Decomposition and You!

A Gift from the Dying: https://atheopaganism.wordpress.com/2018/10/07/a-gift-from-the-dying/?fbclid=IwAR3bJs7PVCSeK6UgNLJqki7a_qdlxRSxHo0pO1_-tgQcIgbWrKKwJjPWE1E

 

S2E38 TRANSCRIPT

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Mark. 

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: And today we are going to talk about death And decomposition, especially the latter part. It's a it's Halloween season, Hallows, samhain season. And so we're going to talk about that aspect of the life cycle. That includes the the disassembly of.

Organisms after they are no longer functioning as alive.

Yucca: And I'm very excited for this topic today because this is one that I really like to nerd out on. So I look forward to getting into some of those details. But why don't we start with. The death side. And we did an episode about this last year. Let's start with talking about death and the, the pagan approach to it, which is a little bit different than we see in mainstream culture.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I really appreciate about pagan culture in which was one of the things that attracted me early on to pig And, culture is that it was very unflinching about looking at the fact that we die. We're all going to die. and it has a time of the year to reflect on that fact and to.

Do whatever preparation we can in order for things to be better for those that survive us. And just to really reflect on people that have gone before us and have died and just to be aware of that whole very key pivotal section of the cycle of living.

Yucca: Yeah. And, and although it is fun to do this, you know, the spooky stuff and all of that, but to also just to honor death in as a, as a beautiful part of the whole cycle as part of life, that that life requires death. And it requires an awful lot of death for there to be any life.

Mark: It does. When, when you think about it, when you think about what you eat, and this is true, if you're a vegan or if you're a carnivore or if you're an omnivore, it's true. In all cases, what you eat involves a lot of death. The it's all made of living cells and those living cells die within you and are converted into energy and nutrients for us to survive on.

And that's a beautiful thing about the nature of the biosphere, actually, that it's able to produce this abundance of life.

that can then support more complexity. 

Yucca: Yeah. We are part of that process. Not only in that we are consumers who are eating other living things and things that could only live because this cycle has been happening for literally billions of years, but that we also are what gets consumed 

Mark: Yes. 

Yucca: already. Right? Eventually we're all going to die. Right?

Where. The, the person that is me, the person that is you, we will die. We will cease to function, but they're still all of the material that was part of us that already has died, which has already been consumed and eaten and incorporated into new life.

Mark: Yeah. One of the things about being a human is that we operate at a particular scale. And so we tend to be, we tend to think of ourselves as these very encapsulated sort of enclosed being. But if you look a little closer, we are radiating. I mean, I'm not only talking about, you know, direct excretion. We are radiating flakes of skin and hair and fingernails and toenails and just all of this stuff 

Yucca: Photons to 

Mark: Oh. And photons. 

Yucca: literally light.

Mark: That is coming off us all the time. And all of that stuff gets digested by decomposers. All of that stuff gets reabsorbed into the biosphere and incorporated into new stuff. And the key point that we were talking about before we started recording on that is to really get, these are the same atoms. They're exactly the same atoms. You know, your body is made up very like. Of atoms that were incorporated into other people right now. Not, not just animals and plants, but other people as well, because we've been around for a very long time. We've got a lot of matter floating around, out there, ready to be incorporated into a living being. 

Yucca: Yeah. love to, just to visualize, to just think about the earth going back four and a half billion years ago, forming the creating out of this swirling disc of material around the young star, around our young son and that material that clumped up little by little. It grew from a few grains of sand up to pebbles and pebbles up to rocks to boulders to the earth.

It's the same stuff. That same stuff has just been used over and over it. Yeah. A little bit falls down from space every year, but basically all of that over and over and over again, it's gone through the bodies of the, of the earliest you know, relatives of Luca into our cyanobacteria that caused snowball earth all the way to now.

And just as mark was saying, other human beings, so same carbon atoms. So same. Oxygen and hydrogen and, and they've been rearranged. They're broken apart, like Legos, right? We're just like little Legos that we get broken apart, put back into, into things. And you know, here we go. Here's some going to pass some Legos out right now.

We're, we're all breathing out. Right. We're breathing out carbon dioxide and that carbon, well that's being released from. To our lungs from our blood and our blood picked it up as a waste product from ourselves. But ourselves got that from the food that we ate that was in trees and that was in the air and just on and on and on.

And it's just, I mean, it's just so much fun to just think about.

Mark: It, it is. And, and it's so important to think about it in a holistic sense, including all of the aspects of that cycle, because I. Talking about.

this before we started recording. In some ways you can think of a multicellular organism or any organism, really as kind of a, a sustained reaction, right. A very, very complex chemical reaction.

And in that sense, it's like a simple. Chemical reaction like a fire, for example, which uptakes carbon and it uptakes oxygen. And it causes a reaction that makes all this heat and light. And then after a while, when it's exhausted all of that, then it goes out and we go out to, and when we do the decomposers are there to disassemble us into those component pieces so that we can get cycled back into the circle of life. 

Yucca: Yep. And this is how it's, this is how it's been, right. This is just when, when that happens and again, it's a win then what is our body just returned? What it was before, right. Which is just part of this planet, part of the biosphere, the living part of this planet.

Mark: Right.

So let's talk a little bit about the details of that, about the specifics of how decomposition works and, and what the players are, Because we were talking about this as well. One of the things that we find is that because humans are kind of hardwired to have a revulsion at things that are rotting mostly.

Yucca: Because we're not scavengers in 

Mark: we're not scavengers and we can't eat it. So we have this sort of automatic sort of gag reflex when we're confronted with stuff that's wrought because it's not something that we can eat and we need to stay away from it 

Yucca: Right. And we don't want to get sick too. Like, you know, if there's another body like, okay, well, did that body die from an infectious disease? Right. We don't want to get, we instinctually know to keep away so that we don't get that disease as well. 

Mark: Right. 

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So that being the case, we tend to shy away from looking very closely at the decomposition process. Yucca was mentioning that even when she looks at her school textbooks, her biology textbooks, they really kind of give short shrift to the decomposition process, which is a shame because it's really super cool. 

Yucca: It is. Yeah. And some of that, I think part of that is some of that, that phobia. That we have of death and dying. And some of it is just biophilia in general, but some of it's also what you were talking about with scale. This is happening on a scale that is outside of our normal scale. And we as humans and actually animals in general, we live in a very unusual scale for life and in the universe too.

So. normal to us because it's what we experienced, but we are really weird compared to most life. Most life is really, really tiny. Just, I mean, it's, it's hard to even communicate how tiny and comparison. To us this life is, and some of the decomposers or the first steps in decomposition are on scales that we can relate to.

If we start to talk about worms or termites or things like that, we can see them. We don't usually think about them very much, but those are probably the things that come to mind when we first think of a decomp of a, of a decomposer decomposition. It's all life. And so why don't we actually let's step back before going there and talk about what, what life needs to do to be life.

So we can really broadly separate things into two huge categories. We can say we've got bias. Which are things that are alive are made by living things. They might not be alive anymore. Like say your book, your books made of paper, right. That's biotic. And then we've got our Abe biotic, which is the opposite.

It's the things that aren't life and life needs. At least the life. As we know it here on earth needs very specific arrangements of matter to be able to work. So we've got producers and what they do is they take that abiotic. it into a form that's biotic. And what we're used to for that would be our photosynthesizer turns out there are way more strategies to do that, but we're usually familiar with our plants and our algae, like our cyanobacteria.

They take the sun. So photons, they take carbon from the air, so they take water, they rearrange it and then make an organic compounds. And then that's what goes into the food chain and that's what we're eating. So, and then we attach little other things to it, like, oh, let's attach some iron, let's attach some copper and all of that.

And, and that's how it travels through our bodies. As we eat it, they eat it, they eat it. But what life is really, really good at. Is taking these little pieces and making more and more complex and complicated structures. So we ended up making these huge molecules, but those molecules are usually only useful to the organism that is.

Using it, right? So the plant is going to make cellulose and the tree is going to make some lignin or something like that. Or, or we're going to end up on a larger level yet we're making bone and all of that. But when somebody else needs to use that, they don't need the whole cellular. They need it broken down into simple sugars.

So we take it apart and then we put it back together into something bigger. So this is constantly ripping it apart, putting it back, ripping apart, putting it back and that breaking it down, breaking it into pieces. That's what digestion. So big things like us, we digest on the inside. That's what we're doing.

When we eat, we take the food, we chew it up to us. We that's the mastication. Right. And then it goes into our stomach and in our stomach, we have acids and enzymes that, break it apart, and then we can redistribute it through our body and use it the way we. So decomposers are also breaking things down, but for the most part, they aren't doing it inside of their body.

They're doing it on the outside. So they're releasing enzymes into the environment to break those things down. So our, and it's mostly our bacteria and fungi are though archaea are a little bit involved with that. And for organisms that are bigger than we think of as decomposers like worms. Well, it's not actually the worms who are doing the decomposition.

It's the microbes living in their bodies that are doing it. They're just big micro factories basically. And this is the same inside of our bodies or the body of, of cattle or anything like that, too. We've got lots of microbes living in us that with. Our bodies wouldn't work, right. We're working in as a team.

So our, our decomposers, they are releasing enzymes into the environment, around them to break down those more complex molecules into smaller forms that they can then directly absorb into their bodies and different. Organisms are specialized in different types of material. So our fun guy are typically really, really good at breaking down Woody material and that had to evolve.

I think we talked about this, a few episodes back about the Carboniferous and how, yeah. For a while. Life hadn't figured out how to break down all that Woody stuff and it built up and it built up and it caused all kinds of fires. And that's where our coal comes from today and all of that. But they release those enzymes into the environment.

It breaks it down into these simple forms that then life can, can take up again and it can go back into that food web. So the bacteria breaks it down and then. They eat some of that. And then the protozoan, which are larger microbes there, you carry it. So they're like us, they come and eat it and then the nematodes eat them.

And then the nematodes are eaten by micro arthropods and up and up and up. But if it hadn't gotten digestive, hadn't gotten broken down, this material would just build up and there would be nothing for us to then be making our bodies from now. And I'm not just talking about us as a humans. Life right.

Surface, terrestrial life. And this process, we talk about it from, from our perspective as terrestrial organisms, but it's happening in aquatic systems. It's happening, it's different players, but it's happening at the hydrothermal vents. It's happening deep in the crust of the earth, everywhere that we find life.

We see this basic process happening to them. Somebody eats it and turns it into a form that someone else can use to eat and on and on it goes.

Mark: Right. Right. And it's important to recognize that this is, it's not just that this is a good idea. From the standpoint of our being able to eat, it's also. The world, if we were to suspend the decomposition process and survive that even after one winter's worth of leaves, we would be up to our knees and leaves and decomposition is what turns those Woody's those, those Woody cellulose. Dead leaves into soil, into, into stuff that can then be used by living creatures, living plants in order to to survive. So it's the, the sheer volume of stuff that is subjected to this decomposition process at all times is really overwhelming. 

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: It's it is such an important part of the cycle. Without it, we simply couldn't be here and life, as we know it couldn't work. 

Yucca: Yeah. And, and life like us to use an old image where the tip of an iceberg, right? The big stuff like us, plants and animals, most of the life or the micro. Right there that the vast amount, and there they're the ones doing the decomposition on the outside. They're the ones in our bodies doing the decomposition we're full of them.

This, this process isn't just happening in the soil. This is happening everywhere. Now this time of year in temperate environments, this there's it's kicking up. This is when the fun guy are getting really, really active because those Leafs you just talked about, they dropped down and it's time for the fun guy to grow.

They just start eating that up and converting it into forms that then are going to be taken back up by the plants. And by not just the plants, we usually talk about plants and animals because those are who we're most familiar with. They exist on our scale, but our bacteria and archaea and, and fungi and, and all of those other things too.

So that don't fit nicely into one category or the other that we're still kind of trying to figure out how to, how to categorize those. 

Mark: Right, 

Yucca: So.

Mark: Yeah. As you say, this is the season when that gets going. One implication of this is that we encourage you if at all possible not to rake your yard. 

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: Because what you're doing is you're suspending of the necessary decomposition process. That turns all of that leaf cover into nourishment for your lawn.

You know, if, if you have a lawn or some other sort of bare area that ends up covered with leaves, leave him, leave him and let them decompose because that's actually the healthiest thing you can do for the environment. There. 

Yucca: It really is. Yeah. And, and any place that you can keep the Sarah, the soil, not bear is really, really helpful because these decomposers that we're talking about, they need water. All microbes are. All of them. They exist on very different scales, so they live in a little tiny drop. Right. But when you dry out.

That soil. That's how you start to turn it into dirt from an agricultural perspective, right? Soil is the living thing. Soil has got all of that life in there. It's got the, the water, it's got the, the organic material, the dead broken down stuff that the microbes have been working on. Just turning into basically this wonderful.

Soft. So it's like cake, it's just this and the air pockets. And when we rake away the leaves or we carry, we, we move away all the, the, the detritus and, and all of that. We're exposing that to dry. And so it starts to kill all of those things. And then you're left behind with the minerals and the minerals are important, right?

Life's got to get in there and convert those minerals into a form that we could use, but life has to have certain conditions to be able to do that. 

Mark: Right. 

Yucca: When it's there, when the life's there to do it, it does a great job. There's a, there's so much life. If you have a light microscope and these are really, really inexpensive, you can.

Really good light microscope for like $40. Right? If you're thinking about getting your kid on microscope, the like kid Microsoft sets, like don't even bother with that, just get them a real microscope because they cost the same amount and you'll be able to do so much more with a real one. But with just a real one, you can take a tiny drop of soil, put it on a slide.

Look at it. Put a little drop of water in there as well. And you can spend hours looking at the literal billions of organisms who are in there. Even if you're in an area that's got pretty poor soil. It's just, I mean, it's, it's one of those wow. Things just to go, whoa, there's so much life they're busy as it can be just breaking things down, eating each other.

And then this is a topic for another time, but we can start, we can talk at another time about how the plants and the. Soil microbes have a, basically this really complex communication network in which the plants can ask for what they need. They can be like, I need some more calcium and they send out exit dates that, that encourage the growth of specific bacteria that are going to start to accumulate that calcium.

And then the plants can get that. And so there's just this amazing communication. How. 

Mark: Right. 

Yucca: But let's come back to that one in the spring, because this is, this is talking more about the let's let's get that eating happening, that breaking down. And we, we got onto this with saying that this is when a lot of the fun guy are really coming into their season and they're working below, below that leaf litter.

They're working below the ground and transforming. The previous year's material back into a form that could be used again.

Mark: And that's what they do to us. 

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And that's, that's an important consideration. I mean, my feeling, I, personal feeling around this is that there's sort of a moral component to this in that, you know, I've used all these materials and I've consumed all these living things for all this time. I feel like.

It's it's my obligation to give the assembly of my body when it no longer works back into this cycle so that it can be created in, in different ways. And that's very different than the sort of mainstream interest in involving and stuff like that. We'll talk in a few minutes about alternatives to, to some of the death practices that are popular in the over culture.

But I just feel like, Yeah. This is it's the price of the ticket, you know, you you gotta pay it back,

Yucca: Yeah. No matter how hard you try not to eat, you're going to be decomposed anyways. 

Mark: Right. 

Yucca: why not doing it in a way that's going to be, that's not going to poison things in the meantime. Right. Which is what a lot of those embalming practices will end up doing. Right. 

Mark: Yeah. 

Yucca: And it's uncomfortable to think about, because we don't like to think about our own.

Death, right. It's it's really it's. We have a deep primal fear of that. Because we're trying to avoid it as living things. We're trying to avoid it as long as possible. Right. But that's one of the really nice things about this year is that this time of year is that we can come back to that and have the time to think about it and to try and be present with it.

Mark: Yes. And what I find is that having, having been a pagan now for more than 30 years I am a lot more comfortable with the idea of my death than I used to be. I mean, I don't want it to be anytime soon, unless I'm, you know, very uncomfortable and unable to have a quality of life, in which case send me off I'm I'm done. I'm okay with the idea that it's going to happen. And that is kind of contrary to what seems to be the implicit conventional wisdom in the mainstream culture, which is, don't think about it. Don't talk about it because that might make it happen somehow. There's this sort of superstitious. Idea about, you know, thinking or talking about death, that it's sort of bad luck in some way.

And what I find is that I come to a much more peaceful coexistence with the fact of my own mortality, because I do these rituals every year at this time. And I contemplate these things every year at this time. You know, I, I, I think, I mean, Halloween has been commercialized so terribly, but it still contains grains of. You know, the fear and yet the excitement, the sort of morbid fascination, you know, all those sorts of pieces that I think it's very healthy for a culture to contain ironically, you know, the, because decomposition is not just a good idea, it's the law it's going to happen to you. Right. It's going to happen to everybody and we,

Yucca: And if it stopped, that would be the end of life. Right? If you take death away, there is no more life.

Mark: that's right. That's right. And so death is, is what life is built on. You know, we are these assemblies, these biological assemblies. And when we stop functioning, we get disassembled, as I said before, and that kind of brings me to. Talking about decomposition and you the listener we have a lot of, kind of messed up ways of looking at death in our mainstream culture.

You know, we're so avoidant we give our dead people to strangers at funeral homes to process them and, you know, pickle them in. Carcinogenic formaldehyde and, you know, hide them away in ridiculously expensive boxes so that they can be buried and can become a pollutant to the water table. And you know, we're talking about millions and millions of gallons of formaldehyde going into the water table just in the United States every year.

And that's. I mean it, and it's a problem. Not only environmentally from a scientific standpoint, it's a problem, culturally, because if we had a more healthy relationship with death, we would be a happier and more contented people. People are phobic about dealing with dead bodies. They, they, you know, when someone dies, suddenly they go from being, you know, my beloved relative to becoming this.

Terrifying object that we have to get away from us as quickly as possible. And the truth is that until around the 1850s in the United States 1860s, actually during the civil war when embalming to ship bodies back from the war to their loved ones, became commonplace until then most funeral arrangements were made at. There would be a viewing of the body with a wake and or some other kind of, you know, acknowledgement in the home. And then the body would be buried with a minimum of any kind of preservative treatment, you know, nothing for that purpose in a simple wooden box. And that was how it was done. And.

The thing that many people don't know is that that's still perfectly legal, even though a funeral home may lie to you and tell you that it's not, it is perfectly legal in every state, in the United States. And, and I am unaware of a country anywhere in the world that requires you to use a funeral home, or that requires you to be involved unless you're going to be shipped over a vast distance.

You can do this for your loved ones at home. And there's a lot of work being done to transform the deaf industry right now. Caitlin Doughty of the ASCA mortician YouTube channel has written several books on this, and she's really kind of a, a leader on this the natural burial home funeral movement.

And I really encourage you to look into her, her materials. She's very funny. So it's, it's very entertaining stuff to watch but it also answers and demystifies questions. She's the mortician herself and has a kind of an alternate funeral home in the Los Angeles area. So. This, you know, this is the time of year.

When you get to think about your own decomposition and. Right down, hopefully provide some written instructions to the people that love you about how you would like your body disposed of, let them know that, let them know where this document is, get your will together. And you're, you know, maybe a farewell letter that you'd like to say to the people that love you or a video or something like that.

You can A health directive so that people know when you no longer want heroic measures to keep you alive. There is a there's a workbook that you can download from the atheopagan ism website that we'll put a link to in the. Episode notes that we'll kind of walk you through all the stuff that you need.

Once he filled out this workbook, it really gives you everything that you need to have a death packet that will help your loved ones. Through that time, there is a very real phenomenon called grief brain. When people are grieving, they go into this kind of fog and it becomes very, very difficult for them to do the sort of.

Dealing with insurance and dealing with, you know, putting obituaries in the newspaper and, you know, figuring out about 

Yucca: There's just so much. And, and you're just dealing with, yeah, you've got your feelings of what's going on here. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So, you know, do your, do your loved ones, a favor and yourself a favor, because it really does take a big weight off your mind, download that workbook and go through it and, you know, do some preparation for your death. And you may think to yourself, well, I'm only 35. I, I don't need to worry about this.

That's not the way the world works. 

Yucca: Hopefully you'll make it to a hundred. Right. We're shooting. We're all shooting for that, but, but. 

Mark: That's Right. We we 

Yucca: know, you know, there could be a car crash or whatever, or a diagnosis, or we just don't know.

Mark: we don't know. And the, the good thing about that about really embracing the fact that we don't know.

and that our mortality is real, is that it helps us to live well. 

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: It helps us really to embrace this life because. It's an amazing journey and it's a finite journey. It's not going to last forever. And being aware of that really helps you to take the time to smell the flowers.

Look at the sunset, look at the stars, watch the moon come up. All those things that are so, that, that make our lives so rich and. 

Yucca: Well, mark. Thank you. I think this is a, I think that's a perfect note to finish today up on. 

Mark: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for saying so we wish you, of course, the very best of the hellos cell and see. And we'll be back with more sort of seasonally appropriate stuff coming up in the next couple of weeks. And Thank you for listening as always. We really appreciate her and listeners. So take good care.

Yucca: Thank you all.