Curating compost is necessary for any spiritual growth. Start by taking all the scraps from your kitchen — leftovers from past relationships, sour fruit, rinds from old projects, crusty traumas, rotten ideals and scraps of dreams unfulfilled — and bury them into your heap. It takes a lifetime to build a fertile compost, rich in color, teeming with micro-organisms. And you can’t just throw your scraps haphazardly on the pile, for rodents and birds will surely steal them away and you’ll never build a nutritive mass. No, the art of composting requires that you tend to your trove with loving care. Add water, mix in organic matter (leaves, cut grass, shavings) and mix, churn and turn your pile.
If you fail to groom your compost it gets moldy and smelly. A prize compost is fertile and dense, pregnant with possibility. It is a tragedy that people trash their refuse. People don’t get that the dregs of life are essential for generating new sustenance. For what you don’t ingest today will spawn new growth in days ahead. All the castoffs from your life — your mind rubbish, your heart slop — are grist for your compost mill. When you realize that your ruin is nutritive, you will become a compost connoisseur. All your failed projects, all your shame, all your unrequited love are prize leftovers, essential for your future becoming.
So put on your boots, take up your pitch fork, go stand in the clod of compost and groom your remainders. For there lies the promise of a new and wondrous garden.
