Hand Model Seeks PT Work

I would have to offer my services for the "Before Treatment" image. No diamond rings for these pinkies!
It's a sure sign of early June and the planting frenzy that occurs: my hands are a mess. Skin cracked and calloused, nails brittle and bashed. I'm full of contradictions, and my hands in relation to the garden are no different. I shy away from glove use unless real mucking is in store, but it makes me crazy to feel dry soil underneath my fingernails!!
A few sources indicate that putting ones hands in the soil---in the earth---allows for exchange of negative ions (not sure that's saying it right...), the same ones that are released by the calming pulse tumbling water, waves, or waterfalls. I don't know if that's true, but I surely enjoy having my hands to the soil. (Ok, well, except for when I am hunting for cutworms around my poor broccoli plants...) So, am I getting enriched by the soil? By my work? A prominent cut-flower grower once stated dismissively that if you think growing flowers/gardening is theraputic, then you're pursuing the wrong thing. But my opinions differ: I think that life is therapy for life.
But am I giving back enough? to the gardens, to the soil? I know that there are So Many things I could be doing better in my little venture here, and I often get caught up in the guilt of the imperfect system, but I'm trying! Today and yesterday, for example, I disced in two fields of green manure in an effort to boost the fertility of the soil in those areas. Then I seeded with peas, vetch and oats in one plot, and buckwheat in another.
But this isn't what I'm trying to say. Here:

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is a last raised up into song.
-w. berry


PS:
When will the sun come back out?

Saw a mother bear with THREE cubs day before yesterday in the back woods! Hurrah!