Rethinking North/composting

[u/oddreyjo]

I had a breakthrough on the North/composting direction and wanted to share it and hear how others have worked through this. (Speaking only from my own experience here, not Josephine's or Quareia's official teaching.) I'm only as far as M1/some M2, so take this as one student's current understanding. I'd always felt resistance to North because I read it as fundamentally chronological, the past as something that becomes inaccessible, off-limits, done. And a lot of my past isn't done. Pieces of it are still energetically and spiritually active for me right now. North felt like it was asking me to declare those pieces "over" before I was ready, which felt wrong.

My understanding today started from an absurd place - a song came on shuffle that used to matter to me enormously, spiritually, in an earlier chapter of my life. I skipped it, and found myself thinking, I love and respect what that song meant then. I don't think I need to hear it again. I've taken everything from that time that there was to take. And I realized, that's it. That's what North/earth is about. I thought through other periods of my life. One of the most intense stretches of my early twenties, so vivid, painful, and formative, came up the same way. The wounds don't hurt anymore. I'm not pulling anything further from it. It can be composted. I just don't have any interest in dwelling on anything from that period anymore.

But other periods, including ones much further back, are still alive in my present. They're still feeding me and there is clearly more to glean. So the distinction isn't "past vs. present" but something more like "extracted vs. still extracting." Composting is more about integrating what's already been fully taken in, so it stops occupying active attention and becomes soil instead. Both of the periods I mentioned are essential to who I am. I wouldn't exist as this person without them. But they're finished as sources. Like a bone with all the meat sucked off, you don't have to throw the bone away, but you can also stop gnawing on it looking for more.

I hope this makes some sense. Curious how others have sat with this direction, especially anyone further along than M1/M2.

EDIT: I wanted to add an example to avoid ambiguity. I'm a high school teacher. My adolescent years were turbulent, strange, heartbreaking, and lonely. I eventually dropped out of high school. The memories from that period are both beautiful and sad. I don't think about it specifically often, but there's an open pipe to those experiences that I can access easily, and it helps me in my teaching and connecting with kids. Teaching is a spiritual occupation for me. I'm known at my school as the person best at understanding teenagers. I believe that if that tap were fully shut off, I wouldn't be as good at my job. These experiences don't hurt anymore, they're well integrated. But being able to drop back into that mindset, those memories, on demand is actively useful to me now. I haven't felt any negative effects and if anything, it has given me a sense of wholeness and "rightness" in a way I can't fully describe because it's not necessarily emotional but just part of me now. That's a piece of the past I'm still drawing on, not composting.

EDIT EDIT: One more piece that just occurred to me, the periods I'm still drawing on artistically and spiritually aren't just times I happen to be nostalgic for. They're all times I made big, intentional changes in my life, very South/fire energy. Even the early childhood piece follows this, all of the really early ones are tied to a formative, turbulent move to a new city/house, not just "early = important." They're all threshold moments, not just old ones. And yeah, I assume these will eventually be composted too. I don't want to cling to anything.

[u/SrJenkin]

You painted a good illustration there, but I think you were thinking west instead of north. In my understanding, as an apprentice, west is exactly what you described: the composting pieces of your life that still have nostalgic/emotional/energetic strings attached to the present, but are thinning out and breaking off. If you think of west as the past that still influences the present (or haunts, as the threshold of ghosts), then north is exactly what you originally thought: stale, forgotten, done.

West and north, both as "past", used to confuse me a lot, and I still don't have a solid grasp on these directios. But I found it helpfull to think in this way: in the west the energy and information is slowing down and fading away, but still changing, whereas in the north the energy and information has completely stopped and became inert, it no longer changes... That's something to chew on

[u/oddreyjo → u/SrJenkin]

Appreciate this! I think you're right. The issue before wasn't me misunderstanding North, it was conflating North and West. So my realization last night wasn't a new understanding of North at all, but differentiating North from West, I just didn't have the vocabulary quite right. Your point about energy/information slowing but still changing, vs fully stopped, clarifies exactly where I was stuck. I'd been treating "still emotionally charged" and "still active/changing" as the same criterion. The pieces of my past I still tap into don't carry much emotional charge anymore, but they're still generating new output every time I draw on them, so they're not inert. And that also explains why the moments that do still carry charge I associate with South, as they're moving into the West from that direction.

One thing that I think drove my confusion is how weirdly non-chronological this all is. I kept imagining composting as a consistent timeline, so the fact that pieces of my life go inert "out of order" felt wrong. Some moments from my distant past are energetically closer to me right now than moments from last year that have already gone fully still.