The Annual Meeting of Corn Husks & Masa
Composting Ancestors
A few weeks before Christmas Eve, my Grandma Lupe held an annual meeting of corn husks and masa. As the unnamed as such misogynist tradition, it was a female only affair. The men and boys were neither interested nor invited, their absence both a bonus and an affront.
Each year after the age of two, I begged to be included. Instead, I, along with a mixed-aged bag of cousins and tag-a-longs, were pushed out the backdoor of my grandma’s small Compton, California bungalow and into her glorious yard filled with flowers and adventure. Even though Grandma’s Garden was the best place I had encountered thus far in the world, I felt certain I was missing out on something special. At nearly seven, when the coven of aunts, sisters, mothers, and grandmothers allowed me to attend, I learned I had been right.
The gathering was a time when this collection of women became more human with each other, themselves, and now, reflecting on that first occasion nearly six decades later, to me.
I’m participating in an online class devoted to what I’m calling ancestral composting, though the instructor, teacher and mystic, Thomas Hübl, says students are learning how to process life experience into “soil.” As odd as that concept may sound, composting life and even the past lives of our DNA, comes to me as sensible as using a filter to catch coffee grounds.
Unprocessed life experiences sits around holiday tables all over the world, where dysfunctional interactions may have echoes from previous, unintegrated events. If that concept doesn’t seem logical or possible, recall your top five worst family dinners and wait for an “ah-ha” moment when something pushes into your feels about the upcoming holiday season.
I wonder if this could be why younger generations may be less than thrilled receiving great-grandmas dishware and traditions. If experiences from histories are coagulating in place of composting, doesn’t it make sense that capturing an ancestor’s goop baton might resonate, even silently, as an act of self-sabotage?
There must be people without lint mucking up their best holiday sweater and to those I offer my joy that you and your family exist. For me, those histories are the vibration of wonder and possibility our community of humans can build upon. Protect what you have by holding awareness for how precious it is and may it continue to guide your family’s interactions going forward.
For the rest of us, composting isn’t just for veggies.
Last winter, I started a compost pile. Truly the worst time in a Midwestern year to begin that practice and also the perfect time since it starts out hideous, is a little easier in spring, summer, and fall, and when winter returns, there’s no illusion it looks wickedly cool sliding over snow and ice on the way to the pile.
Composting is a life-ab test similar to waking up and dragging on layers of material and boots to hike with dogs on frigid mornings. Not only is it necessary to dress oneself, most dogs fiercely resist being forced into coats and sweaters
Outlier dogs are undoubtedly owned by folks with happy daisy histories and yeah, that’s snarky. Forgive me, but some of us need to occasionally vent the lack of life-guaranteed evens-stevens.
And, there is that other life-ab crunching thrill—clearing the gunk trapped above a child’s palate expander. The latter example popped out of a memory hole while reading the horrifying and ferociously funny Amber Tamblyn Substack post, Good Riddance: Palate Expanders. What’s the opposite of thank you, Amber?
Composting is grimly tedious, with, or without the plague of fruit flies. If the concept is applied to life experience and not simply veggies, it can be quite grueling. Whether it’s walking scraps out through a frozen tundra, painstakingly separating Aunt Elsie’s beneficial traditions from her urgently whispered “God don’t like ugly” response to telling the truth, or digging into a new-agey concept of composting the shells left behind when we die.
What might be harder—thinking about bodies composting or the cellular act of doing it? I suspect that thinking about it is mentally harder, while the other is an ancient process that expends and expels energy similar to the movement of water—it just happens.
The trend away from burials and cremation toward composting may have at least partially been incited by images of caskets floating in flood waters and an aging population that’s wondering who pays for the hoopla with what little may be left after caregivers and retirement plans end. News flash…it’s usually up to someone other than the deceased and it won’t always be a thoughtful outcome.
As gruesome as it might be to contemplate, cleaning up each individual human experience seems to be something that should be given more, not less thought, and that doesn’t only mean evolving the mushy bits we were born with.
The Sixth Sense as a metaphor for intentionally evolving our lives and DNA:
Many—I believe most—people carry what can become a crushing amount of difficult experiences.
I spent a large chunk of my middle ages outlining the shadows in my suitcases. A few years beyond that endeavor, I’m feeling the benefits of composting what I remembered all along, as well as what had been forgotten due to survival mechanisms that kept me upright and functioning.
A question readers may have is whether or not I seem “lighter” with more experience composted. The answer is that’s not the best way to describe what’s going on with me internally. I feel freer, yet more intricate, stronger and also weirdly delicate. It’s as though a gooey mish-mash of shrieking bits found a way to be a part of a cohesive, communal blend while not losing their individual flavor. Before the shadow work, each bit desperately needed to shriek separately and influence decisions with emotional and mental disruptions. Which, when taken with the understanding that unprocessed and never-witnessed life experiences are memoir elements that have been shoved in a closet, makes sense.
Secrets and unprocessed information clog the arteries of our individual and collective life journey. It might be why grievous mistakes cycle through the human universe repetitively. With so many scratches on our record, the music of our existence cannot play all the way through. The thing about humans is that beneath the shouty bravado we are superior to all other life forms, we are molecularly very similar. In all species, DNA harvests from experience. Whether events nurture, integrate, expand, and propel forward is the element that concludes whether life evolves or it goes extinct.
It is supposed Saber-Toothed tigers could not adapt to massive climate change. Perhaps, all it might’ve taken to enable their survival was an intentional, communal effort to work together with other species and manage fight or flight instincts. Maybe it seems fantastical to imagine a tiger intentionally choosing to evolve.
Is it fantastical for humans to intentionally choose to evolve?
As I work through the idea of smoothing out my internal memoir, I am struck by the possibility that not only may I be evolving through this process, but so might the DNA from the Annual Meeting of Corn Husks & Masa.
The Christmas tree in my grandma’s house had tinsel and the mantel on the fireplace displayed a tiny village made of glittery cardboard houses. The ethereal garden was a vibrant miracle in the middle of a gang-war torn area. Lupe painted her nails a shocking red and loved sparkly things in an often dreary and painful life. An illegal immigrant, Lupe and her six children survived on the few dollars she earned picking vegetables or working in a spuds sorting conveyor line.
As I visualize the familiar large ceramic bowl, my grandmother’s hands mixing in the chiles and filling corn husks with masa, her sing-song voice comes to me, “Mija, don’t forget the olives.” Her voice sounds the same as it did the night she died.
Grandma hadn’t spoken for many months. A third stroke had pushed her into a coma. She’d been bedridden for so long I no longer received updates on her health. I cannot say if I had thought of my grandma in the preceding days, or weeks, only that she appeared in a dream, standing in front of my favorite place in the world. There was flour on her apron and streaked across her cheek, as if she had stepped outside after making tortillas. The smile on a younger Lupe’s face was full and didn’t list to one side as it had since the first stroke. Grandma looked beautiful. Sparkly. And, as she wiped her hands on the apron, I could see that her nails were painted red.
“Mija, don’t forget the traditions.”
In previous essays, I have wondered about how people live within the impact of continuous war and dictatorship. My Grandma Lupe’s words along with my survivor-DNA understanding that composting brings with it rich, bloom-possible soil comes to me as a worthy place to begin.
The night my grandma died, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, she stayed with me until I fell asleep.
Absolutely incredible, beautiful…much to unpack, and that’s a good thing! Omg that share of Amber’s was something!!😍
Lovely