Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day: Decomposers

Every first Saturday of the month we are inviting people to celebrate Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Days, and offer invitations for blessings, practices, and poetry honoring a beloved being or aspect of nature.

This month we honor our more-than-human kin who specialize in decomposition: Decomposers and Detritivores. We listen with them and offer our awe and gratitude. Next month, we tune into the magic and Wisdom and Treasures of Darkness.

Decomposers feed by chemically breaking down organic matter (they don’t have mouths to consume with) into detritus, like bacteria and fungi. Detritus are small pieces of decomposing organic plant and animal remain, which are in turn consumed by Detritivores, which include earthworms, snails, pill bugs, millipedes, and beetles. From dead plants, fungi recycle carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and minerals into nutrients for living plants, insects, and other organisms sharing that habitat. Most gourmet and medicinal mushrooms are wood decomposers, the premier recyclers on the planet, building soils in the process.

From a certain perspective, we all live inside the stomach of fungi.

Participate in the movement during this Great Turning for the re-enchantment of our lives, re-belonging ourselves to the sacred web of life with our gratitude and awe. 

These are not online gatherings, but a dispersed web of folks deepening into our own unique landscapes around a particular theme. The invitation is to participate byhonoring Decomposers and Detritivores through words, intention, learning, ceremony, altars, song, or deep listening in your own landscape, at your own pace.

See below for suggested ways to celebrate Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day:

• Prayers/Blessings
• Practices
• Poems

As we express awe and gratitude for the Decomposers where we live, we come into deeper relationship with Life, and contribute our energy towards building a culture of reciprocity, curiosity, and care.

We might even come into inquiry into how we can ally with and invoke those energies of decomposition for our own personal and collective lives.

I’d love to hear about your experience and unique ways of connecting with Decomposer kin in an intentional way. 

Wishing you a wormy, ‘shroomy, sacred slug slime week!
Ryan