I recently started a food journey since that's where my true passion lies. It has led me to subscribe to Masterclass during this time off and I stumbled upon Ron Finley's series about gardening. He's my new hero. You'll see why if you watch the Ted Talk.
While I was watching his bit on compost it brought me back to my 9th-grade self sitting in the back of biology class while my teacher stated that when he dies he would love to have someone take parts of his over 6 feet tall body to be buried in the soil of his favorite places like Krusi Park in Alameda. At the time my thought was this is absolutely disgusting. As much as I have a scientific brain a part of me never got over the idea of someone cutting into me when I'm dead to harvest my organs and letting me rot somewhere. That's why I am not currently an organ donor and I plan to get cremated.
My thoughts are changing. Maybe I've been swayed. I still do not like the idea of my body rotting, nor do I like someone cutting into me despite the fact that I would be dead. Ron said "To change the community, we have to change the composition of the soil. We're the soil!" in the Ted Talk. The impact of this statement that I had heard just a few hours ago is still mining depths into my mind. There's something empowering about something dead being able to provide nutrients for new growth as it breaks down. Regeneration. Perhaps the thing that died was beautiful while it lasted but died. Perhaps the thing that died was ugly, shameful, and despicable. All the same, nature the good, bad, and the ugly goes back to nature, and new growth and hope sprout forth.
Ron started a movement when he planted food on the sidewalks of South Central Los Angeles, a place known for being a food desert where liquor stores, fast food, and dialysis treatment centers are all over the world. I truly agree with the notion that food is medicine. That nature has healing properties and that really good food exists. It's harder to see that if you had grown up in a poorer neighborhood and lived in a concrete jungle surrounded by nutrient-poor processed food and snacks. I'm so inspired by someone who flipped the narrative of the system he lives in and made it beautiful. His idea created community in neighborhoods, introduced children to real and good food, and empowered poorer communities to "print their own money" by learning to grow a garden of food to sustain life.
Ron says your hair, eggshells, your coffee grinds, and all those things that come from nature are things you can compost. It takes time for it to break down, but it will decompose and become compost if you put it on the soil, keep it moist, and aerate it here and there. What shocked me and made me sad was when he said these items don't compost in the wasteland because it's surrounded by plastic. All this time I thought there was no harm to the environment when we let our compost go into the trash since my HOA doesn't have compost. There's something beautiful about the way that nature regenerates and I suddenly want to be a part of that when I die. If the life I live does not give back because I've failed while I was living, I want the body that I had for however many years I get to have it to go back into the soil, decompose, and provide nutrients to new life. I'm not sure how to do that since we have there are cemeteries and a whole economy built on people's death as well as the stigma that comes with being buried in a beloved place thinking it's haunted or scary or etc. Please somebody create a startup that makes this possible! I'll be your customer! Truly - I do not want to waste money in some casket or let my body be incinerated so that you can treat my ash as sacred. I want my body to be under the soil that grows my favorite flowers: an ombre of light pink, blush pink, and white peonies pretty please! I do not want a headstone or to be put in a plot of land where they bury or build shelves for urns. For the sentimental who want to remember me, I truly hope it is something that I've done right or perhaps something that enabled and empowered people to live a full life that helps me live in your memories. I came from dust and hope to go back into the earth as dust.
2023 is a new me since I am letting go of parts of me that I held onto with fear due to my perfectionism and unwillingness to see myself fail. I want to fear not trying more than failure. I want to let the things I shed behind provide new life literally and figuratively. I know from time to time I would be reminded of those parts of me that I feel shame, anxiety, or fear as it takes its time to decompose trying to hold me back. I will acknowledge it and let it break down so that it transforms into something powerful that enables me. I honestly thought the postpartum depression period was one of the hardest things I've experienced due to the fact that I had nothing in life I looked forward to. Yet it was this time period that currently lets me soak in this break without anxiety. A reset amidst a recession with tens of thousands of layoffs of qualified people. This new journey of discovering what I love and how to figure out a way to make what I love sustainable so that I can someday teach other mothers who are having a hard time as they adjust to their new life of forever learning curves and little to no privacy. Let us let the things that hold us back and limit us to be better humans decompose and transform the environment around us.
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