Dealing with my s**t
It is early spring in England, and in my garden, life is emerging — the camelias in bloom, the waving yellow heads of the daffodils, the new shoots of the roses, the buds appearing on the fruit trees. Seeing all this, I feel called to be outdoors — to sow seeds, tidy up beds, prepare soil and spread fertiliser. This includes fertiliser that has been composting nicely for six months in an old bin out the back, the output of my compost loo. Turn away now if you are squeamish :-)
I built the compost loo in our back garden a few years ago. To avoid howling gales blowing up my backside, I have used it for six months a year, from April to end of September. I then leave the results to decompose, and by March I have excellent compost to put on my fruit trees and shrubs.
Why bother, you might ask? We have three flush toilets in our house — why not simply flush my s**t out of sight and out of mind, and buy a couple of bags of compost each year from B&Q?
There are several reasons. Firstly, it gets me outdoors. A lot of my work involves me sitting at a desk, staring at a computer — a disembodied experience that can suck the life out of my body. A trip outside to the loo, feeling the sun and rain on my skin, is a great way of getting back in touch with my body and with nature. And since I built the loo in a patch of trees, I have the delightful experience of birds twittering around me as I do my business. Once I even had a baby greenfinch hop through the gap under the door and perch on my shoe for a few seconds — a truly magical moment of animal/human connection.
Secondly, it is a small but, for me significant way of reducing my environmental footprint. The average person in England uses around 50 litres of drinking-quality water each day to flush the toilet. It pains me to think of the energy wasted in cleaning and pumping all that water, in removing and treating the sewage and disposing of the remains. My compost loo uses no water, I save money and create a useful product.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it serves as a small but significant rebellion against a society which feels the need to sanitise our s**t. It is not just hygiene that drives our toilet habits — it is our discomfort with facing up to the fact that we have bodies that defecate. We prefer to make an inordinate fuss to remove the output from our bodies, to be dealt with by others somewhere beyond our sight.
Of course it is not just our s**t that we try to sanitise. We have animal bodies with needs, appetites and emotions — in “civilised” society, we spend a lot of time trying to pretend that we don’t have them. We find it inconvenient or embarrassing to admit that we get angry, or lustful, or envious or whatever, and so we deny and cover up. This ends up causing a lot of individual and societal dis-ease — suppression is rarely an effective or healthy long-term strategy.
I have a long way to go before I am ready to embrace the whole of me, the ugliness as well as the beauty. My compost loo is one small way in which I walk that path.
