Again and again when we are brought short by natural events – the helix of a raptor’s ascent on a thermal; a flock of knots shoaling over an east-coast estuary; the shadows of cumulus clouds moving across Lewisian moorland on a sunny day – the astonishment we feel concerns a gift freely given, a natural potlatch. During such encounters, we briefly return to a pre-economical state in which things can be ‘tendered’, as Adam Potkay puts it, ‘that is, treated with tenderness – because of the generosity of their self-giving, as if alterity were itself pure gift’.
