Pride has taught me how to fall gracefully.  This summer we surrendered to our ineptitude and bought a compost drum.  It’s a neat creature, a black, coiled dragon that guards the back entrance from the laundry room to the north gardens.  It has a little lid that flips back and the first thing we put into it were the crazy-wild marjoram that now infest all the beds.  And because it’s right by the door there are no longer any excuses about taking out the day’s cooking scraps.  Every couple of days, we give the drum a twirl and listen to the ka-thunk, ka-thunk that suggests maybe we shouldn’t have put all that mud in with the marjoram.

Sometimes I need a little extra help and it’s no great sin to get the right equipment while I’m in the learning stage.  Of course, my ego resents this black dragon-drum.  The competency police have been out in full force reading me the riot act about taking the easy way into transformation.  The Poor-me Pixies have been hanging around too with their night-time serenades about giving up and never really amounting to anything.

To all of them I have this to say:

COMPOST!

Well.. almost.  But hey, it’s a heck of a lot closer than I’ve ever been to real live compost!

Now I’m wondering if there’s a zazen technique that involves getting spun and tumbled every couple of days to speed up the process…

Thank you for composting,

Genju

There are lots of books that tell you how to compost.  They’re filled with lovely pictures of wood boxes, metal screens, tubs, and containers filled with worms (vermiculture).  The text is romantic and seductive, promising that for a few dollars you too can have something rich and dark which will fulfill your wildest horticultural fantasies.

Something gets lost in the translation from book to earth around here. The best we’ve managed are piles of smelly, slimy rotting vegetables.  However, the skunks and raccoons seem to think we’re doing just fine.

Transforming our vegetarian gourmet delights into fertile earth is as much of a mystery to me as the creative process, in art and in the life of practice.  I follow the directions, build the magical three containers, put in the table scraps of my days into the first one, dig deep with Manjushri’s pitchfork (yes, it’s a pitchfork, not a sword in my part of the world), and wait.  And wait.  And wait, until I am distracted or so frustrated I just go buy a bag of earth someone else had made out of their own scraps.

(I have to make a comment here about today’s 108buddha.  I really dislike the colour.  But what are you going to do; it’s what showed up for today.  Such is the makings of compost.  Like, not like – degeneration doesn’t discriminate.)

So I continued to fill those containers.  Then I learned something.  One of those Fine Print Teachings: don’t add fresh scraps to cooking compost.  It’s like continuing to add ingredients to a cake while it’s baking.  That’s why there are three boxes: fresh scraps which then get turned over into the cooking box which then get turned over into the simmer-until-done box.

Oh, she said.

Practice is like that.  “Are you using zazen or letting it use you?”

Oh, she says.

Thank you for practising,

Genju