The Community Compost Bin as Nourishment

The neighborhood compost calls me like church bells. It’s made up of dead leaves and bent stalks, mostly. Sprinkled into the growing dark are brightly colored vegetables, crisp eggshells (leaping from rigid cardboard egg cartons), and weeping flowers, all the vivacious spoils of so many tables that eventually blend into rich black soil, together. 

This compost pile is a community effort. I approach, like a penitent, with a jar like an urn, and empty my worn-out breakfasts and discarded dreams of burnt toast into the heap of renewal, rejuvenation, and nourishment that is the compost pile. It heats up. It burns away imperfections. It promises better things to come.

We believe. Together. 

It releases a nutrient-rich pot of gold for the neighborhood gardeners to re-bury, with new seeds of curiosity, hope, and desire. 

With trembling hearts and determined hands, gardeners dredge up the gifts of earth. We re-plant the compost with fragile seeds, determined that this time, this time, maybe, probably, god willing and the creek don’t rise, goodness springs forth and continues under our care. 

Compost goes beyond myth. We see evidence around us: the smiling sunflowers and luscious tomatoes, the reminders that one goodness leads to another. So we contribute, we withdraw, and we believe. 

The materials mix. We mix. And the whole process yields surprising benefits. Participating in the community compose effort is as much a physical exercise as it is a social, psychological, and spiritual one.

We will return

We may master, dominate, and decimate the earth during life, but we know we will return. In the compost pile at least, we are intentional. We are united. 

The community’s contributions meld into a common effort of renewal and nourishment.We mean well. We do well. It is evident in the growing pile, thick, rich, and warm.

Here is hope: the end of a plastic life, and the beginning of a planted one. 

The material

Human-made tools lie scattered from garden to garden, like lost voices in a choir, children run astray, frozen pieces of a still-life painting, forgotten. A metal trowel. A plastic watering can. A woven glove’s middle finger pointing to the sky in triumph: We will bury our knees in dirt. We will walk away and let our labor sleep. We will return to bright pumpkins and sweet peppers. 

Through the smallest of efforts, a few minutes in the garden here and there, and through the incubating space in between, we endure. We grow. We continue on a cycle of love and life—despite the wreckage of schedules, politics, and arguments. There is always goodness ready beneath the surface. 

I come in gladness and gratitude. I bring my offerings with reverence and celebration. We contribute in hope and in a loving gesture of continuum and nurture before we join that black soil in a final embrace during our last long sleep. We share with neighbors the bright abundance that manages to erupt from our gifts.

Why compost?

Life is made of a series of small ceremonies that are, each one, sacred. I write about this compost pile for the ceremony it calls for: color, flavor, a gathering feast, common threads, and indelible ties.

Further reading

More on gratitude: http://www.experienceconnectrelish.com/secret-sauce-gratitude-practice/

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