Ta-dah.  That would be…….compost.

When I was a kid, my father used to grow the most outrageous bright, red, lip-lickingly juicy tomatoes, along with vivid explosions of hydrangeas and fragrance-laden roses.  When people drove by our house, if my father was in the yard, they would stop to ask his gardening secrets.  He attributed it all the the quality of his compost, beaming as he discussed each vile thing he had tossed into that putrid goop, fenced and hidden, behind our garage.

The term “compost” was politically correct before the idea or the need for being politically correct lept into its proper place in our culture.  Think about it—compost is really just a dressed up name for a four letter word beginning in “S” and ending in “T”.  Lots and lots of it.  Take that and mix it with all kinds of other nasty, rotting  garbage: bones, yesterday’s coffee grounds, moldy bread, egg shells, buckets of ash from the fireplace, and you have the beginnings of the perfect recipe for a glorious, accelerated result.  This great muck takes tending to with patience and persistence, faith and focus, vigilant turning and sifting throughout the steaming pile to create the final payoff. 

In all those ways, compost and life have a lot in common.  No matter how deep the brown stuff you might be in—if you manage to sift through it—-there will always be some huge gift that comes to light our lives with new understandings and perspectives.  When we see what can bloom from within, regardless of our circumstances, that’s when we see how all things work together, with faith and focus, with persistence and vigilance….for good.  We begin to see through the chaos to the opportunity.  Our breakdowns can be viewed as course corrections—-even saving us from some greater disaster that we could not imagine.  Believing that everything which lands on our “pile” has its own purpose in being there, it’s own unique contribution to an eventual greater payoff is an act of pure intention.  Some people call that choice or belief….wisdom.  Others call it, optimisn. Still others call it, growing up.

What would you call it?