that help us stay put, unmoved. And that bridge they keep referencing? There won’t be space for everyone.

Somewhere along this path, I encounter El Manantial, a poem by Federico García Lorca from 1919, set to music by the Spanish band Los Planetas. And something in me shifts. My heart stirs. I hear the impassioned cry of the lead singer, Jota, singing: “¡Sé árbol!”—Be a tree! So that I, too, might understand the springs and the birth of water.

I want that understanding. I want to know the secret of the water that falls from the sky like a gift, that seeps into the land to keep life sprouting from the springs Lorca spoke of. But we have severed the cycle. We’ve blocked the paths the water needs to flow. We’ve sealed off its recharge routes. And now, nature has begun to rebel—not to punish, but like a wounded body that cries out. Like a current that, unable to find its channel, overflows. Like a soil so saturated that it can no longer bear the weight. There is no surprise in its response—only our refusal to acknowledge it. We knew. And still we kept drilling, draining, sealing.

From that place, I hear a second call: “Be soil!” I close my eyes, turn inward, and recognize—yes, I want to be soil. I want to understand how I feel from within the darkness that concrete has imposed. I want to feel from the place of impermeability that has come with the denial of life inside me. The toxins of industrial agriculture have killed the organisms that live in me. They’ve made me hard, breathless, without pores.

I try to understand how I was denied the right to protect life. To protect you. To receive what the sky offers. To hold it. To release it gradually, at the pace life truly requires.

The lighthouse Lorca refers to—the one that needs oil from words—today needs a different kind of oil. The oil of compost. What it needs is for us to stop harming ourselves. To recognize what no longer serves: the model that encapsulates our lives, isolates us, compacts us, keeps us from breathing with the Earth.

We need to gather what still holds value and combine it with processes that do not yet exist—but are already beginning to emerge. They are sprouting, like new shoots from an underground spring. Only then can we build that rich, organic matter—full of microorganisms, capable of sustaining complex life: our life.

So: Be soil, soul. Be soil.

(Inspired by the verse “Be a tree, soul!” by Federico García Lorca, 1919)