On death

I started eating chicken again recently, after nearly nine years of abstention. I hesitated on reintroducing chicken for some time, despite reintroducing eggs and fish; but I realised that my relationship with plants has changed, with place, with death has changed, and that I no longer consider the consumption of high-welfare meat such an atrocity, as I once did. So I found a local butcher and roasted a bird.

As all things are ultimately emanations of the Earth, all things have a built-in ‘shelf life’, after which they must return to the Earth. Death is the engine on which life runs – as we get older, our bodies remind us that we’re made of food, and that we are obligated to feed in return. We eat animals, who eat plants, who eat sunlight and soil, and when we die the soil eats us.

I think about this a lot as I use my body to feed my new baby. I think about it when I see social media posts lamenting at the ageing process, or talking about death in a way that fundamentally misunderstands it, as though it were a completely separate phenomenon to life rather than intimately intertwined, optional rather than fundamental.

In my mind’s eye I get a vision of the Saturnine deity sometimes. It dwells under the ground, and the honey-coloured grains grow above, sprouting over It. Their roots hang over the deity’s head, and It braids them together, as It braids us together; our roots intermingle, cross-pollinating, breeding new life, compelled by forces we either cannot or do not wish to see. I like to think that I too will weave life together when I return to the ground, Saturn’s handmaiden.

I’ve worked out that each kilogram of chicken makes one meal for at least four people. After roasting it and pulling off its meat to save, I harvest its bones and make broth in my pressure cooker. Two hours later, the bones are so soft they snap like twigs, and I inter the hen’s remains in my compost – ready to feed new life, to return once again to the Earth.