I learned reverence from burnout.
Reverence in the Time of Rot: Lessons from the Compost Pile | Michelle Carrera
There are parts of me I never thought deserved reverence. I remember one night in the Brooklyn apartment, smack in the middle of the COVID-19 city shutdowns. I sat on the bathroom floor, back against the cold porcelain of the tub, the overhead light too harsh, head in my hands. My face was wet. My body trembled in a way that felt both unfamiliar and ancient.
I was tired. Bone-tired. Soul-tired. I had spent the day coordinating drivers for food delivery, arranging donations, making panicked runs to supermarkets that were half-empty, logging every box and lining the hallway to the ceiling with groceries, knowing it would all be gone in a week. And then, after all that, I was part of the delivery team too, showing up at the homes of families waiting for food, knowing they were holding out hope, and I couldn’t be late. I carried that weight in my shoulders, in my breath. The city was on pause. But I was full throttle.
And somewhere in that fluorescent-lit bathroom, I felt it rising: not just the exhaustion but the envy. Everyone else finally had a moment to sit down. To stay inside. To slow. And I couldn’t. I remember thinking: Why can’t I rest? What had I done so wrong that I didn’t get to stop moving? Why didn’t I deserve rest like everyone else?
That kind of grief, the kind that comes out messy, inconvenient, animalistic, felt like something meant to be hidden. Not holy. Certainly not sacred. I thought reverence lived only in the curated: in silence, in palo santo smoke, and in something called closure.
But then I met a compost pile.
Steam rising from straw, decomposing food, and mold-flecked orange peels. Things we’re taught to discard. And yet, there it was. Becoming. Heat and surrender. Transformation. That pile wasn’t waste. It was process. A beginning disguised as decay.
What followed in me was a shift I could never have orchestrated. A slow descent from collapse into decomposition. From burnout into something unexpectedly fertile. From polished, performance-based spirituality into something closer to rot-honoring. From a life measured by usefulness into one shaped by humility, slowness, and deep listening.
I learned reverence from burnout.
Not the sanitized kind mentioned in HR workshops, but the kind that splits your ribs from the inside. The kind where every version of you tries to claw its way out, and none of them get to speak because they’re too busy holding up everything else. I spent nearly a decade in frontline food relief, feeding others while something in me starved to be acknowledged: the part that was crumbling. The part that didn’t want to be a savior. The part that longed to stop. My skin broke out in rashes. My hands trembled. I cried in elevators and wiped my tears before the doors opened.
So I came to the forest.
I thought I was escaping collapse, but I had already collapsed. My body had forgotten how to rest. I woke up with clenched fists and a jaw aching from night-grinding. I skipped meals not from discipline but because hunger had stopped knocking. Every message, every ding, sent a bolt through my chest. I remember standing paralyzed in the grocery store aisle, undone by the impossibility of choosing rice. That was collapse, not a single, cinematic moment, but a quiet, persistent implosion. I was already decomposing. And the forest welcomed me.
The leaves were doing it. The mushrooms were doing it. The insects. The wind. The buried bones beneath the roots. And I, brittle, half-dead, was doing it too.
Out here, I began tending to grief instead of emergencies. I wrote obituaries. I watched vultures circle. I noticed what was breaking down and stopped calling it failure. I let myself soften. I unearthed the parts I’d buried: the bitter one, the bone-tired one, the one who cried in the car, the one who didn’t know how to rage, the one who didn’t want to be perceived. I let them live again. I let them teach me. One told me that exhaustion is not weakness but an ancient signal. Another whispered that silence can be a form of prayer.
In the forest, I learned what we’re never taught: what actually happens when something rots.
When something dies, a fallen leaf, a deer, a former self, it doesn’t disappear. First, the body softens. Moisture releases. Cells unravel. Then the decomposers arrive. Bacteria. Fungi. Worms. Scavengers. They do not come to destroy. They come to transmute. The bacteria digest from within. The fungi lace themselves in, weaving through decay like holy thread. Worms chew, aerate. Vultures clean the bones. And what’s left is not emptiness. It’s richness. Nutrients reborn into soil. Carbon returned to air. A feast for the roots.
The forest does not rush this. The mycelium never shames the body for falling apart.
I think about how long it took me to stop apologizing, for needing rest, for going quiet, for not replying, for saying no. I remember a relationship I clung to long after it soured, unwilling to admit I was no longer who I was when it began. Letting go wasn’t a dramatic finale. It was a series of small, necessary deaths. And yet, over time, I softened. I became porous. I began to see endings not as failures but as instructions from the earth. They whispered: thank you for coming home. And I imagined they meant me.
We live in a culture obsessed with binaries: good/bad, success/failure, healed/broken, sacred/profane. But decomposition refuses those terms. It is not either/or. It is all of it. Breaking down is not the opposite of becoming; it is how we become.
Collapse is not the end. It is a sacred invitation: to grief. To stillness. To a reconnection with what we buried in our rush to be useful.
It asked me to stop proving. To rest without earning it. To meet myself in the rubble and offer no blueprints. Not to rebuild. But to unmake. And in that undoing, I felt the pulse of something older than ambition. Something feral. Something Caribbean. Something sacred.
The rot is what comes after. And if we honor it, rot becomes ritual. Breakdown becomes altar. Collapse becomes initiation.
This, to me, is reverence. Not performance, but process. Not curated. Not sterilized. Not for show. Reverence is dirty. Slow. Holy in its honesty. It is what happens when we stop fixing and start listening.
And it doesn’t end with the self.
This collapse, this decomposition, this rot-honoring,
It is not just personal. It is planetary.
The Earth is collapsing too. The systems we leaned on are crumbling. The air is thick with endings.
But decomposition, if we let it, can be our teacher.
We’ve been taught to discard what no longer serves. To exile the unwanted. To pave over grief with distraction. But what if reverence meant staying? Long enough to witness the full death, not to save dying systems, but to let them die with dignity. To sit vigil beside collapsing institutions, extractive ideologies, and colonial myths. Not to fix them, but to listen to their last breath. To compost not only our personal wounds but also the grief of generations, the sorrow of land, and the rot of empire. This too is deathwork. A kind of world-hospicing.
Letting go, not with apathy but with sacred attention.
If we learn from the vultures, the fungi, and the mycelium, we might remember that nothing is separate. That we are not hovering above the tree of life; we are tangled within it. That we are not the only ones grieving. The more-than-human world mourns, too. Trees grieving their felled kin. Birds circling vanished nesting grounds. Coral bleaching in silence. Mycelium remembering the lives it once fed.
Reverence, then, demands more of us than curated sympathy.
It demands that we recognize grief in the soil, the wind, and the wing.
That we honor this shared unraveling.
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll find a way through it, together.
Reverence might be the thread that reweaves us. Human to human. Body to earth. Not polite. Not performative. But sacred in its mess.
And when I let the half-dead parts of myself speak, when I let the Earth speak through them, this is what I hear:
We were never waste.
We were waiting.
