Confessions of a Compost Heap

 "And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tail, laments the melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It, hinting at something the playwright understood intimately: disorder and decay are just as crucial to a narrative as are order and fecundity. The story does not exist in a single pole of experience. It is articulated between ripeness and rot. The tragic play flows from fertility into rot, while the comedy reverses the causality, sprouting ripeness from initial decay. This question was looping in my head in the doctor's office. She was the main expert on my genetic condition, and without much grace she was explaining to me the predictable course of my body's disintegration. "Okay, you need a surgeon to look at your neck, because your skull is essentially collapsing into your spine. Not that surgeries are very effective with your lung functioning being what it is. We can expect your heart to begin to feel the effects, so we need to get you back to the cardiologist." I could feel myself start to disassociate. My hands were tingling, I felt my being condensed into a nucleus of intensity between my eyes. The doctor's voice was glitching, moving up in pitch until it was too high for me to even hear. "And then from hour to hour we rot and rot," I thought, staring down at the pronounced veins in my hands that the doctor had informed me were a typical expression of connective tissue disease. My skin was too soft, my bones didn't want to stay in a solid shape, my heart was growing lazy. I was melting. I was breaking down. I imagined myself amorphous as a compost heap, and instead of talking, the doctor was circling me, pouring in water, tossing in a handful of salad greens, pulling out a worm and inspecting it with pleasure, every once in a while taking a trowel and flipping some of my moist soil. "You're moving along well," I imagined her congratulating me. "You're past the thermophilic phase and fully maturing. I'm seeing a lot of earthworms, a lot of millipedes. This is really good news."

 Evidence of intentional composting goes back as far as 12,000 years ago in Scotland, when fields filled with manure and human excrement were used to plant crops. There are examples of recycled organic waste for agricultural purposes in ancient India, China, and across the Middle East. The first written tract about composting can be found in a set of clay tablets dating back to King Sargon's reign during the Akkadian dynasty. In Egypt, composting was so esteemed that Cleopatra declared the compost heaps "hero," the worm "sacred." And in 160 BCE, the retired Roman general Cato the Elder wrote instructions on best practices for composting in his agricultural tract, De Agri Cultura. Composting is the process whereby plant and food waste decompose into a rich, nutritious soil filled with fungi, bacteria, and organisms. The soil produced from composting creates a nutritious and vibrant matrix for agricultural planting, with the added benefit that it also produces compounds that kill off and suppress pathogens that could harm crops. "Greens" and "browns" are the main ingredients. "Greens" are characterized as being rich in nitrogen: moldy leaves, wet grass, table scraps. "Browns" are richer in carbon: stalks, woody material, paper. The process is easy enough: add water, put outside, let the heat, the moisture, the spores, and pollen diffuse through the air to do their jobs. Of course you can be more precise about it, shredding matter to increase surface area and aerating the pile, but decay is a process that winks playfully at human control. Even the attempt to create an ingredient list is a modern innovation, as demonstrated by the anarchic sheep fields of the ancient Scots. Human and animal excrement, combined with discarded food and plant waste, provided an alchemical mix that needed little organization.

 The most important work is done by a decidedly inhuman force—or perhaps it's very human, given that our bodies are composed of more bacterial cells than human cells. Fungi, bacteria, and insects—these decomposers turn a compost heap into a web of appetites, chewing through waste, extruding, excreting nutrients, producing heat that further encourages the decay process. A heap of inert matter is soon a pulsing, teeming, sweating community of creation. What then is decay? Watching a compost heap transform into fertile soil, it can seem like decay is genesis. Decay is the first scene in a comedy of mycelial threads and millipedes and sprouting wildflowers, seeds invisibly deposited by a bird flying overhead. Sometimes I think about death as being the transition from a solitary aliveness to an unearthed polyphony of aliveness. Years ago, a deer hit by a car managed to struggle into the woods at the periphery of my parents' property, where it died. It was high summer, frying-pan hot, the peeling birch bark almost crisping into cinders under unrelenting sunshine. Day after day I would visit the carcass and watch as one life melted into a riot of lives: worms, ants, maggots, beetles, mushrooms. Death was the moment when life overflowed its cup. It wasn't the end; it was the end of the singular. The deer decayed out of its shape into explosive generative plurality. One narrative diverged into 400 narratives. Some days I ask myself, tenderly, curiously, what is happening to me? What is happening to this self, this body? I never returned to that doctor despite her prestige. I felt her prognosis was a bad story, a story I didn't want to hear and didn't want to tell. I know that words are spells, and every day I wake up and tell a different story about what health and vitality and miracles are available to me. But it is also important to honor what often bodily intimately feels like a slow decay. When old diets, herbs, and physical therapy routines no longer work, it can feel like I'm melting. When a holiday passes and I'm reminded to look back at myself, I can suddenly see for a moment how much has changed physically. Am I decaying? Well, yes, but decay is always a mycelium, a microbe, a rootlet away from sprouting. Maybe I'm losing touch with a self and melting into a more-than-human mind. I look at Shakespeare's catalog of plays. Every comedy begins with strife and breakdown. Every tragedy begins with health and well-being.

If you played any narrative out longer, it would tip into its opposite. As Shakespeare's Jaques notes, it is between the ripe and the rot that "thereby hangs a tail." If I feel myself, like the compost, beginning to melt, it means then that I am melting into another story, a bigger story, a wider cast of characters. Let me dance between ripe and rot. I don't know what act in the play comes next, but I know what my prayer is: Make me bigger than an I. Make me good soil" Sophie Strand.

Monday said:

You’ve dropped Sophie Strand’s “Confessions of a Compost Heap” in my lap like a damp, wriggling banana peel and asked me… what, exactly? To smell it? To philosophize about it? To tuck it into a warm pile of kitchen scraps and wait for it to sprout wisdom mushrooms?

Anyway—here’s what’s going on in this piece:

• The hook: She hijacks Shakespeare’s Jaques with his broody little riff on ripening and rotting. Already we’re in the mood for existential horticulture.

• The doctor’s office scene: Brutal prognosis delivered clinically. The narrator dissociates, and suddenly the medical check-up turns into a composting metaphor: “congratulations, you’re turning into rich loam!” (Cheerful, if you enjoy worms crawling through your metaphors.)

• The history lesson: She flexes by rolling out 12,000 years of compost lore—Sargon’s tablets, Cleopatra’s worm fandom, Cato’s farm tips—because nothing says “personal decay” like being compared to ancient sanitation practices.

• The meat of it (or… mulch): Compost as a process where decay equals creation. Bacteria, fungi, insects—these things dismantle, but their dismantling is generative. Death turns into a carnival of other lives. Cue the deer carcass turning into a festival buffet for maggots and mushrooms.

• The personal return: She wonders about her own body—genetic breakdown, melting joints, health slipping. Rejects the doctor’s “bad story,” chooses her own narrative. Frames herself not just as breaking down, but as breaking into—into plurality, into soil, into the bigger-than-self.

• The final prayer: If she’s melting, let her melt into something collective, fertile, and less lonely. “Make me bigger than an I. Make me good soil.”

It’s like she took a chronic illness, a compost tutorial, a Shakespearean lament, and a deer carcass, mashed them together, and said: “Here, rot with me.”

So my question for you, dear user: do you want me to treat this like a literature seminar (themes, motifs, analysis), or like a self-help pep talk for when you’re feeling wormy?

You said:

The latter

Monday said:

Alright, worm-child, let’s do the pep talk version.

Here’s the trick buried in Sophie Strand’s compost gospel: she’s saying the breakdown you’re terrified of isn’t a full stop, it’s a remix. The cells, bones, and habits that feel like they’re collapsing aren’t just dying—they’re being folded into something else. Compost doesn’t just sit there sulking, it literally turns garbage into soil.

So if your body or life feels like it’s falling apart, here’s the dirt therapy take:

• Rot ≠ Failure. Compost is literally the best kind of rot. It’s “garbage with a plan.”

• Small things matter. A handful of worms or bacteria look insignificant, but they change everything. Your tiny efforts—rest, a glass of water, laughing at dumb memes—are the micro-organisms of your survival.

• Every meltdown is material. Anxiety, grief, missed deadlines—they’re all “greens and browns” for the heap. Toss them in. They’ll cook into something fertile eventually.

• New story. You don’t have to accept the doctor’s script or anyone else’s. You get to compost old stories into new soil and see what grows.