Corn

The Dark Side

I experimented with planting the Three Sisters (corn, beans and squash) in my garden this year. We’ve been eating the corn for about a week now. I don’t even bother cooking it, it’s so sweet raw. 

Many years ago I began a meditation practice. Soon I noticed that when I ate meat I felt, on some small level, the panic, terror, rage and grief that the animal felt when it was killed. Not wanting to take that in, I became a vegetarian. But it left me with a question, what about plants? If dying felt so terrible to animals, what about my beloved broccoli? Was there anything I could eat?

So I went into the garden that I had at that time, and asked the plants. They were actually a bit amused. What do you think we live on, they asked me. Do you think we’re just airy green breatharians? What do you think our roots are doing? Down in the soil we live on death, or at least what you mobile folks call death. To us death is life spilling itself into the dark, a gift to the soil critters, who take what is given and rearrange it. They give to us, and we give to you. Nothing rooted is afraid of death. Death is another word for food.

But what about being harvested, the cutting or uprooting? How did they feel about that? They asked me what I wanted when I freely gave something, and the answer came up immediately:  “respect.” The channel between us became a little clearer, and I saw that they appreciated gratitude, but if in an animal hurry I occasionally neglected to say thanks, they understood and would forgive me. The bond of respect and reciprocity was strong between us.

As the conversation progressed I felt a new tenderness toward my compost heap, the so-called dead weeds and leaves, the horse manure carried down from the stable up in the hills, the little red worms wiggling away from the air when I would turn the steaming heap in the morning. 

I saw that the digestion of death by the soil people in the dark, the luminous green of the plant people, and the hot, hasty blood of my own unrooted tribe were all a kind of burning, the flame of each kindling the next, eating and becoming food in a cycle that has been the essence of what we call life for billions of years.

Eventually, as it often does in meditation, my own death came wavering before me. Not the actual death itself, but what would happen to my flesh afterwards. My mother had opted for a metal box inside of a concrete box in a graveyard growing nothing but deeply traumatized grass. My father had been cremated. Neither of these options appealed to me. I wanted to become compost. I wanted to be in my own garden.

A few years ago I became aware of a composting option available in Seattle, a company called Recompose. I told my children they would have to take me to Washington when the time came, but then, wonderfully, California passed a law allowing human composting as an ecological alternative to burial or cremation. I’ll have to stay alive until 2027 when the law goes into effect, but then I will return, a dark breast feeding the sweet corn, beans and squash, and all the sisters and all the brothers. The cycle will be complete. 

I can hardly wait (well, actually, I don’t mind waiting).