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Compost: Mother Nature's Real Gold
GARDENING WITH THE
GODDESS
Compost: Mother Nature’s Real
Gold
by BellaDonna Oya
One of the unloveliest things you will ever find in a
garden is compost. Even gardeners who love using it can’t deny that it isn’t
‘pretty’, and even a wet dog smells better than a compost pile that’s not
finished or not curing properly. So it’s hard to believe that people would
actually write poetry about it! But here is part of a fairly long poem on
compost by Walt Whitman:
"Behold this
compost! Behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick
person—Yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean
bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the
onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree…
Out of its
little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill
rises the yellow maize-stalk—the lilacs bloom in the door-yards;
The summer
growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour
dead."
About five weeks ago, I finally began MY compost pile.
The first few weeks, nothing much happened, and I realized I wasn’t doing
something right. When it’s working, things decay; when they don’t, it means
there’s a problem. So I fiddled with it constantly, adding a bit of this and a
lot of that, trying to get the ‘recipe’ just right.
This last weekend, I opened my bin and stirred it with a
forked thingy I bought just for the compost. From the bottom area of the pile, a
rich, black, crumbly, soil-like substance came up, smelling of freshly damp
earth. I felt like I’d just given birth, in a sense, to more earth. And I fell
in love with it, as a mother loves her newborn child.
"Mother Gaia, now I
understand…
The cycle of life, death
and decay is needed to bring forth new life,
And by giving back to
the earth I am a part of that cycle.
Thank you for the gift
of co-creation with You."
BellaDonna Oya lives in
Hayward, CA, where she runs a small eclectic coven. Her hobbies are gardening,
belly dance, crocheting, Renaissance faires, travel, and cats (she has ten). She
has a Master's Degree in Anthropology, and is fascinated by mummies and ancient
Egypt. She has travelled to Ireland, Jamaica, Eleuthera, and Mexico, and hopes
someday to visit Crete, Malta, Egypt and Delphi. She is a Level II Adept of
The Sacred Three Goddess School, and is currently working on Level
III.
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