Title: The Zen of Shit
Date: 17 April 2005
Location: Penang & Green Gulch Memories
Hashtag: #ZenCompostChronicles
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 to our personal pile, until comes a time when, as the Americans say, we find ourselves "up shit creek without a paddle."
Well, shit isn’t all that bad — not if we know what to do with it besides burying it for posterity. One of the most profitable and enlightening uses for shit is in composting.
When I was a child growing up in Penang, I used to watch the Chinese night soil carriers lug around buckets full of human waste from the outhouses around our neighborhood. It seemed disgusting at the time — the smell, the idea of touching or handling it was unimaginable.
But years later, I came to understand that the waste went straight into fertilizing vegetable gardens, which produced the fat, healthy greens sold at the very market where my grandmother shopped. That, right there, is the ultimate in Zen scatology — the sacred art of turning waste into sustenance.
This morning, as I watered my compost piles made of chicken and cow droppings, the irony hit home. Now that I am seeking ways to survive, I have taken up the project of selling shit. Yes, sir — shit for sale: top-grade compost, organic and research-backed, ready to enrich any soil it touches.
Such is life. When all else fails and before the shit hits the fan, we return to the primal barter of waste made valuable. In the process, I am also healing the earth, engaging in the most elemental form of recycling.
Just as I process and unload mental waste into this blog, I do the same with organic matter out back. Who would buy this mental compost I’m writing? Maybe no one. But I write it anyway — because it matters to create, to act. If I don't, it stays as just another fading idea. But if I do — even if no one reads — I've made an existential difference, if only to myself.
Years ago, I lived at Green Gulch Farm, a Zen center in Sausalito, California. There, we grew organic produce for the Bay Area — including the famous Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. One of the most meaningful practices I learned there was compost-making: food scraps, horse manure, layered day by day into mounds of potential. It was my meditation.
Watching waste turn into life, into green, into nourishment — it was healing. It was Zen. If Zazen was sitting with the stillness of the mind, composting was working with the soul — a soulful fermentation of effort, patience, and presence.
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