Earth Day 2026

Celebrate the Earth

every day as a matter

of personal habit

Make composting your practice

to insure the continued health

of our beloved planet

That's the gist of it, really. Earth Day shouldn't be viewed as a one and done thing.  It's good we set today aside to celebrate but what's far more important is what we do and how we live all the other days of the year.  And that's where Compost Mentis comes in. Composting is a daily practice. And it's relatively easy.  It takes only a few seconds to show our enduring love for Mother Earth by removing the label from the banana peel before dropping it in the compost bin.     

 

* * * * *

As a form of spiritual practice, composting deviates somewhat from the Buddhist tradition of the Eightfold Path, in which practitioners first learn to cultivate awareness and intention, which in turn leads to profound changes in behavior.  The practice of composting generally works the other way around -- we change behavior first, simply by starting to collect our kitchen scraps in a separate bin, and from that relatively small change in behavior, consistently performed, a whole new awareness begins to take form.  We become Compost Mentis.  Transformation ensues.  

* * * * *

Was invited to give a composting presentation at the Ketcham Inn as part of their Earth Day program.  I plan to write a blog post summarizing my talk in the next week or so but in the meantime here's a link where you can see the deck:

Notes from a Suffolk County Compost Pile

And many thanks to Daniel Ricci of the NYS DEC from whose deck I have borrowed liberally.

Compost Mentis: all about the mix

On Easter Sunday

I napped and gardened awhile

and thought about Colman

an old friend who had just died.

 

Death comes and goes swiftly

whereas decay happens slowly

everywhere all the time.

Decay is part of life

in a way that death is not

and never can be. Without decay

there can be no new growth.

That's why decay and composting provide a sound

basis on which to build in life.  You can use compost

to enrich your garden soil. You can write poems about it. 

You can make a career out of it, driving around in a beat up

old van and picking up food scraps from your neighbor's

doorstep. 

You can even use compost to build your personal philosophy.  

Compost Mentis is the working title for my next book, which

I hope will turn out to be a seminal work in the field of

compost studies.   True to the composting ideal, the book will

be a mix of things, a real hodgepodge of poetry and prose,

natural science and philosophy, with a bit of economics and

self-help thrown in for good measure. 

Compost Mentis. We live in a decadent age so it's all for the

best that we learn to to make the most of things as they're

falling apart. In short, by way of reply to WB Yeats, here is

the prelude to my new book:

Things fall apart

And thank God they do

The center won't hold

The periphery goes too

But the more things decay

It’s undeniably true

We end up with compost

And the cosmos renewed

When in Doubt Start to Blog

When in doubt, start to blog because writing is literally manual labor, which permits one to think more clearly, to more fully grasp an idea.  So that’s what I’m doing in resuming this blog.  It’s time to get back to the compost pile, which forever needs turning, with either pen or shovel in hand.

Hand and mind move in tandem, much like moon and the tide.  Diurnal rhythms must now be resumed.  Once again, it's time to turn and return to the pile.

Getting Started

 Set the alarm for 5:30 this morning to see the eclipse. Looking west from the bathroom window, the moon was little more than a red smudge resting a few inches above my neighbor's roofline.  It's always just before or right after a total eclipse that the moon reaches its fullest extent -- further proof of the Dao in action, in case you're wondering. 

I spread out the blue exercise mat and meditated for a while under the moon's influence, alining myself near perfectly with both the eclipsed moon and the sun, as it was getting ready to rise.  What a great way to start the day. Today is election day to boot.  And just yesterday I had heard back from this literary agent who was first person to read the working draft of my new book - he had been the only one who asked to see the draft in response to a few query letters I had sent out the previous week.  His reaction was a tepid pass.  "I enjoyed it but I'm just not sure it warrants book length treatment. Maybe it should be a magazine article."  Oh well, it was Thoreau who wrote somewhere we have to learn to find compensation in every disappointment.  In this case, my compensation shall be my redoubled resolve to finish the first draft with a flourish.  Fuck them all. 

Later in the morning, I did a double compost run - 9 households altogether, which netted a total of more than 70 pounds of fresh food waste.  The corn is played out now; it's primarily squash and cabbage leaves that account for serious bulk of household food waste this time of year.  Here's a picture of today's haul spread across the the current active compost pile, after shoveling a blanket of maple shavings on top.  It's a post-harvest still life worthy of Flemish painter. 

Honestly, I've spent the last day trying to absorb this first bit of reader reaction -- I'm just not sure it warrants book length treatment -- a real kick in the solar plexus for a self-doubting writer such as me.  Those words go right to the heart of the enterprise.  Writing a biography invariably rests upon developing an unhealthy obsessive interest in someone else -- whether that someone is interesting enough to warrant book-length treatment cannot be well-judged once you fall under their spell.  I acknowledge that this has happened to me - I have become too much of an acolyte perhaps, an apologist, as it were, for Allan, who after all is just another seriously flawed individual.  But twenty or thirty years from now, I don't think mine will be the only book that's been written about Allan and his work.  I think it more likely there will be at least a handful of others.  That at least is the retort to this first reader of mine that I've been formulating in my head all day.  It may be the fault of the messenger rather than the message inasmuch as my manuscript -- which is still a working draft, after all -- still fails to adequately convey a sense of Allan's genius.  Perhaps it's time to turn up the amp a notch, and infuse a bit more poetry into my prose. 

So all things considered, it's a good day to write a first entry here on my new blog, where I plan to keep track (for myself if no one else) on current work-in-progress, destined as it is for the compost heap.