Are You Headed to the Landfill, or the Compost?

Compost is a miracle first. Before anything else. The wisdom of the earth’s natural processes writ small. It’s the place where broken, thrown away things become more than the sum of their parts. Where they find meaning again, no longer in their spit-shined individuality, but in their muddled, decomposing relationship to each other.

A fresh Honeycrisp is a majestic thing, isn’t it? Can you taste it? That perfect balance of tart and sweet, that snap and pull with your top incisors, ripping a part of it off along an unseen fault line. The Garden apple must have been a Honeycrisp. Thousands of years of original sin for it. I get you Eve.

The apple core. The brown avocado. The banana peel. These things we chew up, use, and then discard. They lose their purpose and are tossed in a trash bin full of microplastics, styrofoam, plastic bags, and more plastics. So much plastic. This is their end. These things, once so full of life and promise, now alone in the landfill. The browned apple core finds itself resting among otherworldly strangers: broken Star Wars figures, plastic tricycles, used batteries. It decomposes and drifts into nothingness. The loneliness of this pulls at my solar plexus. Can you feel it too?

Our society is a landfill brimming with plastics. Look around you. The techno-feudalists, the barons and dukes that run the platforms, the fiefdoms — they chew us and eat us like a Honeycrisp, extracting every last piece of goodness from us while we’re in our prime, only to discard us in a heap of batteries and plastics.

We’re chewed up, burned out, alone and scared, decomposing and clinging to the glory days of yore when we were bright and crispy and useful. In our society, becoming anything but useful is the death knell. Our kids get it. Thomas the Train understands that he must be useful above all else. What an evil piece of propaganda, huh? Be useful Thomas! When your engine gets old and sputtery, or you find yourself sick or broken or at the end of your track, then you are no longer needed.

Stay useful, or be alone. That’s the promise of our techno-feudal society. In this striving to maintain our shine, we distrust our neighbors, bicker with them, fight them, even hate them. We compete with them.

Why? Why do we choose to live like this? Why do we move across the country, ripping our children away from their friends and family for a $15k increase in salary and a slightly larger fiefdom to stamp on our LinkedIn profiles?

We pour thousands of dollars into self-help, productivity hacks, lip injections, continuing education, night classes, promotions, conferences, happy hours, and flight miles. All in a desperate bid against the march of time, to stay useful, relevant. Squeeze it all in before we die. We’re all so terrified of our deathbeds, are we not? Experience it all! Buy it all! Travel everywhere! We all have a bucket list. Funny how all of our bucket lists usually involve more money than we can afford. “I lived well!” we want to say at the end. Look at all the things I did!

But at what cost? How lonely are you? Be honest with yourself. Do you think it’s going to get any better? Do you think if you continue on this path you’re going to magically become less lonely? Maybe. If we’re lucky, perhaps we’ll have a begrudging adult child or two there with us, swallowing all their pain of abandonment to the drums of capitalism to make our final moments pleasant. For us. God what a fucked up thing.

I’d trade a lifetime of consumeristic exceptionalism for one person to sit with me in mindful presence at the end.

In this slavery to maximizing our experiences, we castrate ourselves from the only thing that can bring meaning and love: connection. The thing that makes us human again.

Connection takes time and presence.

The wisdom of the earth understands this. Compost. The mother can speak to us if we would just listen. Compost is a promise that together we can be more. It’s a rebuke to the forces of isolation and individualism that plague our souls like a virus, driving wedges of mistrust and pain between us.

Compost is where trash becomes. Where its individual essence combines and mixes with other previously useful things and in so doing, becomes something more. It’s the place where life goes to transform, decompose, and renew. And out of it, comes more life.

Time. Presence.

A plastic My Little Pony has no place in a compost pile. It’s only a place for living things, or things once living. A healthy pile requires tending and balance and love. Ego has no place here. That Honeycrisp has long been used up, but in a compost, it’s discovering the beginning of its story.

What plot of soil will be renewed in the future? What new plants will grow because of it? What joy will it bring to the community. What joy will the apple feel as it rests with its fellow brothers and sisters?

The compost is not the trash. Not even close. It’s not a lonely place, like the landfill. It’s a place of compassionate community where the essence of individuality is broken down by the mother, the divine feminine, by the forces of light and heat and presence with each other.

And out of this comes the promise of renewal. But it takes time. And it takes presence.

When was the last time you said no to the forces of consumerism? When was the last time you chose connection over consumption, over desperate experience? When was the last time you decided to cancel that European vacation because you wanted to be mindfully present with the people who miss you?

Are you headed for the landfill? Or the compost?