what is compost?

A museletter about restoring fertility to the earth

I looked back to when I first drafted this post and it was in April. That is coincidentally when I started the compost pile in the mesh bin outside. Kelly had come over a few months before that and we built one bin out of old fencing and wax boxes, and then when that filled I built two more so I could transfer my compost-in-process between them. All the kitchen scraps go in the compost— the cores and stems from the pears I just processed, a bread crust that nobody wanted, corn meal the moths found, kibble from the floor, cucumber peels, slimy lettuce, egg shells, and pickled peppers that went all wrong. When I take those food ends out to the mesh bin, I dump some yard waste on top of them. This morning it was old straw goat bedding that had been rained on (!) all weekend. It was soggy when I plopped in into the bin, which is good because that pile dried out all summer long.

I like compost. We can take all the beautiful things that exist in the world and mix their bodies together to create soil. While I was turning the bigger pile this spring, I found the skin of a winter squash that was well on its way to being dirt-like. A fragment of blue egg shell, a pocket of wood chips. Taking care of compost is a peaceful maintenance project. Waiting for microorganisms to break down my food waste and turn it into “dank” soil (as Brian described it) is not very hard. I just have to make sure the process has everything it needs to complete itself, and then wait patiently. It’s a process that lends itself to rich (dank?) metaphor. The past few years have been a period of intense transformation of my internal landscape, which I think is not an uncommon way to feel here in the year 2022. I went from being in my early twenties to being almost thirty, and had lots of time to think about things. My perspective has shifted. I have let go of a lot. I feel some things more intensely, and have stronger beliefs and opinions. My face and body look sort of different. It feels like the right time to put some things into writing and share them with the world, to make public what I feel inside and maybe see if other people want to read it. To reclaim voice.

Earlier this year I was thinking a lot about the idea of what it means to be in a fallow field as an artist. I didn’t really make any art outside of a few newsletters in 2019, 2020, or 2021. Before that, I had been trying to produce something creative for so many reasons— to impress the world, to earn a living, to feel proud or skilled. In the past few years of not really producing anything creative except sauerkraut, I have worked a lot to uproot ideas I held about the purpose of art as well as uproot other ideas about life and the world in general. The field where my preexisting beliefs about the purpose of art making is emptier. Less organized, more full of rocks and weeds. I’m interested less in production and more in expression. During this fallow time, I have felt really relieved that my livelihood did not depend on me making things because I did not have any interest in doing it. I thought for a while that maybe I would never do it again.

This summer I started working with The Artist’s Way. For those not familiar, it’s a book that guides the creatively blocked reader toward a spiritual rediscovery of how to make art. At a time when I was ripe for discovering this book, I opened it up. It’s been a few months now of slowly working through the chapters while journaling every morning. Perhaps the most useful perspective that the book’s philosophy offers is that art/writing/expression is not made for egotistical purposes; art is made to serve God. I don’t particularly resonate with Julia Cameron’s language, but I really like the sentiment. We are all born naturally inclined to celebrate the world through representation in images, song, poetry, dance. I think Martin Prechtel says it better when he says that we “feed the ancestors with words and eloquence.” I don’t draw comics to gain followers, I draw them because the gods of the burned hillside and the coastline north of the gentle bay are hungry and they eat exclusively art which is sincere. This is one of the things that has come out of all the composted thoughts and ideas I’ve had over the past few years— rich, fertile stuff that helps me to write and draw and make things when before I felt so stifled by the existential questions around why we do anything. Cameron describes being creatively blocked or traumatized as a state in which “the very act of attempting to make art creates shame” (Cameron 69). This really resonated with me. If we return to the compost metaphor, shame is like a lack of oxygen to the heap of organic matter. Breakdown turns anaerobic, sticky, putrid. Instead of getting processed, the scraps in the pile turn to poison.

I turned twenty-nine this year, which is almost thirty. I have heard that turning thirty can feel big for people, or the number can affect us in ways we cannot really expect. I am not sure what it will feel like for me to get there, what will feel important next year. But I have been thinking a lot about my life so far, and all the things I’ve believed and done and learned, all the relationships I have held and that have held me. It kind of breaks my heart, and also inspires gratitude for being a living human with so many big and small experiences, for knowing some humility, for feeling joy and disappointment and compassion and then getting to turn around and write and draw and express that in this uniquely human way. This little essay is an invitation for you to join me in that expression, to be an audience in community. One thing that feels important going forward is sharing— not on Instagram or Twitter, and not with the exclusive purpose of selling, but really sharing. I want you to see what I’m working on, to share your thoughts and feelings about it with me. Nothing would bring me more joy than being in creative community and I am trying to build that here through writing and art. So I would love if you subscribed to this newsletter, and maybe shared it with someone else who might enjoy it. It’s just a seed right now.

P.S.: Why Corn Lily? I chose Corn Lily as the pseudonym for this project. She just seems like the kind of mountain-dwelling, stream drinker and prolific pollen propagator that I want to embody. She’s who I sing about it my song.