Compost and Life

How has your June been? I cant believe that summer solstice has gone by and July is nearly knocking at my door.

Here, the elderflowers are on their last days, the foxgloves are still in their blooming, the roses are in their fullness, mallow flowers are out. The fields are full of tall and beautiful grasses and flowers that gently hum in the breeze.

And I have been the observer if amazing compost being made. It is a huge, beautiful dome that holds both life and death in their ever changing form. Every so often in moments of contemplation I walk by and enjoy the sweet sickly smell, the pungent decay and the mouldering feeling.

Through childhood, growing up in these times, within the modern western world, we most often, do not have enough contact with compost. With the making of it, the turning of it and adding to it. We do not see enough, the way life springs from death, the way nature alchemises what has been lost, disguarded or no longer needed into magic.

Nor are we shown how winter is necessary, how spring grows because of it. We are not shown enough how to plunge our hands into the blackness of soil and understand its magic, nor are we shown in a good way, the way weeds try to take over and restore health in concrete.

We are not kept in intimacy with the wilds natural processes of recovery and transformation, and I feel this lack of connection with these processes breeds fear into our psyches. Fear of change, fear of letting go, fear of being different from what we were a month ago.

Yet we cannot stay the person we have always been. We are made of wild matter, a soul as rich as soil and full of seeds. We need to grow, change, shift and alchemize just like the wild we are made from. We can think, feel and behave differently, we can morph, reform and rewild. We mustn’t let ourselves or others spray weed killer on our becoming.

More and more, I feel my soul is like the soil, composted lives, a matter made of all that has been, ancient, dark, fertile and full of the want and know how of how to grow me.

I often feel that we are all just like piles of compost.

For we are souls and bodies built on bodies, stories and bones of what has been. We are our ancestors recycled, made up of their different parts, completely unique, yet reformed, repeated, remade from the death and decay of what was. We hold their tales, their experiences, their journeying with the land in our ancestral memory.

We are feelings, experiences and sensations that are continually transmuting and alchemising.

We are made up of natures atoms, reorganised and reused into the shape of human. We are in a constant state of dying and rebirthing.

Just as seasons move and swirl around us, just as compost turns into fertile gold, just as death is eaten and turned into nourishment, as winter turns into spring, so too are we asked to shift and change from within our very core.

Yet we often become to tied up with the same routine, the same job, the same partner the same expectations all jumbled together with busyness, it can be hard to find time to listen to our needs, our inner calling, and it can feel frightening to change when our whole lives depend on us being the same.

Yet our souls, like soil holding the seeds of our own becoming and filled with the wilds life force, will keep trying to push us towards our greatest health, will keep trying to bring us to our right life and dismantle the concrete, even if it means taking us down and deteriorating the life we have and taking it out of our own hands.

When I look out into nature, I have witnessed that nothing is stagnant and still, the only constant in nature is change, yet nothing is wasted, it is always transformed.

And as I have come to realise and understand myself to be nature, to have the same ingredients, spirit and life force inside of me, I see that I too have a desire to be in a flow of change all the time, my moods shifting, me habits changing, my desires shifting depending on the season, the time, the environment, and yet, in the past, and still now to a degree, I fight against it.

In the past, I used to only want to pick the change that looked in my mind, like me walking steadily to a glowing golden light, but not the change that is the unravelling, the decay, the breaking down, the mulching.

These gold, light filled ideas of beginnings can create pressure and unrealistic expectations and there can be confusion when the journey of alchemy, restoration and transforming are full of days where you don’t feel like yourself, times where you realise you no longer fit in, the uncomfortable feelings arising in what was comfortable, and the embarrassing awkwardness of new ways, or a truth that feels as fragile as a blackbirds egg and as fiery as lava.

When I was a kid, I used to love the darkening areas within a forest, where beetle worm and fungi were transforming the carcass of a tree into more beauty, more medicine. I had a fascination with the compost pile under the tree near my grannies lawnmower shed and I was transfixed by the weeds that sprang from the concrete.

There was something in watching the process of alchemy and witnessing its story, that fed me, reminding me of my own power to alchemize away from any situation.

It was a story, that as a kid, I deeply needed.

And it is these stories and teachings that I lean back on now.

Inspired by compost, I have learned to honour my letting go as much as I honour my growth. For both come together, they hold hands, birth and death are reciprocal, a symbiotic relationship like lichen, algae and chlorophyll bound together to create one goal.

Death of something, some old way of being, some habit, some belief, is always the sacrifice we are asked to make on the threshold of becoming. And just as new life feeds on the old, inhabits the space left behind, so too does death open some new beginning.

It is a question I ask myself a lot when I'm down by the compost, what is it I'm transforming in the compost of my life, in the soil of my life.