Tending Compost.

Renewing Emotional Capacity.

People sometimes will casually mention “composting” their life experiences. I think the idea was popularized by Dr. Brené Brown, who explains that integrating negative experiences, such as failure, “yields the exact same results as adding nutrient-rich humus to soil: It brings growth and new vitality.”

I find this framework mildly hilarious, because it makes compost sound so TIDY. 

Written this way, it sounds like compost can even be clean, straightforward, EASY: You have a problem. You let the pieces fall into a container. It decays naturally into fertile soil that can nourish new seeds.

However, if you have ever actually composted, you understand that it is a messy, smelly business. It requires tending through awareness, problem-solving, and active involvement.

If you live in an urban area in the Pacific Northwest, you may set aside your food scraps to be carted away to a composting facility—that’s not the sort of tending I mean. That’s supplying the materials for composting, which is also useful, but it requires less effort than turning decaying food into soil.

When I lived in Portland, we composted on the property. We carried our food scraps from our kitchen, down the steps, and dumped it directly into a plastic receptacle, just beside the front porch. In winter, this chore was pretty tame, but in summer, we procrastinated until our food scraps overflowed its indoor bin. Outside, you unscrewed the plastic lid, braced yourself, and flung it off. All of a sudden, you were blasted first with a wave of heat (generated by the decomposition itself), then with an assault of fruit flies (living inside their food source), and also a sour, sweet, sticky smell that seemed to cling your face and clothes. We would dump in the fresh food scraps, slam the cover back, and then race up the stairs to a realm of more pleasant smells.

This was actually the second compost-tending experience of my life. My first was when I attended an experience called Maine Coast Semester, where a few dozen high school juniors (including myself) learned about the environment and had morning chores that ranged from cleaning the dorm showers to participating in farm work.

Of these, compost was one of the most dreaded and the most bragged-about assignments. You would have to climb into a vat of decomposing biological matter with a pitch fork. Then you had to dig in and turn the compost, which helped make sure that the tiny microbes doing the decomposing had enough oxygen to do their work. You never sure what you were going to find below the top layer. (To give you an idea, this farm kept chickens, and if they died, the chickens went into the compost vat.)

Chores happened before breakfast, often before sunrise. Depending on how hungry you were and how much you cared about stinking of compost beside your tablemates, you may or may not have chosen to change before you went to the cafeteria or to class. It took me an entire mud season to get the smell out of the boots I wore that week (and in this picture).

Thankfully, in Portland, my neighbor-landlord Tim, who lived downstairs with his wife, daughter, and lab, took charge of turning the compost. One day, my roommate and I found him adding dead leaves to the hot, stinking, fly-ridden stew of compost, and he said that this was to balance the compost, specifically its ph. Earlier tenants had more of a mix—grains and veggies, which kept the compost pretty well balanced, he explained. But we were the first tenants to love our vegetables more than our grains, which was great for our bodies but tended to make the compost out of balance. One way to fix it would be to ask us to stop adding veggies for a while, but he’d decided against that. So, to fix it, he was adding the opposite, the dead dry brown leaves, to balance out the ph, help the smell, and ultimately make the compost useful for planting in the spring.

Right now, I’m thinking a lot about compost, because we’re inside a hot, stinking mess as a collective. Though it impacts each individual and each group differently, we all share that reality and the pain and discomfort it brings.

Experiencing the decay in our collective society is inescapable right now. To turn that decay into your own personal compost—to make it u s e f u l—you may need to tend it differently.

What’s necessary for your compost though is going to depend on your specific situation. It will likely vary from day to day.

Is there something you need to omit for a while because you’ve incorporated something else? When I am deep into researching the violence of American history and the way this root system still causes massive harm today, as many others are as well, violent movies are too much for me. (You may be thinking I’m just eliminating horror and graphic wartime films, but I actually mean like, superhero movies.)

Even if you haven’t sought anything out, do you need to let what’s composting air out a bit? Sometimes, after reading articles documenting the ongoing Portland protests, a city where I’d lived, one I’ve loved so much, I have to shut off my phone. One day, I even decided not to go to the grocery store as I’d planned. I was too emotional to trust myself to be kind to everyone I encountered. Instead, I went on a walk with just my music for company, giving my grief the opportunity to rip through.

If you have been clogged up with an over abundance of one flavor of the human experience, do you need to reach for the opposite to cultivate balance? This will depend on whatever you find yourself in and what you can readily access. If I have been on a screen too long, I go out to nature or call a friend. One day this past month, bogged down with heavy sadness, I reached for the silliest, frothiest book I could find, and enjoyed it immensely, which lifted me into a better mood.

If you are on the front lines of any of our collective struggles right now, such as one related to health or injustice, you may need to give yourself peace. That can be difficult to do when you are flooded with the desire to help, the need laid bare before you, and your heart racing to keep up with everything coming in. It’s true you may not have much time, so it will take some determination. It may be as simple as telling your mind to be still as you step into the shower and rinse off the sweat of your labors. It may be as simple as taking a deep breath and saying, “I give myself this moment of quiet so that I will be more ready to handle the chaos to come.”

But tend these experiences as they compost. Tend yourselves, even if it’s only briefly. Make these experiences useful.

Take care, sweet ones.

Originally posted to Instagram on 9/3/2020.