“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Giving
I was born into the time of Giving.
It is a Giving, of course,
That is not new,
But that has existed since the dawn of time;
Heaved up from below,
Raining down from above,
And slipping like ribbons
across the face of the Land;
Restless, churning, cycling;
Sometimes terrifying, always beautiful;
Always giving.
The air
The rocks
The waters
The creatures
The sunlight
All gifts
But all limited
By the tempo of the cycles,
By the beat of the songs
Played by the ancient musicians
From the beginning.
Taking
But I was also born into the time of Taking.
This Taking, of course,
Though far younger than the Giving,
Was not new to my species.
But it had been accelerated,
Refined, focused,
Sharpened, organized,
Quantified, optimized,
Monetized, rationalized,
and rendered so toxic
That all its yellow eyes fell upon
(Which was much and then most)
Withered and blew away
It was a Taking framed as holy religion,
Masterminded by dispassionate science,
Engineered with adroit technology,
Powered by ancient sunlight,
Defended with card tricks and hell-fire,
And inspired by both the crushing sadness
And blinding selfishness of a suicide.
And for what purpose, this Taking?
Alas (alas!), it sought,
as its ultimate and baffling goal,
the reduction of a miracle
To blendered entropy;
A spark of magic at the cost
Of the world.
And now, fifty years later,
This Taking,
Metastasized and overgrown,
Has diminished
Not just the songs of the present,
And not just the songs of the future,
But now even the songs of very distant future;
A scale of time as unimaginable to our minds,
as forever.
This is the Taking
Into which I was born,
And to which I have served.
The Obligation of Gifts
So now what?
Now that we have reached
The endgame,
When the songs of the Giving
Are becoming softer
And sometimes falling out of tune,
And instruments are dropping out
One by one,
And even the ends of these songs entirely
Are imaginable.
What are we to do now?
For the songs are not gone yet.
And we are still here.
And now,
As we still breathe,
And we still see and feel,
And hear and taste,
And we still have hands,
And we still have voices,
And we can still laugh and cry and love,
We can do,
Once again,
What is the right thing to do
When given these gifts,
Or any gift:
We can
Say thank you.
And we can acknowledge
That these are indeed
Gifts
That we have been,
And are continuing to be,
Given.
And we can treasure the gifts,
Even the smallest,
And treat them with the respect
And love
That all gifts deserve.
And we can nurture the upwelling desire
To repay these gifts
In whatever way we can.
And we can trust that
What we give back
To those we love
Will always be returned to us
In some way.
Flowers of the Food Forest
So on an April morning,
Birdsong ringing out,
The ground wet with dew,
I sink a shovel into the damp soil
And plant another tree.
And I upright one from last year
that has fallen over in the Winter,
And I start seeds
For those that I will plant next year.
And I visit a sour cherry,
Planted fifteen years ago,
And now in full, glorious bloom
(That may perhaps avoid the frosts this year).
And I stand in awe,
With an upwelling of love
And thankfulness,
For these gifts,
For all these beautiful gifts
We are given.
