To See the Cosmos in a Bag of Compost

Tomorrow the compost.  I know it's not a lively topic, and I will be the first to acknowledge the mystery of my warm fascination with the stuff, but there it is.  Without my really intending it it finds its way into conversations.  I read about it.  I have taken a class or two on the subject.  I have been trying to make it in the burgeoning mounds rising like the Tetons behind the garden shed, and in the barrel spinner outside the garage -- religiously sequestering kitchen scraps, shredded bills and credit card offers, miscellaneous manures and, in their season, extricated weeds, all for the important part they can play in the grand transformation.  And until I get it right -- until that earth-bound abracadabra has been incanted -- I buy it by the bag.  From Wisconsin.  From certified organic materials.  Don't laugh.  This is serious stuff.

This season I partnered with the CSA farmer who has been supplementing our harvest in recent years; combining our orders in pursuit of a little savings on shipping.  Having heard from him today that it has arrived, tomorrow I'll fire up the pickup and haul it home.  The twelve bags of it.  Which will hardly be enough.

As I say, its allure is hard to pinpoint.  Sure, there is the intrinsic nourishment -- the organic matter, the natural nutrients.  The soil needs it -- especially, I am coming to realize, my soil.  For all its vaunted fertility, this little corner of Iowa soil leaves a few things to be desired.  That's fine of course; it gives me something to complain about and, more to the point, something on which to blame my failures.  But it also gives me something more to learn about, which I like.  If I intend to grow the vegetables I will, along the way, honor the necessity of building the soil.  Like anything else, it needs its care and feeding.  The tires need their air; the equipment needs its oil and gas; the blades need their edge.  The soil needs its replenishment.

But as important as all that is, it doesn't quite get there.  That's the sterile stuff of science and pragmatism -- what you do because it helps you accomplish your goals -- but there is more to it, somehow, than that.  Compost has, for me, something almost soulful about it.

Yes, I hear you.  You're laughing again.  But stay with me.

It's the circle that fascinates me, captivates me and draws me in.  One thing becoming another, enabling still another.  Nothing lost; simply transformed.  In the dying, a rising.  At how many gravesides have I stood over the past 30 years and pronounced similar affirmations of creation's cyclic symmetry?  "Like dust returning to dust," I say; "earth returning to earth" -- an almost ineffable testament to the essential oneness of all things.  "Hummus to human and back again" as agrarian theologians remind us.

Which, of course, is compost's essential constitution.    Brown, green, root and rot, what once upon a time found its expression as leaf or fruit or pulp or cud, completes that purpose and, in its expenditure, offers its remainder to still another.  Teeming in that bag from Wisconsin (and, with any luck, in that pile out back) are the flapping wings and thundering hoofs of dinosaurs silent now for millenia; the frost of glaciers long ago melted and evaporated; the waving prairie grasses long since scythed, and in every handful a microbial cacophony more populous than New York City, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro  and Beijing together, taking yet another spin around the wheel.

And I find that infinitely wondrous -- sacred, even.  So that spreading it, spading it into the garden spaces and entrusting it with seeds -- those crusty and, for some varieties, almost feathery wombs of life-to-be -- becomes almost sacramental.

And I the sacristan, humble behind the scenes.