Adding ethanol to grape juice doesn’t make it wine.

Thoughts on the energetics of objects.

There’s something that infuriates me about things that are attained without effort, where effort is implied through their ownership.

The Congolese mask that hangs on a person’s wall who has never set foot on the African continent.

The perfectly styled four-piece outfit that was bought straight off of a mannequin.

The homemade Christmas wreath, pieced together from dried fir branches, pine cones, and orange slices that traveled halfway across the world in a plastic bag in a cardboard box from Amazon.

Someone might argue that there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these. The owner valued, respected, and appreciated the workmanship and spiritual meaning of the mask. They recognized the subtle beauty of the colour palette and complimentary textures in the outfit. They didn’t have the time or a dehydrator to forage, harvest, and dry the individual parts of the wreath.

Someone might also argue that the alternative to all of these is a privilege that is not afforded to many. The privilege to travel, to learn about styling, or to live somewhere that pine can be found in natural abundance.

I don’t disagree with any of these arguments, but to me they miss the point.

There are things in the world that hold the resonance of beauty for the energy required to create or obtain them.

You can feel it.

You can feel the resonance of the stone on your window sill that called out to you for no particular reason when you went to that windswept beach last winter. You can feel the resonance of your boots that have traveled with you back and forth to work each day and out for lunch with your aging grandma each weekend until her final breath. You can feel the resonance of those decorations that you made from scratch, by hand, with new friends and old. The orange slices that molded because you didn’t dry them quite right. The essence of fresh pine sap wafting through the hallway midsummer; it’s thick, sticky tar now a permanent feature on your front door.

Without effort, these objects are without frequency. They are a carbon copy of the entity you desire.

There is no short cut to the frequency you so desperately yearn for.

We are told that it can be bought with one click and delivered with Prime but this entirely misses the point. The frequency cannot be manufactured. It cannot be sold. And it cannot be bought.

When we yearn for something — a towering vase, a knitted blanket, or a delicious novel — what we really yearn for is not the object but the energy imbued within it. The timbre, the texture, the intangible, the invisible, the je ne sais quoi.

You can’t add ethanol to grape juice and call it wine.