Composting when it feels like shit out.

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Two weeks ago, I was excited to kick off the new version of my newsletter with a post about compost microbiology and a home soil-testing kit that I had recently purchased. Today, I find myself in an entirely different state of mind.

It is hard to jump straight from the election results to posting light-hearted missives about soil biology, and I wanted to find a way to say something more profound about the future of the planet and where the environmentally-concerned can go from here. I wrote several versions of an email that outlined how our focus for action would need to move from federal policy to city and state leaders, how alternative energy markets were surging, how there was lots to still hope for—but then I deleted it all.

I didn’t want to offer quick solutions.

Last time this happened we all took to the streets in protest. This time, something different. I woke up the day after the election with a phone flooded with texts from friends: “I love you.” Just simple things like that. I almost laughed. The insane joy of realizing how much you love other people. How clarifying to your priorities a threat can be. For some reason, it felt huge to me that our first instinct in the aftermath was to simply reach for each other. Something felt like it was rooting deeper, becoming stronger and more bonded.

That same weekend, my friend Anthony lead the charge on gathering a small group of people in the garden, where he served food and put together some writing prompts for us to journal with. People sat quietly and wrote, talked, a little bit of composting was done. We mostly just shared the space.

This made me reflect on my instinct to find and prescribe immediate solutions with a little embarrassment. We all know what we are “supposed” to do right now. Call your representatives, take the streets, run for office. Fight, convince, argue, march. Get up, do something. Fight, fight, fight. What’s missing in the standard formula is something quieter, though, and that’s simple self-reflection. Who are you, what do you want, who do you love, what does that feel like. What can you protect and what will you have to let go.

The truth is, I have absolutely no clear idea how to be useful right now. I don’t have answers and I don’t know what actions to take. The writer P.E. Moskowitz recently wrote about the value of “giving up.” Not in the sense that we should recede into apathy, but that we now have clear permission to release any of our outmoded models: “I think we are collectively, perhaps mostly subconsciously as of now, wondering what exactly we can do to be useful again, and realizing that we do not yet have the answers. That is not nihilism. It is a recognition that we need to change. It is a recognition that new ways of thinking and tactics are needed. That, if anything, is a form of hopefulness.”

The gathering in the garden was, obviously, not about solutions. It was about affirming simple connection to each other and the earth. It didn’t feel like hope, exactly—but it did feel like something important was happening. In the subsequent days I fielded a not-small number of phone calls from people who wanted to come “just put their hands in the Earth.” They wanted to sweat, move soil, build compost. Examining the urge and its collective manifestation made me feel—again, not hopeful—but at least, finally, something close to useful.

Hit me up if you want a dose of earth in the coming weeks.

Love,

Cass