December 12: The Call of Compost
By Bayo Akomolafe
I say to you, my dear, wherever you are, on Earth or off it, where you are at the moment is the most sacred place you can be in. Life is not a ladder, whose topmost rung is more valuable than the ones before it; life is not a race to see who crosses the finish line first; life is not a circle with a discernible center or a proscribed circumference. The language of deficit drops you on a linear path, where you are never enough, where what you do doesn’t count in the larger scheme of things, where you feel guilt for not doing enough to save the planet, or where you do not always rise to your cherished shibboleths and values. Your job in this framework is to rack up achievements, faster than others, sooner than most. But what if life is a fractal with interlocking images, with parts reflecting the whole? What if life is a web, where the past and present and future melt into a rapturous immediacy, glimpses of which we perceive in heightened moments? What if you don’t have to beat yourself into shape? What if there is no outside force to which you must measure yourself? What if your questions, your imbroglios, and tooth-chips are just as sacred as “having it all together”? What if you are in the most interesting place you can be in now? This home that is a dance with exile?
This realization that there is no permanent home, no permanent ground, just rupturing places and condensing fields of welcome—only for a while—drives us to find new kin in plants and mountains and human others. As your mum and I are deepening our accountability to you, we meet many others who are your parents as well—the cow down the street, the wet anointing she spills on everything, the moon that nods as we stroll by.
We are learning to see that we are in this together—and nobler words could not be spoken at this time of vexed exclusions, legitimized exterminations, and weaponized boundaries. This is a time to linger at the edges, to lean into the troubling intersection points where the differences between me and you, us and them, queer and straight, nature and culture, living and nonliving, man and world, are not given and done, but still in the making. This is a time to stay with the trouble of knowing that there is no becoming that is not a becoming-together.
The things that stand in the way are “aspects” of our ongoing reconfiguration. Enemies, bottlenecks, seething memories, gnarling fetishes, haunting creeds, howling specters, grumbling boogeymen, careening splinters, frowning clouds, green giants, gaping holes, chucking forests. The challenge is not to go “through” them and come out unscathed on the other side. The invitation is to know them, to stop for a drink, to resist unsheathing a sword, to be grateful for a wound, and to share a joke with the shadows. The challenge is to gasp—as microbiologists do when they see that the bacteria that inhabit our bodies exceed the cells of our own bodies—as we realize how strange we are also.