Shit makes good fertilizer!

If you take nothing else from this piece please remember that shit makes good fertilizer.

I’ve said that a few times to different people and in different situations recently and each time it seem to have been words that those listening needed to hear. Life is never easy but the past few years seem to have brought blow after blow to many of us. There are days when it feel like you are struggling uphill through thick sucking mud, other days where it feels something in the universe has dumped a big pile of shit on you. For some it may feel like they are having to carry increasingly heavy loads that they don’t feel they can let go of for all sorts of reasons. Grief, pain, anger and fear buffet us like the winds of an unceasing storm. And it’s exhausting!

And so I remind myself again and again that shit makes good fertilizer. I’ve stuggled in the past, feeling I had to hold my pain and fear in, that I couldn’t let my anger out or express my grief. I was wrong.

I discovered that if I didn’t learn to drop the steaming pile of shit, or at least some of it, I would break down and for a while be buried so deep I didn’t know which way was up. I learnt to cry out my fear, to scream my grief out into the winds. I learnt that if I sever the chains that bound me to my heavy load of anger it would fall and shatter apart like a brittle rock and let out the tears of pain bound within. And I learnt that in release I began to wash away the shit clinging to me with my tears. I didn’t get rid of the shit completely but I was able to dump it on the emotional and spiritual equivalent of a compost heap.

Over time huge piles of shit break down and in doing so it becomes fertilizer that helps new things grow.

Patience, compassion and empathy can all grow stronger from the shit life throws at you. How to hold safe boundaries for yourself and others; what love and trust look and feel like; these things also grow from times when life kept throwing shit at you.

Let your tears flow and wash the shit off you for a bit even if it’s only a couple of minutes. Do it again and again if you need to, and you will sometimes. And breathe, just keep breathing.

And remember that shit makes good fertilizer.

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