Meditation & Exploration
Meditating with found materials creates space for exploration and critique of both human and more-than-human systems. It also allows us to acknowledge and critique chains of production and disposal, feel the sweat of workers embedded in our clothing, the fracked soil that held this polyester’s crude oil, the ecosystems that were cleared to grow this plantation of cotton, the legacy of slavery embedded in those fields, whose ideology continues to manifest upon this poly-cotton t-shirt being shipped to Ghana after it doesn’t sell at the charity shop I donated it to (Johnson, 2023). Meditation creates space for vital critique. It allows us to perceive, and decide whether we want to support these systems through our consumer practices, and continue to worship the false idols that are commodities (Akim & AK, 2024).
On the contrary, this meditation practice also has profound grounding qualities, aiding construction of spiritual ties between the human and material as unified parts of the natural world (Schlumberger, 2024). We are living on a damaged planet. Human guilt, responsibility, and distress for ultimately human centric ideas of annihilation, grows masks of nihilism and acceptance who cover our reluctance to change behaviour and ideology. We must grow past life/death binaries that centre the human experience of life as the only one that is true. We must begin to grow child-like empathy for non-human material, listening to stories of so called ‘objects’, and the plethora of critters which compose and surround us. Rocks move. Plants think (Bridle, 2022).
Mediating with material involves paying attention to that which has been naturalised to invisibility, such as the structures of where something came from, why we are not taught the process of how something was made. With an endless curiosity, we meditate to explore the entire life of a thing, instead of just its within human-use-life intervals. Should we perceive plastic as composed of dinosaur flesh, might we feel less inclined to throw it away? Should we feel less inclined to burn fossil fuels if we understood their composition as akin to our bodies, carbon creature in a new form. Should we subscribe these materials with souls, we might see them as precious beyond their monetary value. We are made from the same things that surround us; we’ve just followed a different chain of chemical reactions. We will become dirt, become bed for fungus farming algae and algae farming fungus, entangled with roots and mycelium (Sheldrake, 2020). Our material unravelling did not begin and will not stop with human consciousness. We will return to rock. Will we be mined and burnt by hyperintelligent cuttlefish, become the sky, etc.
Material meditation allows for a more-than-human spirituality, allows space to grow appreciation and wonder for the more than human world, acknowledge our ignorance, and the fundamental preciousness of all material.