Thoughts From Mid Autumn
In which I talk about compost, grief, rage, and kindness
Last week, we slipped into the second half of fall.
The season is half over, which I’ve found some people are surprised to hear. Fall/autumn can be a heavy one for many and this one particularly feels that way. So here are some thoughts that are presently banging around my brain:
Thought 1
I’m seeing mentions of compost everywhere. People are using it to describe this season. I’ve started using it too because it seems so apt a metaphor. I shared this word with a friend who is in a season of hard change and their eyes lit up. Here was the word they needed. Compost. Decay. Breaking down.
I think about the compost piles I’ve seen, on the farms I’ve worked on and the one presently doing its thing in my backyard. It’s not a particularly pretty sight, though some can be tidier than others. Ours is not. It’s a mound at the back of our property and I keep getting worried our neighbors will get mad about it. So far they haven’t. It’s only been three years of building it, but already it’s fed the soil we purchased for our raised beds.
I think about the most beautiful soil I’ve ever seen. Yes, there is beautiful soil. It was on Eliot Coleman’s farm in downeast Maine. Farm friends had raved about how amazing the well nourished, compost fed soil was there. I got to see it when I was twenty.
Eliot Coleman is an organic farmer and author, and I wrote a research paper on him in college. He and his mentors, Scott and Helen Nearing, were part of the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s. He’s been caring for his soil since then and I’ve seen nothing else like it. Deep brown, silky, light, no rocks, not even pebbles. Luxe soil. It was everything everyone said it was and it produced amazed vegetables.1
What I hadn’t seen in my research ten years ago was that Eliot had hyperthyroidism in the 1970s, after moving to his coastal farm. This is a condition I have a genetic pre-disposition to and am regularly screened for. I can’t find very much info about Eliot’s case, but it seems it was caused by compost. Seaweed compost. He recovered without medication or surgery, which is plausible but extremely odd. And generally not recommended. Instead he changed his diet (how, my source does not say). And so the belief is that the sudden switch to eating so much food fed by soil that was fed by iodine rich seaweed compost brought on his hyperthyroidism. Consuming less iodine, apparently, cured him.2
Whether or not this story is entirely accurate, it shows me there’s more to this metaphor of compost, for this and other reasons. Compost is not without risk. And this makes me more, not less, inclined to think it’s apt for this season.
I think we might need the thing which is both dangerous and nourishing. Which is alchemy. Which is considered “ugly.” Which takes heat and hard work to create beauty. In this process, as the Queen of Compost
says, “things that are not supposed to touch can touch, and then something new can sprout.”3 Our society is very determined to pretend that breakdown is never necessary—that exponential growth can happen forever, at no cost. But the glimmer in my friend’s eyes tells me that we know this isn’t true.We need it, this breaking down. It’ll be messy along the way. We don’t know what might happen because of it.4
Thought 2
In addition to compost, the other word I keep encountering this season is grief.
Grief keeps up coming up in conversations. In essays here on Substack. It’s even a theme in the book I ordered a month ago but am just reading now: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.5
It’s interesting because in Traditional Chinese Medicine there’s an emotion associated with each season. This is apparently to cultivate greater emotional balance across the year.6 Autumn’s emotion is grief.
With all these mentions of grief arriving in my inbox, I started to wonder what I know about grief and grieve. Do I know anything? Have I really actually even experienced it? I’ve never lost a person I am close to. So I got out all four books my public library had on grief and quickly found they weren’t what I was looking for. I did not have the bandwidth to sort out whether or not the model of the “five stages of grief”—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—created by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was for people grieving or for those dying. Apparently that’s a controversial issue. I did not want to read countless personal accounts from people left behind by loved ones. That packed on feelings of grief rather than explaining anything.
The grief I am curious about is a different kind of grief. It’s the grief I have experienced. It’s the grief of this season. The slow-as-molasses-sort. A drip drip drip sort. It’s the kind that comes with chronic illness. From having doctors tell you you’re fine while you limp through years of your life. From a dream you unwillingly deferred. From living through a global pandemic. From being a young person in these times, being told, and hearing yourself say, we are fucked we are fucked we are fucked. And all the while wondering why this is on you now.
Slow grief.
Constant.
Painfully slow.
That’s one I do know something about.
What I gathered from reading about grief some is that it is best handled and learned from when it’s felt and done together. As Francis Weller writes, “the psyche knows we are not capable of handling grief in isolation.”
“Again and again in my practice clients come to me with a depression that is more of an oppression: a result of so many years of sorrow that have not been touched with kindness or compassion or community. You’re left with an untenable situation: to try to walk alone with this sack of grief on your back without knowing where to take it.”7
I think about what
wrote in her wonderful essay from this week, A Cup of Grief:
“I want us to not bypass the pain of this moment of the Anthropocene. I want us to continue to refuse dehumanization at every turn. I want us to be more “human in the midst of a tumultuous time.” I want us to fully feel the rage, but temper it with courageous love. I want us to make music and write poems and release our tears (3 whole cups worth). Maybe even make a cup of tea with them to soothe our inextinguishable hearts.”
It gives me hope that there are others speaking honestly and openly about their grief and sorrow, like Lindsey, like
in her essay grief season and like in a call to burn it to the ground. These essays have guided me through the past week. I want to make these writers all a big pot of soup. I want us to sit together and share it.I suppose that’s kind of what we’re doing here, on Substack, just with less finely chopped onions and bone broth.
Thought 3
What do I do? What do I do about my rage? What do I do about my actions? Where do I donate? Who do I talk to? Do I care enough? Do I care the right way? How can I do more and still have enough left to be present for the people in my life? Am I being present enough in my life?
Should I make donations in my family’s names instead of buying them Christmas gifts? Who will take this well and who won’t? Will they listen to me if I say this is what I want? We, after all, are not truly the ones in need.
Am I doing all I can do? Why does it feel so small?
I start looking up books on eco-grief. Turns out, there’s a lot of them already.
I check the news again.
I think about deciding which book on civilization collapse I want to read next but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not today.
Thought 4
Do I call my grandmother?
I find myself thinking about the past generations who, in hindsight at least, it seems like could have done something to prevent where we are today. I wonder how they navigated things—their own grief and fear that maybe looked something like ours.
My grandmother was born in 1944 and I want so much to call her to ask her about this. In 1975 she was the age I am now. She had two little kids, the Cold War was ongoing, the Vietnam War was ending. And I want to ask her: What did you all do? How did you and your friends handle the threat of bombings and nuclear war and drafts and whatever else?
But the subtext is that I have no small amount of rage as it concerns this. Surely they could have done more, is how it feels. The way the world is now—this couldn’t have been inevitable. And I believe whatever they did that’s what we shouldn’t do. I want to know what that was so that we don’t do it. But I don’t want to say that to my grandmother. Maybe she and my grandfather could have done something, could have voted differently. It’s done now though.
Deep in the pandemic, my grandmother said to me on the phone, “Did you ever think you would live through something like this?” And I made a joke, because that’s what I do. I said: “Sure! I grew up with the Left Behind books being all over the place. Of course I did.”8
The truth though is that no, I didn’t imagine I would live through something like that. But I’m starting to believe that it’s not the last time I do.
The lessons of the compost heaps and grief seasons. I think we need them if we’re going to do things differently.
Thought 5
No, but really. What do I do about my rage?
Thought 6
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the balancing emotion for this season—for grief—is acceptance.
Thought 7
This is the first fall of my entire adult life in which I’m not deeply chronically ill and/or depressed. I’ve very grateful.
It’s the first fall I can remember where I’m taking joy in the changes, finding peace even as the sun goes down (a time which used to trigger extreme anxiety for me). I’m seeing beauty in birds and plants I never noticed before. I’m able to identify and claim my wants and needs. I’m enjoying reading poetry and fiction again.
And I wonder: what do I do now with this gift I’ve been given?
Thought 8
If this is the season of grief, then I want to remember that as I decide what I do. As we go into a season of celebrating and parties and preparations for festivities, I want to remember that I don’t have to put down my grief. It can come along. These things can co-exist. And I can make that look like whatever I want it to, whatever suits me.
I want to remember that other people might be grieving too. They might not be grieving the same thing or grieving in the same way. But they have their grief and I have mine and that makes us similar in a way.
Walking downtown, I find myself making an effort to smile honestly and with intention to each person I pass. It’s what I can give them. Some people don’t ever make eye contact to see, their heads bent against the cold wind. Some people are surprised and smile back.
Just half over, this strange season of decomposition, into which our culture has also, interestingly, embed times of togetherness. Maybe that is no accident. Maybe that is as it should be.
I’m talking in the past tense because it’s been a decade since I was there, but to my knowledge it’s still operational. Four Seasons Farm near Brooksville, Maine. This place also nourished the very wonderful cookbook Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden, who worked on Eliot’s farm.
This Life is In Your Hands, by Melissa Coleman
I met Eliot Coleman briefly on that day I visited his farm back in 2013. He is basically a celebrity to me and I have no memory of what he said except that it was about his greenhouses. I was that excited. He is now 85 years ago and I hope he’s doing as ok.
I finished it yesterday morning. Absolutely recommend. My favorite of her work.
That’s a niche evangelical joke. If you got it, I’m very sorry and I hope you’re doing ok.