Unfurling

“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.”

From Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

 

This morning I chose to experience and be a part of the gifts in motion in my backyard.  I surrendered, with eyes wide-open, to the great unfurling that is taking place on the forest floor and in the trees and inside of me.  So many ways to emerge, open and become.  Along the way, I foraged fiddleheads for supper for the first time.  I then slid into the cabin by the brook and lay in the bed, drifting in and out of sleep.

“We say that people have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn – we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.  Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live.  They teach us by example.  They’ve been on this earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.  They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld with the earth.  Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.”  Braiding Sweetgrass