Coming Back to Reciprocity
Living rEvolution is a journey of the human species as a collective returning to a sense of belonging in a world of living beings who are all worthy of respect. It is about returning to belonging with and to Earth in a respectful relational way, behaving indigenous again, rather than as alien conquerors. Robin Wall Kimmerer says that after 500 years of being a good neighbor in a place, one can become indigenous to it. Many modern humans have not been acting as good neighbors in the places where they live and have been contributing to local ecocide for centuries if not millennia, and that local ecocide is now reaching global proportions. How can humans become good neighbors again?
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It may have been nearly a decade since I saw this poem written on the wall at a Santa Fe, NM farmers’ market, but it has stayed with me ever since:
“To be of the Earth is to know
the restlessness of being a seed
the darkness of being planted
the struggle toward the light
the joy of bursting and bearing fruit
the love of being food for someone
the scattering of your seeds
the decay of the seasons
the mystery of death and
the miracle of birth.” – John Soos
I was struck and so taken with that line: “the love of being food for someone.”
To eat and be eaten is part of the contract of being a part of the circle of life. A species has to contribute to conditions conducive to the wider community (thank you to Jenine Benyus and the biomimicry community for first sharing this concept with me). Otherwise, over the long-run, the species will undermine conditions for health and will eventually go extinct. The long run can be a million years. But eventually, selfish behavior - where a species does not give back in ways that contribute to conditions conducive to the wider community - will earn you an extinction status. There is a reciprocity to the circle of life that is not tit-for-tat or direct barter. It is more a gift economy where you give and are given to (thank you to Patricia St. Onge for first sharing the concept of give and be given), but not as a direct exchange between the same two parties.
One of the reasons that the human species has gotten into so much trouble is because some of us forgot that we had to give back, or give on, and give forward.
How can we be food for one another? How can we be medicine for one another?
Can those of us who have strayed from reciprocity live a new covenant with the community of life? Can we find our place once again in respectful relationship in the circle of life where are give and are given, rather than taking endlessly?
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Food can be a doorway. For those fortunate enough to have food security, and there are many who don’t, it can be a doorway three, perhaps more times a day into relationship with the world. What could be more intimate and relational than eating the body of another and it becoming part of you? I will never forget the line in Chellis Glendinning’s book, Hi My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery From Western Civilization where she talks about a more indigenous hunting relationship with food that understands for example that “as I become moose, moose become me.” Humans went terribly astray when they forgot this fundamental dependence, and thought we were independent conquerors who could take and take and take with no obligation or respect or return. The worldview that views others as objects rather than beings enables this violence. How can we shift that worldview? How can we come back to relating with a world of living beings worthy of respect rather than a world of objects and dead resources that humans (and certainly some humans more than others) are entitled to exploit with impunity. What can help shift us from an I-it to an I-thou orientation?
Can we greet and give thanks to all of the community of life as a way to orient with humility, respect and reciprocity?
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The book had been inching towards position #1 on my reading list for a while, when a few months ago I was finally able to read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Wow, what an extraordinary gift! Self-described by the author as “a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world” and as “old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other” – the book is just that.
Kimmerer offers such beautiful lessons for the reader – humility, wonder, gratitude, reciprocity, awe. Those are just plain words without the stories to accompany them. But rather than recounting some of Kimmerer’s stories, I wish to share part of my own story.
While reading Braiding Sweetgrass, I found myself newly in relationship with five backyard chickens. The chickens have been a powerful doorway into reciprocal relationship for me, a pathway back to starting the day with gratitude, a daily call to presence. I have long admired practices such as the Haudenosaunee Protocol or Thanksgiving Address as an example – not one I have to appropriate, but rather one that can inspire a shift in relationship for myself – of how a people can orient towards gratitude, the power of what comes after if we begin with humility, reverence and appreciation. So I am grateful for the impact the chickens have had on my life, as my own gratitude practice. This has been my experience:
We had brought these five chickens to live behind our suburban house in a home of their own – commonly referred to as a coop – in August. Never really having had pets in my life, nor any long-term relationship with animals other than humans, I can remember the excitement on the day we brought them home. Many months of preparation had gone into their arrival – first navigating town bureaucracy to get the regulations on the keeping of chickens changed; speaking with all of our neighbors about any concerns they may have; submitting a permit application; undergoing a public hearing with the Board of Health; building the chicken coop with mostly reclaimed materials; painting the coop with love; studying up on how to care for chickens.
The friendly man – Dan – who sold us the chickens – three Rhode Island Reds and two Easter-eggers (so named because they lay pastel pink, blue, or green eggs) – promised us that we would get our first egg on Christmas morning. Growing up in a household that celebrated Christmas, this felt special. I don’t know how Dan could know that with any precision, so I guess he must have been joking. It’s a good thing he was wrong, because we were out of town on Christmas day (with friends looking after the chickens for us while we were gone), and how disappointing it would have been to not be there for the arrival of the first egg. As luck would have it, we were home two days after Christmas, and voila! – the first egg. It was total magic: on that day and many days since, I have not ceased to marvel at the miracle of an egg.
It used to be that I would hit snooze on the alarm clock several times before dragging myself out of bed in the morning, but once the chickens started laying eggs, I began waking up before the alarm went off, thinking about the chickens and eager to jump out of bed and see if there were any more eggs.
It’s funny though. With all this admiration of the miracle of the egg – one that comes from a bird that I am in relationship with rather than from the grocery store with which I have no connection – I wasn’t able to eat any of the first eggs. There is complexity in the reasons for this, and while discussing my reasons with a friend, she helpfully suggested that I simply ask the birds permission to eat their eggs. I was floored with the idea. Why hadn’t I thought to do that myself? Maybe because I grew up in a culture that treats animals as objects rather than as subjects, which eliminates the possibility of communication.
Soon after that conversation, I found myself out in the yard with the chickens, delivering a bowl of salad trimmings – now whenever I make salad, I make salad for two: salad for humans and salad for chickens. The chickens get all of the carrot tops and cucumber peels and lettuce stems; lettuce is one of their favorite treats. As I emptied the food into their dish and as they tore into it with fervor, I thought, perhaps I’ll catch them by the eye one by one, and we can have some silent unspoken communication whereby I could ask if it was okay for me to eat their eggs. After all, I didn’t know chicken language, and they certainly didn’t speak English.
I silently promised to them that I would feed them well and keep them safe to the best of my ability, and silently asked with my heart-mind if I could eat some of their eggs. I did manage to look one and then another of them momentarily in the eye, but it didn’t seem like any substantive communication happened through this momentary eye contact. Rather, the omen that sealed it for me is that as I crouched near the ground as the chickens gobbled up their salad, a speck of lettuce flew back up from the feeding frenzy and landed in the now empty bowl in my hands that I had just brought them food in moments earlier. “Yes, Aravinda. In this relationship, you can eat too.” Message received. I was able to happily eat their eggs after that.
My deepening relationship with the chickens has been my own education in reciprocity, and I take great care with feeding them well – all of the best kitchen scraps are now diverted from the compost directly to the chicken bowl, and every egg is still a miracle.
The chickens have had many lessons for me. Another one is patience. A few weeks ago, we managed to give away nearly two dozen eggs in a single week, which meant that we had to wait a few hours on Sunday morning before we could make French Toast. The gift was again ours, as we hung out in the yard and practiced adjusting from grocery store time to chicken time.
Tending to the chickens in the morning has become a morning ritual for me now. I wake up, get out of bed, go downstairs and put my shoes on. As I open the door to the back yard, my body greets the day and the day greets my body. In winter months the cold air meeting my face brings my body and mind to alertness, reminding me that I am alive. In the spring months, the bird song that greets my ears reminds me that the rest of the world is alive, too. Each morning, I let the chickens out of the coop where they have been safely enclosed from any night predators, and check the water and food levels in the feeder. Most mornings I bring a treat in my silver chicken food bowl – either salad trimmings or some other food scraps that humans were not going to eat. And then I just hang out with the girls for a few minutes before I continue with the rest of my day.
How about you? Do you have a ritual for greeting the living world each new day? If the answer is no, as it was for me for many years, chickens may or may not be a doorway for you. What other doorways are available to you? Perhaps a tree you pass each morning as you walk to catch the bus? Looking at the color of the sky? Greeting the food plants in your morning breakfast?
Thank you chickens for contributing to this doorway for me back into reciprocal relationship, back into wonder, back into gratitude. May we all have abundant doorways.
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In the summer of 2018 I signed up for an online course on animism with Daniel Foor. I have studied a little bit with Daniel Foor on ancestral healing. The classes were recorded and I am just getting around to watching the recordings in the summer of 2019. In the course, Daniel says that the need to come back into relationship with others is a function of cultural damage that has been inherited differently depending on where your ancestors are from and their history with colonization. Many of us have inherited a pattern of disconnection and don’t know how to relate well with the Earth or other-than-humans. But if we go far enough back in our lineage (some of us have to go less far than others), we all have ancestors that lived in earth honoring ways that regarded the land as a community of beings rather than a collection of dead objects. This worldview can be understood as animism. As Daniel phrases it, animism is the understanding and relational approach that living human beings are just one kind of people in a wider relational field of people - most of whom are not human - such as plant people, stone people, human people, those who don’t have physical bodies viewable to us, stars, etc.
Such a worldview is a radical toppling of a colonizer anthropocentric worldview that views only humans as people and as having rights. Daniel uses the word animism to describe “a set of core values that extends personhood or acknowledges the inherent personhood of more-than-humans and does not see living humans as somehow above the others.” He continues that because of an emphasis on relationship, “the ideal is that a living human being learns how to relate humbly, skillfully, and respectfully with the other-than-humans.” Western civilization has severe cultural damage in that it does not teach humans how to relate humbly, skillfully and respectfully. Rather, the worldview positions human as conquerors, with the right to exploit with impunity.
Class two of the animism course is on Eating, Killing, and Giving Thanks. As part of the homework for that class, Daniel instructed us to reflect on a food that we often eat, and the next time we eat it, to invite the conscious experience of what it is like to be eating the body of another being, and what it is like for that being to be eaten by you. I tried this with some wild strawberries. I was mowing the grass at Starseed in mid June and I passed a particularly luscious looking patch of wild strawberries. They were larger and juicier than any of the other wild strawberries I had seen growing around, because that area had not yet been mowed that season. They were so enticing, I stopped the mower and got off.
As I knelt in the grass, I reverently thanked the land for the gift of these strawberries and then feasted on handfuls of them. As I chewed them in my mouth, the thought came to me that this strawberry was now becoming part of me, the digestive juices in my stomach would soon be breaking down the bodies of the strawberries, metabolizing them and incorporating them into my blood, bones and body. I thought “you and I are not so separate anymore, strawberry. You are now part of me.” It reminded me of that line that has made such an impression on me from Hi My Name Is Chellis And I Am In Recovery From Western Civilization - “as moose becomes me, I become moose.” The strawberry is now me. And I feel responsible for giving in turn and contributing to conditions conducive for that community to thrive. While I have eaten the body of a strawberry, I can still contribute to conditions for the wider community of strawberries to thrive. It reminds me of an ethical relationship I have heard Derrick Jensen describe before with I believe salmon. Use rights/taking rights/harvest rights obligate the eater to contribute to the health of the community from which they are taking. This means you don’t take too much so as to undermine the viability of the population you are harvesting from, and otherwise contribute to conditions conducive to the community from which you are taking.
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Given shifting household responsibilities, I fell out of the pattern of chicken care being my morning greeting of the day. Within the past few weeks, I’ve developed a new ritual. It involves going out to the garden and harvesting some plants - most usually chamomile and lemon balm - although today I also added raspberry leaf. As I harvest the plants, I greet them and take in their presence, thanking them for contributing to my life. I then bring them inside and steep them in hot water to make tea. In this way I drink the land in a way that feels so intimate.
An important part of the ritual is offering the first sip to the land and the ancestors of this place. I greet them and say that I come humbly and with respect and seek to be a good neighbor in this place to the entire community of the living. After offering greetings and thanks and first sip, I return inside with the tea pot and pour some tea into one of my ancestor’s porcelain tea cups and thank them and invite them to be with me in my work that day.
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This morning when I went out to pick lemon balm and chamomile for my morning tea, there were two rabbits in the front yard. This was bad news for me, because our whole front yard is garden beds and I didn’t want the rabbits eating things up. We’ve left the back yard as partial domain of coexistence – in the garden beds back there I plant things that rabbits tend not to eat – garlic, leeks, tomatoes, basil. And they can’t eat the upper levels of the food forest we are trying to establish back there, but they did eat the entire cover crop of winter peas. I would sit at the kitchen table, where I am writing now and for weeks watch them just eat up the pea tendrils until there was nothing left. I don’t mind sharing some food, but it was frustrating because I like to cut the peas when they get tall and then they mulch in place and keep the soil covered and suppress other plant growth. Now, all manner of plants are growing and I don’t know what I am going to do with that ground area under the fruit trees and berry bushes (any permaculture friends have some advice?).
So this morning when I went out and discovered the rabbits in the front yard, I felt annoyed and chased them away (of course they just ran around to the back of the house). They went out of my mind as I harvested lemon balm and chamomile, thanking the plants for their being and singing to them a little. Thinking about how this is the week I intend to put up signs on the sidewalk inviting humans to pick some herbs if they would like. I have been looking forward to sharing in this way for so long, but I had my limits with the rabbits.
So I went inside and made my pot of tea, along with a pot of coffee, which is also a ritual morning drink, and the thought suddenly came to me to offer the first sip back to the land which has provided me with so much nourishment. It wasn’t an original thought. I remembered how Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks in Braiding Sweetgrass about I believe her parents’ practice of pouring out the first sip of coffee to the land as a morning greeting ritual of thanks and respect.
So I went out the back door with both my teapot that was steeping and my French press that was brewing, and of course there was a rabbit just sitting there in the grass. Thoughts raced through my head like – we should catch these rabbits and get rid of them (yikes so violent!). We had a stare down for a while with each other, the rabbit and I, and then I approached the grass and knelt with my two pots of morning beverages. The rabbit moved a few feet away, and as I put the two pots down on the ground I noticed right smack in the center between where I had placed the two pots – rabbit poop! “The nerve! Now I’m going to step in rabbit poop when I walk in my back yard!” my mind thought irrritatedly. “These rabbits really have to go.” Luckily I was able to just observe my thoughts, for there to be separation between a thought and an action, and then another thought came, “well, isn’t it their back yard too? Here I am coming out to do this supposed ritual of gratitude and respect to the land and I am thinking about trapping and killing its inhabitants?”
There are so many interesting questions about coexistence and hypocrisy. Many of them alive in my body, mind and actions.
I shared the above on social media and am so grateful to friends who let me know that rabbit poop is an excellent fertilizer and they are doing a service with recycling nutrients. A few days later when talking with a friend I was sharing how every year the birds eat most of the currents and gooseberries before we harvest them, as well as the grapes if the racoons don’t get them. We intentionally leave the violets and I don’t mind the rabbits eating those. And we leave lots of plants to go to flower including dandelions which are one of the first foods available for bees in the spring. It brings me such joy to see up to ten different pollinators on the leeks that are flowering. The way we cultivate conditions in our yard, or work in concert with the plants growing in our yard - some we planted, some who volunteered themselves - creates an abundance of food for both humans and other animal species. Our yard is delicious food for many beings. A giant bird feeder without ever having gone to the store. Earth provides so abundantly.
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I used to get confused. I used to think that my book would be written while I was at my computer. Obviously that is where words get on the page, but the book is being written throughout my days and life, in my interactions with the world as I am living the revolutions. It is not just being written by me, it is being written in concert with the world, as we are dynamically interconnected and linked. It is co-arising. This shift in paradigm, this shift in consciousness is at the heart of Living rEvolution, overcoming the false separation in our mind and then enacted in our actions. We do not exist as separate creatures that enforce our will on the world in some independent way. Yes we are autonomous, and we are interdependent. I am so grateful for the words that come to and through me in relationship with the living world, the ideas that are written while doing things in the garden.
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What is a weed and what isn’t?
How do you contribute to care of the world?
When is it care of an other and when is it self-preservation?
Last night a man came over for dinner who is developing a Global Climate Corp leadership program to talk with me and Joseph about the Work That Reconnects and how he might incorporate it into his program. We may have given him a bigger earful than he was anticipating!
Because evenings are often our best availability for meeting up with people, and we have more vegetables than we know what to do with right now, we asked if we could talk over dinner. I served salad with lettuce and peas from our farmshare and rocket, purslane, basil, dill, cilantro and nasturtiums from our front yard. When we said what the options for dinner were, I asked if he knew what purslane was. He said “yes, it is a weed that grows in my garden.” And I said, “yes it volunteers itself in garden beds and it is also edible. I put some in the salad.” So then we started talking about what is a weed and what isn’t a weed… For some purslane is an unwanted nuisance and for others it is food.
This morning I spent some time removing black swallowwort from the yard – an invasive that I definitely consider a weed. It is one of the plants that is toxic for monarch butterflies because appearing similar to milkweed, they lay their eggs on it, but it is not a food for them and it kills them. So I remove the swallowwort from my yard, and the part of the neighbors yard that abuts ours as an act of solidarity with the Monarchs which are already facing so much difficulty as it is.
And so as I was weeding this morning I was also removing small saplings, because I didn’t want them to grow into big trees because I was trying to keep that area garden beds rather than forest. I would suspect the saplings don’t consider them weeds – but I am choosing to remove them to manage for one kind of habitat/ecosystem over another. Garden isn’t absolutely better than forest. Am I weeding when I remove the trees, engaging in a selfish act of choosing one ecosystem over another, or is it not selfish to manage for one ecosystem over another?
As I was weeding, or removing plants – maybe depends on perspective, I was realizing how much I have been loving spending time in my garden in the past few weeks. This morning I harvested a quart of raspberries – an activity I missed last year because I spent the entire month of July in western MA at a regenerative culture living laboratory where we were intensely focused on interpersonal and group dynamics. I have continued that learning process over the year, as well as a deep inquiry into personal healing. I am interested in healing disconnections and splits within myself, within human groups I am a part of and between me and other humans and the ecosystems we are a part of. As I was weeding, I was suddenly struck by how these past few weeks I have been connecting so much more deeply with this local land around my house – this particular place. As I write this now, I am sitting at my kitchen table looking out at a rabbit in my backyard who is munching away on things.
The birds ate so many of the berries this year before we got to them.
I grabbed some raspberries this morning before the chipmunks made off with them.
I am waiting for the raccoon to return for the grapes.
We had a vision to transition this land where we live into an edible oasis – food forest, etc. and it is happening over time. Food for us and food for the other beings who live in this place. I feed the chickens a lot of wood sorrel I remove from the garden beds. The chicken poop is fertilizer for the garden beds. We buy organic chicken feed from the store, so it is not a closed loop, but there is a lot of cycling happening in this tenth of an acre.
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My life is my work. My life is the book. How I choose to live my life, day by day, moment by moment, is the rEvolution. While some things I do and choices I make are not the rEvolution, I am still stuck in many old systems and ways of relating that are not life affirming, it also isn’t a binary that one day you aren’t living the rEvolution and the next day you are. It is progressive, comes in stages, and you have to commit over and over daily, moment by moment. Sometimes it can take a long time for something to happen, and then suddenly, it happens very quickly. But all of the building to it was part of the revolution. It isn’t only the product that matters. That is a capitalistic lie. You don’t ever get to the product without the process, so you can’t actually separate the one from the other. You build the capacity over time. And ideally, you do it with help and support. Someone who has been such an influential teacher to me, Lucien Demaris of Relational Uprising, says that if you want to change a behavior, it is not just a matter of coercing more willpower, but rather of bringing more support online.
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Sometimes I plan on doing something for a long time and then one day, it suddenly happens. It isn’t really sudden, it may have been a long time in the works, but then the result can appear suddenly. For example, when we moved to this house maybe 10 years ago, I didn’t like that it was on a busy street, but I thought, hey, let’s use it as an opportunity to share messages with everyone who passes by. Maybe 8 years ago, we sheet mulched the entire front yard - a permaculture technique to get rid of the grass without disturbing the soil structure - and put in vegetable garden beds. And that was a message: you can grow food instead of grass. And then when we had housemates move in, we invited them to make signs also and some did. Fyonn (thank you Fyonn) painted this great (need kale, pick some) sign and I think Tess did the lettering for the semi-automatic silhouette that read #neveragain. When we redesigned the front yard (thank you Meghan for your help with that), we intentionally put in a lower terrace next to the sidewalk that was intended to be an interactive zone with anyone passing by. I’ve wanted to put up signs that said things like “this is purslane, it’s a wild edible that I put in salads. It is especially tasty with grated carrots, cucumber, and a simple dressing of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper.” I’ve yet to make that sign, but thanks to Joseph who whipped up these signs, we planted them today and now have labels on most of the herb spiral and lower terrace inviting people to harvest some herbs if they would like some. “If you have more than you need, build a bigger table, not a bigger wall.”
Given and be given. Keep the the gifts moving.