Gifts of the Earth: Embracing Abundance, Reciprocity, and Friendship

We have recently lost a number of dear friends and colleagues, which has some of us reflecting on our time here, how we wish to spend it, and the small mark we wish to leave on the world while we have the privilege of being here. As we enter into the holiday season, it is striking us that getting our priorities straight is particularly important.

We are, of course, not the first to reflect on the irony of how a time of year intended to focus on gratitude, light, and love has been co-opted to be a time of extreme consumerism. But last week Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s new book The Serviceberry – Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World was released. It could not have come at a more opportune time. Inspired by the wisdom of nature, Wall-Kimmerer beautifully captures the sentiment of gratitude that receiving a gift inspires, and how it naturally leads to a desire to reciprocate.

There are two important nuances to explore in this idea of reciprocity.  The first is that the gifts she is talking about are not the trinkets many of us are exchanging this time of year, but rather the myriad ways in which we are surrounded by exchanges that make life possible in the first place.  Secondly, this is not reciprocating in a transactional, tit-for-tat, kind of way but rather how we receive the gift in the spirit of gratitude and humility that a true gift evokes, and how that inevitably inspire us to want to contribute to the mutual flourishing of the systems around us.

There are so many wonderful gifts we receive from mother earth. These include the oxygen we breathe, the food gifted to us by the soil and the miracle of photosynthesis, the water that balances and refreshes our bodies, the sun with its power to provide energy for everything on earth, and of course the gift of each other.

This holiday season, we choose to focus on the gifts that we have and ways we can reciprocate them.  The philosopher John Searles is credited with the quote, “The meaning of life is to love, to laugh, and to make a difference—to have it mean something that you lived at all.” We couldn’t agree more.  The season of celebration is upon us. It is a time for gathering, sharing, and expressing gratitude. Kimmerer reminds us that “gift economies arise from an understanding of earthly abundance and the attitude it generates. A perception of abundance, based on the notion that there is enough if we share it, underlies economies of mutual support.”

We invite you to join us in reflecting on the gifts that surround us, the gratitude that they engender when we choose to look at things from this perspective. We also invite you to reflect on these three questions this holiday season and beyond:

• What if we viewed the climate crisis as an opportunity to create a more caring world? 
• What if we could leave the world a better place for future generations? 
• What if we decided that our abundance came from our relationships rather than from our stuff?

You are a gift to this community and to all those that you are each a member of.

We wish you a season of abundance and reciprocity – and love.