The Recipe for Compost
Late Summer is ripe with all the ingredients for the best kind of compost. Damp, hot and lots of overripe, even rotting stuff. Stuff rots on the vine because we can’t pick it or eat it fast enough. Instead we begin to find ways to cook, condense, freeze, or store our excess produce. I like to think about how we do this with ourselves, how we cook our ideas, condense our thoughts, freeze our fears or store our excess feelings. You can, I have come to conclude, see the results of these strategies in our bodies; lumps and bumps, tightnesses, hard immovable places. What would it look like if instead of cooking, condensing, freezing or storing, we composted?
Composting breaks things down, transforms them, releases heat, creates nourishment. What if we took our ideas and instead of cooking them into big fantasies, we broke them down, released them. What would that look like? Might it be a sense of space or freedom? And what if instead of condensing thoughts, short-circuiting our own creativity, we allowed the half-formed, half-chewed thoughts to roam around and let the flies land on them? What would happen then?
I think about composting a lot these days as I am of an age, an age when I have acquired a good deal of life experience, but the question remains, have I acquired wisdom? In Chinese medicine we have an aphorism that says we spend our essence to gain wisdom so that by the time we die, we have no more essence, only wisdom. I’m not sure exactly what that would look like, but I’m pretty sure it would mean the body had been dissolved and all that would remain would be some kind of rainbow light in space. This is in alignment with many wisdom traditions that tell of realized beings who dissolve into space and remain as light.
But back to composting, something that happens best in the dark. We are entering the time of year when the light will diminish rapidly. When will lose the heat of the day quickly after the sun goes down. It is an ideal time to allow yourself to do some composting, to choose to enter the dark, to release heat, unfreeze your fears, allow feelings to move through you. This process of composting can happen on all levels of being; physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. We can actually create the ideal conditions for a full compost transformation of all the lumps and bumps in each of these realms.
What remains after the compost? Well, gold dirt. But, never, ever does the compost look like what went into it. In this way:
“Healing may not resemble cure. The activity of the healer calls the patient into a different life with different assumptions and healing emerges from this. At its essence, healing is a practice, a spiritual practice, that engaged in on a daily basis creates a life that may mitigate symptoms, may help keep illness at bay, may itself heal”
Healing happens as we allow the transformation. The cure, the very thing we seek, is actually just the result of all that we can allow. The very nourishment we need. What we bring to this moment is our willingness to be transformed, and all the richness of own experience. The perfect recipe for compost.
Retreats are an ideal environment in which to begin to compost, to access and reclaim the essence of your own experience. When you emerge from retreat, you may find renewed strength, enhanced connection and new possibilities for the future. Please be in touch at josephine@josephinespilka.com if a retreat might be of interest to you.
Tasting Life
Life is bitter sweet. Life is salty sour. Life is sometimes bland, without inclination in any particular direction. This can seem obvious. But so much of the time, we aren’t really tasting life, we aren’t really letting a given taste take over, teach us, tell us what is up. Taste is the way the world, the outside world and especially the plant world, communicates with us, letting us know what might be in store if we fully take what the world is offering.
In each taste there is a message, an important message. Bitter, for example, is the taste of toxicity, proximity to death. A very interesting paradox. We love and hate bitter. We love our coffee, our chocolate, our negronis. Yet, we don’t want to talk about our ever-present proximity to death.
Sour says step back and consider. Might not be too harmful, but take it in a little bit at a time. Conserve, take care. Sour protects us from moving too fast into life. Salty says relax, give over, settle in. Salty says we will be nourished deeply, at our core. And most of us want to use salt a lot. We’ve been told that too much salt is harmful. In a way, the harm of too much only comes from the loss of the ability to detect what exactly is too much. And then there is bland, the humdrum, daily, water-moving, almost undetectable experience of bland. Bland is what it is like to rest easily in the moment without any ambition to go anywhere.
If we have full possession of our taste buds, and our ability to smell ( a whole discussion on its own, but not unrelated, as smell is crucial to how we taste as well) we won’t miss the moment when enough is enough. Unfortunately, often we have obliterated our taste buds with too much sweet and the moment is gone. [Here is the research documenting just how sweet taste does exactly that, blocks our ability to taste anything else]
Sweet is everywhere, as if we can’t bear our world without a heavy dose of sugar. We find sugar in the least obvious of places; in our drinks, in our mayonnaise, our tomato sauce. The ubiquitous sweet taste; of sugar, brown sugar, coconut sugar, maple sugar, molasses, honey, maple syrup, stevia, erythritol, xylitol.
Even the fakest of sugars is still a sweet taste. Sweet taste is all about comfort, softness, buffer. Sweet taste reassures us, salves our wounds and bucks us up for the next bit of trouble. Sweet is the taste of the earth in Chinese medical thinking, the taste that nourishes, harmonizes, brings things together. Sweet is the center but not the center of attention. Sweet is the way we live into ourselves if we are gentle and the way we touch another when we are paying attention. Sweet is the taste of home.
Too much sweet, however, can bring things to a halt, make them sticky, stuck. Too much sweet can make things impossibly murky, soft, cloudy. Too much sweet takes away our ability to discern other flavors, numbs us to other happenings in our world. Here in late Summer, understandably, we often want to bring things to a halt. We want to stop and savor this season of transition with its last vestiges of heat and light before the darkness takes precedence.
It is hard not to love late Summer; the sultry invitation of the damp hot days, the melancholy softness that clings to the grass in morning and evening, the colors as they ripen into the almost unbearable yellows, reds, purples. There is in late Summer an abundance of sweet; tomatoes and squash, apples and grapes, evenings on the porch with friends, all sweet. Yet, when is it too much, when is it enough? Can we taste the moment when things are turning, turning from ripe and sweet to cloying and overdone, gone, time to let go? Do you know?
The Meaning of Taste by Steve Godwin
1.
Sweet is always first in line,
or would like to be.
Heaven is probably the kind of place
where you’re expected to have dessert first.
But, leaving heaven to heaven,
search no further
than this very world to receive
the love letter made of chocolate,
the songbird’s praise
for the deep blue day,
the scent of lilac, cloying
yet irresistible.
A memory of someone’s lap
you used to curl in,
the taste of being good.
2.
The note in the melody
you weren’t expecting,
sour lives on the part of tongue
that detects the joke
amid all the muttering,
savors irony, enjoys the sting.
It’s the one at the edge
of the crowd, making faces
like the uncle in plaid
who always liked a pickle
with every meal.
Yet it’s known
in serious circles too:
sour’s the only taste
that ages well, the only one
that goes vintage.
3.
Bitter is a wind
that robs you of all you don’t need.
It is the taste that teaches us
that pain teaches us.
A taste hard to acquire,
it may at times mix with sweet,
but don’t count on it.
Count on lying dormant
till the pill wears off,
dreaming of the day
when you will get up,
throw clean water in your face,
put on a new suit of clothes.
4.
Salt is the story of life.
It walks with us through every door,
turns every corner we turn.
All our paths are salted,
beginning middle and end.
It seasons us the way
a good tool wears in the hand,
the way our bodies
enter the world every day.
Perhaps because we came from the sea,
it is the taste our bodies make.
Do we weep for our former home?
Isn’t there a life somewhere more mythic
we’d rather be living, the flavor
of which is said to be of the earth?
Steve Godwin is a graphic designer, book artist and poet, with a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC. He studied book binding at The Penland School of Craft in western N.C. in 2005. His artist books have been included in exhibitions at Bookworks in Asheville and at The Design Gallery in Burnsville, N.C. Steve was awarded poetry residencies at The Vermont Studio Center in 2006 and 2008. In 2010 he co-published a book of his poems coupled with photographs by Rick Ruggles. Steve currently is working on a collaboration with a photographer focusing on the N.C. Museum of Art. stvgodwin@gmail.com www.artistbooks.ning.com/profile/SteveGodwin
When Information is NOT Enough
It is easy in our times, to think that information is all you need. Just look it up on the internet. Just pull out your phone for an easy definition, the how-to video or the article explaining a particular political position. But when is information not enough? Information, you could say, is only one kind of information. What else could you be informed by? Your gut, your experience. But, what if you have no prior experience of your situation? What if everything is new? Information is not enough when things are constantly changing. We need more. Information is not enough when you have lost your power of choice.
And things are always changing. This is true even in the information flow, on the internet. In fact, things are changing so fast in cyberspace, that they can appear to be sitting still. Meanwhile, you can feel bewildered, overwhelmed, stymied, stuck, weighed down by the seemingly limitless amounts of information that often do not clarify what the best choice might be.
So, where do you go to find something besides information? What is there, anyway, that isn’t information? There is knowing. Heart knowing. Belly knowing. Eye knowing, ear knowing, even feet knowing. Your body is an amazing library of knowing. In every moment, your body is right here, vibrating with knowing, with a kind of “information” that isn’t really information at all, but direct communication about what is happening.
The body does not use words to communicate. The body uses sensation, pain, vibration, resonance to communicate its knowing. Your body speaks the language of sensation, perception and intuition. Words sometimes eventually pop up as you listen in to the communications from your body, but the knowing precedes them.
Our perceptions are often barreling in at top speed, [information, in fact, would say, that at least 10,000 bits of information in every second are pouring in to our eyes, ears, and nose] that it can really be challenging to make good use of them. That is the reason that even eye witnesses to a given event can differ so drastically in how they describe what has happened. It isn’t that anyone is wrong, per se, but only that each person noticed a different one of the 10,000 things that poured in at that moment. How then can we choose? How then can we know?
I have a way that I use to listen in, to slow down. I place my hand on my heart. I place my other hand on my belly. I stand or sit still. I relax my muscles, feel my feet on the ground. And I listen. You could do this for any amount of time, until something pops in. Something could be a word, a thought, a feeling, anything really, but after it shows up, you know. You can do this anytime, anywhere, to bring forward your own knowing.
There is only one reliable source of information of any kind; your experience. I like to say the only news you can use is your own. When it comes right down to it, no amount of information can actually give you what you need to make an informed decision. A truly informed decision has to include both information that you can find on the internet and the knowing that you can only find inside yourself.