death is a verb · the compost heap
Whatever you are sensing of the living world — especially here, in the city.
The Compost Heap gathers art, science and story — traces of what people notice as they sense their relationship with the living world.
To help you find where your trace belongs, the Heap is oriented by Earth’s four linked spheres, or the biogeochemical cycles. We added a fifth sphere, metamorphosphere, to honor Emmanuel Coccia’s idea of metamorphosis as the phenomenon that binds all species and unites the living with the nonliving. All the spheres are porous, your traces might sit all…
The systems that move through everything — including you, including your city or suburban block.
Breath, carbon, weather, the smell of rain coming. Notice the air as a thing you share, with pigeons, with the ginkgo on the corner, with eight million other lungs.
Water, grief, tears, rain in the gutter, the river the city forgot it was built on. Notice what flows: storm drains, tears, the river, the glass in your hand.
Soil, stone, concrete, calcium, bone, the dandelion breaking through the sidewalk. Notice the earth where it surfaces, maybe in tree pits, cracked curbs, the cemetery, the houseplant on the sill.
Life, lichen on the headstone, the mycelium under the park, the bacteria that are already most of you. Notice the life that lives alongside you, invited or not.
Transformation itself, the becoming-with, making and unmaking that moves through all four biogeochemical cycles. Not a place but a process, happening in every body, right now and befor. Notice what is in mid-change-ing around you.
Anything that does the work of sensing the living world, and of decomposing the lines we drew between ourselves and it. Some ideas…
What is breaking down near you, and what is growing from it — compost, rot, ruin, regrowth.
What loss has shown you. How grief moves. What it feels like to belong rather than only to lose.
Weather, heat, flood, the season arriving differently, what the living world is saying, and how it lands in a body.
The ecological where it surfaces in the built world — the tree pit, the weed, the hawk, the buried river.
Experiments in unfreezing the world from nouns: the river rivers, the soil soils, you are bodying. And new words for death itself — from any language, especially the ones English forgot.
Moments of sensing yourself as part of, not apart from — kin with microbe, street tree, stranger, weather.
Bring it. A photograph, a recording, a few words, a field note. The decomposers have never turned a contribution away.
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