Decomposition 2022

Discussing the most important and exciting aspect of Life: its ability to deconstruct what is no longer alive into assemblable parts for new life.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [e-mail]

TRANSCRIPT:

----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca,

Mark: And I'm Mark the other one.

Yucca: and today we are talking about decomposition and death

Mark: Yay.

Yucca: and I've been really, really looking forward to this one. So this whole season we've been talking about kind of the autumn themed things, right? We talked about ancestors and our own deaths and hollows, and now we get to talk about it on the college side.

Mark: Right. And both of us are big fans, so, you'll, you'll find out why and you'll hear how excited we are about all the incredible. Things that have to do with death and decomposition?

Yucca: Yeah. So let's start a little bit with why. Why we're thinking about it this time of year, because this is relevant all year round, but why are we focusing on it today?

Mark: Well, it seems to me, yeah, it seems to me that there are kind of two reasons, right? One of which is, Kind of obvious. And the other one of which is not obvious at all. The first one is that this is the time of year when we acknowledge mortality, right? With the skulls and the bones and the blood, and the monsters and the ghosts and the

Yucca: All of that fun stuff. Yeah.

Mark: all that stuff that is part of our psychological complex around our mortality.

But the other part that isn't as evident is that this is actually the time of year in the temper zone when decomposers are going crazy with activity. I mean, they, they, they work all year round, but

Yucca: This is their spring,

Mark: yeah, with all the leaves falling and, and, you know, you know, some, some moisture coming to help kind of speed the process.

They're all out there going, Yum, yum. Yu yu yum. Yu Yu performing their function.

Yucca: All right. And they'll keep that up all winter long, right underneath those, the leaves with the, that nice, wonderful blanket of snow on top in the temperate forest. But this is happening to a certain extent in grasslands and, and most of the temperate. Northern hemisphere right now, and farther north as well, right as we get into the farther polar regions, so,

Mark: Right. And when you think about it, when you think about the, the deciduous. Forests of the Northeast and the north and southeast, that whole huge band of deciduous trees in the, in the Eastern United States as an example.

Yucca: mm-hmm.

Mark: When you consider the sheer volume of leaves, that falls off of all of those trees onto the ground, it.

A miracle that that stuff, that we aren't buried in it up to a 15 foot level every spring. Right. But no, it's all gone. It has all been consumed and transformed.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. There's our reasons, right? So we're thinking about it from this ecology perspective, but then also we have the, the kind of wheel of the year when this is a time where we're focusing on the, the death side. Now the decomposers are kind of interesting because they, the, this is their life, right? This is life and food and yum for them, but they're taking what has died.

They're taking the death and they're transforming that into the new life. And we live in a point in Earth's history where we're, we have these incredibly complex systems that are built on literally billions of years of.

Mark: Mm.

Yucca: And so if you think about the individual number of deaths, that's trillions and trillions of deaths that have, that have all added up to be able to make the soil that supports these systems to be able to make these ecosystems, to make our bodies

Mark: Right. I, I, I was gonna say this is this is not an academic exercise. This is very personal

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Those trillions of deaths were and are necessary in order for us to function, you know, at this very instant in the body of you, listener cells are dying. Living creatures are being disassembled because you, you consumed them and either your immune system is attacking them or your digestive system is dissembling them.

And so there is, there is a deep inter penetration of life and death as mutualistic functions that enable the process of life to exist on earth.

Yucca: Right. And this is a, this process is continuing, right? And that's something we talked about in the, the past few weeks about our own death, but our. Our many deaths, the deaths of ourselves, and eventually the death of the whole of us as a pattern is part of that cycle, which then is going to continue on to allow for the new lives, on and on into the future.