There is a story told in LeGrand Cannon's Look to the Mountain in which the master blacksmith makes a scythe blade of Damascus steel for a young mower in 1769. In the high heat of his forge he pounds bars of iron and steel together, folding them over each other again and again. After tempering, the effect of the mingled metals in the blade is much like fudge ripple. The iron gives the blade flexibility as an antidote to the steel's brittleness; the steel holds the edge razor sharp, and gives the enduring shape of the blade. The price? Twenty-one cords of rock maple, cut, split, and stacked. The master smith assures the young man that there will be at least one blow of the hammer for every strike of the ax.

University extension agents argue persuasively that a farmer cannot afford the time to mow: he is forced by economics to sit all day atop his tractor attaching one implement after another to produce enough to make the payments on loan for the equipment. I do not offer the scythe and its related tools as an alternative to this scale of agriculture. Yet, even here the scythe has a place, trimming the edges where the machine cannot go.
I do not use a scythe in order to make enough money to support a livelihood, but rather to support a livelihood. Not only is the product of my labor- hay, mulch, grain-- superior to any I could obtain elsewhere in this chemical age. In addition, I deeply enjoy the experiences of contributing to my own sustenance and of relating intimately to the earth.

- David Tresemer

 

Death: W.C. Fields called death "the Fellow in the Bright Night-gown." He shuffles around the house in all the corners I've forgotten, all the halls I dare not call to mind or visit for fear I'll glimpse the hem of his shabby, dazzling gown disappearing around a turn. This is the monster evolution loves. How could it be?
The faster death goes, the faster evolution goes. If an aphid lays a million eggs, several might survive. Now, my right hand, in all its human cunning, could not make one aphid in a thousand years. But these aphid eggs-- which run less than a dime a dozen, which run absolutely free-- can make aphids as effortlessly as the sea makes waves. Wonderful things, wasted. It's a wretched system. Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British physicist and astronomer who died in 1944, suggested that all of "Nature" could conceivably run on the same deranged scheme. "If indeed she has no greater aim than to provide a home for her greatest experiment, Man, it would be just like her methods to scatter a million stars whereof one might haply achieve her purpose." I doubt very much that this is the aim, but it seems clear on all fronts that this is the method.

- Annie Dillard

"Despite the recent rise of fundamentalism, the crisis of belief continues. Many people, including me, have overcome it to a greater or a lesser degree by locating God in nature. Most of the glimpses of immortality, design, and benevolence that I see come from the natural world- from the seasons, from the beauty, from the intermeshed fabric of decay and life, and so on. Other signs exists as well, such as instances of great and selfless love between people, but these, perhaps, are less reliable. They hint at epiphany, not at the eternity that nature proclaimed. If this seems a banal notion, that is exactly my point. The earliest gods we know about were animals- tigers, birds, fish. Their forms and faces peer out from ancient ruins, and from the totems and wall paintings of our first religions..."- Mckibben

"Sit and be still
until in the time
of no rain you hear
beneath the dry wind’s
commotion in the trees
the sound of flowing
water among the rocks,
a stream unheard before,
and you are where
breathing is prayer."

Wendell Berry, from “Sabbaths 2001”

People involved in industry, design, environmentalism, and related fields often refer to a product's "life cycle". Of course, very few products are actually living, but in a sense we project our vitality-- and our mortality-- onto them. They are something like family members to us. We want them to live with us, to belong to us. In Western society, people have graves, and so do products. We enjoy the idea of ourselves as powerful, unique individuals; and we like to buy things that are brand-new, made of materials that are "virgin". Opening a new product is a kind of metaphorical defloration: "This virgin product is mine, for the very first time. When I am finished with it (special, unique person that I am), everyone is. It is history." Industries design and plan according to this mind-set.
We recognize and understand the value of feeling special, even unique. But with materials, it makes sense to celebrates the sameness and commonality that permit us to enjoy them-- in special, even unique, products-- more than once. What would have happened, we sometimes wonder, if the Industrial Revolution had taken place in societies that emphasize the community over the individual, and where people believed not in a cradle-to-grave life cycle but in reincarnation?

Every man is followed by a shadow which is his death- dark, featureless, and mute. And for every man there is a place where his shadow is clarified and is made his reflection, where his face is mirrored in the ground...He becomes the follower of what pursued him. What hounded his track becomes his companion.
That is the myth of my search and my return.

- Wendell Berry