I’ve been shedding some skins these past few weeks, leaning into release of some dreams and visions that no longer fit, clearing space for new cycles and new paths. As I’ve tried to ground myself through these changes, submerged within an individual and collective aching heart, I keep coming back to compost. To the importance of what is rotting and smelly, expired and decomposing. The way the willing release, the care-full tending, of these scraps creates the conditions for life to thrive. As usual, I’ve been sitting with the work of visionary brontë velez, who reminds us that “Decomposition as rebellion is saying, ‘I don’t know what is coming, all I know is these things need to be laid to rest.’” I wonder what we might learn from the practice and process of composting, about endings, about release, and about what it will take to alchemize the material of this world and create something new.
In a period of the Gregorian calendar year often focused on calling in and manifesting, it is just as important to have deep clarity about what must be let go. I’ve often experienced the certainty that something must end as a heavy knowing in the center of my stomach, a feeling that can show up months before I’ve accepted it with my conscious mind. It’s taken a while for me to recognize this bodily knowing as anything other than shameful and annoying. But I’ve realized that the blessing of knowing what needs to go, this ancestral clarity about what is muddying the waters and constricting my breath, is also a call to life. How could we compost if we didn’t recognize what was old and no longer fit to be consumed in its present state? How can we care for what is new, tender, and green if we don’t make space for the transformation of waste into nourishment?
Compost teaches us that things have many lives. That something which appears useless, unpleasant, even toxic to us in its current form can be transmuted. That decay is sacred and necessary. In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell writes that “In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative.” While healing their soil and their communities from the effects of plantation slavery, compost was one tool Black Southern farmers used to remedy centuries of extractive agriculture and the damage it had done to the land. It continues to be a powerful tool in the hands of Black growers who are working with soil that has been depleted by regimes of colonial monocultural farming and corporate extraction.
When I work with and learn from compost, I think about how life-saving it can be to embrace the parts of the life cycle that white society tries so hard to hide. The parts that are about being tired, burnt out, not productive anymore, ready for an ending. The parts that are about becoming an ancestor, coming apart and rotting, changing into a new form. The parts that are crucial, not pretty.
In the spirit of compost and the lessons it can teach us, I invite you to sit with the following questions:
How can I be more present to the breakdown, without trying to fix or hide or change it?
Are there things in my life that need to be released? Am I holding onto any energy that might serve me better in a different form?
What is necessary for transformation? What have organic processes and other living kin taught me about processes of decay and change?
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My thinking about rituals of release and letting go has been greatly shaped by this video piece by Kearra Amaya Gopee called an excision spell (2020) It’s one of the most beautiful sound/visual works I’ve encountered.
I recently learned a lot about George Washington Carver’s love of compost, and the ways he advocated for composting as a regenerative tool among Black Southern farmers, by reading Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica White.
Image Credit: Chelsea Charles