Plastic resists the gratitude practice because its origins hide from view.

Evidence

In that awareness, looking over the objects on my desk—the 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. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 539

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Soundscape/observation thread (what escapes attention because it resists perception) and to eco-justice critiques of petrochemical goods obscuring their material origins. — connects to: Abandoning gratitude makes the gifts themselves depart. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 679
• DEFINE: Illustrates the perceptual basis of reciprocity — respect requires being able to trace an object’s life.

Broader Connections

• Abandoning gratitude makes the gifts themselves depart. #responds-to (0.75) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 679