19/09/2025
Life is messy.
Compost is messy.
Being human is messy.
Creating culture is messy.
Weâve been fooled into believing it all needs to be perfect.
Perfected. Strive, strive, strive.
Take this workshop, take that workshop.
Get better. Produce more.
More degrees, more certificates.
Botox your lips. Tuck your tummy.
Chisel yourself into a shape that will finally be acceptable.
But for thousands of years,
our ancestors lived by the natural cycles.
The Wheel of the Year. The spiral of growth,
harvest, decay, and renewal.
Itâs only in the last few centuries
that industrial thinking has threaded its way
into everything
teaching us to think like machines.
Social media intensifies the lie:
perfect poses, perfect feeds, perfect lives.
And when weâre not scrolling,
weâre bombarded with ads:
this course, that course, this upgrade, that fix.
Sometimes, you just have to get real with the s**t.
With the mess.
The mess I am. The mess you are.
Iâm not perfect. I make mistakes â in parenting, teaching, relationships.
I try to balance my own compost
with what I am preserving.
I look for seeds I can carry forward into new forms.
But I also need the mess
the compost
to fertilize those seeds later.
Compost is sacred.
It reminds us life is not a straight line.
Not a ladder to climb.
Not a polished profile.
Life is circular. Spiral. Ever-changing.
Moments of mess. Moments of rest. Moments of ordeal. Moments of transformation.
The whole, not just the parts.
My first teacher â a big, bold Sicilian-American woman who refused the title âspiritual teacherâ â used to make a mess of everything, just to teach me not to put her on a pedestal. She once took me to the dump and said:
âHoney, if you want to know whatâs spiritual â youâre looking at it right now.â
That broke something open. I had divided the world into âspiritualâ and ânot spiritual,â holy and unholy, better and worse. But thatâs the lie of the line.
You canât have preserves without compost.
You canât have the seed
without the death of the flower.
The caterpillar becomes new
only by drinking its own mess.
So go gently today.
Be more human.
Bring your mess out of exile.
Let it belong.
Words: The Wild Remembering