The Sword and the Poop

I started reading "The Humanure Handbook"  by Joseph Jenkins. We already compost vegetables scarp but to ge tour household to do something like this I would need everyone on board including our neighbors who we share a yard with. But let's just say my eyes have been opened by what I have read so far. I sort of thought when our pee and poo goes into the sewage system that it got processed to be used for something, like fertilizer. But it doesn't. And after reading about the process of composting "humanure" I'm feeling guilty and as if I am losing something every time I pee and poo in the toilet. Like I am flushing something very valuable away. Which apparently I am.
But I want to finish the book and see if a composting toilet is feasible for us before trying it. I'm not saying I would completely switch over to composting only all at once. But it would be nice to start small and see where we go from there.

Maybe we can compost some of the paper we are always throwing out too. And then maybe we can grow our own food.

I had just finished reading Eiji Yoshikawa's "Musashi", and hadn't gotten a chance to write about that. But there is a section in there where Yoshikawa's fictionalized Musashi uses his Way of the sword, to farm a seemingly unfarmable plot of land, and then he also organizes the villagers to protect themselves against bandits.

This struck me as interesting because most of the Kung Fu Lineages may trace back to Shaolin Temple, but there is a long time spent among farmers. I.E. a romantacized Musashi travelling to a romanticized Chinese Village, might find that the villagers were already training and had a vital Martial Arts system or indeed systems. In fact a lot of my Sifu's system is from the Village Kung Fu, and has a story of a traveler, who passing by, saw the villagers practicing Kung Fu so hard, and decided to stay and teach a stick form. And then later, another traveling Martial Artist passing by, would do the same thing further enriching the Kung Fu soil.


Anyway, a lot of people talk about the "modern Samurai" or Wuxia Hero, and what you can do to save the world now in these times. And reading Jenkins' book I get the feeling that the single most important thing you could do is to compost your own poop.
The first time a heard of a compost toilet I thought it was the same thing as an outhouse or that the "humus was the same thing as night soil. I wasn't against it, as I remember my 2nd grade Chinese School teacher talking about how in China, poo and pee was cherished for making particularly vibrant looking flowers. I just figured their must be a reason why we stopped doing that. And there is. Night soil spreads disease. But "Humanure" isn't Night soil. It's much more like dirt. Jenkins explains the process of how it is broken down.
I can't believe we went from night soil, to the system we have now, instead of night soil, to composting it. I guess we figured out how to flush things away before we figured out the microscopic process of how composting works.

But anyway, it looks like if I really aspire to take up the Zen Martial Way that is prevalent throughout a lot of Chinese and Japanese Martial Arts, then the way to do it is through poop and there are already people (like Jenkins) doing it. But I have to finish the book first. Wouldn't want to do this the wrong way and spread disease or attract rats.