The Life Within Objects

White Sands, NM.

Last weekend, our well pump went kaput. We had no water for about five days. I was amazed at how little I was able to accomplish while we had no water. It was like we were in suspended animation. My husband thinks it’s because we’re so enmeshed with our home, that what happens to it also happens to us.

I think this is true. For instance, last December a drunk guy drove his truck straight through the 28” thick adobe wall of J.’s workshop, creating a ten foot hole. (The driver walked away with no injuries.)

The vehicle stuck in the building. The picture looks red because of the flashing lights of the police cars.

After all the debris was removed.

The sound of his truck slamming into the building was almost like an explosion. We both felt physically assaulted for weeks, even though, thankfully, we were across the street at the time and completely safe. It was awful. That building has had a long history of hardship—it reminds me of our abandoned pup Lucy. It’s a part of our family and needs our ongoing love and attention.

Our homes are our nests. Extensions of ourselves. And we, in turn, are extensions of our homes.

We are all deeply energetically enmeshed with the land, air, and water—but also with buildings and objects in ways most of us, I think, barely realize.

In my spiritual community, one of our foundational practices is to connect to the energetic presence within all matter, including what we normally consider to be ‘inanimate objects’ and acknowledge them all as individual expressions of universal life.

As an artist and a maker of things, it’s not a stretch for me to perceive the life within objects—my artwork, for instance, feels especially alive for me. I look across the room at a copper watering can that was my mother’s and I smile. This morning, I drank out of a handmade mug created from local clay. I stirred my coffee with a favorite spoon. Artifacts created by other humans hold a lot of energy and heirlooms that get handed down feel important to most of us.

But what about all the mass produced machine made objects that fill my life? Like the heat mat beneath my seedlings, warming the soil so my annuals are willing to burst from their protective seed shells and emerge as plants—what a wonderful invention and so supremely handy—silently helping my dream of a cut flower garden come true. Or the inexpensive metal shelf from a big box store that lets me make the most of my indoor growing space? What about the random bits and pieces in my desk drawer or the expensive laptop beneath my fingers?

Some, like my laptop, are mass produced but also expressions of sophisticated design principles. Others, like the plastic pen I’m looking at, were made as cheaply as possible and as fast as possible with a focus on cranking out as many as possible in the hopes that you’ll throw it out and need another as soon as possible.

It can be genuinely overwhelming to live in the time of mass production. And it’s such a recent phenomenon in human history—maybe 150-200 years? Before that, humans mostly made what we needed ourselves or got it from someone in our community.

As someone who has been a product designer, I can get quite anxious thinking about the alarming endlessness of mass production. I’ve designed and developed products that have been (hand) made in developing countries and shipped to the U.S. on a container ship. I’ve quaked as those boxes have come rolling into shipping and receiving. I’ve agonized about needlessly adding more ‘stuff’ to the world.

But getting tangled up there also misses something important.

Everything on this planet has an energy signature. And those energy signatures are endlessly varied and unique. Acknowledging and honoring the truth of that doesn’t mean we have to embrace a consumer culture. In fact, I think the process of acknowledging and honoring the life all around us has the effect of making us much less likely to consume thoughtlessly or feed into a throwaway culture of cheap machine made clutter that was designed to be temporary, to break, to be tossed away.

Even as the cheap pen I unconsciously picked up free somewhere runs dry, and I get ready to toss it into the wastebasket below my desk, I can remember to think, “Thank you pen. I appreciate how easy you made it to write something down on the spur of the moment. That was nice.”

And then I can wander into the kitchen and marvel at the clean, potable water effortlessly flowing out of the tap into my glass, appreciating how this living entity cools my throat and hydrates my body. Thank you water. Thank you well pump. Thank you well. Thank you water table silently living below the land beneath my feet.

Thank you Gaia, soul of the world.

Thank you, as always, for reading all the way to the end. If you have a friend or family member you think might also like this newsletter, I’d be honored if you forwarded this to them or shared it in whatever way works best for you!