compost, meditation and community

Today Edinburgh was bathed in autumn sunshine. I cycled 8 miles from Leith to Colinton, on the border of the Pentland Hills - uphill all the way. A group of us were visiting Colinton Community Compost.

The project is a residential home for a group of folk with learning disabilities - and composting is one activity they do. This is how it describes itself.

"The project provides meaningful work for adults with learning disabilities. We promote home composting and run a local kerbside collection of garden waste. Our final products include compost, worm casts, leaf moulds, woodchip, horse manure and firewood. We are currently negotiating a partnership with Edingburgh City Council and our plans include processing food waste and initiating a network of community composting sites around Edinburgh."

It was a beautiful place. I'd pushed my bike up the final steep gradient of the hill, and reached a wooden hut. I felt instantly that I was stepping into the earth, that beautiful fertile rich smell of mulch and berries and autumn soil heavy in th air. And the siting of the project, right on the verge of a disused quarry, with steaming heaps of compost on the brink of the hill, gave me a feeling of being safely cocooned and grounded at the same time as being opened up to the hills and view of the sea where I had started my journey.

I had that same grounding and stretching feeling doing yoga yesterday; and at my meditation group on Thursday, being part of something bigger than myself and being connected and interconnected with others. The teaching on Thursday was about impermanence, and several people spoke of the beautiful transience of autumn leaves. "By leaves we live", said Suzanne. It is a central quote of her play 'Leave to Remain', in which she pays tribute to the death of her mother. She told me she found the quote in the Poetry Library. "When I rise, let me rise like a bird; and when I fall, let me fall like a leaf, gracefully".

And the thing that I know but find hard to articulate; that I seem only to be able to glimpse; is that this impermanence and this interconnection - interbeing - are different aspects of the same thing. My buddhist teacher Thay - Thich Nath Hanh - speaks of the way he sees a cloud in a piece of paper - because the paper comes from the tree that cannot grow without rain. Maybe this non-self is the essence of our humanity.

All conditioned phenomena
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, or shadows;
Like drops of dew, or flashes of lightning;
Thusly should they be contemplated.

But at the heart of this impermanence is love. Someone else offered this Mary Oliver quote:

"to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go"
— Mary Oliver

The paradox of meditation for me is this: that I feel both more myself and less my 'self', in this practice I am fortunate to share with others.

Coming back to the compost - what else can embody impermanence so perfectly - I think back to the gardening day last month. It was lovely, a group of us all working together. Actually, I did more cooking than gardening. And of course making lots of cups of tea. We had some slate left over from repairing the roof last year, and we used it to make paths, taking up the mouldy carpet between the raised beds, laying down some plastic sheeting for an impermeable ground layer, then covering the sheet with shards of slate. I used the bigger pieces as a border, thinking of my friend Rachel's community mosaics (you can see pics at http://www.thirdrock.moonfruit.com), the beautiful way she creates patterns and gets people working together through inspiring them so gently.

For me there was some significance in working together, feeling like we were jointly creating something, and had a similar vision we were aiming for. But I also wonder about the ways in which it is possible to hide in a group, assume a mask, and be inauthentic. Living in a housing cooperative there have been many blessings but also so many power struggles, perhaps it is just one way of living together cooperatively, and perhaps my journey will teach me others.