Winter Compost

I have always thought that we compost year-round at our house. We use 2 closed bins to avoid attracting critters to our backyard and chickens. The bins work on an annual rotation — we add our compost to one bin at a time, while the other “rests”.

This resting bin is really a fertile cavern of activity. The microbes, worms, and fungi in the resting compost bin change the apple cores, egg shells and other food waste into dark nutrient rich soil. By the end of the summer, our discards are ready to become the foundation for the next season’s garden. Every fall, we put one of our garden beds to bed with the fully cooked compost from the resting bin.

Once empty, the bin is ready for contributions. This winter, I am watching the empty bin fill as the compost pile inside grow taller and taller; I realize that we are freezing rather than composting. The last few times that I have brought out the compost, I have wondered how much more I will be able to fit into the bin. We have never run out of space before. I don’t ever recall having a frozen pile of banana peels, carrot tops and withered greens rising to meet me when I take off the lid. What have we done differently this year to create a food scrap stalagmite rather than a decaying pile of organic matter?

In previous years, maybe there was enough organic matter left in the bin to begin and maintain a modest rate of decomposition throughout the winter. Or maybe the deep freeze of early January killed or stunned the microscopic critters that are responsible for sustaining the transformation from scrap to soil. Or maybe we are eating a greater volume of fruits and vegetables that have skins, cores, seeds and stalks that are bound for the compost. Whatever the reason, we are freezing rather than composting this winter. The growing pile of perfectly intact food scraps is a little absurd, but I continue to take my food waste out to the growing pile.

Every bucket added to the pile feels like an act of affirmation that the cycle will continue. I have observed the interplay and cycling between decomposition, creation, and decomposition hundreds of times in the garden and forest. This year, in the frozen pile of food scraps, the cycle has slowed, perhaps even suspended for the winter season. The compost’s long pause is a good reminder to find time, space and safety to pause among the activities of our days and years.

In our journey from birth to death, we have thousands, maybe millions of opportunities to create, break down, cycle and recycle. Between each opportunity, there is also a potential for pause. In these pauses, we can take note of the process that brought us to this moment and in wonderment of the one that will follow. Sometimes glaringly obvious and sometimes barely perceptible, the pause is an integral part of the cycle too. It exists in the subtle time and space between inhale and exhale, between dawn and day, between speaking and silence. It exists in a time and space that is both hollow and full beyond measure. The pause is fleeting and slippery, but I know it when I have moved through it. In this year of All Time and No Time, the pause visits often and we are learning to harvest its gifts.

No matter how long or short, every pause eventually yields to motion. At the compost pile, spring will come. With the warmth and movement, the compost pile and garden will “spring to life” in a flurry of decay and decomposition, beauty and growth. I will be looking for the subtle pauses that co-exist within the cycles. They are there too.

While I tend the garden, I will also be settling more deeply into the pauses of my daily life by regularly practicing stillness and reflection. I will create longer pauses by stepping out of routines that restrict time and energy. I will value the solitary space and time that slows my pace and hones my intentions.  I will live deeply into the sacred pauses that pepper my days… And I will turn the compost and weed the carrots, taking my place in the cycles of dissolution and creation that will always surround the sacred pause.

To John Muir, with Gratitude

John Muir (1838-1914) was a writer, naturalist and social activist. I discovered his writing in the months after my first trip into the wilderness. I was 16 and on a 6-week camping trip. That trip was my first close encounter with high peaks, deep wilderness and the essence that percolates beyond the realm of the physical.

Nothing in my life to that point had even hinted towards the ethereal. I had grown up regularly attending an Episcopal church and Sunday school and, at the time, was attending a Catholic high school. I had an appreciation for the formality and traditions of religion, but I had never felt anything that could be called spirituality. I’m not sure that I even recognized it was absent. I had heard the concept and even thought that I believed in its existence, but I had never experienced it.

In the mountains, I felt a Oneness that was surely the holiness that I had heard described in church. I turned the corner at the end of a long switchback and emerged above treeline. An immense valley opened below me, the wide sky stretched above me and I felt myself melt into the expanse. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it, I loved it and I was loved by it. I didn’t need to believe it or understand it, I knew it. I became devoted to honoring and protecting Mother Earth.

in the months after my trip, I began reading John Muir, and his words helped me to embrace and touch the sensation more fully. With a naturalist’s training and an artist’s heart, Muir describes the glory, wonder, ferocity and peace of moving amidst trees, storms, creeks and mountain peaks. His words resonated with my experience of the wilderness and, perhaps even more importantly, with the spirituality that my travels had awakened in me. He described the interconnection like this: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”

In sentence after sentence, John Muir validated my budding awareness that I was connected to a larger whole, connecting my fragile teenage humanity to the vast and mighty natural world, and acknowledging all of Nature as God. He wrote about forests, mountains and glaciers with such rich detail that reading his essays was like a walk through an old growth forest, dripping with sights, sounds and feelings. I took many armchair journeys as I read about his adventures. He was an accomplished alpinist and a risk taker, so rapt by experience that his own health and safety were quite secondary. He spent many months living simply and closely to the earth, spending long swaths of time alone or with just a few others in wild places. Through his words and sketches, you would believe that he was most happy with the trees and birds for neighbors, but he was also passionately committed to protecting wild spaces.

I relished his observations and the conclusion that there is more for us to glean from wilderness than an understanding of the sum of the parts. Wild spaces and humans are expressions of the same spirit. We need one another.

The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease…This is fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns.

— The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West from Our National Parks, 1901

While Muir advocated that people should get out into wilderness whenever possible, he also argued that it was important for them to know that wild places existed if they couldn’t get there. His love of wild spaces both for their own sake and for their potential to heal humanity fueled his persistence; his writing and lobbying ultimately contributed to the development of the National Park Service. As I learned more about John Muir, his activism sparked mine.

In the decades since my first encounter with wilderness, my connection to Nature (capital N) has grounded, guided and supported me. Muir’s stories kept my passion for the wilderness alive while I was making my way through college, suburbs, and cities and I followed his advice, “Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” For a few years, I stepped off the beaten path quite fully, living off the grid and closely to the earth. In those years, the rhythms of my days closely followed the rhythms of the sun, moon, seasons and critters.

I didn’t see it at the time, but I now fully recognize that my forays into wilderness, inclination to keep my hands in the dirt, and connection to seasonal cycles has been my link to a Universal Spirit all this time. I named my affinity to Mother Earth, Muir named his to God’s Creation. We were talking about the same thing. Renamed and reclaimed, the thread of Nature that has been running through my life is already being woven into new patterns. What gifts!

To John Muir, with gratitude

The Divine speaks

In rustling leaves and

Babbling brooks.

In singing birds and

Howling wolves,

The Divine speaks.

 

The Divine glows

In oranges, pinks and purples

Of the rising and setting sun.

In the brilliant white reflection

Of the full moon,

The Divine glows.

 

The Divine lives

In wind and earthworm,

Mountain and valley.

In you and me,

Eagle and salmon.

The Divine lives.

I am participating in a 2-year interfaith ministry program with the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine (ChIME). During this exploration of heart, mind and spirit, the first year focuses on Contemplation while the second year is about Action. This piece originated out of preparation for a presentation to my class on a Planetary Chaplain who has been particularly impactful in my life. A Planetary Chaplain is an individual who, as Matthew Fox describes, is “doing good work – that is, work that is a blessing to the community, a midwife of grace.”

Consider the Raindrop

Photo Credit: Duncan Steele-Maley

Consider the raindrop,

falling to earth, singular and newly formed,

carrying millennia of history, information, and form in its molecules.

Consider the raindrop,

nourishing soil, growing plants and animals.

creating, feeding, and cleansing all life.

Consider the raindrop,

tumbling into cracks and crevices,

following millions of raindrops through

unmarked paths carved into the landscape over centuries.

Consider the raindrop,

giving itself in communion with a trickle before

tumbling into a river that

rolls into an estuary and

co-mingles with the ocean.

Consider the raindrop,

entering your body as water, food, creation or inspiration,

filling you with life and possibility.

 

Consider the thousands of raindrops that are in you.

 

Sunrise Intentions

For almost a year, I have been watching sunrises. Waking in the quiet darkness, I move to the living room windows and watch the eastern sky. Some mornings I do yoga as I keep watch out the window. Other mornings, I just sit in peace and presence. I miss a few sunrises here and there when sleep is too sweet to interrupt or the nest inside the blankets is too warm to leave, but I miss more than the sunrise on those days. It is with the dawn that I set an intention to guide my words, actions and thoughts for the day. At this time, whether in yoga or in meditation or both, my body, mind and heart rise to greet the day. My daily intention emerges, like the sun, slowly and reliably from behind the veil of night, sometimes a surprise but always a gift.

As the winter solstice approached this year, I began writing down my intentions. I think that subconsciously I was hoping to hold the gifts of the sunrise a bit longer as each day got shorter. Alas, each morning I still seem to have to learn anew that the beauty of the sunrise doesn’t linger. It is leaving even as it arrives. Impermanence is hard to hold. For that reason, it has been an interesting challenge to attempt to put words to the intentions and capture the beauty of ephemeral sunrise in a photo. Neither words nor images capture it fully, but together they do offer a splash of light and beauty. Enjoy!

With this sunrise, I hold both the gifts and the challenges lightly, as the branches receive, hold and release the new snow.

 

 

 

 

 

With this sunrise, emptiness sits heavily next to the fullness. Today I will hold them both gently.

 

With this sunrise, heavy clouds linger above the silhouettes. I am reminded that the Universe is a continuum. Darkness and light are one and the same.

 

 

With this sunrise, my heart opens fully to give and receive abundant love.

 

 

With this sunrise, I welcome each new moment as it arises.

 

 

 

 

With this sunrise, the woodstove springs to life, a beacon to the coming light outside the window.

 

 

With this sunrise, I welcome the gifts of love and family that surround me.

Anatomy of the Remembrance Tree

Thick limbs carry our memories and suspended dreams.

Light branches gently hold our sorrows and pain aloft.

Delicate buds tightly hold to hope and possibility, closed against the season of grief.

 

Heartwood sustains firmly from the core, strength through past and future,

Steady in the weight of what is here.

 

The base is held firmly by earth and sea,

Hugging the roots with love while the world shifts around it.

 

The remembrance tree holds

All that was,

All that is and

All that will be with

Gentle and abiding love.

It’s all here now. 

Remembrance

Regret ~ Sorrow

Embracing ~ Dreaming ~ Wondering

Possibility ~ Sadness ~ Love ~ Stories ~ Joy

Honoring ~ Forgiving ~ Allowing

Hope ~ Reverence

Gratitude

All Time, No Time

T is taking a year away from school. He is a diligent student but was eager to step away from the traditional flow to give himself a chance to approach high school with greater intention. Stepping away from the treadmill is an opportunity to clarify his personal interests and become more familiar with his strengths and challenges. We once designed an entire program for students wishing to take a year away from traditional school between middle school and high school, similar to a gap year between high school and college. We called it The Bridge Year. Our friend, Frank, described it as “the gift of time”. The program did not launch, but T is now living its potential, a year off of life’s treadmill to identify and live among his own priorities and expectations.

While T found that he needed to get away from school, I have gone back to school. After a full academic career as a young person and 25 post-school years of living and working, I am taking time for personal exploration in a new direction. I needed the structure of a program to focus and guide my inquiry. A year of spiritual study and personal exploration is my opportunity to nurture the emergent, powerful Grace that I feel both in me and around me.

For both T and me, the opportunity to do something different is expanding our sense of possibility. The richness of the possibilities with us now place us very fully within each moment. Within those moments, the tyranny of time has dissolved. Our days are well balanced and organic – filled with reading, playing, walking, working, writing, and rich conversations. At once, we have both all time and no time. This is not timelessness; It is more like a time-full-ness — each moment so full of the now that it also contains future and past without aspiration or regret.

Early in the fall, I caught myself wondering what would be next? Where would these non-traditional paths take us? Those annoying questions still emerge periodically, but they intrude less often. We are simply here, now, living each day fully. That is to say, days are full of will, goodness, presence and meaning.

It seems the gift of time is to simply dwell deeply within it.