Poop

“A Zen master is not a saint, but it helps to imitate one.”

** WARNING  poop jokes  (Some may find offensive) **

“It began as a fine plan: replace the primitive outdoor toilets at our rural, monastic-style Zen Center. The head monk at the time was a charismatic and idealistic German (look out), and he made the final call to install composting toilets. CTs are based on a beautiful principle. It’s a principle with great metaphorical as well as practical value. The way the toilets work is, you crap down a long narrow chute and it accumulates in a large plastic box. Once a week you shovel a bag of wood chips into the box. Eventually heaps of rich, earthy soil appear. This manure, or “humanure,” makes primo fertilizer for your gardens. What you took from the earth in food, you return to it as food. Beautiful, right?

I’ll admit, I got jazzed about the project. It sounded great on paper, with its universal themes straight out of an animated kids’ film. I could almost see little Pixar “poo people” singing Elton John numbers about the circle of life à la the Lion King. “We take a journey from your butts to your plates / We compost your garden, acquiring whole new tastes!”

The problem is, the lease we have on our land from the forestry service strictly prohibits us from planting anything—fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees. We probably can’t even legally grow Sea-Monkeys up here. So here we are, twice a year, stuck with a thousand pounds of human-based fertilizer and nothing to fertilize. As a solution, the board of health makes us periodically jar up a pint or two of the compost-in-progress and bring it to them so they can test it. When they deem it fit for burial, we have to stuff all one thousand pounds into special plastic boxes, bake it in the sun for a week to kill the pathogens, carve out mass graves six feet deep in the mountainside, and put every last, useless morsel to rest.

The German head monk has recently returned to his homeland, where he is no doubt enjoying precision-engineered flush toilets. Our new head monk hails from the streets of NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen and harbors none of his predecessor’s romanticism when it comes to playing Professor Higgins to our craps’ Eliza Doolittle, transforming turds into topsoil. The CTs are again packed to capacity, and his solution is decidedly American: “I’m no fecal alchemist, a’right? Let’s just get these friggin’ things pumped.”

The task falls to me and “Rose,” the gruff, grandmotherly sewage sorceress we’ve hired from the village a thousand feet below to make this mess disappear. Rose is kind, sweet, and patient; she is a mountain woman with an earthy naturalness that puts this city boy to shame. She is also exactly the kind of woman you’d expect to find on a job like this. She looks like André the Giant in drag. You can look for her breasts, but you won’t find any, unless you’re looking somewhere near her navel, where she’s got them tucked into her tool belt. She sports a flattop haircut, her neck is as thick as her shoulders are wide, and she’s got the vocabulary of a trucker with Tourette’s. In her left earlobe is a single diamond earring, an almost ironic nod to her ostensible gender.

This potty-mouthed, lantern-jawed Lady of the Loo muscles the side hatch off one of the compost tanks and leans forward, pensively stroking her chin and screwing up her chiseled face. Several moments pass in silence as the “stool whisperer” psychically tunes in to the situation. Then she turns to me, problem diagnosed, solution at the ready: “We’re gonna hafta make poop soup.”

Crammed into each of the three bins are dense, towering shitbergs. The plan is to soak them into a thin gruel of sewage, which Rose will pump into her twenty-five-hundred-gallon truck tanker. I spray the manure masses with a garden hose while Rose—Slayer of Fecal Dragons—hacks them apart with her shovel. A grueling hour passes. We switch jobs. If there is a trick to impaling the increasingly gelatinous heap and removing the shovel without producing a suction-like back slurp of shit spray, I do not learn it. “You really do not have a feel for this kind of work,” Rose says. She tries to smile encouragingly, but her eyes betray her real thoughts: Whither the man who can whip up a batch of poo-brew?

I am embarrassed and ashamed. How could I have gone my whole life without learning how to liquefy a nine-hundred-pound boulder of human defecation? Clearly I have lived a Paris Hilton–like existence of sheltered luxury. Like the monomaniacal Captain Ahab sighting the great white whale, I harpoon the shovel into the murky depths without mercy or pause. Finally Rose raps me on the shoulder, sweat clinging to the hairs haloing her mouth. Her eyes are wide and full of life: You done good, they say. “See?” She grins, sloshing the shovel around inside the bin like a muscular, mustachioed witch churning her pot of poison. “Poop soup.”

If there’s an anal stage of spiritual development, I’m in it. When I first moved to the monastery a year ago, I had delusions about a Zen center’s being some kind of bliss factory. There’s no smog up here, I noticed upon strolling the grounds. The air is clean. I’m going to get clean up here too. I felt special, chosen. I convinced myself that all of my various failures in life were inevitable steps on the path to this higher calling. Then came my first intensive dai-sesshin retreat: I remember hours beforehand peering down the open lid of a compost toilet and suddenly getting the sinking feeling that, like a reader of coffee grounds, I was divining my future in the dark and ominous shapes below.

“That’s a lot of shit down there—it’s not, like, piling up, right?” I asked, naively hoping that it was just sort of taking care of itself, politely decomposing into the earth, checking out of the game without too much hassle. “You think you can take a dump in a hole and it’s gonna just somehow disappear into the ether?” roared the monk from Hell’s Kitchen, bleaching down a urinal nearby...

All those places that we think are horrible are usually just unfamiliar, and it may sound blasphemous, but somehow the world wouldn’t be as roundly beautiful without them. I’ve tried to introduce some of those places, with the hope that we will look not only up, for visions of light, nor merely in, for exclusively personal truths, but also down and all around, until those downright disturbing places, inside and outside of us, start to feel like home.”

~ Shozan Jack Haubner is a Buddhist monk in the Rinzai tradition and author of Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk. He writes under a pseudonym.