wild cherry plums, Candelo, NSW
I recently wrote an essay which discussed the idea of Community as ‘being in service to others’, to be published shortly in a homesteading newsletter. In my mind I had a picture of the never-ending cycle of reciprocity which I am calling the Cycle of Abundance. I want to expand on that idea here.
The Cycle of Abundance
the Earth freely gives - we accept - we Gift to others - others feel Gratitude - out of Gratitude others give - we recieve
In her essay The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer explores Gift Economy and how we can relate differently to currency. She starts the essay by describing the abundance offered by Mother Earth…
The bushes are laden with fat clusters of red, blue, and wine purple in every stage of ripeness—so many, you can pick them by the handful. I’m glad I have a pail and wonder if the birds will be able to fly with their bellies as full as mine.
This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are—along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in the towers of cumulonimbi. You could call them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts. We both sing gratitude with our mouths full.
The Earth freely gives to us and, if we are paying attention, we can see that; we can see the bounty all around us - from the ‘weeds’ (plantain, dandelion, mallow, yarrow, etc.) to the fruits trees and the nut trees, from the rain and running water to the fish swimming there - the bounty of the Earth is everywhere. My daughter and I are keeping a close eye on the wild plum trees near our house. Each night after dinner we take a walk to see how close they are to being ready; we talk about what we will make with them…plum sauce, an upside down plum cake, jam - most of which we will share or give as gifts.
As Kimmerer points out, abundance is everywhere. Once we recieve these gifts from the Earth, it is our highest duty to share them out amongst our friends, family and community. Our natural response should be to spread the ‘wealth’ around, but we have learned to hoard the Earth’s bounty for ourselves. Abundance, though, should be redistributed evenly.
Whether these gifts are freely accessible to all or are from our labour (i.e. from your cultivated garden) need not alter this order - abundance needs to be shared out. According to Rudolf Steiner, the act of giving to others is what underpins a healthy, dynamic society, in which everyone’s needs are met, what Steiner called an Associative Economy:
In a community of people working together, the wellbeing of the community will be the greater the less that the individual claims for themselves the proceeds of the work they have done; i.e. the more of these proceeds they give over to their fellow human beings, and the more their own requirements are satisfied not out of their own work, but out of work done by the others.
At first this statement seems counter-intuative, especially seen through the lense of our current Machine Culture. It would seem as though giving things away leaves us with nothing, but, in fact, ‘giving away’ means things also being given to us.
Gratitude and Reciprocity
The act of recieving a gift makes us feel Gratitude. Gratitude sparks the impulse of Resiprocity; it makes us feel the desire to give back. Reciprocity is defined as “responding to a positive action with another positive action.” We tend to think of Reciprocity as payback, giving something back so that we are no longer in their debt; but this is Machine thinking again. Reciprocity is about giving to others, giving in general, not repaying a debt. This is Indirect Reciprocity - gifting is just feeding back into the Cycle of Abundance.
The cherry plums pictured above are the equivalent of Kimmerer’s Serviceberries here in southern New South Wales. The Cycle of Abundance works like this here: Mother Nature offers up cherry plums on the sides of the roads, my daughter and I forage as many as we can carry day after day, we make gifts for our friends like plum jam, fermented plum soda (or plum wine) and spicy plum sauce, those we gift are inspired to continue giving and make beautiful things for their Community, we recieve those beautiful items (as we are part of their Community) and feel Gratitude for them, we are inspired to continue Gifting.
This cycle is very different from the story we have been told in our culture - that all economic life is based on scarcity. Economic life is (supposedly) the basis for the way we spend our days, e.g. working for money so we can purchase those items that are (erroniously) in short supply from Big Business, whom we do not know, but are indebted to. This is not the story I want to be living in, this is not the way I want to live my life. I want to live in a place of Abundance where I live to serve others and all economics are sacred.
I think that the Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency. Without gift relationships with bees and birds, Serviceberries would disappear from the planet. Even if they hoarded abundance, perching atop the wealth ladder, they would not save themselves from the fate of extinction if their partners did not share in that abundance. Hoarding won’t save us either. All flourishing is mutual…..Thriving is possible only if you have nurtured strong bonds with your community.
It is to Mother Nature that Robin Wall Kimmerer turns for guidance…and she isn’t the only one looking to Nature for direction.
Sacred Economics
In his book, Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein says,
In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources. The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear. Money may not disappear anytime soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as it takes on more of the properties of the gift. The economy will shrink, and our lives will grow.
We are in a maturation process. The global shifts we are experiencing are bringing us closer to the next step in our cultural evolution – ‘we’ are greater than ‘I’ and “all flourishing is mutual” according to Robin Wall Kimmerer.
I don’t mean this in the way Ayn Rand did in her books We the Living and The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand, coming from a Communist country, painted a picture where individual lives are sacrificed for the sake of the collective, where our sense of individuality is extinguished and the group is all-powerful. This idea that only one entity, either the Collective or the Individual, can hold power is erroneous. We can live our authentic life while serving the Community, they are not mutually exclusive.
…human individuality will not be forced into an institutional mould. How one person assists another, how one helps another advance, will simply arise from what one, through his own abilities and accomplishments, is able to be for the other. It is no great wonder that presently many people are still able to imagine nothing but a state of anarchy as a result of such free human relations in the spiritual-cultural branch. Those who think so simply do not know what powers of our inmost nature are stunted when we are forced to develop according to patterns imposed by the state and the economic system. Such powers, deep within human nature, cannot be developed by institutions, but only through what one being calls forth in perfect freedom from another being.
In this quote Rudolph Steiner is confirming that we can, and should, have both individual freedom and collective strength. We can only offer to others those things which come genuinely from our Souls, which are pure and honest. If we all approached economics through the lens of the sacred, we could create a system which honored everyone involved, and honored Nature as well. Kimmerer described it like this:
You might rightly observe that we no longer live in small, insular societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations. But we could. It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy. Intentional communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity are the wave of the future, and their currency is sharing. The move toward a local food economy is not just about freshness and food miles and carbon footprints and soil organic matter. It is all of those things, but it’s also about the deeply human desire for connection, to be in reciprocity with the gifts that are given you.
In Nature we find guidance, we find the example of how to act, how to share, how to recipricate….if only we can be quite and humble for long enough to see it.
Local Communities, Local Economies
In his essay, The Total Economy, Wendell Berry states:
We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of ‘raw materials,’ and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes…
What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the ‘developed’ world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly increasing their proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, childcare, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of ‘service’ that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities. Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others….The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life….we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, God-given world…
And so we have before us the spectacle of unprecedented ‘prosperity’ and ‘economic growth’ in a land of degraded farms, forests, ecosystems, and watersheds, polluted air, failing families, and perishing communities.
Wendell Berry is describing how we have come to be where we are, what he calls The Total Economy - living in a land where we have degraded the Earth, relinquished our responsibilites and commitments, placed comfort and ease over self-reliance. “To be a consumer in the Total Economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers,’ explains Berry.
His solution is to move into a Local Economy based on two priciples: neighborhood and subsistence. Neighborhood is what I would call Community, and according to Berry a neighbor asks what he can do or provide for others; and subsistence occurs when a neighborhood cherishes and protects what is common.
Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
Again, we are back to “all flourishing is mutual.” Whether you call it a Local Economy, a Gift Economy or an Associate Economy, it is all the same idea - if we are in service to our Community, just as Mother Nature is in service to us, we will be able to feel secure knowing that our needs will be met through The Cycle of Abundance.
the Earth freely gives - we accept - we Gift to others - others feel Gratitude - out of Gratitude others give - we recieve