Composting for Life

We came into this world full of it and depart with even more, shit, that is. All through our lives we create and add more shit to our lives untill comes a time when we hardly know what to do with the load and as the American would say we find ourselves 'up shit creek without a paddle'. Well shit aint all that bad if we know what to do with it other than bury it for posterity and one of the most profitable use of shit is in composting.

When I was a child growing up in Penang, west Malaysia, I used to watch the Chinese Night Soil Carrier lug around buckets full of shit from the outhouses around my neighborhood and thought how disgusting it was. The smell the very thought of removing human waste itself was beyond my imagination untill I learned later in my life that the shit that was removed was later used to fertilize the vegitable garden which grew fat and healthy vegetables sold at the local market where my grandmother shopped. This is the ultimate in Zen scatology, the essence in recycling of waste materials.

This morning I was watering my compost piles made up of chicken and cow droppings. It is not as bad as the human manure to deal with but none the less the irony struck home all the same. Now that I am in need to find ways and means to generate some form of income to survive I have ended up with the project of selling shit! Yessir! Shit for sale, compost of highest quality available, guaranteed organic and well researched and ready for use. Such is life, when all else fails and before 'the shit hits the fence', it is inevitable that one can fall back one the most primal of commodities to barter with and it is readily available everywhere. In the process I am also helping out with the environment in the form of the ultimate in recycling.

Just as I am selling my mental waste that I am processing at this moment on to my blog, processing the compost materials behind my house is no more different. Who would buy this piece of garbage that I am writing? Perhaps just as I wonder who I could sell to my organic compost the idea of my writng this material would someday find an unlikely market. But it is all in making it happen, you either do it or you dont. If you do it chances are you have made an existensial difference in the world in one form or another and if you dont it all remains an idea and ideas have the tendency to disappear while manifesting one's thoughts into action can at least work out your sweat and set your mind at ease having the knowlege that you have yet made another effort for the day.

I spent two years living at Green Gulch Farm in Sausalito California where they grow acres and acres of organic produce that supplies most of the organic food stores and restaurants including the Greens Restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the best lessons learned while on this job was making the compost piles from left over food and kitchen waste and gathering horse manure by lorry loads from nearby horse ranch. I enjoyed building the compost mounds layer upon layer everyday and watching the compost later in the year being buried in the ground where lettuces and potatoes are grown packed and delivered to the markets. It was a healing process for me to be in touch with the soil especially one that I had a hand in creating. It was more reflective as it was part of my Zen practice in mindfullness. Next to the sitting meditation of Zazen making compost was the most rewarding practice I had at Green Gulch.