Compost Making Quotes

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.

Just by breathing deeply on your anger, you will calm it. You are being mindful of your anger, not suppressing it...touching it with the energy of mindfulness. You are not denying it at all. When I speak about this to psychotherapists, I have some difficulty. When I say that anger makes us suffer, they take it to mean that anger is something negative to be removed. But I always say that anger is an organic thing, like love. Anger can become love. Our compost can become a rose. If we know how to take care of our compost...Anger is the same. It can be negative when we do not know how to handle it, but if we know how to handle our anger, it can be very positive. We do not need to throw anything away," (50).

HAPA was like mint. You could rip it up, and six months later, it was back, healthier than ever. Mint smelled better, though, and you could make juleps out of it. I don’t know what I could make out of HAPA. Compost, maybe.

If life wanted to hand me lemons I was not only going to make lemonade, but I'd use the zest for cookies, plant seeds for future fruit and turn the rind into compost to grow flowers, all the while giving thanks for lemons.

Tell the world what scares you the most” says Brandy. She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says “Save the world with some advice from the future” Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read. On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.” Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss in the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift and card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle. Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads: Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random useless facts that are all we have left from our education” A kiss and the card’s on it’s way toward Lake Washington. From Seth: When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” A kiss and it’s off on the wind toward Ballard. Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.” Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write: I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again. Beandy is waiting to rake the card and read it out loud. Brandy’s waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don’t give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don’t have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net. While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net Brandy reads another card from Seth. We are all self-composting” I write another card from the future and Brandy reads it: When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves” An updraft lifts up my worst fears from the suicide net and lifts them away. Seth writes and Brandy reads. You have to keep recycling yourself”. I write and Brandy reads. Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.” I write and Brandy reads. The one you love and the one who loves you are never ever the same person.

I used to teach at an abused children's home. I told the kids, "You all have a manure pile of memories. Nothing you can do about that. Now you can drown in the stink or turn it into compost and grow a garden. I wouldn't't be as good a teacher to you if I didn't know what you're going through. That way, I make my memories do good instead of letting them eat me. I'm like Herbie from Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I pulled my Bumble's teeth. He's still big and scary but he can't bite me anymore.

All of us are given a certain amount of crap to compost. Get it out of you so that you can mix it into rich soil and create something new. Learn from it, write a poem expressing it, and dance or cry it out of you to heal yourself. Create something better from the crap so that it doesn’t define your life or make you sick. And

In my opinion, if there is one extremely legitimate use for petroleum besides running wood chippers and front-end loaders to handle compost, it's making plastic for season extension. It parks many of the trucks [for cross-country produce transportation]. With the trucks parked, greenhouses, tall tunnels, and more seasonal, localized eating, can we feed ourselves? We still have to answer that burning question.

We line up and make a lot of noise about big environmental problems like incinerators, waste dumps, acid rain, global warming and pollution. But we don't understand that when we add up all the tiny environmental problems each of us creates, we end up with those big environmental dilemmas. Humans are content to blame someone else, like government or corporations, for the messes we create, and yet we each continue doing the same things, day in and day out, that have created the problems. Sure, corporations create pollution. If they do, don't buy their products. If you have to buy their products (gasoline for example), keep it to a minimum. Sure, municipal waste incinerators pollute the air. Stop throwing trash away. Minimize your production of waste. Recycle. Buy food in bulk and avoid packaging waste. Simplify. Turn off your TV. Grow your own food. Make compost. Plant a garden. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If you don't, who will?

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?

Life is compost. You think that a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it had rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel.

And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud Madden me back to an afternoon I carry in me not like a wound but like a will against a wound Give me again enough man to be the child choosing my own annihilations To make of this severed limb a wand to conjure a weapon to shatter dark matter of the dirt daubers' nests galaxies of glass Whacking glints bash-dancing on the cellar's fire I am the sound the sun would make if the sun could make a sound and the gasp of rot stabbed from the compost's lumpen living death is me O my life my war in a jar I shake you and shake you and may the best ant win For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things and I will ride this tantrum back to God until my fixed self, my fluorescent self my grief–nibbling, unbewildered, wall–to–wall self withers in me like a salted slug

I don’t believe that God’s up in heaven making things go terribly wrong in our lives so that we learn better manners and better coping skills. But I do believe in something like composting for the soul: that if you can find life out of death, if you can use the smashed up garbage to bring about something new and good, however tiny, that’s one of the most beautiful things there is.

I think that places, like people, ought to have boundaries. Who ever said that gardening was a public activity, anyway? Gardening, like making love, feels a lot better than it looks. Nobody buys tickets to gardening competitions. There's no such thing as the Gardening Olympics. There is no gold medal in Speed Weeding or Double Digging. Maybe there should be, but I wouldn't compete in a gardening Olympiad for all the compost in China. I go through ungainly contortions when I garden. I squat. I crawl around on my hands and knees. Most of the time I bend over, upended. That angle may be flattering to a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, but it is not flattering to me.

What you can do now Look out for misleading claims on packaging. Plastic is still plastic, even if it is ‘degradable’. Some ‘eco-friendly’ packaging can still only be composted in industrial composters and will spoil recycling streams if it gets into them. While sustainable plastics are better than oil-based, it’s still important to think about what will happen to it after you’ve used it.

None of this is to argue that growing plants for people to eat isn’t beset with uncontrollable variables as well. It’s only to note that, while there will always be ecological and ethical costs to growing food for billions of people, kale doesn’t have to be sent to a slaughterhouse. Kale doesn’t have to be fed with forage grown elsewhere. Kale won’t wander off to the highway and get hit by a semi. And if it dies a sudden death, rotten kale makes terrific compost.

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark.

It’s the flowers I hate, fresh bunches almost every day, tossed, fine, composted, before any hint of wilt, like bright blooms aren’t a luxury, like they’re some kind of need. When we argue about the flowers, the arguments I make are about waste and about money, valid arguments both. Though in fact what I hate about the flowers is that they are, for my mother, a source of pleasure, that my mother believes in allowing herself pleasure, in indulging her various material desires. What I hate about the flowers is that they are an example of the many ways in which my mother extends her kindness also to herself.

To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence. 4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. 5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions? 6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening. 7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The

Mother Nature Shows Us How To Make Great Soil When you walk through the woods, look at the soil under your feet. It’s rich and black, and smells earthy and sweet. Falling leaves have done their work as long as the trees have been there, and burrowing animals and worms have broken down the leaves, mixing them deeper into the ground. All is as it should be. Now look at that poor soil under your trees, and consider the many bags of leaves you’ve dragged to the curb. This year, run the lawn mower over your piles of leaves several times to shred them, then scatter them over your yard, or pile them on a garden you plan to leave fallow for a year. Or compost them. They might take a year or two or three to break down, but leaves make some rich soil, and good mulch. Try it sometime.

It isn't easy to become a fossil. The fate of nearly all living organisms- over 99.9 percent of them- is to compost down to nothingness. When your spark is gone, every molecule you own will be nibbled off you or sluiced away to be put to use in some other system. That's just the way it is. Even if you make it into the small pool of organisms, the less than 0.1 percent, that don't get devoured, the chances of being fossilized are very small... Only one born in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today- that's 270 million people with 206 bones each- will only be about fifty bones, one quarter of a complete skeleton. That's not to say of course that any of these bones will actually be found. p322

Honoring Transmutation Thank you for helping me see my broken pieces as beautiful and worthy. Thank you for helping me lay into the earth what has become oppressive on my soul, and for helping me see the importance in my courage to feel. Scrub my body, heart, and mind of their accumulated stresses and unaddressed anguish. Let me stop the abuses and misfortunes from telling my future. Help me author my personal story of strength and perseverance while ripening me for rebirth. Let me strip off unwanted debris with my hands and behold how feasible it is for me to move my own energy. Help me see my offerings like fallen leaves that nourish the bustling, hungry communities of unseen beneficials living below the surface. Let the intensity of the weight I’ve been carrying feed the soil of my spirit. Help me plant the seeds of tomorrow’s wellness and water them with my tears. Let every creaking wail of sorrow be an investment in the freedom of tomorrow. When my griefs begin to release, let me feel the lightening of my heart like a dandelion setting free its seed-wishes. Let these composted traumas and hopes for the future quell my desire for an endless summer. Cover them gently in preparation for nature’s season of reflection and restoration. Open me to recurrent occasions of self-cleaning for giving my spirit, body, and mind the precious attention it is asking for. Make me an enthusiastic gardener for my well-being. Fill me with willingness to allow downtime when I have done what I can do for now. I trust you to finish the job in my dreams while I rest.

Here are ten ways Zero Waste makes financial sense: 1. Reduces consumption of products (focus on activities versus “stuff”) 2. Reduces storage, maintenance, and repair costs 3. Eliminates the need to purchase disposables and offers amazing cumulative savings 4. Encourages buying bulk groceries, which are generally cheaper 5. Reduces (or at best eliminates) solid waste, therefore reducing disposal fees 6. Eliminates the purchase of trash liners (“wet discards” are compostable) 7. Favors buying quality, and therefore provides value for money spent 8. Supports a healthy lifestyle (see below), therefore reducing health care costs 9. Advocates selling unused items and renting seldom-used assets for a profit 10. Offers an option to sell recyclables directly to MRFs and compost material to gardeners

Pencil: The most durable and reusable pencil alternative is that of a refillable mechanical pencil in stainless steel, but the leads are sold in plastic cartridges. Until manufacturers sell leads in a recycled cardboard box, newspaper pencils (versus wood) are the most Zero Waste alternative. Make sure to pick an eraser-free model (purchase a natural rubber eraser separately) so you can compost it when it is too small to write with.

I discovered that creativity need not be limited to the canvas, that opportunities to create abound all around us. For example, reinventing leftovers for dishes, and repairing have been sources of creativity, and our yard, compost, and recycling, of materials. Since the latter keep recurring and are always on hand, the kids and I do not need to collect or store them but simply reach for them when needed. Just as “the clothes do not make the man,” I believe that the art supplies do not make the artist. It is not a wealth of supplies that gave van Gogh’s work power, but rather his vision and execution. After all, “creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun” (Mary Lou Cook); none of it depends on supply inventory.

Certainly, I believe that wilderness experiences are both restorative and essential on many levels. I am constantly contriving to get myself and my family out of the city to go hiking or camping in forests, mountains, and meadows in our Pacific Northwest home and beyond. But in making such experiences the core of our "connection to nature," we set up a chasm between our daily lives ("non-nature") and wilder places ("true nature"), even though it is in our everyday lives, in our everyday homes, that we eat, consume energy, run the faucet, compost, flush, learn, and live. It is here, in our lives, that we must come to know our essential connection to the wilder earth, because it is here, in the activity of our daily lives, that we most surely affect this earth, for good or for ill.

Mulching the vegetable garden will save you a lot of time watering and weeding. It is amazing the difference that a thick, 3-inch layer of mulch will make. If you mow your own lawn and don’t use chemicals on it, save the grass clippings—they make great mulch, and they add nutrients to the soil. Just remember to let them age for a few weeks before spreading and make sure they don’t have seed heads. Other good materials for vegetable garden mulch include: Shredded newspaper Shredded bark mulch Aged manure Compost Wheat straw Shredded leaves There’s a misconception that you shouldn’t use wood mulch in a vegetable garden. Now, you wouldn’t want to use treated wood mulch or sawdust, but shredded hardwood mulch is more beneficial than detrimental. If you can buy shredded hardwood mulch with compost in it, even better! When mulching around your plants, avoid mounding the mulch up around the stems of the plants, which can cause the plants to rot.

I want to make doubly sure you got the message of this chapter, so I’d like to summarize the critical facts about compost. You need blended compost made from at least five different ingredients. Mix several different types of compost together if you buy your compost. Most commercial composts have only one or two ingredients because they are merely leftover waste materials or byproducts from an industrial or commercial operation. By themselves, they do not make a good ingredient in Mel’s Mix. However, the good news is, if you can find at least five of these individual composted materials you can mix them together to make a well-rounded blended compost ingredient for your Mel’s Mix. And if you did your job and got a blended compost made from at least five major ingredients, you will be blessed with the most wonderful garden you could ever imagine. And no more work ever.

Do people ever make each other happy, Sid, or is happiness just something that's lurking there inside you all the time, waiting for the right moment to come out? Like worms in compost?

She'd said, "Put me on the compost heap" but she hadn't meant it. She'd meant just "don't make a fuss." But funerals are for the living, and the living wanted a fuss.

To make heritage out of consciousness is to make garbage out of consciousness. To make tradition out of stagnation is to make fertilizer out of living veins. What's in your head, fervor or fertilizer! What are you, consciousness or compost! Buy some flowers for your ancestral graves, but never become compost to get their praise!

Their flesh is compost out in my barn. Their bones make good chew toys for the dogs.

The soil beneath our feet is absolutely brimming with life. We often spend too much time looking up to the sky that we fail to notice the life beneath our feet. I love making soil. Layering plants, food and waste in just the right amounts. Feeding, watering and turning it as needed. Holding it in my hand as I feel the heat from the trillions of unseen bacteria. Watching as it transforms it right before my eyes. Nurturing it so it can sustain life. Life! The same life that me and you possess. It’s an entire universe in itself. When I eat food that has been grown with my compost I get the satisfaction that I have created a circle of life. I put some of that energy right back into the soil and then use it. It doesn’t matter if we are plants, animals or people. Decomposition is just a part of the circle of life.

The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.” Memory as a Compost Heap We all know that we forget things but to discover that a recollection is completely fabricated is something else. It is shocking because it makes us question our own minds. If we all can vividly remember events that never happened, then this undermines the reliability of memory and ultimately the reality of our self. This is because part of the self illusion is that we know our own minds and recognize our own memories. But we are often mistaken. The

Modern economics, by which I mean the style of economics taught and practised in today's leading universities, likes to start the enquiries from the ground up: from individuals, through the household, village, district, state, country, to the whole world. In various degrees, the millions of individual decisions shape the eventualities people face; as both theory, common sense, and evidence tell us that there are enormous numbers of consequences of what we all do. Some of these consequences have been intended, but many are unintended. There is, however, a feedback, in that those consequences in turn go to shape what people subsequently can do and choose to do. When Becky's family drive their cars or use electricity, or when Desta's family create compost or burn wood for cooking, they add to global carbon emissions. Their contributions are no doubt negligible, but the millions of such tiny contributions sum to a sizeable amount, having consequences that people everywhere are likely to experience in different ways. It can be that the feedbacks are positive, so that the whole contribution is greater than the sum of the parts. Strikingly, unintended consequences can include emergent features, such as market prices, at which the demand for goods more or less equals their supply. Earlier, I gave a description of Becky's and Desta's lives. Understanding their lives involves a lot more; it requires analysis, which usually calls for further description. To conduct an analysis, we need first of all to identify the material prospects the girls' households face - now and in the future, under uncertain contingencies. Second, we need to uncover the character of their choices and the pathways by which the choices made by millions of households like Becky's and Desta's go to produce the prospects they all face. Third, and relatedly, we need to uncover the pathways by which the families came to inherit their current circumstances. These amount to a tall, even forbidding, order. Moreover, there is a thought that can haunt us: since everything probably affects everything else, how can we ever make sense of the social world? If we are weighed down by that worry, though, we won't ever make progress. Every discipline that I am familiar with draws caricatures of the world in order to make sense of it. The modern economist does this by building models, which are deliberately stripped down representations of the phenomena out there. When I say 'stripped down', I really mean stripped down. It isn't uncommon among us economists to focus on one or two causal factors, exclude everything else, hoping that this will enable us to understand how just those aspects of reality work and interact. The economist John Maynard Keynes described our subject thus: 'Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.

Students choose topic groups and do focused studies of bees, apple production, compost, greenhouses. They write, draw diagrams, make models, read nonfiction literature. All of this is

The next day we sat in Geir’s bedroom and wrote a love letter to Anne Lisbet. His parents’ house was identical to ours, it had exactly the same rooms, facing in exactly the same directions, but it was still unendingly different, because for them functionality reigned supreme, chairs were above all else comfortable to sit in, not attractive to look at, and the vacuumed, almost mathematically scrupulous, cleanliness that characterized our rooms was utterly absent in their house, with tables and the floor strewn with whatever they happened to be using at that moment. In a way, their lifestyle was integrated into the house. I suppose ours was, too, it was just that ours was different. For Geir’s father, sole control of his tools was unthinkable, quite the contrary, part of the point of how he brought up Geir and Gro was to involve them as much as possible in whatever he was doing. They had a workbench downstairs, where they hammered and planed, glued and sanded, and if we felt like making a soap-box cart, for example, or a go-kart, as we called it, he was our first port of call. Their garden wasn’t beautiful or symmetrical as ours had become after all the hours Dad had spent in it, but more haphazard, created on the functionality principle whereby the compost heap occupied a large space, despite its unappealing exterior, and likewise the stark, rather weed-like potato plants growing in a big patch behind the house where we had a ruler-straight lawn and curved beds of rhododendrons.

Consciousness not Compost (The Sonnet) Owning brand new devices counts for nothing, if your mind belongs brutally to the stoneage. It's okay to carry trinkets as heirloom, but consciousness is no object of heritage. To make heritage out of consciousness is to make garbage out of consciousness. To make tradition out of stagnation is to make fertilizer out of living veins. What's in your head, fervor or fertilizer! What are you, consciousness or compost! Buy some flowers for your ancestral graves, but never become compost to get their praise!

Okay. What about this. Can you make up a few buckets of compost tea in the greenhouse? And then maybe you can help with dinner. Lance said he’d be done with work early tonight so he should be here any minute.” “Fine,” Lily sniffed. Then her eyes narrowed and darted around the grass. “Rabbit!” And she was off.

Right Mindfulness: Practice keeping to basic requisites of food, clothing, accommodation and medicine. Make things last. Refuse to live with excess. When you go to the shops carry shopping bags from home and do not accept plastic bags. Keep packaging to the minimum. Give to charity shops and buy from them. Be mindful of what you wear in terms of the ethics of shops and clothing factories. Avoid companies that are known to sell goods made in ‘sweat-shops’ in developing countries. Be mindful and informed about all points in this Charter. Right Renunciation: Let go of desire for a bigger or better home. Have a spring clean in your home and see what you can give away or recycle. Support and develop love of minimalism and enjoy the outdoors in all weathers. Avoid shopping malls. Buy only necessities. Avoid impulse shopping. Keep out of debt. Offer dana (in the form of donations, time, and energy) to worthwhile projects and individuals. Right Sustainability: Be well informed about recycling; compost waste food and recycle paper,

We make ourselves in order to destroy ourselves, becoming compost for the next thing.

Our practice is based on the insight of non-duality. Both our negative feelings and positive feelings are organic and belong to the same reality. So there is no need to fight; we only need to embrace and take care. Therefore, in the Buddhist tradition, meditation does not mean you transform yourself into a battlefield, with the good fighting the evil. This is very important. You may think you have to combat evil and chase it out of your heart and mind. But this is wrong. The practice is to transform yourself. If you don't have garbage, you can't make compost. And if you have no compost, you have nothing to nourish the flower in you. You need the suffering, the afflictions in you. Since they are organic, you know that you can transform them and make good use of them.

Helmina,' said Tannie Engels, 'you always keep the shiny side up. But you can't make gold from cow shit.' 'Ma...' 'It makes good compost,' I said. 'Cow dung

Potato - 1947-1995 In haste one evening while making dinner I threw away a potato that was spoiled on one end. The rest would have been redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail it became the consort of coffee grounds, banana skins, carrot peelings. I pitched it onto the compost where steaming scraps and leaves return, like bodies over time, to earth. When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay fork to air the pile, the potato turned up unfailingly, as if to revile me— looking plumper, firmer, resurrected instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow until I might have made shepherd’s pie for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning hand-me-down clothes on the line.

It’s Hugh Grant’s first day on the job, and he’s saying hello to his new staff. One staffer is named Natalie, and as far as I can tell, her job is “woman.” She’s also incredibly, disgustingly fat, like a beanbag chair with feet, according to literally everyone else in the movie who apparently all have Natalie Dysmorphic Disorder (a silent killer). Natalie accidentally says some swears in front of the prime minister, and then she makes lemon-face for forty-five minutes. Actually, she’s probably just thinking about delicious lemons because NATALIE HUNGRY!!!!!!! Hugh Grant falls instantly in love with Natalie, which is understandable, because she hasn’t yet exceeded her Love Actually attractiveness word quota. (The quota is twenty-seven words before you become Emma Thompson and must be composted.) Keira Knightley is marrying Chiwetel Ejiofor while wearing some

It’s Hugh Grant’s first day on the job, and he’s saying hello to his new staff. One staffer is named Natalie, and as far as I can tell, her job is “woman.” She’s also incredibly, disgustingly fat, like a beanbag chair with feet, according to literally everyone else in the movie who apparently all have Natalie Dysmorphic Disorder (a silent killer). Natalie accidentally says some swears in front of the prime minister, and then she makes lemon-face for forty-five minutes. Actually, she’s probably just thinking about delicious lemons because NATALIE HUNGRY!!!!!!! Hugh Grant falls instantly in love with Natalie, which is understandable, because she hasn’t yet exceeded her Love Actually attractiveness word quota. (The quota is twenty-seven words before you become Emma Thompson and must be composted.)

just done nothing more exciting than water a begonia. “However, they will knock you out for several hours, and as I’m sure none of you want to miss your first day back, make sure your earmuffs are securely in place while you work. I will attract your attention when it is time to pack up. “Four to a tray — there is a large supply of pots here — compost in the sacks over there — and be careful of the Venomous Tentacula, it’s teething.” She gave a sharp slap to a spiky, dark red plant as she spoke, making it draw in the long feelers that had been inching sneakily over her shoulder. Harry, Ron, and Hermione were joined at their tray by a curly-haired Hufflepuff boy Harry knew by sight but had

The realization that no matter what you do, no matter how many little mistakes you make, you are still probably going to come up with reasonably good, usable compost.

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few named, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don't know what tongues the people who erected that standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don't know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don't know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don't know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don't exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?

Nature is never the same twice; this inconsistency requires adaptability. There are limitless problems in the world. If we think like a machine we only find ourselves with the same problems. The problems are there because we haven't adapted a solution; the only way to find a solution is to think outside the machine. This thinking is necessary to a natural food system. There are no two vegetables that are the same, no two days of cooking that are the same, no two humans that are the same. Industrial systems give us the same ingredients every day, through all the seasons. When you put square shapes in square spaces, you don't understand the circle. Your thinking becomes linear and you can't adapt. When you adapt, your mind is able to make connections and find solutions to the unpredictable nature of real food.

Nature is never the same twice; this inconsistency requires adaptability. There are limitless problems in the world. If we think like a machine we only find ourselves with the same problems. The problems are there because we haven't adapted a solution; the only way to find a solution is to think outside the machine. This thinking is necessary to a natural food system. There are no two vegetables that are the same, no two days of cooking that are the same, no two humans that are the same. Industrial systems give us the same ingredients every day, through all the seasons. When you put square shapes in square spaces, you don't understand the circle. Your thinking becomes linear and you can't adapt. When you adapt, your mind is able to make connections and find solutions to the unpredictable nature of real food.

I went to Germany and saw every German there carefully sorting out their waste: bottles of clear glass in this container, green glass in that one. The lid of a milk carton went into the container for plastic, while the carton itself went into the container for paper. Camera batteries had a place of their own, compostable waste another. They really focus on it. I can’t imagine a Russian behaving like that: white glass here, brown glass there. He would consider it too boring, simply beneath his dignity. God knows, his place is to make the rivers of Siberia run backwards, that sort of thing. The boundless Russian soul taking an axe to every problem … If we are to survive, we need to change.

The weirdness never stops! Help! With the Recess Enrichment Program, A.J. and the gang have to take classes even during recess! The new teacher, Mrs. Lizzy, teaches how to make balloon animals, how to compost worms, and lots of other weird useless skills that nobody would ever want to know in a million hundred years!