Compost of the soul

Some early mornings when I walk along the Merri Creek I find my head drifting up into the tree tops to the calls of magpies & rainbow lorikeets, wattle & whip birds, currawongs & noisy minors.

The summer holiday is a chance to get away from our everyday lives including our logical, busy brains.

The best guided meditation I ever found was sitting under a flowering tree full of working bees – floating out of my day into their universal hum.

I’ve come to realise that walking, swimming, reading, music can blur the edges between ourselves and the natural world – aiding and abetting conscious escape, proffering the nourishment our souls crave.

And it’s not just alone that this happens, we lose ourselves when we sing or dance together or click as a team – merging into one until we’re “really humming”.

Food too gives us many opportunities to get out of our heads.

Working in Joe’s Market Garden I used to chastise myself for slacking off – regulalry finding myself standing in a dream, gazing across the rows into the half distance.

Slowly, I came to recognise this was a kind of composting of the soul, a breaking down and renewing of self that’s as essential to a human as regular compost is to soil.

The same thing can happen during the intense focus of harvesting fruit or berries, picking beans or tomatoes.

In cooking too we go places in the rhythmic, repetitive shelling, peeling, grinding and chopping. 

Our busy minds slow to a crawl and we disappear into dark red swirls stirring and stirring a plum jam on the lowest boil.

And when we smell and taste that one special, special dish that connects us to a time, a place, a person – our eyes roll back in our heads and we are transported.

This all comes together with the act of sharing food; the rising hubbub of a big table full of family and friends, noisy in heightened ecstatic focus, at its peak we meld and lose ourselves in the feast.

This week as many of us come back to the world from summer breaks it’s easy to get caught up in the busyness of things and forget to compost ours souls.

But it’s always right there, just a deep breath and a potato peeler away.

Have a great week

Chris