Wheat

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a thing fall into the heap and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much.

For thou takest the leavings of the kitchen, the peelings and the cores, the grounds of the coffee and the leaves of the tea, the ends and the parings and the things gone soft in the bowl; and the world calleth them rubbish, and would carry them out, and be rid of them, that they might rot elsewhere and unseen. But thou carriest them to the heap, and castest them down, and coverest them; and there they begin to die.

And the dying is not clean, neither is it quick. The bright peel goeth brown, and the brown goeth black, and the shape of every thing is lost — the leaf, the rind, the stalk, all falling in together into a dark and formless mass, breaking down, giving up what they were. And it is unlovely to look upon, and there is a smell to it, and the proud would not put their hand in it. Yet lay thy hand upon the heap, and thou shalt feel it: warmth. Heat riseth from the rot, from the very breaking-down, a slow inward fire that no man lit; for the dying is not a stillness but a labour, and the heap is at work in the dark, and is warm as a living thing.

And thou turnest it, fork by fork, bringing the outside in and the buried out, that the whole may die evenly and the air may reach the deep of it. This is the tending: not to hasten it, for it cannot be hastened, but to keep it, and turn it, and wait. Season upon season thou waitest. And they that seek the quick end have no patience for it, and buy their soil in bags, and count the heap a waste of ground.

But go to the heap when the seasons have done their work, and dig into the bottom of it, beneath the fresh leavings and the half-rotted middle, down to the oldest part; and behold — it is changed. That which was refuse is become dark and crumbling and sweet, fine as crumbs, cool in the hand, smelling not of rot but of the good deep earth after rain; and there is no peeling in it, nor core, nor leaf, nothing of what thou threwest down remaining, and yet all of it there, gathered up and made into one rich and living thing.

For nothing was lost that was cast into the heap. It was only changed, by dying, into that which feeds. The peel did not vanish; it fell, and died, and abode not alone, but is become the black crumb that thou returnest to the beds, that the next fruit may grow out of the death of the last. And so the ending feedeth the beginning, and the refuse feedeth the root, and that which the world would carry out as waste is the very thing that maketh the garden, if only it be given to the heap, and covered, and turned, and suffered to die the long slow death that is not an ending but a becoming.

It may be so. It may not.