For six weeks, we’ve explored death and renewal through the lens of ChangeMaking. We’ve worked with embodied release, collective witnessing, systems-level sacrifice, and deep-time thinking. We’ve distinguished between hospicing and slaughtering, between conscious and unconscious sacrifice.

Now, for our wildcard week, I want to offer you something different: a conversation that makes all of this visceral, tangible, and undeniably real.

This is an interview I recorded in 2022 with Michael Kennard, founder of Compost Club in Brighton on the south coast of the UK. This was the final episode of The Human Hive Podcast published through my organisation The Human Hive, interviewing ChangeMakers in connection to their regenerative work aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. When Michael talks about composting, he’s not just discussing waste management. He’s articulating a living philosophy that demonstrates everything we’ve explored during this Samhain cycle.

Listen to how he describes it:

“Composting is really good evidence that death is the source of life.”

This conversation weaves together microbiology and spirituality, personal transformation and planetary healing, the movement of energy from one form to another. It shows us what nutrient cycling actually looks like - both in the soil and in our lives. It demonstrates that “there is no away” - only here, only transformation, only the continuous dance of death feeding life feeding death.

If you’ve been doing the Samhain work - identifying what must die, performing rituals of release, sacrificing separation, thinking in seven generations - then this conversation will ground everything you’ve learned in the literal ground beneath your feet.

Michael’s journey from anxiety and disempowerment to passionate purpose mirrors the caterpillar’s dissolution into goo, to emerge as a butterfly at the end. His work composting food waste mirrors our work composting capitalism, composting modernity, composting the beliefs that no longer serve.

And perhaps most importantly, his vision of “multi-local nutrient cycling communities” shows us exactly what regenerative systems change looks like in practice.

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From Samhain to Yule: The Gestation Begins

Michael describes discovering that up to 40% of a plant’s energy gets released through its roots into the soil as sugars and carbon - feeding the microbes that will feed the plant. The plant gives to receive. It participates in the cycle. It trusts the composting process.

This is what we’re entering now as we move from Samhain toward Yule. We’ve released what needed to die. We’ve crossed the threshold. Now comes winter’s deep composting - the invisible transformation happening in darkness, the mycelial threads connecting what seems separate, the slow alchemy of breakdown becoming breakthrough.

You are the food waste in the Johnson-Sue bioreactor. You are being transformed by microbes you cannot see, through processes you don’t need to control. Your job now, like Michael’s, is simply to steward the conditions. Keep it moist. Keep it oxygenated. Allow the fungal networks to spread undisturbed. Trust the biology.

What gets composted from your Samhain work will emerge in spring as something unrecognisable from what you released.

But first: winter. First: gestation. First: the dark, warm, patient work of nutrient cycling.

The Blood Harvest is complete. The composting has begun.

Your Practice This Week

* If you can: Start composting your food waste. Research local composting services or set up a simple system. Let this be your embodied practice of participating in death-as-life.

* Listen fully: Give yourself the gift of this entire 54-minute conversation. Let Michael’s passion and clarity wash over you. Notice what resonates.

* Write: After listening, complete this sentence at least three times: “I am compost for...”

* Share: If this conversation moves you, share it. Tag me Darren Abrahams , tag Michael Michael Kennard l, tell us what landed.