My fingers are actually cramping. I have been wrestling with this piece of fabric-this supposedly ‘fitted’ sheet-for 13 minutes, and it has successfully defeated every logical bone in my body. There is no corner. There is only a deceptive, elastic curve that mocks the very concept of a right angle. It’s a mess of 203-thread-count cotton that refuses to be tamed, much like the topsoil I’ve spent 43 years trying to keep from blowing into the next county. We have this obsessive, almost pathological need to make things neat. We want our beds tidy, our borders defined, and our dirt to stay exactly where we put it. But the more I fight with this sheet, and the more I look at the crumbling embankments of the 73-hectare plot I’m surveying this week, the more I realize that our obsession with stability is exactly what’s killing us. We are building a world out of glass when we should be building it out of mulch.

In the world of soil conservation, the amateur always talks about ‘stopping’ erosion. They want walls. They want concrete channels. But I’m Felix K.L., and if I’ve learned anything from 33 years in the field, it’s that any system that cannot move is a system that is waiting to shatter. When you try to stop the motion, you create brittleness. You create a situation where the first 3-inch rainstorm doesn’t just wash away a little silt; it takes the whole hillside because the soil has lost its ability to breathe and flex. It’s Idea 12 in its purest, most frustrating form: the harder you grip, the faster it turns to dust.

The Failure of the Fortress Philosophy

I remember a project back in ’93. We were working on a slope that had a 23 percent grade. The developers wanted a retaining wall that looked like a fortress. They spent $103,003 on limestone blocks and geogrid. It was beautiful for exactly 53 days. Then we had a freak weather event-nothing biblical, just a steady, unrelenting soak. Because that wall was a ‘stable’ structure, it couldn’t handle the hydrostatic pressure of the shifting clay behind it. It didn’t lean; it exploded. The failure wasn’t in the material; it was in the philosophy. We tried to impose a human timeline on a geological process. Nature doesn’t recognize ‘finished.’ It only recognizes ‘transitioning.’

The Virtue of Ordered Decay

This is where the contrarian in me starts to get loud. We shouldn’t be aiming for stability; we should be aiming for ‘ordered decay.’ In my line of work, that means focusing on the O horizon-that messy, chaotic layer of decomposing leaves, dead bugs, and 333 different types of fungi. It looks like a disaster. To a neat-freak, it’s a failure of maintenance. But that layer of decay is the only thing that actually protects the earth.

“It absorbs the energy of a falling raindrop, which, believe it or not, hits the ground at about 23 miles per hour. Without that cushion of ‘decay,’ the soil particles are hammered into a crust, sealing off the oxygen and turning the ground into a literal brick.”

23

We are so afraid of things falling apart that we prevent the very processes that allow them to hold together. I find myself thinking about this even when I’m not knee-deep in a trench. Last month, I was preparing for a lecture series in the States, trying to navigate the bureaucratic nightmare of international travel. I was bogged down in forms and digital portals, feeling that familiar brittleness of a system that can’t handle a single typo or a slight delay.

I actually had to use visament just to make sense of the entry requirements because the official channels were so rigid they were basically unusable. It struck me then: our social and administrative systems are exactly like that limestone wall. They are impressive to look at, but they have zero ‘give.’ There is no mulch in our bureaucracy. No layer of decomposing buffer to absorb the shock of human error.

The Utility of the Void

If you look at a handful of healthy soil-really look at it-it’s actually mostly empty space. About 53 percent of a good loam is just air and water. It’s the gaps that give it life. Our modern life, however, is a frantic attempt to fill every gap. We optimize every minute, pave over every square inch of ‘waste’ ground, and try to eliminate every uncertainty. We’ve forgotten the utility of the void. In soil, the void is where the roots grow. In a life, the void is where the soul catches its breath.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes. I once recommended a specific type of nitrogen-fixing clover for a 83-acre pasture without fully accounting for the local micro-climate. Within 13 months, the clover had been outcompeted by a native thistle that I’d written off as a weed. I was embarrassed. I felt like a failure. But as I watched that thistle grow, I realized it was doing a better job of breaking up the hardpan soil than my clover ever would have. Its taproots were like 3-foot drills, opening up channels for water that had been blocked for decades.

“My mistake wasn’t the clover; it was the arrogance of thinking I knew better than the seed bank already present in the dirt. I was trying to impose my ‘stable’ solution instead of listening to the ‘chaotic’ one that was already working.”

🪨

[The taproot knows more than the architect.]

Embracing Transition Over Stasis

We see this brittleness everywhere. It’s in our supply chains that break if a single ship gets stuck in a canal. It’s in our social circles that vanish if someone says the ‘wrong’ thing in a 13-character post. It’s in our bodies, which we treat like machines to be tuned rather than ecosystems to be tended. We are terrified of the breakdown. But breakdown is where the nutrients are. If a tree doesn’t fall and rot, the forest eventually starves.

Ecosystem Components (Proportional Cards)

Felix K.L. doesn’t believe in ‘sustainability’ in the way the brochures use the word. To most people, sustainable means ‘keeping it the same forever.’ That’s a lie. Nothing stays the same. True sustainability is the ability to die gracefully and come back as something else. We need to stop building walls and start planting thickets. We need to embrace the elastic, the messy, and the curved.

Letting Go of the Square

I finally gave up on the sheet. It’s currently a tangled ball at the foot of the bed. It looks terrible. But you know what? It’s finally relaxed. The tension is gone. I’ll sleep on it anyway, and the world won’t end. Tomorrow, I’ll go back out to the field. I’ll look at those 73 hectares and I won’t think about how to save them. I’ll think about how to let them crumble in just the right way, so that 103 years from now, there’s still something left for the worms to eat.

It’s time we started acting like we belong to the earth, rather than the other way around. Every 3 seconds, another bit of the world breaks. The trick isn’t to stop it. The trick is to make sure that when it breaks, it turns into something that can finally grow.