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Aug 27, 2022
"Reciprocity--returning the gift--is not just good manners; it is how the biophysical world works." --Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Returning the Gift
"Though we live in a world made of gifts, we find ourselves harnessed to institutions and an economy that relentlessly asks, What more can we take from the Earth? This worldview of unbridled exploitation is to my mind the greatest threat to the life that surrounds us. Even our definitions of sustainability revolve around trying to find the formula to ensure that we can keep on taking, far into the future. Isn't the question we need, "What does the Earth ask of us?" The premise of Earth asking something of me makes my heart swell. I celebrate the implicit recognition of the animacy of the Earth: that the living planet has the capacity to ask something of us, and that we have the capacity to respond." More in this essay from Robin Wall Kimmerer.
BE THE CHANGE
Says Kimmerer, "How can we reciprocate the gifts of the Earth? In gratitude, in ceremony, through acts of practical reverence and land stewardship, in fierce defense of the beings and places we love, in art, in science, in song, in gardens, in children, in ballots, in stories of renewal, in creative resistance, in how we spend our money and our precious lives, by refusing to be complicit with the forces of ecological destruction. In healing." How do you feel drawn to reciprocate Earth's gifts?
