I clipped this poem from a copy of Real Simple magazine back when I subscribed to it (along with Victoria and Martha Stewart Living) in the late 1990s. It spoke to me then, in a way I didn’t even fully realize. It still speaks to me now.
I started watching a documentary recently on Netflix called Buy Now, which shows how scientifically precise Amazon and other high-consumption sites like it have become at playing with our psychology. They want to be our “ever-present friend,” available to ship you whatever you need, whenever you need it. And with that convenience, a bit of human connection escapes our grasp.
Later that week, I saw video of a woman walking through Goodwill, filming row after row of donated clothing, with the caption: “All of this used to be money.” It’s not that I’m trying to hoard money. Goodwill is actually where I get most of my clothes these days. It’s one way I can make a smaller environmental impact. But all of this together has got me thinking about what I buy, how much of it will last, and where all this money goes.
If that’s been on your mind too, you might enjoy Norris’s poem, as I have:
My fingers are full of dark smudges
polishing this silver. It looks good.
I can see my face in the soup ladle.
How I do like to look good to myself!
And the cost is always some kind of dirt
on my hands. Some kind of slavery.
More polish on the rag. What kind of effort
is this really? I hold these old family objects
that so many hands have held. How strange
to know that this good silver
will outlast my life and my children’s lives.
Here, around each of us
are the things we live with.
They are like tracks an animal leaves behind
That show where it has been.
How insignificant we let ourselves become
beside our things when we allow them
to stand for us, to be the sum of our existence.
As I polish let me remember
The fleeting time I am here. Let me let go of
all silver. Let me enter this moment
and polish it bright. Let me not lose my life
in any slavery—from looking good
to preserving the past, to whatever idolatry
that keeps me from just this—
the grateful receiving of the next thing at hand.
From Being Home.
Spilled Milk 