Sitting with the Compost

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I scratch away at the straw and leaves and burrow my hand into the heap, just like the squirrels did last night. My fingers slide into damp heat, my wrist itchy with dirt and coffee grounds. I hold my arm steady as long as I can as warm seeps into hot climbs into burning scarred skin. 

But now I know it is cooking. 

This decay is squirming with life, microbes devouring their fill of what we could not. Devour. 

What we let go we pour onto a heap, cover it with earth, feed the fire with water, and nourish it until it happily crumbles into compost for the next thing. 

The next seed. 

The next bloom and fruit.

But it is too hot for me right now. My fingers burn with reactions. I need to sit with this pile, be patient with its process, wait for the natural decline in temperature and activity. I will sit under the pepper tree and write. I will cook vegetables I picked from the fields yesterday in cast iron pans and pickle the rest in cloudy mason jars. I will sing and dance and cry and giggle giggle giggle until we cry again in tents, at picnic tables, held in branches. I will talk with the foxes and the deer as they cross the hollow dip in the mountain where the oaks shade and whisper. I will sit through the ecstasy of my hair being brushed, oiled, braided. I will leave love notes in scavenged mailboxes hanging from trees and squish clay from the rock pile between my fingers and onto my face and feel it crack in the heat.

I will wait for the work to do itself before sinking my pitchfork deep into the crumbling result.

My hands bring earth up to my nose. I inhale the depth and life. I scoop and sift and sniff. I know that even this finished pile of nourishment is not broken all the way down. So I sift out the readiest of the sticks and eggshell strewn bunch and toss the rest back in to cook some more. 

The process unfolds. The breakdown continues to nourish. The decay is the point; without it there is no life, no sweet smelling earth, no stone fruit dripping juices onto chin, chest, toes from a smiling mouth.

I have piled, watered, nourished. Now we decay. Now we delight.

A universal schoolyard

I am tethered.

I am the scuffed white ball at the end of the string. The faster I spin, an attempt to flee, to forget, smacked by hardened palms and youthful grunts, the faster I wrap myself around the pole lodged in the earth. I hit the weather worn metal with a hollow thud. I am suspended for a second kissing the gray, thankfully still… then I fall away, unravel myself from my destiny, wait for the next throw and punch.

I expect it. So far that is the only way I’ve known to stop the spinning, the constant motion circling that pseudo silence within every continuously acrobatic atom.  I think that if enough beings push me I can attain my goal. Instead, what if I withdrew, stopped begging for the nudges and slams? What if I just lay still? A memory flits past fibers, remembering how stillness feels every so often between the back forth back.  

I am (will be) still tethered (to the ocean, farming, my writing) but I am not tangled up in it, always trying to be simultaneously free and closer. I am not (will not be) twisted and pulled and smashed into the gray (of gloriously squally sunset-less evenings, no land in sight. Of the rocks and slug underbellies and spider eggs in gossamer sacs. Of black words and white paper fusing into one). 

If I resign myself to stillness, to the quiet of disengagement, then I simply lay against my desires, my string straight and unstrained, my body able to re-inflate those bruised spots and enjoy the emanating warmth of earthly minerals nestled up next to me, whispering, “Isn’t this better?”

The kids will still want to play, prove their strength, I know this too.
But the intervals can shift, I can be less attractive to battle. Like the ships the Native Americans didn’t see, I will be out of context to tangles and strikes. I will melt into the gray with my scuff marks and dirt and age and the string won’t even be necessary anymore.

Naturally tethered, the struggle dissolved, the hard fists no where to be seen, felt, imagined.