A Basket is a Love Song

A cold wind kissed my cheeks, and I knew I wouldn’t last much longer. I had walked along this roadside ditch in the Grand Ronde watershed for hours, gathering bundle after bundle of willow whips. I found a lot of pink and purple shoots that day. A colorful contrast to the orange, yellow, and red bark of the Deschutes River Basin willows. 

Oregon has a stunning variety of wild willow species in its many watersheds and bioregions. Capacious in their ability to put out new shoots year after year, willows have a generous and regenerative spirit. When supported through a traditional method of woodland management known as coppicing, they create a rich variety of habitat and benefit biodiversity. It’s a practice that has been performed by humans (and beavers!) throughout the world since time immemorial. 

This winter willow harvest and its seasonal rhythm has taken me to majestic rivers, creeks, wetlands, farms, and roadside ditches all around Oregon. These riparian plants have deepened my relationship with the land and waterways where I live and travel. When I dove into the world of willow basketry in 2021, I quit my jobs and moved to my teacher’s land to live as scrappy as possible and devote myself to this ancestral craft. I was brought into a community of traditional-skills enthusiasts who celebrate land-based craft and try their best to live outside the confines of the clock. During my apprenticeship in traditional European basketry, I studied with renowned ethnobotanist and weaver Margaret Mathewson and learned many things from her. My favorite is her saying, “There is no right way, only different.” 

We live in a culture in which our relationship with land, creatures, and each other is fraught with instability, with prescribed historical amnesia and a profound alienation from the natural world. Earth skills and place-based craft offer a pathway of renewed relationship with the life around us. Weaving with willow helped me understand that all humans once held the ecological wisdom and skills of their place and time. When I learned that a bundle of flexible sticks harvested from a roadside could be woven into a basket, it felt like a veil lifted. I saw with new eyes as the living world returned my gaze. 

Baskets are for everyday life. These hand-shaped vessels have held our foods, fibers, medicines, and more since a time beyond memory. Plastic totes and grocery carts have replaced some of our need for baskets in the modern age, but not completely. Think about the upside-down basket you wear on your head on a sunny day. Or the basket you take to harvest berries or zucchini. Or the basket that holds knickknacks on your kitchen table. Every basket is handmade, including the twenty-dollar ones found in box stores, made by people whose labor is exploited or forced. 

Before plastics, basketry was a professional trade. It’s an art that lives in the ancestral memory of all human hands. In Ireland, people fished out of willow-woven vessels fashioned with rawhide. In Scotland, people wove horse bridles with a certain type of grass. On the northwest coast of North America, people weave spruce roots into waterproof hats. In Japan, people weave beautiful market baskets out of bamboo. 

Techniques, styles, and materials are a reflection of place, culture, and time. Many of these cultural traditions have been fractured, stolen, and forgotten as a result of colonization, migration, and assimilation. Willow offers me a way to study the tattered quilt of my European lineage and traditions and engage with the complexities of stewarding stolen land. Weaving with willow, a plant that bridges this land and the land of my ancestors, has brought me a sense of belonging. I walk that bridge every time I use ancient weaving techniques with local plants. 

The word weik means ‘to bend or shape’ in Proto-Indo-European. Wicker, wicked, and witch all share this root. Witches were thought to have the ability to ‘bend or shape’ reality. Wicker work transforms flexible willow sticks into sturdy baskets. During the transition from feudalism to capitalism in old Europe, the ability to to transform natural materials into useful tools was seen as suspect. In Silvia Frederici’s book Caliban and the Witch, she shines a light on the ways country folk were demonized for their subsistence lifestyles, which involved reliance not on a central government, but rather on the land, community, and shared ecological knowledge. This demonization was part land-grab and partly a way to shift lives from place-based community resilience to lives of wage-based labor. Writes Frederici, “...the land was now ‘free’ to function as a means of accumulation and exploitation, rather than a means of subsistence.”

We all know how this violent story repeated. The sinister exploits of colonialism aim to fracture the thousands of years of relationship with land, community, and ecological knowledge. But there is hope! A T-shirt from the earth skills nonprofit Rewild Portland reads, “Subsistence is Resistance!” And I really do believe that to be true. When we learn how to make things or do things or fix things, it proves that we are capable of living in ways that rely more on community and reciprocity and less on Amazon. There is a DIY culture, alive in the earth-skills community, that values time more than money and regards accessible mentorship as foundational to creating a culture of resilience and connection. This subculture gives me hope that we can bend or shape a new reality where we remember we are truly alive in relation to each other.  

An individual stick is flimsy and cannot hold anything. But when we weave our stories together, we become capacious in our ability to shape the world for future generations. Just like a pile of sticks transforms into a basket, we too transform and hold stories. We too are vessels, shaping and being shaped by the world around us. 

As we stand at a crossroads of cultural transitions, I look to the longer human story of adaptation and interconnectedness. In direct opposition to capitalism’s promise of disconnection, domination, and destruction stands what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls "the honorable harvest,” and traditional crafts that use natural materials offer a pathway of renewed relationship with the land. Preservation and land restoration generally exclude humans and invoke a ‘look but don’t touch’ approach, but I want to engage with the land, with respect and curiosity, knowing that humans are part of the complex web of relationships in the natural world. When more and more people feel empowered to engage with place and community, more and more people will actively fight to protect place and community.  

I went to a poetry reading earlier this year and heard the author Jason Graham speak. He said, “Pay attention to when the spirit winks at you.” To me, that meant those moments  you don’t let slip away, but rather dive head-first into, like a pelican hunting for fish in the sea. Attention happens to be my most abundant resource, living as scrappy as I do. So it feels powerful to know that attention can act as a long-term investment. We say pay attention because giving our attention is a form of exchange. But how can we give our attention and meaningfully participate in community if it's a struggle just to survive? 

The spirit winked at me the day I became a student in the world of willow basketry. The spirit winked at me again the day I became a teacher. I love keeping the tradition alive and sharing what I have learned. Teaching has become an integral part of my basketry practice. As we move through the process of weaving a basket, their woven bodies emerge as a reflection of our time and attention. A basket asks us, what holds us? What holds our attention? What holds our reverence?

Weaving has become a way of life for me. Basketry made me realize I am home on this earth in a profound way and gifted me ways to connect and engage that make me feel like I belong. The process of making art celebrates relationships. A basket is a love song for my teachers, for the rivers, and for the willows. The winter days I spend harvesting are always my favorite. It staves off the winter blues and reminds me I am home. We are alive in strange times, but one thing I know for sure: I will return to the rivers and the ditches and my teacher’s farm to harvest and to weave and to give my attention.