Your favorite fruit. Definitely your favorite flower. Even your favorite tree.

They all grow out of the ground.

The earth.

Soil.

And chances are that this soil is mixed with the remains of fallen flora. Dead leaves. Rotting greenery, festering into what seems like nothingness.

Or, better yet, if this soil is expertly cultivated by human hands, it probably has some mix of animal excrement. Fertilizer.

Stinking horse (or bull) shit.

Any farmer will tell you that nothing yields a voluptuous crop like a good mound of manure.

Well, maybe not every farmer. The farmer who was overseeing our “working meditation” (read: daily manual labor) at the Plum Village monastery certainly didn’t mention the importance of horse shit as he ran through the day’s tasks. But the presence of the wooden cart stacked with a near mountain of freshly acquired dung implied enough.

The farmer asked for a few strong hands to help shovel the aptly named “holy shit”¹. My penchant for taking on activities that others don’t want (not to mention the slight ego boost of being labeled as one of the “strong hands”) led me to raise my hand.

As others picked ripe cherry tomatoes off vines or dug potatoes out of the ground as if on some herbivorous treasure hunt, I thrust a worn shovel into a fast-hardening mound of shit, yanking upwards to free clods of digested hay and dumping them into a wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow was full, I would roll over to a patch of recently-tilled earth and neatly, evenly distribute the poo.

I tried to find catharsis in this activity. I did chuckle at the idea that shoveling manure was my father’s first job at age 10 and here I was, paying 300 Euro for the privilege. Generational irony, if you will. But, it was what it was – dealing with a lot of shit.

As I sat for lunch later that day, I couldn’t help but admire the cornucopia of color from the arrangement of vegetables on my plate. Nearly all of them came from the monastery farm. The flavors were rich. The mouthfeel – whether crisp or juicy – was sublime. These were some of the best vegetables I’d ever had. And they were the byproduct of….

….mountains of shit.

I’ve thought a bit about the interplay between shit and the sublime over the course of my travels. But it’s only over the last week that I’ve come to truly appreciate the essential role that shit – whether figurative or literal – plays in the cultivation of a rich, meaningful existence.

While re-reading my favorite novel, The Alchemist, the other night, this passage leapt out of the pages:

“We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our life or our possessions or property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”

In that moment, I took this statement as “Your life is uncertain right now, but every life is uncertain at some point in the midst of an epic journey. So don’t worry about uncertainty because, if this is meant to be one of the more meaningful stories, everything is going to plan.”

This felt profound and certainly comforting – but it also didn’t feel quite right either. There was a deeper layer to it that I still had to decipher.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long. It came as I was walking the streets of Florence the next day. Straddling the banks of the river that cut through the old city and admiring the Roman-era architecture, I started to wonder what had led me to that very moment. Just how the hell was it that, out of any one of my family members or high school classmates or peers from around the world, I got to be the one to say “fuck it” and take to wandering the streets of Europe?

The obvious reasons were all of the positive ones – the attributes that society would laud and any ego would love to trumpet. Curiosity. Perseverance. Deftness. Intelligence. Fearlessness. Freedom. A smattering of good luck.

I could have chalked it all up to my own doing. Patted myself on the back and thought “Diaz, you are the fucking man.” But then I realized that was kind of bullshit. Because while these things perhaps explained how I physically got to Florence, they didn’t say much about why.

So I thought about it. There was the childhood, where I desperately wanted to explore the world around me. But my parents, God Bless their hard working souls, didn’t have the financial means or energy to do a whole lot with us. In those long, lonely days stuck inside the house, I dreamt of the world.

There was the relationship-cum-marriage that lasted about six years too long. There was a fair amount of frustration and malaise on both sides. At times, I felt like I was sacrificing a proper college experience because I couldn’t say No. But it was during that time that my ex-wife and I got to London, where we both started to see a whole other side of the world and ourselves.

There was the divorce, where the world felt like it was crashing down. But the tabula rasa that emerged made a whole lot of room for new discoveries. My tastes completely changed. I tried oysters, steak tartare and lamb vindaloo for the first time. I fell in love with adventure. I came to lean on friends and understand their hearts. I had to learn to connect with strangers and – gasp – revealed this charm that I had never been familiar with.

There was my time in New York, which felt like a lot of useless running in circles at times. But I learned that I worthy of a higher quality of life. Fancy cocktails, hard-to-get-tables, every sort of obscure cultural pursuit. I learned that I could be a tastemaker, not just a follower. I realized fully that, per the words of one of my ex-girlfriends, “I march to the beat of my own drum.” And at the end of it, I realized that a higher quality of life didn’t depend on what I consumed, but on what I treasured.

There was every heartbreak. After stumbling and falling enough times, I finally grasped the importance of being my authentic self from Day 1. I also understood the importance of being contentedly single to round out that discovery, which led me to finally travel solo to London this past May for Tom and Lucy’s wedding. In seeing London with fresh eyes of solitude, I came to realize how much I truly loved Europe.

There was the full-time job that disappeared. I unexpectedly found the freedom to go to Europe.

If you had asked for my opinion of life during any one of these periods, I would have told you that it was fucking bullshit. They were all filled with angst, anxiety and fear. In those moments, I would have happily traded that existence for any other that felt just a little more secure.

And yet, it was because of every one of those shitty time that I came to be right in that moment. Staring at the Ponte Vecchio. Trying my best to not judge the swath of tourists.

Often, our instinct in life is to run towards security and avoid pain. We want more and we don’t want to lose what we have. We constantly strive for some concept of the good life. Intellectually, we understand that shit is part of the equation – but unconsciously, we may feel that shit is a sign that things aren’t going right.

But that’s missing the beauty of shit. Because shit now can unexpectedly open the door to really amazing things that you couldn’t have fathomed when it was all going down.

The shit in our lives now can be the fertilizer (or catalyst, if we want to start ditching the metaphors) for something extraordinary to blossom down the road.

Sure, some really great things can materialize in our lives without difficulty – just as flora can still blossom in nature without the help of manure or dead plant matter. But nothing seems to help create fruits – again, whether rhetorical or literal – that are juicy, tasty or filling more consistently than a heaping mound of shit.

What I’ve learned from all is that there is no need to be afraid of shit. Shit is part of life. Shit is part of the plan. Shit is part of our life stories. Shit is part of any noble life story. Shit is a sign that our lives might just be going the right way. It’s made me quite comfortable with the current uncertainty of my life situation.

I hope I remember this the next time life tosses a worn shovel and a rickety cart full of bullshit my way. I hope I get excited at what that period of labor might eventually reveal.

– – –

¹It was the only time over the course of the weeklong retreat that I heard any authority figure curse. Using my good old “give me an inch and I’ll take a yard” methodology, I made sure to use the phrase ‘the Holy Shit’ as often as I could that morning.