Wasting away: what happens when we decay with dignity

Hello Hedge School,<br/><br/>It's been a while. A huge amount of gratitude to one of my favourite humans, Lara, for the gift of her prose, dulcet tones and pertinent inquiry. It brings me great joy to see a penned letter from Lara in my inbox each week.<br/><br/>Personally, I've unhooked the 'always on' trailer and taken a really long break. <br/><br/>I found myself wasted of words. Wasted of energy. Waste has been the dominant theme. A sick in-law wasting away. Projects decaying. Moments squandered through worry. Relationships dying. <br/><br/>The cycle of decay, compost for growth. All natural. All compost.<br/><br/>Compost has been a big teacher this year. Capturing our food and garden waste has schooled me about nature's relationship to waste. <br/><br/>&#8220;Nothing in nature is disposable. Part of the resilience of nature is that nothing in nature is wasted. The earth swallows it all through mouths or soil or water. This is such a simple beautiful truth. Everything is food, fuel, compost, a home for some other creature.&#8221;<br/><br/>Adrienne Maree Brown - Emergent Strategy<br/><br/>Nature wastes nothing. Think about that for a while. Now think about how much humans waste. Waste, from the Latin word "<a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/waste">vastare</a>" meaning 'empty' or 'desolate', is deeply woven into the fabric of human existence. Holes in the ground are filled with our squandered opportunities. We get wasted. We waste people. We squander more than any other creature on this planet. And it's part of the reason we are in the current climate mess.<br/><br/>So why are we so wasteful?<br/><br/>A few reasons spring to mind. <br/><br/>Our obscene obsession with hacking growth. Waste is the precessional side effect of fast tracking growth. <br/><br/>Our disconnected relationship with nature. We visit nature like we would a holiday destination, curate nature into unnatural landscapes that suit our taste and see overgrown forests as desolate. <br/><br/>Our infatuation with our own nature. We are too bu