Cosmic Compost

We die and rise again...

Rising from the dead… many Christians say that Jesus did it. IRL people who are dead don’t usually appear to others as though they are still alive, walking around and saying things.

And yet, the way we use the word ‘dead,’ misses a certain point. In this physical world of inevitable impermanence, everything transforms all the time. You can call it dead or you can call it change.

I’m not discounting the truth that the death of people, especially people we love, including ourselves, is a big deal. Often a very hard and sad life-changing big deal.

Yet the common concept of ‘dead’ suggests a kind of finality that does not exist in nature, and probably doesn’t exist beyond nature either. Transformation is closer to what happens.

We can’t help wanting a status quo, a static quo… Whatever game we think we are playing, life is playing Calvinball, where the rules change all the time. How can we not feel disoriented, and wish for enough steady state so that we have some idea what’s going on?

(I think it’s worth mentioning that life isn’t playing Calvinball; it just seems that way to us, because so much is beyond our comprehension, and our desire for consistency is inconsistent with reality.)

There is a fundamental cognitive dissonance between the sense of self as an individual—a particularity with needs and desires—and the multiple deaths and transformations we experience in our body and psyche during a lifetime, until the big one, when the body, which we have depended on for information and action, quits on the job.

What happens then to our consciousness, our sense of self? We don’t know. All we can know is that during our time here, in the body, on planet earth, we are not really a separate entity, even though it feels that way. We are part of the cosmic compost, fertilizing everything around us with our energy, for good or ill, and becoming part of everything that has felt our influence.

Giving birth to and raising children is an obvious example of this influence, but whether or not you have children, you are affecting everything, everyone, around you. We are all mothers, fathers, and children in the great game.

I’d rather be here now

It’s been close to three years since I started this publication, a fact which astonishes me. Has it really been that long? And how is it that I still don’t know what I’m doing? I keep wanting to know, and not wanting to know.

I want to know because systems are helpful. They save time and energy. They put time and energy to good use. Systems take a big ocean of possibility and channel it into movement and meaning. Systems create velocity.

And I don’t want to know because I want to make art, and not knowing is central to that activity. Not knowing is sort of my religion. I don’t mean ‘not knowing’ as stupidity; I mean it as a kind of intelligence, and even courage. It takes guts to not know.

Why I’d rather be here now

Not knowing is key to entering the magic kingdom of the present, where I’d rather be. Not knowing means being open to new information. My understanding is an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. The empty spaces allow new pieces to be added. For this analogy to work though, we have to imagine a jigsaw puzzle that grows and changes all the time. There is no picture on the cover to work from; only mystery.

The only picture we get is faith. When I say ‘faith’ I do not mean unquestioning belief in a completed picture or puzzle. That’s the opposite of faith. People who think they know everything are kidding themselves. They want sureness, they want the comfort of things not changing all the time. I get it. We all want that. We just don’t get that, and when we pretend that we do, we shut the door on mystery, on not knowing.

When I say faith I mean faith in not knowing. Faith that there is pattern, meaning, magic, story, evolution, transformation, happening all the time. Even if we can’t see it clearly, we are part of it. We are of it. We rise and fall. What we have been and what we are and will become is all part of the cosmic compost. We are a garden.

May the power of spring, of renewal, of rising from the dead, help us move without fear into the beautiful mysterious wonder of our lives.

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