Habits are hard forming and it is not often that I recognize that an activity has become part of my day to day lifestyle. Mulling over a cup of mug green tea this morning, I realized as I plucked the used tea bag from the cup and opened my compost bucket, how composting has become a unique habit in that it is second nature, my unconcious way to handle food scraps, as well as a subject of practical education that I am enthusiastic to explore and use when gardening. A compost bucket has a home next to my doorm room desk, and when I see it to be brimming over with coffee grounds and satsuma peels, I will take to dump into the working pile at Little Rock Urban Farms or at Big Wayne’s gardens.
I first learned to compost at the farmstead on Petij Jean Mountain. I learned to dump excess food scraps and organic matter from the garden into the pile. Imagine my shock to find a winter squash growing in the pile a few months after I started gardening. Amazing! I looked at compost more closely and as I learned by both reading and getting my hands dirty, I sensed the earthy wonder of the process. Leftover food, grass clippings, the leaves on the lawn...were not trashed but synthesized into dirt. All those leaves, apple cores, and tomato tops conglomerate in a from of witches brew - magic is worked and rich humus is formed. The soil is richer with nutrients, and microbial life grows, which attracts worms that loosen the soil, which allows the plants in the graden to thrive, which feeds the people...who have the choice to comkpost. Soil is alive, and when humans compost, they perform what I feel to be some of the most fruitful actions possible in human experience, by enouraging diversity of life they contribute to ecosystem development. Composting is one of my favorite parts of gardening, because my energy is being used constuctively; my actions add to the life of the soil. Grateful for the fruits and vegetables that nourish me, the least I can do is return the excess back to earth. Relationships with compost are helping me be grounded in a new, more mature form of joy. Before my compost conversion, my taste buds would rise in the store as my Mom bought me packages of pineapple, or better yet, summer blackberries. But at the end of the day, my purple stained teeth were the only remnant of the delicious fruit, and the plastic container they came was lost in the garbage, a lost cause for the soil. The scrumptious moments were quickly over, for as it is often said, joy is fleeting. Perhaps, John Keats says it more beautifully than me in his poem “Ode on Melancholy”:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might
Here, Keats uses the metaphor of a grape bursting in a man’s mouth to represent the transience of experience. There is an intense flood of sweetness that leaves an aftertaste of sorrow at its passing. He posits that at the core of delight is sadness, because beauty passes and fades away. Death, abscence leave memories. While it is true that beauty passes, thinking about compost can extend the metaphor of the grapes. Imagine tossing the grape stems with kiwi peals, wood chips, papaya pulp, and pumpkin shell - put them together and what have you got? A piece of land that is better than it was before, and better because of human action. Grape vines will bend deeply with more clusters, and a cornocopia of other fruits will flourish on the land. What recyclable joy grows in the garden when the compost is mixed in with the soil!
The experience of composting means mixxing new life out of old, and along with the fresh humus, human stories are dug in. In the same ground that the summer squash roots are drawing nourishment are material remnants of my experiences- the top of my first persimmon given to me by Raeleigh, the coffee grounds from the Summatran brew Wayne roasted, and the apple core that my cat Leon batted aound the kitchen. Compost brings feelings that my body trusts as it relaxes into the sense of durable, tough weather joys, who have no closing end because they are modeled after natural cycles. When rooted in the earth, good experiences are like good stories, like blackberry days - they come round again and again.
Some people may think that my composting habits are strange, and question the smelly, goopy bucket in my doormroom corner. Many of my climbing friends, have laughed at the composting tupperware that Wayne and I keep between our seat during road trips. But I don’t mind, because composting is one of my best habits. I would lose something wonderful if I threw food away...
