COMPOST BY ABSTRACTING : WHAT IS WORK?

There are few. better. ways. to. time. travel… than to compost broken things, in  my humble opinion.  It is the mindfulness of the earth’s essence, to re-integrate and re-member, self.  The rainforest is a natural ecosystem of composted leaves at the forest floor, which, by breaking down in an-aerobic conditions, allow nitrogen, vitamins, and fibrous material to enrich the soil for the plants of the floor layer to absorb at the root.  

As compost-of-Empire regains momentum, a beautiful image of the intricately designed collaborative spirit gives me a down-to-earth feeling about this long-term recycling project. An excerpt from S.I. Hayakawa’s book “Language in Thought and Action” illustrates the meaning behind any type of “calculation”. In Latin, the root word calculus meant “pebble”… By extending a pebble to represent a sheep, the action of shepherds putting a pebble in a box for each sheep as it left the fold, so at night they could check the number of sheep against the number of pebbles, to see if any had been lost, came to be called : “calculating.”

Hayakawa, S.I. , Hayakawa, A.R. (1941) Language in Thought and Action. Harper Collins Publishing. [Book] Chapter 8 : How We Know What We Know.” Why We Must Abstract. p.87.

Compost : decision to definition

Compost – verb. When a person cares for the Earth by carefully re-cycling old food scraps over a period of months or weeks.

Noun. (product) A rich soil created to naturally fertilize garden or farm vegetables.

IMHO.  (this is my website, my opinion) Ingredients of compost are digested food scraps which contain no meat , are processed by indirect heat from the sun rising from earth, using help from worms and beetles to digest the material , providing the vital excretion of waste products from these and many types of insects , maintenance by turning regularly , and ventilated containers.  These collective processes in time result in a rich nutrient-full soil-concentrate, which conditions garden soil for growing all kinds of healthy plants.

A people without knowledge of their history, origin, and culture, is like a tree without roots.”

Marcus Garvey said, “A people without knowledge of their history, origin, and culture, is like a tree without roots.”   This is our our ancestors speaKING our indigenous nature out in plain english…but climate change truly has shown us that compost-of-empire will be the essence of the Generation Alpha and subsequent generations labor force action, globally.  When I say compost the Empire, I mean compost the waste-of and the ideals-of white-ness which have created phobias about our survival and existence. Time contributed to turning and maintenance, one of the essences of compost , is a service word. By writing journaling scripting scribing, our stories become a way to begin compost-ing the Empire.  By turning in our work, submitting our drafts, and turning the compost to the sun, we find that consistent-cy is our work… albeit the disciplined adage, ” We Are What We Consistently Do.”

COMPOSTING BY UN-MASCULIN-ING

Kendrick Lamar’s single, NOT LIKE US, begat/begot a lot of community love. As it should have.  And…

Kendrick Lamar’s single, meet the grahams, put fatherhood in the spotlight and honestly, even motherhood took a backseat to get popcorn.  The lyrics made us taste the sweat in this decade’s best diss track : ‘’wanna be liked so bad that it’s puzzlin…no dominance…let’s recap moments when you didn’t fit in…no secret handshakes with your friend…no culture cachet to binge” creates a paradigm to see how male dominance has crumbled just like the wall around hip hop.  Global gender politics and queer black motherhood challenged stereotypes that misoginistic malehood had taken for granted since hip hop began to go through the commodification stage (circa 1977).  And honestly those who were addicted to trash had to fess up, or die.  

Black, non-traditional, queer, indigenous motherhood has never been a topic of the mainstream science, and grief and loss couple every single mother without exception.  Even when the womb does not produce fruit, a woman can mother (verb), and even when a mother comes in the gender of a male, a wound can mother. Without any need to replicate or follow the exact steps or ‘’formulas’’ of anybody else, God wants us all to win. So we tell the story, nurturing the needs of the story, not the storyteller.

Lamar Duckworth, K. & The Alchemist.  (May 2024) meet the grahams. [Musical Recording] Interscope Records, Distributor.

COMPOSTING BY TRAVELING BACKWARDS THROUGH MUSIC.

Flashing backwards to Maxwell, blackSUMMERS’night had an impact that album on me in 2009.  This album was a show about the needs of composting male-ness as a real world animation.  The spirituality of its essence is what Maxwell calls, ‘what it means to become a man’. Take that and compost it if you can.

Maxwell. (2009). blackSUMMERS’night. Columbia Records. Album Produced by Muzse, Hod David, and Stuart Matthewman. [Audio Recording].

2001…Maxwell released the song Lifetime.  To sum it up, Lifetime asks the mask in all of us to melt. Face our bodies in 360.  The bargaining chip in our capitalistic white supremacist patriarchal bias says, “Do it.  Harder.  Faster.  Stronger than any Version of you.  Ever.  Beat the Odds by never giving up.”   The bargaining chip seems shiny-er and more val-uable but it requires us to start from an masc-ed place.  My question becomes, what does giving up look like when you’re all alone?  When you’re all alone and you rest in your body, does it look like victory?  Does the spirit feel lighter/ Does the face become more youthful / do the shoulders relax when we turn in our bargaining chip, and really just refuse to be at war with anything? He says, I could let my life pass me by…or I could get down and try…and work it all out this lifetime.

Men or masculine tropes are likened to rooted and calm and deep. Anybody’s lifetime can turn into fertilizer for something new and most importantly, organic.  Let’s explore how being deep-ly rooted in native plantwork can make our father-hood dreams grow.

Musze, Hod David, Matthewman S. (2001). Lifetime. Columbia Records. Single Produced by Musze (Maxwell) and Hod David. [Audio Recording].

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RESOURCES FOR COMPOSTING :

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions: Feelings Wheel

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (excerpted from Six Seconds Terms & Conditions : part (g) except as expressly stated herein, no part of the Six Seconds Properties may be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted or transmitted in any form or by any means.