Gratitude and Reciprocity

If you are a gardener, you might be familiar with the feeling of waiting for your vegetables to grow. Watching them go from seedlings to leafy plants, sometimes with flowers, and then finally being ready to harvest. All along the way, you’re not totally sure it’s going to work this time, but then one day you’re out there tending to the plants and you come across the first beautiful zucchini or tomato or cucumber of the season, and it feels like a miracle. A tiny seed became this thing that my family can eat for dinner. Even though I planted the seeds and tended to their growth, it isn't something that I made happen. It's a gift from the earth.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawami botanist and an author. I read an essay by her this week, entitled The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance. As a scientist and a Native American, she is informed in her work by both Western science and indigenous knowledge. The essay is a shorter articulation of a book that she recently published with the same title. In it she lays out an ecologically-inspired alternative to consumerism, and a theory of economy based on systems found in nature.

She talks about how gratitude is a key component in natural systems functioning well, the plants give the gift of berries to the birds and the birds spread the seeds, which produce more gifts. The mutual generosity of each being allows everyone to be provided for. She says that “Conceiving of something as a gift changes our relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed. (For example) a woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite aunt(ie), then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships.” This is a powerful shift. When we realize that something is a gift, the natural response is gratitude. And that gratitude naturally inspires reciprocity. If we saw everything we consume as a gift from Mother Earth, we would give back to the earth, and take better care of her gifts. Robin Wall Kimmerer theorizes that this is how we’re meant to provide for ourselves and each other, through a system of gratitude and reciprocity, rather than manufactured scarcity and competition.

 

I was at a retreat in September, and we were sharing some things that we had written down in our journals. The prompt was: Write about something that you want to remember. And one woman shared something that I decided I wanted to remember too. She said there was a plant in her yard this year that had been a volunteer, meaning she didn’t plant it. It just came up on it’s own. She didn’t know what kind of plant it was at first but as the season went on, she decided to let it grow, and take care of it. Through July and August, it didn’t produce any vegetables. She checked everyday. Finally in September, she walked out of her door one day and glanced under a leaf. And there it was. A great big squash. I could feel her delight as she told the story, she said, “It was so exciting!” As she was talking, I wrote her story down in my journal. It made me feel grateful because life is always surprising us with new life. 

Things are falling apart in so many ways, we’re getting older, the world is divided, but there’s a squash growing under a leaf, right outside the door. The earth's gifts are abundant.