There is a small patch of bare earth in our backyard that I consider hallowed ground, treated with the same respect and reverence as our home altar. It is a zone of quietude where no cellphones or audio devices are permitted.
Here, underneath the soil, you can discover little bits of my family history since the day we moved into our house 40 years ago. Someday in the future, maybe a hundred or two hundred years from now, an archeologist will excavate this site and would be able to piece together a composite picture of the kind of people who lived here. He would know what we ate, what pets we had, the packaging materials we used, the plastic utensils we threw away, and other objects that would be tell-tale evidence of the way we lived.
Since we started raising pets -cats that had strayed inside our garage and never left or dogs given to us by friends-this backyard has served as a burial ground for many of them. I can’t count how many times my youngest son, our official grave digger, dug the ground to bury the long list of animals that endeared themselves to us. ‘Boxer, Athena, Harpo, and Chinkee are just the few I can remember. A future archaeologist discovering their bones would conclude that a pet-loving family once lived here.
So, in a sense, it’s our pet cemetery, a ‘sacred’ place of honor for all the animals we’ve learned to love and who in their own little ways had a beneficial effect on our family. Cats are said to be sacred pets protecting their human owners against evil spirits. Some Buddhists believe that cats have a spiritual mission in life. They neutralize and transform negative energy into positive energy in our homes.
But beyond our dead pets, there’s something I am now burying beneath the ground of our backyard. It has become the scene of my dirty work in late life.
A few years ago, during the pandemic, I was reading a book on permaculture and I came across a quote about soil that captured my imagination: ‘The soil is miraculous. It is where the dead are brought back to life.’
The truth is that the soil is not dead, but can be kept alive by feeding it with our wastes from the food we cook and eat. What we think is waste is not really waste. With the help of earthworms, bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms (billions of them), these discards are broken down and brought back to life. This process is part of the ongoing cycle of life that values everything, uses everything, and transforms everything.
That’s when I went into composting. Every morning, I collect the organic wastes put in plastic bags the previous night, such as vegetable and fruit peelings, rotten leftover food, chicken and animal bones, animal internal organs that can’t be fed to our cats and feral dogs in the neighborhood, and other wet wastes. I dig a hole, put these mixed wastes, and then cover them with the same earth I dug out, happy in the thought that I am feeding the earth and all the creatures that live underground. I confess that I have no background in Biology and Botany so what I am doing is not scientific or systematic but simply for the spirit of it.
All the while, I imagine that our wastes are a feast to the squirming earthworms that emerge and come to light as I dig the ground. I’ve been treating the worms like pets that I have to feed. I like giving them things that are really well rotten- a blackened banana, slimy greens, even fish scraps. I am comforted by the thought that these tiny wormies are helping inoculate the soil with new richer life, without the help of chemicals bought from a store.
If you decide to try it, I suggest approaching it as more than just a ‘green’ habit. One can look at composting as a teacher, showing us lessons we wouldn’t be able to learn any other way. For example, composting is a living metaphor for transformation.
When I look at my compost, I don’t see garbage anymore. I see possibility and continuity. The end of one form is the beginning of another. That pile of wet rubbish metamorphose in due time into something nourishing and alive: soil that is full of life and potential. Yesterday’s rotting cabbage becomes tomorrow’s vibrant soil that enables a Bandera Espanola to grow and produce bright yellow and red flowers.
I learn to practice humility, which comes from the Latin word ‘humus’, which means ground or dirt. The work that I do gets me literally grounded. It involves squatting on the ground to dig the soil with a small shovel.
In those moments, I become one with the lowly scavengers, the garbage collectors, the sewage cleaners, as well as those who have been thrown out, forgotten, or shunned by society. I think of Fr. Damien of Molokai who lived with the lepers till his death, Mother Teresa who served the unwanted sick and the homeless of Calcutta, Benedict Labre who tended to people considered dregs of society, and many more.
Nothing tests one’s humility and endurance like the stink of rotten wastes. I have learned to embrace the entire gamut of the smell of rottenness: putrid, sour, rancid, fetid, name it, I’ve smelled it. In truth, nothing is offensive anymore to my olfactory sense. Like my practice of cleaning the toilet bowl, stink is no longer repulsive to me. Despite the filth and stench of composting, I love doing it. Nothing could be a more pleasant sight to me than seeing the mounds of earth that mark the wastes I buried. Someday, I hope to do more systematic composting. Then who knows, I might pick up gardening too. I would like to grow our own food.
Out there is the city where life is always moving fast. Meanwhile, here is my little corner where time slows down, nature does its work, and with every digging of the shovel into the dirt, I feel happy to be participating in the ancient cycle of decay and renewal. At the same time, or because of this dirty task, I feel my inner life being worked on, renewed and transformed.
No wonder every time I come here, it feels like a quiet celebration.