By Clifford Scholz

There were chuckles and laughter recently as I divided my redworm colony in half so a friend could start her own.  Worms and the whole idea of caring for them seem to inspire no end of jokes, and I was laughing along with everyone else. Of course, we tend to laugh where there is a disconnect, expectations that have been in some way violated. Caring for worms just isn’t “normal”.
And, well, it IS funny! What interests me here is that healing the disconnection beneath the humor makes keeping worms worthwhile. Whatever else happens, if you try keeping worms, keep right on smiling!

There are many excellent books and online resources to help you get started in composting with redworms or vermicomposting. The question I want to address is more fundamental than the “how”-- it’s pretty simple to get started.  The bigger question is: Why? Why bother with worms at all?
There are useful reasons to keep worms.  The castings of worms are rich in plant nutrients and excellent for soil supplementation. Worm bins make composting possible indoors, for example, or in a classroom.  In the classroom, of course, worms are “educational”.  As we consider what worms have to teach us, however, we find other important answers to the question, “Why keep worms?”

Worms are low. The phrase “lowly worm” is a cliché. And here’s something that anybody with even passing experience with worms will tell you: They like rot. Toss a bad cucumber into the worm bin and worms will swarm to it. The fact that it’s rotting just makes it that much easier for the worms to eat it as the molds and other fungi break it down into a semi-liquid. What makes indoor worm composting tolerable is that much of the decomposition process happens inside the worms.  This significantly cuts down on the odors.

So, let’s suppose for a moment that you’ve taken the plunge, read up a little on the subject, obtained some worms, and are now feeding them with fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, and so on. Maybe you have a simple plastic box or perhaps one of the fancier tray systems on the market, but what it comes down to is this: you are serving the lowly worm. This is the education. Caring for things that the culture has deemed “low” is indeed a big learning. Insights gained from practical experience can be revolutionary precisely because one is moving in a very different direction than our prevailing culture.

Why do we laugh at the idea of caring for worms? Because we’re accustomed to thinking that worms are, figuratively as well as literally, “beneath us”.  We’ve been trained to shun the “low” and aspire to the “high”—however it is currently defined. But isn’t it interesting to note that nearly every aspect of food production is considered “low”? Working with the soil, picking the fruit, pulling the onions, even preparing and serving food—these are not high-status jobs in our society. While most of us have been preoccupied with finding a place in the money economy that allows access to industrialized food, many are now becoming aware of what was lost. As food production became something other (often poorly-paid) people did, we lost our connection to the quality of our food. So, what happens as we eat food of lower quality, as we become “fast-food nation”?  The stark and simple answer is: lower quality food produces a lower-quality life. By avoiding the “low” we are drawn to it.

Thus, while caring for worms is a practical pursuit, it’s also a metaphor, for by attending to things like worms, soil, plants, and animals—things deemed “low” and unworthy in the glitz and glamour of the imagery flooding the electronic and print media—we begin to subvert an entire hierarchical mindset and replace it with a truer vision of the world and our place in it.

In a very practical sense, the vitality of food plants nourished on a mineral-rich diet of worm castings is transferred to the person who eats from those plants. The revitalized person becomes a more active agent in the world. On a deeper level, however, the message here is this: those who bend in humility arise anew. Yet it’s a rising that places one above nothing but merely sets one in the circle of the living world. Here is a place where the aliveness of a single conscious and profoundly alive person in appreciation of a single candle can outshine all the artificial light of our electronic media and shopping palaces.

There are many ways of bending in humility; raising worms is just one path to that end. If you do experiment in composting with worms, you maximize your results by working with love, with humility, and with humor. You’re a new pioneer, touching the aliveness of the earth and becoming acquainted with her living mysteries.

 

And the really interesting thing is, by tending the “low” one finds that it’s not “low” at all—there is no “low”!