Finding Our Way In the Circle

We have finally stowed the ear protectors, looking forward to an auditory break.  And a muscular one, for that matter.  Having put the chain saw through its paces the past couple of weeks, we have in more recent days been encouraging the chipper/shredder to flex its muscles — and ours.  And did I mention that it’s loud?  Once we had trimmed the cuttings and stacked them Goldilocks-style into “shredding” (the little stuff), “chipping” (the medium stuff) and “burning” (the big stuff), we pulled the starter rope, affixed the eye and ear protectors as the 14-horse engine roared to life, and started feeding the beast. 

It turns out that there is a little more chainsawing to do, shortening a few of the larger limbs that had escaped notice to make them more suitable for the fire pit, but otherwise the piles are gone.  And it feels good — partly to have several of the trees in better trim, and partly just to have the project completed for a time and cleaned up.  But what feels especially good is having the limbs turned back around for their next contribution.  In the coming months, the wood chips will become mulch around the bushes and flowering trees in the meadow to help initially with moisture retention, and later, as the chips work their way into the soil, as organic matter rebuilding the soil to support the growth of new limbs that will eventually be pruned and chipped and mulched all over again.  It’s nature’s “right and left grand” around the circle of life before returning home.

And it’s one of the lessons we have been trying to practice from nature’s way of farming: that there is no such thing as waste.  The end-put of one process — trimmed and shredded branches, animal manure, egg shells, food scraps, etc. — becomes the valuable input of another.  “Waste”, as commonly understood, is less an indictment of the unappreciated material at hand than it is of my lack of understanding and underdeveloped imagination.  Waste is simply that which I haven’t yet discerned how to beneficially use.

But we keep learning and exploring and experimenting. The kitchen scraps that the chickens can’t eat we compost.  The grass clippings and leaves I once bagged and hauled away get the same composting treatment.  The straw bales — “waste” from someone else’s field — now stacked around and insulating the chicken coops will, come springtime after a winter of weathering and manuring, get spread over the potato beds among other things to protect and nourish a new season of growth.  And then become organic matter worked into the soil.

The circle of life.  Right and left grand.  

If only the idea would catch on in other parts of life.  

More appreciation than judgment.

More creativity than disposal.

Respectful welcome of the intrinsic possibilities, rather than dismissive rejection of the richness undiscerned.

Who knows how fruitful we might become?

We might even begin bowing not only to our partners, but to our corners as well; and dancing — promenading — along with the rest of creation.