[Soil & Land - IX]
Everything rots. We spend a lot of time, energy, and money keeping this and that thing alive and upright. Organizations rot; leaves in the alley rot; your teeth rot. We can prop some things up for a while; we can even give the perception that other things aren’t rotting by putting a sheen on them. But it’s all slowly but surely breaking down.
Rot is most obvious in tender organic material. You can almost watch a banana rot if you stare long enough. Most foods rot relatively quickly.
We run into "rotting problems” when we deny its inevitability, or concentrate the rot and try to ignore it. Unhealthy death—death that stinks the most and needlessly causes other things to rot faster than necessary—is not in the embracing of the rotting process but in its denial. We could say that sustaining life artificially ultimately serves more death in the end.
Embracing the rot is not conceding to death, per se, but embracing the upshot of the rotting process: new life. The theological word for this embracing is redemption. Redemption is not the denial of death and rot, but the embracing and honoring of it.
I learned this from my compost heap.
