Let The Dead Feed You

Decay, Integration, Regeneration

Welcome to The Living World, where I explore the wisdom in the web of life that connects us all. I am driven by visions of truly regenerative futures and committed to the cultural transformations that are required to get us there. I write each essay to help me see the world through a lens of curiosity, wonder, and humility at what this world of life creates.

Thank you for joining me as I remember myself as a living part of the living world and seek to live well within it.

In the darkness of decay, there is a feast for the living.

Leaves fallen from oak and hickory trees break down, their veins surrendering the memory of sunlight to microbes and fungi. Dead things dissolve and nourish the tender roots of what is yet to come. We might think death is an ending, but it is also always a beginning, as essential to life’s renewal as birth itself. In every ecosystem, death feeds life, ensuring that nothing is wasted, and that every passing makes way for new becoming.

As I write this just a few days before New Year’s Eve, I can’t help but notice the collective energy around beginnings—the resolutions, commitments, and fresh starts that mark this time of year. But how often do we pause to consider what we’re carrying forward, what we’re integrating and being nourished by from the year just past? Before we plant the seeds of the new, we must ask ourselves: what has fallen to the ground that deserves our attention, our gratitude, and our willingness to let it feed us?

For too long, we in modern societies have turned away from this wisdom. Our fear of death, our cult of disposability, and our craving for sterility have distanced us from the regenerative power of being with death.

Plastics entomb organic waste in landfills, embalming so much against the rot that would otherwise give life. Far too often we shuttle off our elders to live out of sight and out of mind to end their lives disconnected from the world and people they love.

By severing our relationship with death and dying—be it the death of things, of ideas, or of eras—we lose touch with the life they might feed.

The Gifts of Decomposition

Here where I live, by the Indian River Lagoon, a place of extraordinary biodiversity, decomposition is the invisible architect of abundance. Here, mangroves drop their waxy leaves into the brackish water, where crabs, bacteria, and other decomposers transform them into thick, mucky detritus. This rich organic matter feeds the foundation of the food web: plankton, shrimp, and the countless small lives that nourish larger creatures like manatees, dolphins, and the incredibly array of rare and endangered birds who call this estuary home. Without this cycling of death into life, the lagoon would cease to be the nursery it is for so many beings.

We must learn from this ecology.

What might happen if we approached our personal and collective “deaths”—the losses, the endings, the letting-go—as opportunities for nourishment rather than erasure? The compost pile offers a metaphor for transformation: what seems at first a formless heap of scraps becomes, over time, fertile soil. The messiness of endings is necessary. It is through breaking down that we create space for new growth.

Embracing Endings

To live regeneratively, we must embrace endings as an integral part of life. On an individual level, this might mean honoring the wisdom that emerges from heartbreak or perceived failure, recognizing them as compost for our emotional, spiritual, and often professional growth.

In community, it might look like reimagining rituals around death—choosing green burials, planting trees over graves, or creating rich bodies of art to remember the dead.

On a societal scale, it means dismantling systems that no longer serve, allowing their fragments to seed something more just and life-affirming.

Even in the realm of ideas, we must be willing to let the dead feed us. Consider the ways ancestral wisdom—whether it comes from indigenous knowledge, ancient practices, or the teachings of our own grandparents—can inform and enrich our lives. These ideas, though born in different times and contexts, often hold truths that modernity has forgotten but desperately needs.

Practical Nourishment

We can embody this wisdom in simple, tangible ways. Start a compost bin in your backyard or kitchen. Learn to see the food you discard as potential soil, and the soil as a gift you can return to the earth.

In relationships, practice letting go of grudges or outdated dynamics, trusting that releasing them will make space for healthier connections.

And when confronted with loss—whether of a loved one, a job, or a dream—consider what gifts it might leave behind for you to gather.

I leave you with one of my favorite poems, which I often return to in times of loss, or transition, or mystery…

Crossing the Swamp

By Mary Oliver

Here is the endless
wet thick
cosmos, the center
of everything—the nugget
of dense sap, branching
vines, the dark burred
faintly belching
bogs. Here
is swamp, here
is struggle,
closure—
pathless, seamless,
peerless mud. My bones
knock together at the pale
joints, trying
for foothold, fingerhold,
mindhold over
such slick crossings, deep
hipholes, hummocks
that sink silently
into the black, slack
earthsoup. I feel
not wet so much
as painted and glittered
with the fat grassy
mires, the rich
and succulent marrows
of earth— a poor
dry stick given
one more chance by the whims
of swamp water— a bough
that still, after all these years,
could take root,
sprout, branch out, bud—
make of its life a breathing
palace of leaves.