Gratitude: A Guest Post by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass is back with a wise and inspiring meditation on the natural world in The Serviceberry. Read on for Robin’s exclusive essay on how she hopes to change readers perspectives on the natural world and catch her on a brand-new episode of our Poured Over podcast.
Hardcover $20.00
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Illustrator
John Burgoyne
In Stock Online
Hardcover $20.00
Taking on expansive issues with care and compassion, Robin Wall Kimmerer provides perspective on what’s truly important, and how we can rediscover ourselves and our place in the natural world.
Taking on expansive issues with care and compassion, Robin Wall Kimmerer provides perspective on what’s truly important, and how we can rediscover ourselves and our place in the natural world.
The inspiration for The Serviceberry comes from the generosity and creativity of the living world. While picking Serviceberries, I saw that they are excellent teachers to help us explore what it might mean for us to live our lives differently. In June and July, these bushes burst with blue, red, and purple berries that taste like a Blueberry crossed with that satisfying crispness of an Apple. They provide nourishment for birds in their breeding season, are a prized find for Deer, and offer up pollen at a crucial moment for newly emerged insects like Tiger Swallowtails. The Serviceberry distributes its wealth to its community, especially the Bluebirds and Cedar Waxwings and Robins that thrive on the berries. The birds don’t pay for this, and there’s no system that determines whether the birds are worthy of this food or if they have worked hard enough for it. Like other plants, the Serviceberry offers up whatever it has to whoever might need it.
So much of our lives are determined by an economic system that actively harms what we love. Looking at the Serviceberry, I see a different way to exist based on reciprocity, as opposed to the scarcity and competition that poisons our human relationships. The Serviceberry doesn’t hoard its crisp berries, it shares its abundance by giving it away. And this is what helps the plant thrive. When the Serviceberry feeds the birds, the birds spread their seeds, allowing for new life to flourish.
When we experience the world as a gift, the way these birds experience these berries, we enter into a new relationship to the world based on gratitude. Gratitude triggers when we feel the world as gift, and the natural response to gratitude is to give a gift in return. These feelings set off a chain reaction of gifting that changes our relationships with each other. Gratitude is a force in the world and it changes our motivations.
This book is an invitation for the reader to participate in the gift economy. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is not money, but gratitude. Where we share with each other the powerful renewable resource of kindness, something that multiplies every time we use it. We have the power to do this. Our needs will be better met when we have a system that values us for own gifts, that puts us in a better relationship with each other, and that celebrates us not for what we have, but for what we give.
Headshot courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.