dirt

I learned something interesting about dirt today:

Our English word, humility, comes from a Latin word, humus, that means ground, earth or soil, and humilitas, from which we get humiliation, means “nearness to the ground.”

David Roper, the guy who wrote that, goes on to tie the concepts of humus and humility together:

We imagine that spiritual growth, like everything else we value, is upward, when in fact we’re meant to grow down. The path to usefulness is a downward spiral through difficulty, contradiction, injustice and humiliation. There is no other way. We must be brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretense and defensives. We must be left empty, insignificant, useless, feeling like dirt. “Dirt” is exactly the right word, for fruitfulness grows from the ground up.

I think brown is my new favorite color . . .