The New Year Gift
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. I finished it a few days ago and I continue to reflect on the ideas, ideals and theories presented within it. I’ve started to investigate ecological economics. Did you know this discipline existed? Did you know about Elinor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize in Economics? Through field studies she “showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.” And what about gift economies? Kimmerer states that “Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy”and that, in a gift economy*, “wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.”
It’s no wonder, then, that I’m contemplating about my place in the natural world, how I can honor the spaces I get to visit and the creatures within them, and how I can cultivate gratitude and gifts better in my life.
Today, I was unexpectedly on the receiving end of a gift. I was taking a walk and passed a garden I’ve often admired. I commented to a man letting his dog out that the trees were magnificent, not know if they were his trees or not. As it turned out, they were his and his response was, “Please take some of the lemons. There are so many that they’re going to rot soon. I can’t keep up.” Really? What serendipity and synchronicity. I came home with luscious Meyer lemons, with evidence that a gift economy can work, even among strangers.
*Kimmerer acknowledges that gift economies work best in small communities, but we can create our own among neighbors or our own spaces. Will you accept the invitation to be part of the gift economy? As Kimmerer notes, “Whatever your currency of reciprocity — be it money, time, energy, political action, art, science, education, planting, community action, restoration, acts of care, large and small — all are needed in these urgent times.”
If you’d like to know about Robin Wall Kimmerer and her new book, The Serviceberry, I recommend her interview with Emergence Magazine.