Composting what no longer serves

In a garden nothing is wasted. What falls gets turned back in, and after a season it is soil again. The compost heap is not a failure of the harvest. It is part of it.

We tend to treat endings differently. A habit that stops working, a room that no longer fits, a plan that has run its course: these get filed as losses and then quietly blamed on us. But an ending is only a loss if nothing comes back from it, and in a garden something almost always comes back.

Composting is unglamorous work. It is turning the pile, keeping it damp, letting the heat do what heat does. Nothing about it looks like progress from the outside. The useful part happens in the dark, out of sight, and it takes longer than anyone would choose.

The same goes for the parts of a life that have stopped fitting. Ending them is not the same as failing at them. Given time and a little turning, they become material for whatever grows next.

The only thing that cannot be composted is what we keep pretending is still alive. That is the part that starts to smell.

So the practice is simple to describe and hard to do: notice what has finished, let it finish, and turn it in. Not everything deserves a monument. Some things deserve to become ground.