i finally got to work an excavator alongside working with various-sized shovels as well as my bare hands with the rocks & dirt & weeds - what i have confirmed for myself is that without understanding how a small patch of dirt behaves & knowing the ultimate objective... terraforming on a large scale is often counterproductive, requiring huge efforts to correct later - best start small, steady, and slow;

working on correcting ur mistakes is the self shadow-work;