Sal gave me this starry scrap of fabric on the condition that I blow my nose with it. Note her hand-embroidered J which stands for JoJo's Boogers. Well, it took a week and a half, but today I finally managed the feat. Don't worry, I'll spare you the "after" photo.
But all that week and a half I've been thinking about disposability. The amount of trash we generated over the holidays kept shocking me, again and again. Plastic packaging, paper plates, pizza boxes, potato chip bags -- every one of those scraps is a piece of the planet that I judged and found wanting, worthy of a landfill and no better. It made me feel a philosophical dissonance: if the planet is sacred, then so is everything that's part of it, animal-vegetable-or-mineral. Or, in other words, if paper plates aren't sacred, then nothing is. Same goes for boogers, which fully warrant the kindness and respect of being deposited in a lovely hanky.
Each piece of garbage also represented a failure of imagination. Dumb ones, too. Would it have killed me to wash a bunch of ceramic plates? Or to make homemade pizza instead of ordering out? See, it's not that I don't know better; it's that I'm lazy. But not too lazy to honk my schnozz into this pretty washable cloth instead of into tree tissue destined for the trash bag.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment