Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘When I read Marie Kondo’s book for the first time, I thought, oh, she’s introducing a very Japanese sensibility to a Western audience. And it’s a very traditional sensibility, and it comes from the Shinto religion, which is an animistic religion, where things do have agency. They have spirits.

Trees have spirits in them. Scissors have spirits. Umbrellas, shoes, prayer beads have spirits. And they are taken care of as though they are sentient, OK?

And so for example, there’s this one story that I think is actually quite lovely. It’s a tradition in Japan and has been since the olden days for women who have a sewing needle or a pin that’s been broken. They’ve broken it. They don’t just throw it away.

Again, the sewing needle is certainly, when they were made by hand, when they were fashioned by hand, it was a very painstaking thing to make a needle. And so you would take very good care of it. It was a precious object.

And then if in its service to you over its lifetime it breaks, you don’t just throw it away. You save it, and then once a year, you take it to your local shrine. And they have a day specifically set aside for this.

And on the altar there, there’s a large block of tofu. And so you bring your broken pin or your broken needle to the shrine, and you put it in the block of tofu so that it can have a soft resting place. And then at the end of the day, there’s a ceremony performed, kind of a memorial ceremony, where you can express or feel your gratitude towards this thing. And then its karmic life has been closed, right, and it can move on to another existence, or whatever.

So I guess what’s nice about this is that it’s a formalized way of appreciating something that’s been important to you in your life. It’s also sort of a form of insurance because, as we know, pins and needles are sharp. They’re pointy and they can hurt you. They can poke you.

And so you don’t want to just throw them away because that might piss them off, and then they’ll take revenge. So this is a tradition that she’s coming from, a Shinto tradition, that sure, you can call it fanciful or silly or whatever, but wouldn’t it be better if we treated our objects with more respect? Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t build obsolescence into our things so that we had to throw them away and buy new things?’ (from the New York Times)