Behold This Compost // Neither This, Nor That
Whitman, Death, Rebirth, Soil
This weekend was thick with the energy of death and rebirth. Did you feel it?
Yesterday,
described how she felt it in her body thus:Resurrection is in the air, too. This is not hope speaking. It is faith, deep, embodied faith.
I will describe it for you because maybe you also feel it, or something different? It would be good to talk about it and expand our awareness.
It feels kind of like a very soft, bioluminescent, bioplasmic jelly living inside and alongside me. It provides both stability and fluid mobility in this life and body. It roots me into my cosmic origin and identity. I also become a host to all manner of sentient life, microbial, bacterial, and fungal life.
My body is an archive of humanity, earth, and stars. I am multitudes. The fear in my tissues melts in a flash, and I feel safe and warm. My body knows the storm has passed. I am safe and free.
This beautiful example of bringing felt-sense awareness into creative form is something I seek more of in my own lived experience, as I believe it is essential for staying clear, grounded, lucid, and wise during these times.
My felt sense this weekend was full of beauty and wonder and creative joy. It felt like spring in it’s purest expression. Closing out Pesach, knowing how many people are celebrating Easter with devotion and love and joy and gratitude, enjoying birdsong and breeze and the incredible colors of the garden.
I’ve been feeling a lot of pain and dread lately, like many of us, and I believe it’s in feeling it fully that I was able to have such beauty and ecstatic creation over the weekend. And this week, that’s what we’re going to talk about. Compost.
I want to write about compost as the teacher for how we process personal and collective trauma. I’ll get there, maybe in a few days, but first, I have to take us right into the heart of something extraordinary (to me) that happened this weekend.
On Saturday, before I opened my eyes, my two year old was at my bedside mumbling something about a book. I rolled over and blinked my eyes open as he pointed to the copy of Leaves of Grass I’ve had at my bedside the last few months. It’s beautiful. Green and gold and truly gorgeous. I bought it at my first ever trip to Costco with my grandmother a few years before she died. I love it.
Anyway, this way of waking up was unusual. My kid isn’t really into books yet. He’s much more interested in music and cooking and playing with water. For him to pull a book, not to mention this book felt significant and I was delighted to oblige.
I love bibliomancy, the divinatory practice of opening a book to a random page and finding what messages, what meaning, is waiting there for you. We read Whitman aloud for a while, discovering poems I’d never read before, glazing over some, falling in love with others.
Soon, I was floored to discover one poem among the nearly 400 that perfectly, painfully, poignantly explored what I planned to write about that day.
This Compost is Whitman meditating on death and regeneration, and when I read it I was sure it must have been written during or after the Civil War in which he was a Union Nurse and saw tremendous death and suffering. But it wasn’t it was actually written a few years before the war broke out, though the tension building up to it was, I’m sure, as palpable as the tension many of us have been feeling as we sense the escalating crises before us.
The poem opens with Whitman naming a shift he’s going through, a recoiling from the living places he once went to for refuge and renewal:
Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
I feel this. I too have been withdrawing. Overwhelmed by pain at the trajectory of so many of our collapsing systems, I find myself with waves of quiet dread moving in my belly. The wounds of the world some days feel too tender to allow myself to feel.
The dissonance between what is dying and what is still so achingly alive can be almost too much to hold. And yet, this very dissonance is the invitation. It is my gateway to awe. It humbles me. It seems that it did so for Whitman as well:
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?
While Whitman expresses these questions with a sort of holy outrage, it is the spirit of these questions that returns me back to life, again and again. How incredible it is that all the beauty I see when I look out my window, when I breathe in the scent of the jasmine blooming on my garden fence, when I step outside to harvest mulberries, beans, arugula, lemon balm, the beauty of my child’s delight at the colors of the garden, all of this comes from death. All of it.
Without death there would be no fertile soil.
And the soil transforms all through death.
For nearly a decade, compost has been my clearest teacher of regeneration. Not just a metaphor, but a biological reality. A slow and sacred conversation with decay. A way of being in relationship with death, with the beings and systems, and elements of life that are no longer viable, and learning how to hold them long enough, warm enough, spacious enough, that something living might begin again.
Whitman takes it another, somewhat gruesome step here before transitioning to wonder, really allowing himself to feel the grossness not only of the decay process, but also of humanity.
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
We as a species hold ourselves apart from the Living World so much that it may be inconceivable, at some psychological level to many of us that we be so completely decomposed, recomposed, regenerated entirely into rich soil that has no markings of a human being.
A few years ago, when I was pregnant, I had a client who bought a mountain and partnered with Recompose, a human composting funeral home, to be a site for the extra compost to come to rest after the family members received their urn of it. Each person creates a very large amount of compost in this method, and I’ve touched it, I’ve held it, I’ve offered it to the sun and soil and bees and berries at the top of the mountain.
If we die and are fortunate enough to become soil, what we turn into is called NOR (Natural Organic Reduction). My client, Elliot, would often talk about how beautiful this name is, as nor means neither this, nor that, and that is what this soil is. Neither human, nor not human. When you walk up to a heap of nor, you aren’t sure what to expect. Will there be bones? Will there be a smell? No, it’s really just quite mulchy soil. Good aeration. Ready to head to the feilds to regenerate forests and grasslands.
You can learn more about this here.
Going back to Whitman, he continues in the second canto of the poem:
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
Ah yes! This is the Whitman we know! Electric wonder, joy, and beauty at the sheer livingness of it all!
I don’t feel I need to say much here, so please just go back and read that stanza again. Notice what sensations arise in your body, and where, and what texture and shape they are. Notice what images come to your mind! Notice what sensations arise in your heart!
He continues:
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will
none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
My mother has often been mocked by my family for how regularly she proclaims, “It’s a miracle!“ often at some ordinary thing, going right. But it is a miracle, isn’t it? That anything should ever go well at all.
It’s a miracle that the birds are singing outside my window, considering what we’ve done to the biosphere. It’s a miracle that my body should function at all. It’s a miracle that people are kind to one another. It’s a miracle that the bees are still alive, and therefore we too, are alive.
And it’s a miracle that the Earth, in all her patient alchemy, has taken all the death, all the illness, all the war, all the hatred, all the pain that we and our ancestors have wrought, and turned it into fertile soil whenever and wherever possible.
It makes me want to cry. And it makes me want to cry my tears into the soil where I’ve recently planted butterfly pea seeds that the former Rabbi at the local synagogue gifted me, along with sourdough starter, before he left. And the beauty of that gift strikes me so tenderly in this moment, that it actually brings the stinging sweetness of tears to my eyes.
Whitman ends the poem here:
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
This is regeneration. This is trauma healing. This is the Living World.
I have more thoughts to share, but for now I will leave us with this reminder:
“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.”
— Paul Harvey (1978)
And the reminder that that soil is where we came from, and I pray, increasingly, where we return to. When I die, I pray I become a garden, a forest, a meadow. I pray my body serves the regeneration of the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the cycle of life.
Note: Every time we run Sex, G⟡d, & Money, our summer course for excavating, connecting, and choosing how we relate to these three essential currents in our lives, the theme of death always emerges, and always in new ways. Because this is death-work, soil-work, compost-work. We are taking the beliefs and patterns and structures that we’ve inherited, or been force-fed, or have learned through collective trauma and institutional harm, and we are giving them space to breathe, to break down, to be transformed. By the end of July this summer, we will have wholly regenerated our relationships with these currents on our own terms.
And this year we’re structuring it a little differently. Fewer live calls, more guidance for your personal somatic process, half the price of past years. As always, we offer extended interest-free payment plans to put this work within reach. If you’re interested but have questions or a need for further accommodations, reach out to me or and let us know, we’re always happy to connect directly.
May any traces
of our travels and travails
build compost, feed trail.
...
May gun barrels wilt,
like flowers, spent after bloom.
Compost miracle.
thank you for this beautiful post.