Braiding Sweetgrass

basket, the candle, the paper—I delight in following their origins
back to the ground. I twirl a pencil—a magic wand lathed from
incense cedar— between my fingers. The willow bark in the aspirin.
Even the metal of my lamp asks me to consider its roots in the
strata of the earth. But I notice that my eyes and my thoughts pass
quickly over the plastic on my desk. I hardly give the computer a
second glance. I can muster no reflective moment for plastic. It is
so far removed from the natural world. I wonder if that’s a place
where the disconnection began, the loss of respect, when we could
no longer easily see the life within the object.
And yet I mean no disrespect for the diatoms and marine
invertebrates who two hundred million years ago lived well and fell
to the bottom of an ancient sea, where under great pressure of a
shifting earth they became oil that was pumped from the ground to
a refinery where it was broken down and then polymerized to make
the case of my laptop or the cap of the aspirin bottle—but being
mindful in the vast network of hyperindustrialized goods really gives
me a headache. We weren’t made for that sort of constant
awareness. We’ve got work to do.
But every once in a while, with a basket in hand, or a peach or a
pencil, there is that moment when the mind and spirit open to all
the connections, to all the lives and our responsibility to use them
well. And just in that moment, I can hear John Pigeon say, “Slow
down— it’s thirty years of a tree’s life you’ve got in your hands
there. Don’t you owe it a few minutes to think about what you’ll do
with it?”