Objects are Earth, are Us
Reflections of Menditation with Boa’s Repair Shop
When I was little, I dreamed about receiving a mysterious box in the mail full of silky ribbons, lace and dresses. In my memory, the scene is something like the moment in A Little Princess where the main character comes back to her attic garret and finds it transformed into an rhapsody of oriental carpets and silk. Such spontaneous emanations of pleasure can wake us up to whole new realms of possibility.
In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry proposes that, “...beautiful things have a forward momentum, [they] incite the desire to bring new things into the world…” In other words, beauty is not an empty surface but a creative engine.
Boa’s Repair Shop arrives from this commitment to delight in the material world as a form of devotion to embodied existence. In our first live workshop, Menditation, we practiced a meditation that brought participants into intimate sensory relationship with our clothes. We then repaired or embellished them by hand-sewing and embroidery.
Sitting in the shade of Seward Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a handful of people chose this non-default weekend activity. The conversation that unfolded included stories about family members who taught us to sew or kept us from learning how; how we dressed and altered our clothes from the time we were kids; the tools that were used in our families of origin. I mended a hole in a sock and added a snap to a dress. One participant embroidered on the jeans they were wearing.
The simplicity and intimacy of the activity and our conversation stayed with me throughout the day. The vibe and content struck me as very different from other exchanges I have had with groupings of friends, colleagues and strangers. My unprovable hypothesis is that practicing mediation and mending together opened the door for us to relate in a subtly different way.
I thought about the magic of my great aunties’ sewing box, which was handed down to my childhood household from their expert seamstress’ hands in rural western Pennsylvania. This wooden chest contained shell buttons, tiny scissors shaped like a stork, and countless tools and notions that appeared very ancient. These things were threads tying back to the mysterious workings of the country life my grandfather had left behind when his family moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s. Through these objects, my childhood was connected to long-gone aunties I will never know. Their things helped teach me to sew and were props in many fantasy games. They helped make me an artist.
Boa’s Repair Shop is an experiment in developing intimacy with objects and investigating how the way we treat objects is also the way we treat other beings and Earth. Growing up a hippy country kid, I learned early on to be suspicious of my attraction to shining ribbons and other objects. The white liberal culture of conservation told me that human desire, embodiment itself, was the root cause of ecological crisis -- that we should preserve nature in a separated, perfected state. But we are Earth. iPhone is Earth. Jeans are Earth. Needle and thread are Earth… are us.