My husband Mark and I started composting again this week.  I’ve missed it, because giving back to the Earth — in this extremely literal way — is part of my spiritual practice.  In the past, even when Mark wasn’t gardening, I still composted.  We take so much from Gaia, we depend on Her as the very ground of our being, the source of our lives.  The least we can do is compost.

I don’t really feel guilty that for the last six months we haven’t enriched our soil with our kitchen waste. Environmentally-speaking, we’ve been frying bigger fish.  We just completed an energy-efficient, solar-heated, green-built house.  Our main objectives were energy-efficiency, durability, and comfort.

In the new house, we installed radiant-floor heating, which is more efficient than many heating systems.  And because it uses the water that’s heated by our solar panels, it saves even more energy.  We put in triple-pane windows that have an R-rating (resistance to heat loss) that’s twice as good as double-pane windows and better than walls in houses built 30 years ago.  And the R-value of our walls and roof is about 40, when R 22 is considered a good wall nowadays.

As much as possible, we used local materials, in order to reduce our carbon footprint in terms of the oil used in transporting them to Madison, and we bought appliances that needed less electricity and water than average (rated Energy Star or better).  We have floors from Eco-Friendly Flooring (a store here in town) and a roof made of recycled rubber.  It looks like slate, and it will last at least 50 years.  That’s another way to build green: Make sure that the materials you use won’t need to be replaced anytime soon.  The same can be said of the siding on our house.  It’s cementitious shingles that are rated to last 50 years.  We also used materials that don’t outgas toxic fumes (volatile organic compounds or VOC’s), from formaldehyde in the wood to other toxics in the adhesives and paints.

We selected a tile-masonry oven that’s 80 – 85% efficient.  It can heat the house with just a few logs for 10-12 hours on even the coldest Wisconsin day and emits very little carbon monoxide and soot.   We used structural insulated panels for our roof and walls, because they provide a good R-value, superior strength, and use sustainably-harvested wood chips.  But just as importantly, they block air from leaking into or out of the house.  As a result, we also installed an active fresh air system, but one that recovers 95% of the heat that would otherwise be lost.

One of my favorite moments was when our energy consultant came to test the tightness of our house.  His values were so low that he rechecked his fan and looked over his instruments, thinking they were malfunctioning.  But our house turned out to be the best of 1500 houses he had checked.

So I guess I’ve been doing my part for the Earth in the last year or two.  But I’m still glad to be composing again.  Not only does it involve giving back to Gaia, but it also represents in a microcosm the cycle of birth – life – death – and – renewal in which the Goddess manifests Herself to us.  Watching the compost transform into new soil and new life, life that will support the next generation of crops that feed us, is a little miracle, an ordinary miracle, of which I never tire.