Willow Baskets
Willow Baskets from Heart and Soil Baskets
We have been lucky enough to find the most amazing willow basket maker. Made from Somerset willow with materials foraged from the local hedgerows and river banks of Exmoor these baskets are as good as it gets.
Comments from the maker
Well, I think a basket has energy. It’s got life in it. When it rots it will feed the earth, not poison it. Baskets, looked after, will last a lifetime. I don’t feel things are meant to last forever. ‘Things’ are meant to break down and be replaced – part of the cycle of life.
That’s the difference between baskets and plastic containers – you don’t make a basket or a hurdle to last forever, you make it knowing one day it will have to be replaced. You put your soul into making the basket, try to make it as strong as it can be, as beautiful as it can be in it’s strength. All the while knowing this was just a momentary stasis of inevitable decay and that one day it will just be a pile of twigs rotting in the ground, the hours spent weaving long forgotten…
…and this is ok. It’s as it should be. Things arise, things pass away. Being afraid of this and grasping desperately on to an impossible, unchanging life is what has made us need ‘stuff’ that lasts forever… Life to last forever.
Plastic… well, it lasts a very long time. A very, very long time. Do we really want anything to last that long? Past the point where we’ve got bored with it or it’s become shabby or we just want the new plastic thing on the market? There’s no chucking a plastic bag back into the hedge where you got it from – not where you can see it anyway. You have to chuck it away into landfill – out of sight, out of mind.
Is it out of mind though?
I believe that our deepest mind understands the consequences of this and we are inextricably bound by the conscience that it forces on us. It’s a survival mechanism, it’s a higher mind, it’s whatever you describe it as, but it’s there. It’s what is pushing us towards a more sustainable way of life.
With all that said can you really resist the only truly eco friendly shopping basket, linen basket, foraging basket, you get the message.
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