The Compost Heap
A living an-archive. Working more like compost than a museum.
In the Compost Heap, offerings arrive from atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, and metamorphosphere, layering into a shared record of how temporarily organized bodies notice themselves as earth in motion.”
The Compost Heap is a living an‑archive where stories, images, and grief practices settle and seep across atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, and metamorphosphere, refusing to stay in their own boxes.
The Compost Heap gathers recordings, images, writing, rituals, field notes, and fragments of science in one living space. Things do not stay separate here. A poem can sit beside a field recording. A photograph can lead to a ritual. A scientific fragment can open onto a personal reflection.
This is a place to contribute, browse, and make connections. What is added here becomes part of a shared field rather than a fixed collection
Based on the Ecological Psychology of Dr. Lori Pye
The Five Themes
Move through the Heap by clicking on a theme below. Listen, look, read, and follow what connects.
Energy Exchange
Wind patterns, water currents, mycelial networks, bioelectricity, breathwork, electromagnetic fields, thermal cycles, photosynthesis, bioluminescence; the warmth of a compost pile on a cold morning, a sunbeam warming your skin, a gust of wind rippling through grass.
Diversity & Multiplicity
Umwelt, sensory attunement, nighttime ecologies, endosymbiosis, multispecies assemblages, holobiont communities, microbial worlds; a tide pool crowded with different lives, overlapping birdsong at dawn, the many textures in a handful of soil.
Decomposition / Recomposition
Composting processes, human composting, seasonal cycles, weathering, elemental belonging, matter transformation, threshold spaces, blurred boundaries, a fallen tree becoming forest floor, a leaf mid-decomposition, its skeleton still visible, mushrooms fruiting from deadwood
Change & Transformation
Migrations, metamorphosis, geological time, awe and wonder, co-evolutionary responses, climate patterns; ; a caterpillar becoming a chrysalis becoming a moth, shorelines shifting over years of storms, a neighborhood tree growing thicker rings each year, audio or images birds arriving and departing with the seasons.
Relationality
Mycorrhizal networks, entanglement, ecotones, intra-action, quantum physics, Indigenous wisdom, Black Diasporic thought, lichen symbiosis, biogeochemical cycles, holomovement, rheomode, response-ability; the edge where forest meets meadow, roots of different trees woven together underground, the way grief in one body affects a whole room, a hand resting on the trunk of a street tree.
Contribute
The Compost Heap grows through what people bring to it.
You can contribute:
- audio recordings
- field notes
- photography
- artwork
- writing
- practices or rituals
- reflections or fragments of science
Contributions are reviewed for alignment with the project’s ethical commitments before joining the Heap.
Contributions are tended in accordance with CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and African Data Ethics frameworks. See our ethical commitments on the About page.