rot

Todo tiene que morir
para al fin
vivir
-- Charanga Cakewalk, "Vida Magica"

"Yes, rot is the word. Rot means death, and without death and rot there can be no new life... Nature never loses anything: she preserves and protects herself. It is only a fool man who squanders his substance and makes himself poor, and everybody around him, and the land he lives on too."
-- anonymous letter, quoted by Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture


One of permaculture's first principles, as I understand it, is this: don't do any work yourself that the earth is willing to do for you. In a practice concerned with the conservation of energies of all kinds, this makes perfect sense. Permaculture sites reflect this ideal in home-centric planting designs, landform-conscious erosion controls, and gravity-supported water recycling. To give just a few examples.

To stretch this principle only a bit, there are at any moment in this heedless headlong society many people who can do some of the work for us, too. And we the ones who can utilize the momentum of their less-than-conscious actions. All the food that gets made and then trashed -- or, now and then, donated -- there for those of us willing to collect and redistribute it instead of purchasing. All the designer clothes worn twice and then left for us at Goodwill. All of the earth's original and extravagant gifts to us, labelled "waste". Then treated as such, after any other understanding gets forgotten. Wealth on every side, worked for and then discarded, disregarded.

In the past couple of weeks, I've found entertainment and a small sense of purpose in stealing the bagged leaves of the citizens of Albuquerque. I suppose, if I had wanted to gather organic matter honestly, I could've started my own landscaping service and gone door-to-door asking to rake people's yards in trade for the takings. But they're already hiring somebody else to do the work. And then discarding the wealth of potential that's collected from their own backyards. And although I recently learned that a city composting facility exists, and although our municipal website (cabq.gov) assures its readers that collected 'green waste' is used in local parks, I'm skeptical. Due to the degree of manicuring that I see in almost all of this city's parks (where it does not seem very likely that composted organic material would fit with those mowed expanses of grass, which should not even exist in New Mexico). And due to the astonishing numbers of garbage bags that I've been seeing all over town, on my daily delivery routes. I'm skeptical that this is a city ready to recycle on such a level. Some "single family dwellings" have been supporting black-bag populations of over 20 by my count, thanks to the fantastic efficiency of hired leaf-blowers and the level of disconnect that requires every fallen object to be removed from the "landscape". Without any realization that it's part of that landscape for a reason. Part of a system created to recycle itself beautifully every fall, by means of the natural elements which people have renamed "waste". These homes, in fact, are in some of the city's most prosperous neighborhoods. But this kind of occupation of a space -- depriving one's homeground of the very materials that sustain its wellbeing -- is in my view (and Wendell Berry's) a poverty of the most essential kind.

So at this point, 20-30 large bags of "waste" have found a new home in my garden, which is about a quarter of an acre. The goal is to sheet-mulch as much of the area as possible, before the ground freezes and before the bags are all taken away from the curbs. (The next best thing for the land, I'm hoping, since I moved into the place too late in the year to think about cover crops.) Opening each plastic package, once on site, has been just a little Christmas-like. Many of the bags were filled with clean, dry cottonwood leaves that sang with a lovely raspy rustle as they sifted out. Three or four from the first house held the remains of somebody's-last-year's garden: mummified chile and tomato plants, which perhaps will tell their sun-stories to the bare ground as it waits for its own turn to support new life. One bag spilled out a cascade of elm seeds: our favorite garden plague around here. That one went right back to the trash. Another bag turned out to be filled with fresh green English ivy cuttings. Since the property where I live is surrounded by bare chainlink fences that could use some cover, I filled a 5-gallon bucket with some of the vines to see if they'll root and be transplantable later.

The next step in the mulching process was going to be an unimaginable number of trips with a heavy bucket, to water it down and give the decomposition process a jump-start. Since at present my only garden hose would be better used as a drip-irrigation system, so cracked and full of holes it is. And since in New Mexico we don't normally count on precipitation to help these processes along. But, happily, this morning proved me wrong in that regard. It's raining today: a precious, light, silvery fall that I think is what the Navajos call "female rain". The kind that brings no pressure or destructive force -- only quiet nurture. I was on the way out the door to work, but when I saw the rain I ran outside in my work clothes, and ripped open another dozen of the still-bagged leaves. Scattered them on the beds that were uncovered, and left the rain (with much gratitude) to do the rest of the work for me. Let the decomposition commence. Let the rot begin. Let death have its original, rightful place after the season of life and growth. Let Creation's gifts have their respect again, reclaimed from the denial of this consumptive, disposable, and (saddest of all) forgetful society. And let the giving earth offer the renewing work that it's here -- if we let it -- to do for us.