Compost

I often find myself looking for tangible things to make sense of the jumble of feelings and thoughts I have inside. It helps me to analyze things, which I agree, I do too much of. Anyway, this week I found myself thinking about composts... riveting I know. Don't stop reading quite yet.

I have often trudged out to the compost to dispose of that weeks organic waste in my home. It's kept out at the back of our yard, behind a tree, broken bricks are at its feet and one lone pitch fork at its side.

I brace myself, pull back the lid and fruit flies spill out everywhere. I try and control my gag reflex, toughen up and dump the compost in the pile of decaying "stuff". There's brown, oozing lettuce from a few weeks ago, shriveled green grapefruit carcasses that houses a small yellow and black bug, trampled flowers, strawberries who have developed white, fuzzy, and molded caps.

It is not the place where I would choose to spend much time, it's full of all the things we don't want anymore. Each item in a compost has served its purpose and now has been thrown in the back yard for it to live out the rest of its life being eaten and decomposed by millions of little bugs, squirming and sliming their way about. When I am done, and the new items have been placed in the compost I place the lid back on, trap the fruit flies inside and no longer have to think about it.

There are things in life that we carry deep inside, or sometimes very close to the surface, that feel as though they are decomposing our souls. Things like hatred, hurt, and anger. Like some awful little bug has come and housed our very being. At first it is contained to our thoughts or feelings, then slowly it burrows and leaves it's trail behind it, tainting every moment of our day.

You cannot deny it is there and you can feel it creeping through your mind. at somepoint you will need to talk about it, and then when you do you realize how much of yourself it has begun to destroy. I find that it makes me feel nauseous because it's such an awful thing to feel towards another human being or a situation in life.

And sometimes I feel like a compost. bracing myself to take the lid off, I look inside and dump my death into it. And the longer it stays, the grosser it looks, the more uniform all those thoughts become. A large lump of decaying matter.

Composting takes time and slowly those little insects and worms break down all that they find, slowly it changes, and the hands of time gently soften the harder things in life.

In the end though, we are left with a fertile bit of dirt that has no memory of what it was before, that shows no evidence of grapefruit or lettuce, just dirt. and with this dirt we are able to start again.

This death that has housed itself within me greatly saddens me and the amount of time it takes for things to change and heal seems so long. However, there is hope, even in the death of nature, there is hope. It seems that the only way to life is through death and then resurrection.