Go and Make Compost
On Composting, Community and What We Do with Our Pain
I didn’t become a farmer on purpose. It started with getting my last choice for an elective class my freshman year of high school: Basic Agriculture. Imagine my surprise when, four years later, I couldn’t imagine my life without farming in it and decided to major in agricultural science at the University of Georgia.
Now, fifteen years after sitting in Mrs. Lastly’s Basic Agriculture class for the first time, I’m living and working on a farm in the tropical rainforest of Central America growing coffee, good soil, and, hopefully, the next generation of difference makers.
Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. Working and loving the land for the last decade has taught me more about loving people—including myself—than just about anything or anyone else. Maybe that’s why so many of Jesus’s most popular stories center on what the land has to teach us if we’ve got those “eyes to see” he talks about so much.
I don’t know how it’s been for you, but my life has been pretty messy. Some of that mess is my doing; some of that mess is inherited; and some of that mess was given to (see also: thrown at) me by other people. It’s not been all bad; in fact, I’d say I have a beautiful life. But even beautiful lives are often riddled with hardship.
Psychologically speaking, we’re more likely to vividly remember negative experiences than good ones. On average, it takes about ten positive experiences to cancel out the effect of one negative experience and sometimes many more, depending on the individual and the severity of the experience. Blame your survival instincts: quickly recalling previous harmful events helped our ancestors avoid dangerous situations and stay alive longer. Unfortunately, that means you may find yourself lying awake at night reliving your most painful memories over and over again, breaking out in a sweat, heart racing, all while forgetting your friend’s kind words from yesterday.
We can’t avoid painful experiences. As the saying goes, “hurt people hurt people.” I’m willing to bet you’ve lived long enough to know this is true. It’s not that most people are out there trying to cause you pain: in fact, most people are trying their best to do the opposite. Despite that, we often unintentionally trigger one another and end up lashing out at or running away from the people we love the most, passing our brokenness on to the next person.
We can’t avoid painful experiences, but we can choose what we do with the pain we’re given. As Ehime Ora says, “You gotta resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place to live that is not within your body…your body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.” Like physical wounds, left untreated, emotional wounds will fester and even rot inside of us, eventually keeping us from showing up and loving the world the way we want to.
Enter compost.
Composting is the process of taking waste—often literal manure but also rotting fruits and veggies, grass clippings, and senesced branches and leaves—and turning it (because you have to shovel and turn compost over and over and over again) into healthy, living soil.
Composting is time consuming, messy, and takes practice to learn what works best with what you have, where you are. Variation in methodology aside, the end result is always the same: good composting produces what some farmers refer to as “black gold,” capable of healing dead or dying soils and helping plants thrive and fend off diseases and pests more easily.
Just one teaspoon of good compost can hold as many as one billion microorganisms. Incredibly, what starts as otherwise harmful source material becomes a source of abundant life, an agent for healing not just for itself but also its surrounding environment.
Starting to see the metaphor?
As I said before, there are lots of ways to compost successfully. Similarly, healing looks different for everyone. Some wounds heal pretty quickly, some take longer. Leaf litter breaks down fast. Citrus peels, by contrast, take forever to compost. Yes, even in the compost pile, the phrase “when life gives you lemons” still holds true.
In order to heal, we have to face our pain. We have to get our hands dirty. In composting, we aerate and turn the compost heap once a week for several months to help good, oxygen-loving microorganisms thrive and transform “crap” into sweet-smelling (I’m not even kidding) earth. Without opening up and turning the compost heap frequently, the pile can shift to favor more anaerobic organisms—slimy actors that promote rot. Turns out, it’s not putting a lid on your pain but rather airing out your dirty laundry that leads to healing.
Although labor intensive, ironically, the magic of composting—the resurrection of disparate, dead things into a cohesive, living soil—actually depends very little on the farmer and is better characterized as a partnership with naturally occurring processes and organisms.
It mostly requires your time, your willingness to offer what you have. Composting is an invitation to trust the work of hundreds of small living things you, without a microscope, don’t have eyes to see. Reminds me of a certain carpenter’s son who had more to him that what the naked eye could see. While we faithfully turn the compost, hundreds of thousands of microorganisms do what we cannot, feasting on and digesting the rotting material to create the final product: humus rich in organic matter and nutrients.
Healing from pain is similar. We very rarely heal in isolation. I know, I know. This goes against our deeply ingrained instinct to be the stoic hero of the story—to be a “strong, independent woman who don’t need no man,” if you will. Whatever you see in movies, the truth of the matter is healthy healing often happens in the context of community.
One way this happens is by telling our story to a trusted mentor, friend, or medical professional, especially when we feel safe and can bring our most vulnerable and painful stories to the surface.
Composting our pain requires us to release our control over the narrative about the negative experiences in our lives and allow them to become something new. When we invite others into our pain, we create space for new perspectives, lament, and forgiveness—both for others and for ourselves. You may even find the strength to challenge and replace harmful lies or assumptions you have internalized about yourself or others with truth.
Healing is reclaiming our ability to love well, even as imperfect people in an imperfect world, freeing us to interact with the world the way we want to instead of being limited by our brokenness.
Kevin Wilson says in his book The Way of Chai, “suffering introduces you to yourself.” As you tell your story and compost your pain in community, you might be surprised to meet a more resilient version of yourself rising to meet the worst the world has to offer you with kindness. Think Brené Brown’s “soft heart, strong back.”
As a good friend of mine, a chemical-engineer-turned-farmer, has printed on the side of his company pick-up truck: “If people give you sh*t, make compost.”
Hurt can happen in a moment. Healing takes time. Compost is only ever ready in its own time, and healing works the same way, usually taking longer than we’d like it to. And yet, the results are worth it every time. When we choose to release and transform our pain, it can become life-giving. Hurt people hurt people, yes, but healed people heal people, too.
Sometimes the greatest thing you have to give to the world starts with processing what’s inside of you so that when your turn comes, you can offer something different than what you were given. You can offer up something nothing short of a miracle, something that doesn’t even really depend fully on you but rather is a gift that comes from surrendering to a process as old as dirt. Literally.
So, when life gets messy, find some friends, and make compost. Before you know it, you’ll have yourself a group of folks who are able to offer resurrected life to a messy world, and what a beautiful gift that would be.
This is so wise, thanks for pressing in to the whispers of this metaphor and teasing out all the shades of meaning. I love that this comes out of your background and that you have unique insight to share because of that.
Oof. Needed this.