Spirit in Flesh: another Parliament blog

[yezida]

A friend tells a story about people cleaning the kitchen in a monastery. One admonishes the dishwashers, "Remember, these are the Buddha's bowls!" The sensei, walking by at that moment retorts, "They are not the Buddha's bowls! They are the Buddha's flesh!" This speaks volumes about our relationship to what we consider to be "objects" and to the

Comments

[elissa_carey]

Very thought-provoking; it sounds and feels right to me. It also reminds me of the saying, "The things you own end up owning you." It's usually meant in the negative, but I'd say there's a definite positive in this as well.

[alfrecht]

This is a major difficulty, I think, and a tough line to maintain balance upon: is it possible to not neglect the things we buy and come into contact with, but also to maintain enough detachment from them to be able to get rid of them when necessary? Being a major pack-rat myself, and having just moved most of my things into storage for when I'm away for a few months at a job, I'm feeling this difficulty...The majority of my possessions are books and files of various sorts (mostly photocopied articles on this or that, mainly academic), but I've also got a fairly good collection of pagan and religious tchotchkes at this point as well, which got extra care in storage. (Though I'm pretty anal about people manhandling boxes of books and clothes as well

[yezida]

The deeper point is: what if we thought of all of these issues *at the manufacturing end of things*? That would change y/our conundrum greatly.

Yes, sometimes we throw things away. We try to compost and recycle as much as possible, or re-use things, or use steel water bottles instead of plastic, and perhaps cut back on what we buy in the first place... and still some things will go to landfill. I'm OK with a bit of that.

But back to the first point, in the US most products are grossly overpackaged. Europeans are often shocked at this. We create waste exponentially, because the manufacturers don't have the relationship the Ainu are talking about.

[alfrecht]

Most certainly...I wish there were more (for lack of a better term) forward-thinking folks involved at the manufacturing and production level with a lot of this stuff (as well as the packaging level), and that electronic equipment in particular were more component-based and therefore repairable rather than disposable...

One of the other things that really gets me in that regard is medical supplies and waste. As someone who relies on a lot of this stuff to live, I really wish that the impact of keeping people like me alive were lesser on the environment, and that packaging for things (e.g. insulin pump supplies) were lesser, and were recyclable...

[finnchuill]

This strikes down into the knotted, tangled messiness of a culture that has a fix on a constant technological rush; capitalistically it can't afford to slow down, even if it is eating away at is own matrix. I hate the planned obsolescence of everything now, the attitude that if one's phone is a year old it must be really out of date (and oneself as well)....I suspect a good lot of the overpackaging in the US is based on fear of lawsuits. Why else has food packaging over the years become so burdensome, so difficult to open? I know there's a lot of green designers now who are concerned with sustainability issues, but how can it be enough when systemically corporations push the need for ever more consumer objects?

[alfrecht]

The grammatical matter you mentioned is not quite accurate.

There are possessive adjectives/pronouns, which are much later than Old Irish (the oldest form of literary Goidelic language), and are things like "my," "your," etc., as in "my mother," "my house," etc. (which in some cases might be better translated as "of me"); much of the later development of Irish and Scots Gaelic were influenced by contact with Romance and Germanic languages, e.g. Norman French, English, and so forth, from which this influence probably derives as found in Modern Irish, etc. But this also does occur in other cases, as with certain actions--"My taking" comes up in the tale Serglige Con Culainn when Cú Chulainn asks (or rather demands) that he be taken back to his fort after his injuries, etc.

Then there is the older and far more common possessive sense in Irish, used for a variety of things, which is the conjugated preposition or prepositional pronoun, so that one still says in Modern Irish Ta leabhar agam ("I have a book," literally "A book is at me

[yezida]

Thanks for the info. Since he was speaking to a general audience on a broader topic, he likely did not have time to go into all of that.

Interesting though!

[alfrecht]

There are real treasures into other cultures to be found, even in basic linguistics and things like particles, prepositions, and the like...

Goidelic cultures certainly have ideas about ownership in more broad senses--trespassing, laying claim to land that isn't one's own for grazing, and theft are huge matters in the legal tradition. But, perhaps it can be understood more as a question of "rightful stewardship" rather than ownership...?

[finnchuill]

It sure seems like stewardship to me when I read the literature in translation, although, of course, I don't have your language knowledge. I do think these core differences in language, at least at the level of Old Irish are extremely important; this is the kind of stuff that creates a very different world view. The whole prepositional at things create such a different feeling of reality--even when used in English. I'd really love to see you deal with this more for a pagan audience.

[thistle333]

The deeper point is: what if we thought of all of these issues *at the manufacturing end of things*?

The Europeans are trying to do this, at least with larger products such as automobiles and computers. (Maybe smaller items as well, but automotive is the area with which I'm most familiar.) Manufacturers *are* required to take responsibility for end-of-life reuse or recycling, and it IS making a difference in how things are made. Not enough, probably, but some.

[hedgewalker]

Thank you. Talking about that very intimacy you mention, writer Martin Prechtel suggests that we have 10 square feet in our homes where everything in that space is either something we've made ourselves or has been made by someone we know and comes from our bioregion. What an interesting idea.

In my various culling sprees, I have been sad to notice that often many of the things I give away have been gifts from someone else. This has given me much insight when I want to give a gift to someone else.