Waste + Aliveness
“A relationship is successful when it increases the aliveness of all.”
I cried over an uncooked chicken three days ago.
Given my documented obsession with food, crying over a meal strikes me as pretty par for course. But this wasn't that kind of emotional outpouring.
A surprise to basically no one, I source most of my meat from a farm exactly 37 miles from where I live. Irrigated by Rocky Mountain snowmelt, they're a regenerative farm, growing food bio-regionally appropriate for our particular ecosystem and practicing mindful animal slaughter.
A lot of care and intentionality goes into it, and I take a lot of care in sourcing it.
While that might reek of an idealized hipster life intended to guilt anyone without access to this kind of choice, I really just find a lot of nourishment and joy in being this connected to my food. More to the point, I find a lot of alive-ness in being this connected.
So, this week, when I'd experienced multiple bouts of crippling insomnia—one night where I didn't fall asleep at all—the chicken sat too long in my fridge while I opted to order in, incapable of the energy necessary to appropriately process the bird for a meal.
Finally admitting that I'd missed the boat, I started to carry it to the bin in our alley. Halfway there, looking down at this creature in my hands, my chest caved and I stopped mid-stride. Tears formed as I found myself audibly apologizing to the chicken.
That's not an anecdote for comedic effect, a laughable display if anyone had seen it.
It's a story about rupture.
And it said something to me about my internal state of affairs, in a good way.
I mean, I spend a lot of money on this shit. Wasting it is painful in that regard, but my tears weren't so much over the money I'd lost.
And it wasn't about shame—some sort of "What-about-the-starving-children?!" routine. Sometimes, you just have to ~make it through~ to tomorrow.
Instead, my sorrow sprang from a life, wasted.
All the energy, and care, and sacrifice given to nourish me, tossed away. All the energy and life, and nourishment I could have gotten in eating it, discarded.
Something about it just felt completely dishonoring...? Almost like I damaged my sacred role within the compost cycle, forgetting that one kind of death creates more life so that I might then use the energy to create even more of it, elsewhere.
It felt like that bird lived—and died—for nothing.
And that's when my mind flashed to therapy.
A week before, I sat on my therapist's couch, voicing that much of my life and work, now nearing the threshold of 40, feel kind of wasted. Almost as though it's been one long series of tasks to tick off or spent in jobs that fully drained me. I told her how fearful I am of dying without having really been present for any of it.
I understand this might sound very "Follow your dreams!" or, "What a privilege to even consider," but hear me out.
In this recent period of intense internal examination (thanks, COVID?), I'm realizing that MY LIFE—all of the energy and care and resources necessary to survive—might well be wasted if I don't treat it as an utter GIFT, and that this gift is meant to be used for something. To be used well.
Namely, to create more life.
What Wendell Berry would call "good work."
Or what Andreas Weber might call an "erotic ecology."
Interestingly, too, I am realizing that—in order to really encounter a felt sense of grief over devoting your time and energy toward things that do not bring you and others more life—you must be uncomfortably but fascinatingly connected to yourself and agonizingly willing to take responsibility for your choices.
When you are, a strange and wonderful thing begins to happen. You start to appreciate every gracious second, every holy effort as precious. Including and most especially if it is yours. Though, of course, a growing sense of the aliveness we lose in accepting waste helps us understand how every life is precious, and our responsibility expands.
This responsibility doesn't have to be heavy, either. In fact, it can be playful. Not constant bliss but, more and more, pointing your energy toward where the life is.
And the more you realize these connections, the less you're willing to waste any of it. Including and most especially your talent.
Which I'm convinced is here to unleash more beauty and life on the world.
And which might be utterly necessary for both your survival and someone else's.
