“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.” Rainer Maria Rilke

Inspired by a recent energy work session, I am exploring the idea of allowing myself to be composted. I imagine I am lying down on the earth and letting all that is old, outdated, and unhelpful within myself to be composted. Allowing life itself and the earth to move into my body and being and alchemize what is ready to be given over to the dark soil, to the unknown, to breaking down and becoming the nothing that emerges as something. Letting myself be dissolved.

We humans can hold on to identities and the roles we play in our work, our families, our communities, but also to the internal identities – a good person, a kind person, a productive person, a spiritual person, etc… Of course it helps to have a sense of ourselves, and indeed we do need the ego to develop that self; it’s not that we want to float around as edgeless blobs but instead can we be curious about the ways we cling to or get stuck in old patterns and what impact that has on us. 

As I let more ease into my days, my mind, my heart (not easy, I might say), I can see how familiar and habitual it is to work hard, push, do, fill up time and space. That old way of being is ripe for the compost pile, but its roots are deep and tangled, so one go of it is not enough. It’s a practice. To over and over again let myself be emptied, merge with nature, surrender to the alchemical process, to feel the earthiness and how it ushers my being into a deeper service to the soul.

Grief is doing that in my life right now. In general, I think grief has a way of leveling us, of taking us down to the bones and composting what is extra, not coming along into the future with us, unnecessary or outworn. But I am also opening to the possibility that there are other ways to break down the old tangly, invasive, and strangling patterns. Maybe it doesn’t have to be the fogginess of grief that does it (although I am a willing apprentice to that process), but can include other lighter and conscious ways of giving over to the earth, to the truth of change, to the falling apart, decaying, and emerging as something else. Each time I practice this composting meditation of sorts, I end up feeling a bit cleared out, less bogged down, less heavy, and there is something nourishing about that: the idea that nature’s organic way of breaking things down so that they can be renewed and renewing is also a process I can embody myself.

How does the idea of composting resonate with you? Any other gardening images or metaphors that align with your own body and soul?

I came across a poem recently that seemed to lean into this idea of merging with the earth that I am exploring:

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I like my body when I’m in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,

that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
I like when I evergreen, current and berry.

I like when I mushroom, avalanche, cliff.
And everything is yes then, and everything
new: wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew.

To sit with the process of becoming isn’t easy or comfortable. It gnaws away at my patience. The journey of waiting through the fallow times can vacillate between a wild excitement and a hopeless numbing – when will the thing just happen? When will I know what is next? When will the flower finally bloom? 

As Whyte’s poem suggests – the plans we can make ourselves are too small to live. I am finding for myself that the work of holding space for what is yet to emerge requires many containers. The container of my own body, moved and present, able to hold the changing sensations of emergence. It also requires the container of community, of others who are in the process of unfolding with awareness. And it requires connection to the bigger/larger/beyond. On a given day, that might be ancestral presence, the earth herself, or dipping into meditative/spiritual/depth practices and lineages. It is in the remembering to touch into one or more of these containers as often as I can, and to allow myself enough time to feel held by them, that I can tolerate and even begin to savor being with emergence itself.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

—David Whyte

Reflective Prompts:

What is taking shape in you? What is calling you out beyond the limits you have on yourself? What are you living into in your own process of emergence? Who and what is helping you navigate the process?