Nothing is Ever Lost

On death and banana peels.

I began writing this this morning, wasn’t sure whether it was worth sharing, and then read Anne Lamott’s post a few days ago, also sort of about bananas, and took that as a sign to go ahead and share it with you. This, like a lot of the art I’ve been making, feels like an incomplete fragment rather than a grand accomplishment. I think that’s my preference right now, allowing the honesty of messy attempts to be enough. As always, I’d love to hear what this brings up for you. Please note that this essay is about, among other things, death and the range of things that we ought to be able to do with our bodies after death.

There is a metaphor I use when I teach, and I find it is useful, though has very different learning outcomes, in different contexts.

Among other things, I teach shadow work, and I teach about death, and I teach Regenerative Development and Design.

And across these contexts, I teach using the example of a banana peel, but it can be about any vegetable scrap. It goes something like this:

Imagine, for a moment, that there is no garbage service. There is no placing your trash “over there,” out of sight and out of mind.

Imagine you peel a banana, and you shove the banana peel in a drawer you rarely use. It’s out of sight, but it’s still in the kitchen. You live and cook and move through the kitchen every day, and the peel is tucked away just enough that you don’t notice the gradual smell of rotting peel, putrefying and becoming toxic.

Eventually, something gives. Maybe a friend generous enough to be honest with you comes in from the outside and points out the bad smell. You are mortified, and, hopefully, you do something about it.

Now, imagine that same banana peel, and in order to dispose of it so it doesn’t take up space and putrefy your kitchen, you decide you need to incinerate it. You crank up the oven as high as you can, using a lot of energy, and you burn it to a crisp.

Now, imagine taking a banana peel and placing it in a pile in your backyard, burying it in the things that were going to decompose anyway, the exact things that are needed to turn that banana peel’s nutrients and fiber and matter into rich soil for the seeds you will sow next spring.

Finally, imagine that you have a special stove that you can put things in, heating them up, but instead of all of that heat and energy of what’s being burned being released into the atmosphere, you are able to capture the energy potential of the heating process and power your TV, and afterward, what was the banana peel is now activated charcoal that you can use to make your soil far richer and more productive, or make a face mask, or save the life of someone who has just ingested poison.

How do each of these scenarios make you feel?

Really, what do each of them smell like in your imagination?

What textures can you imagine feeling under your fingers?

What sensations do they give rise to in your body?

This is a teaching tool, yes, and depending on the context, it’s more or less a metaphor. It’s more a metaphor when I’m connecting it with shadow work. It’s less a metaphor when I’m connecting it with Regenerative Development and Design. It’s not at all a metaphor (more of a scalar teaching device) when I’m talking about death, specifically, the options we have when it comes to what happens to our bodies after death.

When my father died, two options were presented to me: burial or cremation.

The version of burial that is available to most of us is prohibitively expensive, and involves an incredible amount of chemicals and materials, in a box, sent underground in the exact conditions that are least conducive to soil.

Knowing these two options, my father opted ahead of time for cremation and requested, as many do, specific places for his ashes to be scattered. This can be a beautiful thing, a beautiful honoring.

But I cannot un-know something, and it troubled and frustrated me deeply that here in Florida, composting him was not on the table, even though I knew about, and indeed contributed to the original fundraiser for the first ever Human Compost Funeral Home, Recompose in Seattle. More on that soon.

During the hours of his cremation, I also felt deep frustration, knowing is that there is a small but massive difference between combustion and pyrolysis, the process that makes biochar.

Cremation uses intense fossil-fuel energy, releases hundreds of pounds of carbon dioxide, and emits trace toxins like mercury. To my understanding, a simple adjustment to cremation facilities to make it so that oxygen doesn’t flow into the chamber, enabling us to turn our bodies into biochar would not be that difficult. The energy that could be captured by this, could power the entire electrical needs of the facility potentially, and our beloved dead could offer their bodies to the gardens they love, or to the regeneration of the world where tree planting is most needed.

I have thought a great deal about this because of my intimate experiences with death and my indefatigable tendency to imagine how we could do things better in this world, if we can generate the collective will and shift the baseline of cultural norms.

And because in 2022, pregnant with my first child, I worked on a project centered on human composting. I was a consultant for an organization that bought a mountain in Southern Washington, and was beginning to regenerate the riparian (river) habitat on that mountain with soil from Recompose.¹ I was working on the cultural side of this project, how to present it to the world, and what opportunities for collective learning and transformation might be possible, drawing from the wisdom of the land?

This initiative began to fall apart while I was on my maternity leave, and a part of me grieved the potential that I believed was lost. But another part of me was rooted in the trust that I have in an insight I had the summer my father died, a summer that initiated me into the alchemy of death:

Nothing is ever lost.

This is not just a platitude for grief, it’s the first law of thermodynamics.

If energy can change forms, but never be created nor destroyed, and we have options and choices to make about what happens to the energy of something, especially when it’s dead, or considered “waste”, then we need to really understand what our choices really are. And we absolutely must expand the range of choices available to us.

This is institutional work, yes, but it’s also consciousness work. It’s also relational work, intergenerational work too. I would call this multidimensional, Nora Bateson might call it transcontextual.

These four scenarios aren’t necessarily about banana peels, and they aren’t just about what we do with human bodies when the spark of life is no longer there, but the potential to contribute to the web of life remains. They’re about what we do with anything we’ve decided to discard, to release, or to lay to rest: a relationship, a memory, a version of ourselves we’d rather not look at, a resource we’ve stopped seeing as valuable. We can tuck it out of sight, neglecting to see how this will still impact us over time. We burn it at great cost to get rid of it fast. We can place it within the conditions that will slowly but surely enable it to become fertile soil for the future. We can create the conditions for it to quickly be transformed into something that has enormous potential.

Most of what the overculture calls “waste” is just the first or second option, hidden with repercussions deferred, or destroyed with more energy than the destruction was worth.

What happens when we expand the range of options? What happens when we approach something not as a problem, but as potential? What gold is waiting for us in the shadows? What alchemy is available in death? And what can each of us do to shift the culture toward life-affirming futures?

These are the questions I have been working with for over a decade now, and dimensions of my work I will be bringing into the upcoming Autumn cohort of The Art of Regenerative Living. There is a new payment structure I’m offering experimentally in August, so do check it out and take time to consider if it’s a cohort you’d like to be a part of, so you can take advantage while the price range is most flexible. As always, you are welcome to reach out with any questions that will inform your choice!

Photo by Tehzeeb Kazmi on Unsplash

1. You can learn about this project in the video below. You should watch the whole thing, but they go to this land that I was consulting on around the eighteen minute mark: