Maintenance as spiritual practice

This note is going to come out not quite right. But that's the point of this gemlog, if you want highly polished writing, this isn't the place.

Last weekend I finally got to a very overdue job that was inspired by a Gardening Australia segment on maintaining and restoring secateurs. I'd never previously considered that these could be disassembled for cleaning and sharpening, and then reassembled - but the segment took us through how to do it and it seemed achievable. Certainly, the solution to my quite blunt gardening secateurs wasn't to just replace them, so I finally got onto it. I am not known as a "handy" person, and mostly these sorts of practical things involving physical tools bamboozle me. So it was deeply satisfying to go through the process, and end up with a newly sharp and functional tool at the end, without any mysterious leftover parts!

I found it more than "satisfying", though. I automatically have a different relationship with this garden tool now. It's not merely something I bought from the hardware store. It's something I have maintained, and restored. The relationship I have to this tool is no longer merely transactional - I buy it, and use it until it wears out. There's now a part of me — my care and my time — bound up in the plastic and steel of this tool. If I lend the secatuers to a neighbour now it won't just be giving them access to an object, but also lending them the care I have taken in maintaining it in an ongoing relationship.

This probably sounds a bit weird to some readers. For me, however, it's sparked some thoughts about things like why some people are really into restoring old cars or steam trains. Watching this weeks' Back to Nature in Tasmania, however, made my thoughts go in another direction. Could it be that there is some connetion between the small emotional/spiritual feeling I had when I realised I could understand how my garden tool work and restore them to their optimum codition, and the much more significant relationship Indigenous cultures have with their lands and seas? Australian Aboriginal people talk about "caring for Country", or sometimes "maintaining Country". I don't mean to say that this is directly comparable to restoring an old Holden, but perhaps there is a connection there. Caring for, maintaining, keeping things "working the right way", and — importantly — doing so in a way that makes us connected to our forebears: these things feel spiritually good.

I also was thinking about this in relation to, specifically, repair. The young Aboriginal guy at the Bay of Fires spoke in palawa kani. This is a "reconstructed" language. Tasmanian Aboriginal languages as spoken at the time of British colonisation have been lost as whole, everyday-usable languages. To some historians or linguists this is important and means palawa kani is not "authentic", or perhaps even not "real". But it's real enough to his young man. It connects him with his culture and the knowledge that is stored in cultural practices. If I replace the various parts of my secatuers with replacements — perhaps even ones that are shaped slightly differently, made of new materials, maybe they don't quite fit as neatly — they still do the job. This, after all, is how cultures work. It's not as if the people of lutruwita had exactly the same cultural practices and beliefs in the 1700s BCE as the day they arrived on what was not yet an island.

So what am I trying to say? Nothing necessarily. Other than that maintenance and repair aren't simply matters of materiality or economics. The "right to repair" isn't just about "freedom" or markets. There's a spritual element to repair and maintenance, and maybe that's a gateway into a deeper kind of deep and active care for the broader world(s) around us.