Darkoshi

A cucumber I had in the fridge got bad. I had to throw it into the compost pile yesterday. It was an organic cucumber. A nice green firm beauty, to begin with. And it was even a gift, of sorts. Someone else had bought it for me, for us.
Later at night, brushing my teeth, I thought about it again and got tears in my eyes and a sniffy nose, and felt like sobbing. Imagining the nice happy cucumber growing in a field with the nice sunshine shining on it... and then when it was all nice and big and ripe, it being picked and travelling in some truck, and ending up in the store, and being bought, with such high hopes of cucumberness... and then I left it in the fridge uneaten for too long, and it got bad!!! (It still seems sad today, writing this, but not sad enough for tears)

I neglected it. The poor cucumber!

So anyway, while brushing my teeth last night, I felt a mixture of intense sorrow/guilt/cucumber-empathy, along with a logical awareness of how bizarre it was to be feeling that way. I was obviously over-emotional. I had gotten pissed off earlier too, from just hearing someone on TV speaking at the Republican convention.

Today I was thinking about it again, about how I could feel so sad over a cucumber. Cucumbers don't have emotions. It doesn't care whether it ends up in someone's stomach, or in the compost pile. So why did I feel so sad thinking about it? Maybe in my mind, the cucumber had a guardian spirit watching over it, and this spirit was so proud of the nice cucumber.... so maybe I'm sad for the sadness of this spirit, in having the cuke come to this kind of end? But surely the spirit would have more than a single cucumber to watch over, and surely the spirit understands that some vegetables go bad; it's just the way things go. Or maybe not, maybe... anyway. That was a rather odd thought-process too.

Something which seems neat to me is how I can dig a hole, dump in fruit and vegetable scraps, put the dirt on top and mix it up a little with the shovel, and come back in a couple of weeks, and the scraps will have disappeared/turned into dirt. And then I can do it all over again. Even watermelon rinds disappear, although I cut them into smaller pieces first.

One can read about composting, and about using special bins, and maintaining proper ratios of this and that, and about the temperature needed and all that, but Forestfen and I have never needed to concern ourselves with all that. Maybe it has something to do with the climate here, but we can just dig holes and bury our scraps, and they disappear. I suppose it is possible bugs and worms get the scraps instead of them composting, but I haven't noticed bugs and worms, so I tend to think it is bacterial action.