Social Compost

I've left a couple gardens behind as I move from place to place.
Although I find it difficult to move as much as I have, it's the compost that I find particularly difficult to walk away from.

Compost isn't really anything - this  noun describes an active, regenerative process that sustains soil based life, which is our life as omnivores.
Compost describes the digestion, the reconstitution, of refuse into the stuff of next year's garden.
Compost requires certain simple care - including more carbon than nitrogen, moisture (but not too much), turning (once or twice), and time.
The mass of a compost pile will insulate itself throughout the winter - I've seen compost steam when opened, I've found charred mass from too much heat in the belly of a compost pile. Digestion.

I can see that I've been born into a history - a time and place - that is impoverished, social cycles that haven't been renewing - something disrupted. Great harms of the past scattered through our collective (un)consciousness unable to compost.
I first noticed this from the outside, finding myself in other cultures around the world where cultural legacies were active capital for new friends of my generation - rice paddies built and maintained by families for hundreds of years. What is it that I inherit, born into an erosive time characterized by assumptions that we are individuals - a strange idea that has become a norm.

I can imagine a social compost - a process by which we live through the legacies we have been born into, rather than avoid, pretend, deny, or react to.
What could a social compost look like? With appropriate mass and composition to create the fertility for the next generation - how do we reconcile whatever is there for us to live this life with deep tranquility and reverence? For this is what I believe we describe with the word peace. And for me this is the goal.