"It's not about what it is, it's about what it can become." - Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
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The act of making an object can also be experienced as a long prayer to the earth.
Many living things gave up their life-energies for this simple little project. Birch gave the wood. Sheep gave the wool.
Hemp gave the rope. Cow gave the milk that made the milk paint. Pigments from the stones of the earth made the milk paint, too.
Walnut gave the nuts which were pressed into the oil that sealed the wood, now safe from injury and moisture.
Experienced this way, there are a host of souls hovering around every crafted object. A chorus of lives that are permanently refracted by the thing you hold in your hands.
What a joy it is, to make something with living materials. What a punishment it can be, to use plastic, petroleums, extractions, expulsions, refinements of hardship and labor.
I encourage you to consider which ghosts might haunt the objects you own. Are your clothes, for example, harboring ghouls of nylon, industry, and petroleum infrastructure? Or nixies and ents of well-nourished fibers?
Thwack! 🪓🪵
Thanks for sticking with me. I'll be in the woods tomorrow, so I'll hit you with a double-header on Sunday.
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"Although it is true that we are moral creatures in an amoral world, the world's amorality does not make it a monster. Rather, I am the freak." - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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