Composting

I wrote this in 1999 on retreat at Esalen, Big Sur. I post it in memory of Nutmeg, my first "baby", my 12 year old cat who died today.

There is a cluster of Buddhist Monks who create sand mandalas as part of their practice. They will spend hours creating a room-sized mandala with intricate parts determined by individual colors of sand. For five days, they will weave together this circle. As the mandala is realized, there is the final task of removing it by a ritualized sweeping process in which the entire mandala is fused together and transferred off the table, no longer for us to see.

This process has confused me for several years. It has been so hard for me to let go of “the mandala”. If the mandala is destroyed, who will see it? A beautiful work of art lost in a fraction of time.

There is a tendency in our culture to want others to see us. To live in a way that others notice. To show others our pain, show off our accomplishments; entitlements to be and act how we please. The idea of privacy can be disparaging to us as we become caught up in “media frenzy” and “one-upness”. We seek to hold onto moments, justifying ourselves by living in the past, holding on to our perception of reality as if we would be lost with out. We ignore what is before us, unable to let go.

On retreat in Big Sur, I watched the gardeners planting seeds and tending the garden. I saw baskets of vegetables delivered to the kitchen. I saw beautiful savory dishes laid out for all to eat. I saw people gathering, communing and eating these plants. I saw the garbage labeled “compost” where people scraped the remainder of food off the plates. And finally, I saw gardeners using the compost to tend to their gardens.

No moment is wasted, no grain of sand destroyed. We are each moment composting moments for later fruition. We may think that every moment that isn’t seen by others is seemingly unworthy or needing to be told to others of its story. We may somehow fear the moments will be forfeited, that they are lost, and more so, that we, ourselves, are lost.

Like the Monks, like the gardeners, our task is to do our own work moment by moment. We can know that as each moment ends, we can let go of it. Because the part we need will become a seedling again and grow into what it needs to be. Grains of sand, working towards a circle of art, being swept away when no longer of service to be used for compost again. That our labor, our experiences will find us, even when we feel most lost.