On the pages of the book "Fly Away Peter", Jim Saddler has grown from blameless to middle-aged and even to death. This seems like a series of nature. Individuals born and individuals die. In this book, I think the author is trying to express the thought of regeneration than how Jim transformed all the way through the story.
Renewal is a significant theme of Mallow's Fly Away Peter. According to the narrative everything regenerates, and not just in the physical sense, but as well in the religious sense too. The word renews means to bring back again or bring out something fresh in our consciousness of life. Its incidence can be seen throughout the book and it includes the digging by the aged man, the digging by Jim at the ending of the book, the piece of information birds come and leave with old ones replaced by new ones and how Jim's strength lives on as the young surfer in the eyes of Miss Harcourt. They are all regenerations that are part of the cycle of existence.
World is associated with the cycle of life as it is a symbol of birth, where lives stem from. Earth has always been where the existence starts, this can been seen in the book, "It (earth) was a smell that belonged to the start of things (life)." It is obvious that earth is where life stems from; it is where plants get their nutrients in order for new life and this is why the old man is digging, he is digging to fix new lives. Still there is a war going on around him, he still prepares the ground for the seeds, for the reason that he understands that live still goes on in all conditions. As a result, earth not only regenerates physically with innovative lives but what's more with new understandings of being.