The Cycle of Life

Funny how wild and lefty people think you are when you start talking about composting and raising urban chickens and recycling and all these ideas that are as old as Adam. Doing something slightly old-fashioned is now considered subversive. Whatever label you want to slap on it, I love it.

We enjoy the food out of our garden – squashes, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce and more. We toss most of the kitchen scraps to the chickens who leave only the hardest of the squash skins. (We even recycle the egg shells once they’ve dried out.) Then twice a year we clean out the chicken coop. Today is the autumn clean out.

Kim and I are taking out all the straw and chicken poop and whatever else is in there and laying down a new bed of clean straw. You can’t throw chicken manure directly on your plants – it’s pretty toxic stuff. But it is great in the compost, which will take all that “clean out” and turn it into a nice mix for next year’s garden when the cycle starts all over.

There is really very little that gets thrown into our trash these days that is of organic nature. We don’t recycle the cat litter, mostly because I don’t know how that works, but I might look into it down the road.

We do separate everything out in our trash. We have a recycle bin for what the waste management company picks up every other week – food containers, paper products (that I don’t wind up burning in the fireplace), etc. Stuff the chickens won’t eat and that is too slow for composting or things like weeds goes in the yard waste bin for by-weekly pickup. Bottles and cans and Plastic bags go back to the stores. Waste management also picks up any glass. The actual trash bin gets full, but we have the smallest bin the waste management company provides. And then there is all the reusable stuff we save for taking to the thrift stores.

Most of the furniture in our house we bought at the thrift stores or in yard sales. Portland also has some great re-use locations for construction materials and other resources, so we take advantage of these places as much as we can. Even our new soil is really someone else’s yard waste recycling.

In China, we didn’t have to do our own recycling. We’d carefully put our “trash” out every morning and the neighborhood trash pickup woman would go through it all to find what she could sell to recycling – very little of it wound up in the dump. And we did our own composting for our postage stamp of a garden.

It is not just about helping the environment, as valuable as that is. It is about being in touch with life and the Creator and understanding that every phase of life has meaning, just as every stage in our human lives – from pre-birth to death – has value. Some people think you can waste stuff because there is an abundance. I still don’t see how cleaning up my plate can help all the starving kids in India.

Even so I do think that God intended us to appreciate the cycle of life and to live a life of thoughtful conservation. Which is why, I think, he called Adam and Eve to be gardeners and Jesus to be a carpenter. Something valuable for us 21st Century Urbanites – learn how to get back to the soil and to the cycle of life. Chicken poop, er, coop, here I come.