Unlike our increasing frenzy with repurposing as a way of justifying our overconsumption, it is not for the thrill of upcycling or Pinterest cred that the earth makes use of everything that is offered to it, but I don’t pretend to understand fully the more of this mystery. I only know it makes sense to me to keep playing at mimicking the earth’s impossibly expansive thriftiness, and to honor what happens outside of human control…. We are all food for worms, as it were, and so is all of our stuff: the button necklaces, the bustles, the tin cup and all the trappings of yet another best Christmas ever. “Nothing is lost,” and as my world winds down into another winter, I find these thoughts not morbid, but comforting. We humans cannot make something out of nothing, but with hopeful practice and attention, we can try to make something more out of something less, and when we forget how, the earth is there to help us remember. If frost and moss can return stone to the soil, then perhaps it can also eat bullets if we just leave them lie long enough.
Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
“Original Thrift” from Topology Magazine