I have begun working on an herb garden for my mom's catering kitchen.  She has so much compostable goodness, that it seemed like the thing to do.  I have to keep it watered because the weather here is so dry, that stuff doesn't rot properly.  I turn it every few days.  The pile is dark brown, and various sprouts come up from time to time, only to be dug back in with the next turning.  

As I was digging the compost into the garden bed today, I remembered a moment in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park in Tasmania, when I was sitting amongst the rocks by the Pool of Bethesda, looking at all the beautiful shapes of the dead trees on the hills around the pool.  It had only been a few months since pred died, and I began thinking about what it must be like to be one of the trees, in amongst the rotting corpses of my closest friends and relatives.  Sometimes fallen branches leaned on the living trees.  I realised that death for them is a long process, rather than a single moment.  Not only that, but all the life juices from their friends' bodies gets put back into the soil from which the living trees feed.  

(Picture: Andrew McNaughton)

Then I thought of pred's analysis of the data that makes up a human personality.  He argued that our personalities are just composites of others' that we have stolen along the way.  I wondered if reincarnation is just the combination of the physical rotting of the body back into the soil, but also the dispersing of the personality through interactions with people.

At a recent indymedia meeting, there was news that a friend was pregnant.  All agreed that the baby would be good for both parents, having met on a trip to help the clean up in New Orleans.  They live in Prescott, where there is an anarchist infoshop called Catalyst.  Bill Rodgers, the founder of the shop died late last year, in prison, where he was serving time for alleged political crimes.  A woman talking about the pregnancy gave a very forceful argument for the assumption that the child was, in fact, Bill reincarnated.  My first thought was... wow, what a big load to put on the kid!  

But later I thought... perhaps that's the way reincarnation happens... all that good life energy that Bill had, which made him such a popular figure, is now going to be composted back into the personality of the kid, by way of Bill's friends.