Why do I never touch the soil in my own garden?

There was a man who paid a boy to climb his fig tree every autumn and shake down the fruit. Years passed. The boy grew tall and moved to the city. The man stood under his own tree, hungry, staring up, unsure how a person even begins to climb a tree he has owned his whole life. A neighbor laughed and said, just climb it yourself. The man said, I am too old. But he had never been young at climbing it either. He had always paid someone. You have a green space. Someone else feeds it, cuts it, waters it, kneels in it. You walk past it like a painting in a hallway you rent. This is not really about grass or roses. It is about what happens to a person when every point of contact with a living, growing thing gets handed to somebody else. The soil does not care whose hands are in it. But you might. And you will not know until you put your own hands there.