sarah, she/they, bi, 28 | Great Lakes biologist | Black Lives Matter | 🇵🇸 | feminist, ally for trans rights | (radfems terfs swerfs can fuck off, you're not feminists) | aquatic fairytalecore
When the food does not come from a flock in the sky, when you don’t feel the warm feathers cool in your hand and know that a life has been given for yours, when there is no gratitude in return—that food may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full. Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.
How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers—the living world could not bear our weight—but even in a market economy, can we behave "as if" the living world were a gift?
We could start by listening to Wally. There are those who will try to sell the gifts, but, as Wally says of sweetgrass for sale, “Don’t buy it.” Refusal to participate is a moral choice. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don’t buy it. When food has been wrenched from the earth, depleting the soil and poisoning our relatives in the name of higher yields, don’t buy it. In material fact, strawberries belong only to themselves.
The exchange relationships we choose determine whether we share them as a common gift or sell them as a private commodity. A great deal rests on that choice. For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule. But some invented a different story, a social construct in which everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.
One of these stories sustains the living systems on which we depend. One of these stories opens the way to living in gratitude and amazement at the richness and generosity of the world. One of these stories asks us to bestow our own gifts in kind, to celebrate our kinship with the world. We can choose. If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.
In those childhood fields, waiting for strawberries to ripen, I used to eat the sour white ones, sometimes out of hunger but mostly from impatience. I knew the long-term results of my short-term greed, but I took them anyway. Fortunately, our capacity for self-restraint grows and develops like the berries beneath the leaves, so I learned to wait. A little. I remember lying on my back in the fields watching the clouds go by and rolling over to check the berries every few minutes. When I was young, I thought the change might happen that fast. Now I am old and I know that transformation is slow.
The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four
hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made
of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze.
Braiding Sweetgrass: The Gift of Strawberries, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Clara Peeters (Flemish, 1584 - 1657): Table with a cloth, salt cellar, gilt tazza, pie, jug, porcelain dish with olives, and roast fowl (c. 1611) (via Museo del Prado)
tamarackshack​: Took a year to complete this quilt! Pattern is by NASA Astronaut Karen Nyberg called Cupola View. Fabrics used were also designed by Karen, the collection is called Earth Views.
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