The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance, by going to meet it when and where it arrives.

Data tell the story that there are “enough” food calories on the planet for all 8 billion of us to be nourished. And yet people are starving. Imagine the outcome if we each took only enough, rather than far more than our share.

Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?

Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.

In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away.

When human survival is threatened, compassionate acts overrule market economies.

The challenge is to cultivate our inherent capacity for gift economies without the catalyst of catastrophe. We have to believe in our neighbors, that our shared interests supersede the impulses of selfishness.

“The way I see it,” she says, “always value people over things.

I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.

the ones who have more joy win.