The gentle alchemy of compost

Transforming life’s mistakes and failures Into the fertile soil of new possibilities

New life emerges from the dead of winter

Mistakes and failures as compost

Saturday midday and the mountains are basking in a hazy blue sky. Earlier cloud lay like candy floss on the foothills with the craggy peaks suspended above like ice castles in the air. Across the River Towy from Ferryside in West Wales, are the remains of a twelfth century castle at Llansteffan. On days when the mist rolled up the river, they called it Dragon’s Breath and the castle ruin up on the hill would nestle in the clouds. It always brought Don MacClean’s song, Castles in the air to mind.

Since drafting this post almost a week ago, I’ve had the sense of something brewing, something incubating, indeed something composting! This has become a familiar sensation, often accompanied by unease, restlessness and crabbiness. I’m a little more patient now (sometimes) and a little more curious. If I wait patiently, staying alert, often some new thread pulls me, some insight appears or some unexpected encounter happens. This week two enchanting seeds have sprouted. More on those in later posts. Suffice to say I’m grateful. I like to protect seedlings from too much unnecessary exposure in the early days.

Last Sunday

It’s dark, the forecast storm hasn’t hit yet and the germ of an idea is forming for my next post. The rise in temperature is welcome though I enjoyed the sub zero spell. I write in different spots around the house and also love to head to the library or a cafe with my laptop. Just now I’m writing this in bed. I’ve always been fascinated by other people’s writing habits so I share this in case you are curious. I draft these Substacks in Scrivener first.

The theme of compost has been gently heating on the back burner of my mind.

The mother of all compost heaps. This fallen log gracefully decomposing and providing fertile ground for a whole array of new life

Intensive article writing practice born out of an article graveyard

More than 15 years ago I completed an online article writing course over four months. It involved writing a 5-800 word article, six days a week. The purpose? To generate leads for my business. We were taken back to basics and began to flex our muscles writing about fun things in our life before being drilled relentlessly in topic generation, chunking down, outlining, the use of drama and practicing three types of article writing, as well as editing, formatting and publishing (in the private forum and I used my output in my email newsletters) over and over again. In small groups we honed our skills and learnt to give and receive feedback.

The hook on the sales page that had me sign up was the question, ‘Do you have a graveyard of unfinished articles? Boy oh boy, did I have a graveyard. I had a supersize graveyard that I used to criticise and judge myself about constantly. The course proved a good investment. By the end of four months, I could easily draft 5-800 word articles on my business area in 45 minutes. No more unfinished articles. It’s a skill I employed to share my expertise and attract clients. It brought me leads and prospects and perhaps more importantly the confidence to write and deliver content to a schedule, efficiently and easily. I don’t stick to the rigid structure anymore, allowing myself to meander much more but certain key points remained with me.

I’ve been eternally grateful for that.

What I value from that programme

• The breaking down of what article writing for business was all about and what we wanted to achieve (leads for our businesses) was a great foundation.

• Practice and repetition. Learning through experience. I must have written over a hundred articles in that four months, getting better each time.

• The value of feedback from peers who are also learning.

• The confidence and ease I felt as I mastered this new skill

What I see now

• The rigid structure was helpful to hone our writing but feels less necessary now

• The structure provided a container for the plentiful fresh ideas and inspirations that had always come through me. It enabled me to bring those ideas out of the ether onto the page in an accessible way for the reader.

• I’m re-considering that graveyard of unfinished articles. How were they compost?

• There was compost in the so called failures. From them the desire to write better germinated and grew. I wanted to write quicker and finish articles. I had so many ideas, it was frustrating that they didn’t get to see the light of day. That desire led me to sign up to the course.

• The graveyard of articles represented all the ideas that flowed through me seeking expression and exploration. I felt I was doing them a disservice being unable to midwife them fully into the world.

• Following the urge to capture them and begin to write about them was acknowledging that flood of ideas and attempting to use that material in service of other people.

• I’m wondering how this experience relates to my current creative writing project?

Thanks to

Steffi Bednarek

for the post, Rethinking Success in Regenerative Culture

Not Every Acorn is meant to become an Oak but they contribute to the health of the whole forest by their existence and decay.

Rethinking Success in Regenerative Culture

I had a strange reaction to this post. I thought,

I love the idea of being compost! Me, being compost! Our bodies are all going to end up being food for the worms one way or another.

Such a peaceful feeling came with that idea. It’s been settling all week.

How does decay and dissolution support other beings?

How does the decay of old ideas support fresh thought, fresh relationships with ourselves and others including the non human world? In the death and dissolution of people, ideas, systems and places what might be released?

In these times of accelerated change perhaps one response is to ask deeper questions, to turn deeper inwards. To look beyond the chaos and urgency of the surface, at so much we cannot control and look towards what remains the same. The aliveness all around and within us.

Saplings emerge from an old tree stump. What might emerge from the dissolution of who you think you are? What new experiences await?

I am seeing the beauty of compost everywhere, literally and metaphorically

What we discard, what we consider redundant or useless or not good enough, what if it was all compost for future fresh ideas, projects, relationships, new ways of being?

The joy of left overs

I’ve always loved using up left overs. Either an easy reheat to get two meals out of the original one or to combine random left overs with fresh ingredients to create a new meal. One of my favourites is to make potato cakes out of left over mashed potato. You just add an egg, a little flour, a few chopped up Spring onions (scallions) seasoning and fry them up until they are crispy. De-licious!

My Mum is adept at using up leftovers whereas my Grandma (her Mum) wouldn’t give them fridge room. She didn’t like waste either. So for her, estimating the exact amount for the meal and cooking fresh each day was the height of good food management. Perhaps having lived through rationing in Britain during and after the Second World War (food rationing went on into the 1950s), she appreciated being able to buy fresh ingredients and looked down on reheated left overs. I can remember her visiting the butchers and picking out lamb chops for my Grandad’s dinner. They had a cooked lunch at 1pm every day. She made mint sauce with leaves from the garden.

The cycles of life are apparent. Beloved leftovers to making every meal from scratch show the creativity that waxes and wanes through times of plenty and times of scarcity. The myriad ways that creativity finds expression in kitchens the world over. Our responses: contracting into separation and expanding into our shared experience of the aliveness of being. A big leap from mint sauce perhaps?

Turning out the compost bin

Returning from a walk the other day I stopped to chat to a neighbour emptying her compost bin, a twice yearly task. Compost - there it was again! All those plant trimmings and food waste turned into a rich and crumbly black gold growing medium over months. Sitting in the dark, with the help of worms and aerobic digestion a wondrous transformation takes place. What magic is at play?

It was the first sunny day heralding Spring. The warmth in the air like a great whoop of delight, enticing, inviting us to slough off the extra layers, stretch our limbs and turn to face the sun. I found myself sitting in Gilbey Square in La Conner this week, writing in my journal, sipping coffee, basking in the sunny warmth. Out of the cold dormancy of winter, the suns rays begin to warm the soil, signalling bulbs and buds to send forward new life. It’s a time of quickening. The earth responds. New life emerges.

Excavating old fillings

On another day, out of the decay of old fillings, new structures were created in my mouth this week. My second trip to the dentist and wow, American dentistry is something else. The precision, skill and care the dentist and her assistant gave to my crumbling teeth was simply astonishing. They removed old leaking amalgam filling in one tooth and fitted a temporary crown after filing down another decaying tooth to create a peg. The two worked together with few words, a kind of dance happening in my mouth above my face. I sneaked a photo of the tent like structure assembled over my mouth. I’ve never seen anything like it. It occurs to me that removal of the old amalgam fillings which contain mercury may carry some risk to me and the dental staff so perhaps that’s why the cold case tent was set up. What a feat of the imagination!

I’m struck by the precision and focus brought to bear by countless humans over countless hours that had me sitting in that chair having this work carried out on my teeth by two skilled practitioners. Miraculous when you think about it. How much trial and error was involved over decades?

I am looking for the ideas in what is left behind. The cycle of things. Long ago, my teeth needed filling. The materials used, were considered safe at the time but they decay, just as the original tooth decayed. And nowadays amalgam fillings are not favoured, in fact they are considered toxic. I think they’ve been banned in many places. Human ingenuity is incredible when you think about it. Teeth, unlike most parts of the human body, don’t renew themselves. So we humans have come up with increasingly high tech ways to repair and restore function to rotten teeth.

My departed ex mother in law used to say, “teeth, a pain when they come and a pain when they go.” Pete, a dear man who used to work on our organic veg box scheme back in the 1990s in Wiltshire told me the story of his mother. For her 21st birthday, her family gave her a set of dentures. Off she went to the dentist to have all her teeth pulled out. Ouch! I guess it looked like a preemptive strike to save all the suffering of decaying teeth. Potentially fatal if you don’t have the means to get treatment. See the note below. What are your wildest dental stories? Does anything spark for you in how decaying teeth might be compost for something new?

Creating compost out of our persistent so called weaknesses

You know those things you do that don’t serve you. How would it be to shine a light on those things and get curious about what new ideas, habits or perspectives might grow from letting those things die and dissolve? For me they are:

• being absolutely certain I’m right (and that others just need to see the light!)

• giving up easily when things are hard (I was blessed to find many things easy in school but the flip side of that is you don’t learn to persist when things don’t come easy)

• being impatient with myself and others

These things tend to alienate other people. Funny that! And don’t result in the harmonious connections with my close in people. I’ve just realised that I curb these behaviours out in the world, saving them for my nearest and dearest and myself. To me that suggests I know, at one level, these behaviours are unproductive. I’m grateful these things are coming into focus and curious to see what might grow from the composting of these old habits. No doubt they served me somewhere along the line but now? Not so much.

In these times of huge change and dismantling of structures, where can we see or encourage composting, ready to support new ways of being?

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Questions

With hindsight, what mistakes and failures can you consider as compost, providing nourishment and fertile ground for new projects, ideas, relationships, travel, understanding or insights?

How I know ‘we’re a long way from Kansas Toto’

In this new section, inspired by my brother’s quoting from the Wizard of Oz movie soon after I arrived in the USA, I’ll share photos or observations of things that tell me I am no longer in Ferryside, West Wales, UK!

This is a big pick up truck with me beside it for scale. It is a one ton crew cab pick up. They’re common around here. To me it is a monster truck but Paul tells me Monster trucks are something else. Bigger. Not seen on the street! Note the parking spaces are sized to accommodate these trucks. Love them or loathe them, they are a feature of life in the USA and not something you’ll see around Ferryside. Thanks to Paul Murk for the photo.

Small Joys

Inspired by

Jenny O'Connell

I’m renaming this section Small Joys, a reminder to keep noticing the miracles of life. She keeps a joy calendar in which she records the ‘tiny joys, triumphs and glimmers that make up a life.’ How cool is that?

Here they are in no particular order:

Gazing at the mountains. Drinking coffee in the morning with Paul. Chatting to my Mum on WhatsApp audio. Seeing the buds emerge. Mashing sweet potato with butter and black pepper. The little pot of miniature daffodils on the step outside our door. Three raccoons looking back at me from their hang out by some drainage pipes. Ten pin bowling next to three young guys, one trying out his new ball. Seeing so much beauty on Substack and in my neighbourhood.

Links

The Article Writing Course I did is still on offer https://www.psychotactics.com/workshops/article-writing-course-how-to-write-articles/

Dentistry in the UK has been privatised though some practices still offer free NHS dentistry if you are eligible. Here medical insurance may cover some of the cost of dentistry or some people are cash payers. I looked up what happens if you can’t afford dental treatment and don’t have medical insurance. I discovered Flossy, ‘the dental industry’s trusted AI partner’ - a website full of dental information for patients. The options, in case you are interested, are low cost treatment at dental medical schools, community health centers that offer treatment on a sliding scale of charge dependent on income, join clinical trials and there are some networks offering free dental treatment for those in need. You can read all about it here https://www.flossy.com/blog/i-need-dental-work-but-have-no-money?pseudo_id=(135692153.1740769011).

Threads that pull me

Book: Small Things Like These by Irish author Claire Keegan, a short but powerful read asking deep human questions about what to do when we can’t unsee horrors on our doorstep.

I had tears streaming down my face reading Peter Reason’s encounter with River near Frome in his essay, The Sacred as Immanent in a Sentient World featured in Learning from Life, from Schumacher College. I experienced deep recognition of the enchantment he writes about when the boundary between the aliveness in ourselves and the aliveness in the world around us dissolves. I am often flooded with an almost overwhelming sense of beauty and gratitude. There are many spiritual traditions that allude to the divine nature of beauty. Saint Augustine, for example, believed that beauty is the pure manifestation of the good. It reflects divine qualities and serves as a bridge between the earthly and the transcendent. Have you ever considered that your appreciation of beauty may bring you in contact with a deeper dimension of being?

It encourages me to invite more appreciation of beauty and share more of what I experience. I am so grateful for this piece of writing. I’ve always known words are powerful. Here words are being used to point to something beyond words, something ineffable. Something in us responds. Something beyond words.

Learning From Life - Feature Article: 'The Sacred as Immanent in a Sentient World' by Peter Reason

Since reading the article from Schumacher College’s Substack, Paul, my husband visited their website to discover they closed their degree and post graduate courses in August last year (2024) due to substantial losses. I wonder what may emerge from that ‘death’?

That’s all folks. You can share this post via email or other platforms using a copy and paste link or share to a note here in Substack if it moves you. Drop me a message or add a comment if you’d like to share what this read sparks for you and the little red hearts are a lovely way to say, ‘I like what I read’. All these things encourage me to wonder more, write more and share more photos. ‘Til next time

Juliet Fay