in no particular order…
i.
OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS SO MUCH I WANT TO BE HUMAN COMPOSTED I LOVE WHAT THEY ARE DOING I’M SO SUPER EXCITED TO BE HUMAN COMPOSTED I MIGHT DIE—AGHHH!!!
Phew! Feels good to get that out. So anyway, I’ve been following the human composting lady Katrina Spade from Recompose for a couple of years now, and it’s just such a cool idea I’m going to mention it this week even though the incredible Garrett Francis at
beat me to it just last week when he highlighted this very fun video by the amusing Caitlin Doughty all about the work Recompose is doing. (I ❤️ her “DEATH P💀SITIVE” t-shirt!)Did you know?
The #1 death care option, cremation, releases ONE METRIC TON of carbon dioxide pollution PER PERSON! That’s about the size of 40 propane tanks!
Caskets and coffins use up FOUR MILLION ACRES of forest annually to keep up with traditional burial demand.
Human composting is the greenest funerary alternative available, but only in six states so far—Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, New York and Vermont (Go Hippies!)—and Recompose is leading the way.
Here is the LINK to Recompose with all of the nitty gritty—couldn’t be simpler or gentler. It just looks so comfy, doesn’t it? Like being tucked in bed by enchanting woodland creatures. It’s totally the ride I’m angling for, although who knows where we’ll be “living” by the time it comes up. If I have the wherewithal to know my approximate expiration date ahead of time, I will probably try to set up some kind of hospice situation in Washington State. 👻
At Recompose, you can be an early investor, and you can be a sponsor to help other people who couldn’t otherwise afford this kind of green burial option. They also have payment plans they call Precompose to plan ahead for Your Big Day!
They recently sent out an Instagram Reel featuring Cheryl Nugent, whose husband Eddie was composted, it’s kinda sweet - LINK
O.o
ii.
The Power of Maybe
There are just so many things I don’t want to do; don’t think I can do; think I’ll feel silly doing; have tried and failed; have tried and found too awful; wanted to do but didn’t know where to start and then just let the years roll by and nope, still not; the no thanks, the no ways, the no hows; the not over my dead bodies. I call these the Anchovies of Life, or the Olives, which are just the anchovies of the vegetable world.
I have hated olives my whole life, maybe longer. Wouldn’t you know it, we moved to a country that plunks a dish of olives down on every table you ever sit at, breakfast, lunch or dinner—if you stand long enough at a bank teller’s counter, they’ll put a little dish of olives in front of you. And then one day we went to a restaurant, and they said these olives are special, and you know what? They were right! I wouldn’t say they were my favorite thing to eat ever, and the strange thing was they didn’t taste like olives at all, but they WERE olives, and I liked them! (Of course we’ve never been back to the restaurant serving non-olivey olives, I’m deeply suspicious of foods pretending to be something they are not—looking at you, tofurkey.)
The point is: it is possible to not dismiss things outright, to try something after you’ve said no a thousand times, to surprise yourself, to change your mind. I call it the Power of Maybe.
You can just stay open to things. When you are thinking of something, for example, something you might do, and you encounter resistance in yourself, you can take a step back from saying “No, I can’t! No, I won’t! No, I’m afraid! Hell NO!” and you can simply say, “Maybe. Maybe I could. Maybe it doesn’t have to be no. Maybe not right now, but maybe sometime in the future—maybe I could accept that it’s something I might want to do sometime, or might someday see the value of trying.” Those maybes can open up a space within you that you never could open up on your own.
Take it from someone who has the cheek to name his Substack Ford KNOWS: you just never know, and that’s the power of Maybe.
O.o
iii.
Was reading an article on Lithub the other day by a Mark Ernest Pothier of San Francisco, whose debut novel Outer Sunset launched May 15 through University of Iowa Press. He is 64 years old.
He talks about winning the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award in 1993 for a short story, sitting with Annie Proulx (Brokeback Mountain Annie Proulx!) at the banquet, and how she introduced him to her New York agent for his first novel. I can only imagine the unmitigated delight of being referred by Annie Proulx, the exhilaration of being repped by her agent, followed by the crushing disappointment when the book wasn’t picked up on submission. Back to the salt mines, eh?
Anyway, thirty years later, he’s finally getting his day (it’s his third novel, btw, but first published) and I have to applaud a fellow writer of a certain age for sticking with it. But here’s the kicker for me: he submitted to 200 agents, and got rejected by 200 minus one, as he puts it.
And I’m taking this as a CALL TO ACTION, because I finally finished my first novel back in 2021, spent almost a year polishing it, and started submitting to agents in March 2022. I submitted to about 60 agents, and was starting to think that I was just about done—that’s enough, isn’t it? 60? It seems like a lot—a lot of researching, a lot of “personalizing” queries (“OMG you said you like donuts in that 2003 interview you did in Publisher’s Weekly—I’ve liked donuts since way before 2003, we have so much in common!”) and more rejections than I’ve ever received in jobs and romance combined.
I took them fairly in stride—I’d been well prepared by the querying videos I watched on Youtube, and all the articles I read everywhere—but one of the last ones cut me to the quick. I got a partial request from a well-known agent (“Give me another 20 pages and I’ll see”) only to be told that though the concept is intriguing, the writing “didn’t hold up.” I HEARD the air leaking out of my confidence on reading those words. I SAW my novel collapsing like a sand castle at high tide. Even with several possible next steps in front of me, I ran out of gas, and have let life get in the way a little bit.
Then I read of Mark Ernest Pothier’s 63-years-and-200-agents journey to publication story, and I thought, huh—you know what? I’ve still got some rejections left in me, I just know it! Onward!
Here’s his article, in case you want to read it:
“It’s Not All Over…” On Persisting in Writing and in Life
O.o
Roll me up and plant me when I die! 🌱
Loved every bit of this ... especially the composting. I think it’s a great idea.