Ok, so I don't know if anyone who really knows about composting thinks it is cool. I mean, the idea is cool. It's awesome, taking all that waste and garden excess and turning it into a living source of nutrients, saving the planet, recycling your tiny carbon footprints...blah blah blah.
No.
Composting is tedious. It takes FOR. EVER. Especially if you do it au naturale like yours truly here, and just shove a big pile of leaves and spent vegetables in a corner. For most of a year or two it just looks like a huge mound of trash. And if you can keep adding to the top of the pile without it ever getting any bigger, then you are composting. Exciting, huh? I kept waiting for the compost fairies to come over in the dead of night and sprinkle some hurry-up dust on my pile of trash. I thought maybe one morning I'd go out there and it would be all lusciously dark and crumbly and perhaps even bagged up, ready to go.
No.
After more than a year of ignoring the fact I had a never-ending 6ft stack of crap in the corner of my garden, I decided it was time to change the way I did things. The pile got disassembled. It was by far the most strenuous, sweaty thing I've done and I hated every minute of it. I'd stop after three or four heavy, dusty shovels and whimper to no one in particular, then start up again. Because, you know, once you start to take the crap apart there's really no turning back. Composting sucked.
The ending to this is obvious, right? I dug down deep enough and found that it hadn't been a wasted exercise at all - because there at the bottom (I mean, waaay at the bottom) - was COMPOST. Worth waiting for? No. Cool? Yeah, okay, maybe just a little.
But that's not what I learned. Because, I didn't really make the compost, or even do the composting. That's just life. And it's only called composting because I've been watching it. Watching life.
The final step to get to the sweet, soft black gold was the sifting. That part I can say I did do. And as I separated dirt from rock and soil from twigs, I thought about the wheat and the chaff, and about my first thoughts on simplicity, months ago. Without conscious effort, I realized I had set myself on a course of wanting my soul to be sifted through. I had asked to be disassembled, to have the goodness within me dug out, and to have it separated out into something pure. I've said it before, but it is worth repeating a million times in my opinion; Everything we ask for comes around eventually. It may seem to take forever, or it may be manifested in a way you never imagined. It may happen long after you've forgotten you even wanted it. But, I believe, if the intention is good and genuine then somewhere at the bottom of the never-ending 6ft pile of crap - is black gold.
Oh.
And maybe a rogue potato.
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