Becoming the compost heap

I have long said that I don’t watch dramatised versions of historical tragedies. I’ve never watched Twelve Years a Slave, I’ve avoided Schindler’s List, and even Slumdog Millionaire, for all its heartwarming glow was a one-time watch only for me. I have explained this, to myself and others, not as an unwillingness to face the most heartbreaking parts of humanity, but on the contrary - that I don’t need to subject myself to acted depictions of these events and circumstances, complete with carefully crafted editing and stirring musical scores designed to stimulate emotion, to feel. That I would rather read first-hand or historical accounts, that lay out the facts, hold the Hollywood-ised manipulation.

But as Queen Gertrude told us, perhaps the lady doth protest too much. 

Yesterday, I came into my living room to find my partner Jack watching Lion, and uncharacteristically settled down to watch it with him. Without giving away too much of the plot, the film is a biographical drama that tells the story of Saroo, a five-year-old Indian boy who becomes accidentally separated from his family and ends up alone and lost on the streets of Bengal. The first part of the film is a heartbreaking tour through - poverty, loneliness and child abuse. We are exposed to the most devastating parts of our humanity. 

As I watched and was reminded of the ways that we as humans hurt and desert each other. The violation. The cruelty. As I reckoned with the reality that this is happening, in varying forms, all over the world right now, I broke apart. This film took me down to the depth of the heartbreak that is always there. The part of me that cannot make sense of a world where these things can happen. I spent the rest of the evening in floods of tears. I found myself, at one point, lying on the floor, crying, and quietly repeating to the world “how?”. “How can we do this to each other? How can we do this to our children?” 

I reflected that perhaps the real reason I turn away from these kinds of films and prefer to immerse myself in intellectual studying of “the facts” is that whilst my head can digest the reality of suffering, my heart cannot. You see, armed with a higher spiritual perspective, I can accept that suffering is part of existence. I can posit that this is what we are capable of as humanity right now, and we must have approval for that. I can even make a case for the fact that each unique soul chose its life path and that there is mystery far beyond what I deem to be right and wrong. Yes, my head can get it. But my heart breaks. 

In previous years, I would have finished the film, stirred by the confrontation of human suffering, and jumped to action. How can I fix this? What can I do? I would have turned on my computer and searched for children’s charities to donate to, groups to campaign with, and someone to blame. I would have tried to save the world. The first two have their place. And yet, in recent years, I have realised that I cannot save the world. And with this realisation, I find myself in a deep and painful process of unpicking the threads of this pattern. Of activism. Of rescuing. Of believing that I should and can save the world. 

This process of unravelling the rescuer within me has been deep and complex work, fraught with guilt and shame and constant questioning. And yet I sense deep within my bones that it is true. I know that many people who journey with me and follow my work, grapple with this very tension, and so I felt called to try and unpack where I find myself so that it might meet you with open arms. But I ask you to hold this unpacking with gentle hands, these tenderest parts of me that are very much in the process, not tied up with a bow, but unravelling as we speak. 

I am not here to save the world from suffering. It seems so obvious as I write these words. That it is, in fact, so deeply egoic to believe that I could. But deep deep in me, has been a belief that somehow I could, I should, I must.

But we aren’t. 

For one, it is simply not pragmatic. The ice caps melt. Wars wage. Children are abandoned and abused. Freedoms we long thought were sacrosanct, gone overnight. Forests are falling. And oceans are crying. Not to mention the historical injustices like slavery and colonisation that live in our bones, in the tears of our ancestors, whose souls surely cannot truly rest while atonement and reparations remain unmade. There is no shortage of things to want to rescue the world from. The heartbreaking truth is that there is only so much that one person can do. Could I find my own little corner of the world to make better? Absolutely. But I suspect that the framework of “if we all just did our bit..” is too convenient for a reality filled with twists and turns and trickster gods. It seems naive to think of suffering as a finite block that can be chipped away at, and I suspect we would be wiser to think of it as the natural consequence of a set of conditions that while unchanged will continue to generate ever more creative ways of harm. 

And even if we could attend to all these issues, the damning truth, as far as I can see it, is that we simply do not know-how. We fight. We campaign. We blame. We lock bad people up. We lock good people up. We change our cars. We buy reusable water bottles. And yet still ice caps melt, wars rage, children are abandoned and abused, freedoms fall. This is not to say that these things are not worthy. But perhaps, they are limited. I believe that the root of these tragedies lies in the myth that we are separate from each other and the earth. We try with all the good intentions, to save the world, but we do so using the same level of consciousness that created it, a consciousness of separation. And though we try, as each day a new tragedy emerges, finally we cannot but ask, are our solutions to the problem part of the problem? To truly turn the tide, will take something, we don’t yet have. Something most of us cannot even see. That it will take us becoming something fundamentally different. And that when it comes to alleviating suffering, we must admit that we are totally and completely lost. We do not have a map for healing a deeply complex and interdependent world in crisis. And it remains unclear how we topple the very systems that both harm us and sustain us, ones that we both hate and love. It deserves to be said here, that the distorted view that runs through some neo-spiritual circles, that we can ‘ohm’ our way to higher consciousness in sweatshop-bought leggings, is certainly not the answer here. This is clear to me. And yet, the fight, the division lines, the waiting expectantly for the big daddy state to create systems that serve all, the Thoreauvian fantasy of removing ourselves from society altogether. This is also not it.  

And finally (and this is the most unprocessed piece, so bear with me), I hear a whisper that tentatively suggests that many of our traditional forms of activism may not just be a manifestation of love, but also an aversion to joy. This sense, that while others are suffering, I too must suffer. I find myself lost in the maze here, at once recognising that the interconnectedness of life means that while others suffer I too will suffer. And yet with the knowing that my ancestors, torn from their land, brought across Oceans on death ships, whipped and beaten, would have fallen asleep fingers blistered and backs broken and dreamed of a day, that one of their children could have lived a life without suffering. A life of joy and freedom. And I wonder, if suffering is part of reality, is immersing myself in the suffering of others actually less altruism and more ego. A way of denying the most human part of me. The part that can wake up in my comfy bed, and hug my child close in the knowledge that today he is safe, and I can do all this, knowing that others will wake up cold and afraid and alone. That perhaps all this hand-wringing, heartbreaking, and rescuing, is a way of denying my humanity. A veil obscuring the truth that I do live a life of relative happiness and ease, despite the full knowing of the horrors that exist for so many. And if I were to let myself have this all the way, the joy, I would have to reckon with the reality, that the ills I see out there, that at least in part finds their roots in selfishness, greed and apathy, live in me too. 

And so here I am. In the deep knowing that I cannot save the world from suffering. And in the truth that I also cannot turn away from it. 

Many of us sense that we are existing in a world that is dying, both in the literal sense of our mother earth and in the social structures that appear to be crumbling before our eyes. Forests burn. Oceans cry. Rights we thought were absolute, gone overnight. The great goddess covid who descended upon us with fury, bringing blessing or curse. I have no doubt that we are in a death process. That we are at the pinnacle of what the Vedic scriptures call the Kali Yuga, the epoch of death and destruction that precedes new birth. 

And yet in an age of death, we do not know how to grieve. 

When my sister died last year, I threw myself into work. I deconstructed and reconstructed my business. I redesigned my website. I wrote. I gave talks. Busied myself in all ways that I could. And I felt grief for sure, she was always there lurking in the background until I would hear a song or recount a memory and she would come forward like a great wave and pull me under. In other moments, I would feel grief as a portal, something that I could use for my expansion and growth. In either manifestation, wave or portal, grief lived outside of me, something I had to withstand or something I could use. 

But as I come to know grief more deeply, I have come to see that grief is not something to be withstood or used, but is, in fact, the process of digestion. The taking in of something fully, and letting it transform you. 

And so I take myself back to this thing I have of avoiding these depictions of human suffering. The things that whether I want them to or not, penetrate my skin and permeate my every cell with sadness. And I see that this is a turning away from suffering, but not because I don’t want to see it. But because I fear that I cannot digest it. 

And I sense that on a macro level, this pattern I have is playing out for humanity at large. In the way we turn away from suffering, busying ourselves or numbing ourselves in the name of living. Or we swallow it whole, and spit it back out as activated pain, in the name of fixing.

I see it in the way we are able to scroll from murder of the day to meme of the day, in a matter of moments.  

Or in the way, we gather to march and shout, but we don’t gather to sit and cry. 

Whichever way we turn, lost in both of these processes is grief. Absent is the holding of the suffering in our bodies for long enough that we might actually digest it. 

To find a hand to hold, take it in our own and say, this breaks my heart, and I know there is nothing I can do about it, and I am not asking you to do anything about it, but can our hearts break together for a little bit? 

This is grief. And we have forgotten her ways. How to wail. How to rage. How to gather in circles and cry. How to dance it through our bodies.  

And we must remember. Those of us who wish for the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, must remember. 

To birth a world born of new stories of love and hope and connection, we must first create space for the old stories to die. We must hospice them. We must hold them as they take their last breaths. 

We must become the compost heap. 

For without a place to rest their heads, these stories will continue to run through us. And we will continue to either turn away from them, allowing them to become more rotten, or we will recreate them in ever more complex forms. 

And I know that in some ways, it’s a conceptual leap; it lives in the world beyond logic to believe that suffering can be digested by simply attending to the truth of it and letting ourselves feel the all of it. But I sense that this very process, the feeling the all of it, is the thing that will transform us into the ones who can birth the new world. That we must go through it, become one with it, in order to move beyond it. 

This is, I feel, one of the deepest calls of our generation, the ones of us alive on mother earth right now, to learn how to truly feel and truly grieve. 

To see grief as responsibility. The ability to respond appropriately to what is there. In a way that both stands in reverence to the truth of its intensity and seeks not to create more harm in the process.

I read today the story of a 10-year-old girl, six weeks and three days pregnant from rape, who was forced to cross state lines for an abortion. And instead of wincing and turning away or taking to social media to condemn and lament, I sat, and I cried. Felt the agony of all parts of that story, and my body flooded with a thousand tears. I took it all the way in. This is my responsibility. 

And in my grief, I changed. In what small way, I can’t yet say, but I know that I am changed. 

I’ve long thought of myself as a midwife for a more beautiful world, one that can steward new stories into being. But I see now, that perhaps I have missed a step. That I must first inhabit the role of a death doula, one that can hold our old stories through their death process. 

My mother held my sister as she took her last breaths. I held my son as he took his first. These moments seemingly opposite, now feel so alike. To hold life in birth and in death. To bear witness to the cycle. Without turning away. 

In our society, death is so much less revered than birth. Pushed to the corners. Out of sight. Whereas birth is so celebrated. So visible. And so it follows that when we think about the birth and death cycles of new worlds, we would be more drawn to the birthing of the new than holding the dying of the old. So much more glamorous. But as I enter the mother phase of my life, that glamour somehow feels less important. What I feel is being asked of me is altogether quieter, slower and closer to the ground. 

It is to become the compost heap. 

And how beautiful it now seems to be able to create soil that is fertile enough that my children and my children’s children might one day birth the new stories I went to sleep dreaming of. What better to do with this life, than that.