Gifts from the Mother
When a friend told me to help myself to some Raspberries, it got me thinking about the generosity of Mother Earth. She gifts us everything we will ever need. The gift of life and of unconditional love. Beautiful, juicy gifts that nourish our bodies and our souls. This is part of the marvellous design of nature, luring us in with deliciousness so we may spread her seeds.
These gifts do not cost money but they are not free. As Robin Wall Kimmerer so eloquently describes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate”, and so “the currency of the gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.”
The act of giving back is so important in a world where fear and scarcity have become so embedded, a world where we accumulate material surpluses and build bigger fences to protect them. Trapped in this mindset we can never have enough and so we take it all for ourselves. This extractive, commodity driven approach to absolutely everything is killing us.
We must learn to see and share abundance again. Abundance can simply be a feeling, trusting that if we care for the earth and each other, Mother Nature will continue to provide for us. This is a story that “asks us to celebrate our kinship with the world. We can choose. If all the world is a commodity how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.”
Sources:
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
