Light flows into dark and dark flows into light
This pondering is perhaps not for everyone, some may be offended by my language, if you persevere through it perhaps you will discover my point. If you are simply offended, well we’re probably not a good match for coaching. In my office all language is allowed, things are named for what they are, and all aspects of life have potential value… another way of putting this might be to say that I hope coaching can help you compost all the elements of your life into something that nurtures beauty.
How much suffering occurs in life because we think of things as opposites? death-life; despair-hope; love-hate; north-south; east-west; night-light; suffering-life… the list can go on and one. Perhaps instead of opposites we should think of things flowing. Death flows into life, life flows into death; love flows into hate and if allowed hate can flow into love; night flows into day and day flows into night, east flows into west… the list goes on and on… there is a natural flow in our world.
Cows eat grass, they shit and fertilize the field, and new grass grows.
I was speaking to a client this week about how we all have shit in our lives. This shit can be our brokenness and failures, i.e. the shit we do to others or ourselves. It can be our sufferings, i.e. the shit we go through on any given day. It can be anything on the darker end of life that we might think of as waste.
So let’s carry this a little farther to our literal shit. We take nutrients or food into our body, and waste flows out. We all have our shit, and we shit everyday if we’re fortunate to not be constipated. Our body is made to take in nutrients and release what we are unable to use. Nature is then supposed to take the waste and recycle it. There is a flow to the way our bodies and nature are supposed to work if allowed. Waste is recycled and flows into nutrients if nature is working properly. If we’re in the forest and we see a fallen rotting tree with mushrooms, what we’re really observing are nature’s little composters, fungus taking death and turning it into life.
While growing up my parents gardened, and every year I’d go with my dad out in the country to friends, and we would load up manure, i.e. shit, into a trailer. I hated it. It stunk. I saw no value in what I was being forced to shovel. Yet, we would take it home and we would mix it into the soil, and a few months later we’d have a very fruitful garden. Wise farmers rotate crops and animals onto different fields at different times. They do this because all the creatures shitting and rooting and feeding and pecking, tend to make beautiful soil that produces life.
My point: the excrement or shit in our lives/ world can produce life. We tend to take the suffering of life and relegate it to waste. We can relegate the failures and mistakes in our lives to waste. We can relegate losses to waste. We can relegate arguments in relationships to waste. And certainly this is all they may become, but there is another possibility. Just as nature can take death and recycle it into life, so can we. Every day we have multiple opportunities to recycle everything that goes wrong in life into soil that can produce life.
The shit in our lives can become the compost of life, enriching the soil of our lives and making new growth that much more possible. There doesn’t have to be any such thing as pure waste. Most of us have been taught to feel shame over, and/or avoid negative feelings that rise up from our failures, or we’re made to feel like something is wrong with us if we remain sad too long after a loss, etc. If we’re depressed or anxious we can be left to feel like there’s something wrong with us. Yet depression and anxiety are a natural out flow of so many realities in our world. Embracing our failures, embracing losses, embracing feelings can make us keenly aware of the things that nurture life instead of destroy life. Suffering and loss can become a place of growth.
In my last entry I was reflecting on my father and his death. I grieve the reality that for much of his life there was waste that was not turned into life. I wonder who he could have become if he hadn’t been in many ways frozen by his trauma. My father could have become someone who nurtured me through the traumas of life and helped me grow instead of passing on his traumas. The suffering of his life could have become a rich soil that resulted in life for both of us. Suffering could have enlarged him. It could have enlarged me, but instead his suffering led to my suffering. Repressing the results of suffering, loss, traumas, failures, etc. is at some level like putting all the pain in a closed container and creating as system that has no oxygen. Oxygen is required to take waste and turn it into nutrients. So it is with the shit of life as well, bottling it up so tight is has no air only keeps the shit of life as useless shit. We end up all walking around in our stink.
If we can embrace the shit of life, our sufferings, whatever term you prefer to use, it’s like tilling the soil of life, mixing the good with the waste, until it all becomes something profitable. Don’t get me wrong here. Shit is shit, there’s no getting around that. Loss hurts. Suffering can grind us to a pulp. But if life is also allowed to simply follow its natural flow, all things can be recycled, so that what feels like death flows into life, just as winter flows into spring.