‘I am a compost heap.’

An autumnal Thought for the Day for BBC Radio 4, on the quiet smelly miracle of decomposition.

It began on June 20th and it ends tomorrow.

Summer… which this weekend leaves the stage for autumn, the season of mists and walking into cobwebs.

Around the country the harvest is being gathered in, although, those of us who don’t live in rural areas, may not have noticed.

The TV series Clarkson’s Farm has thrown a spotlight on the challenge of modern farming. Ditto a new film, The Old Man and the Land.

The old English root of the word ‘harvest’ meant autumn and in earlier centuries the harvest was a whole community event. But few of us now inhabit that world of harvest hymns in which we plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land.

Now we plough the aisles of Morrisons or Waitrose for produce originally scattered around the planet.

We do not think of our food as fed and watered by God’s almighty hand. We think of it as regulated by the Food Standards Agency.

We don’t imagine an invisible God sending warmth to swell the grain and soft refreshing rain. Our faith is in an invisible supply line to our kitchen table - one we notice only if it’s disrupted by geopolitical conflict or extreme weather events.

But even the urbanized life hides everyday reminders of our ties to the land.

Peeling apples this week it dawned on me that maybe the most powerful device in a home is not the smartphone but the compost bin.

The apple peel joining teabags and left-over veg, leaves and mown grass, and settling down into itself over the months. A quiet smelly miracle of decomposition… eventually producing some rich humus to fertilize the soil.

In the memoir ‘This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage’ the American novelist Ann Patchett says the creative life is essentially composting.

‘I am a compost heap,’ she writes. ‘And everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shovelled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down — is digested and excreted by worms — and rots…’

From that mulch, she observes, ‘ideas start to grow.’

Given time — coupled perhaps with the long walk, quiet meditation or silent prayer — some unlikely richness may emerge from the dark mulch of most of our days.

‘Earth to earth ashes to ashes,’ runs the old prayer book, drawing on the ancient story that we all come from the dust and all return to it. The turning seasons remind us both of our brief days and of our friendship with earth while we’re here.

‘For everything there is a season,’ as the writer of Ecclesiastes put it. ‘A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to harvest…’