Is This the Path of Love?

We recently finished reading The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It is a beauty of a book expanding on the essay of the same name first published in 2020. In it, Kimmerer explores the gift economy, where resources are shared freely and reciprocally, rather than hoarded.

Kimmerer contrasts this with our current economy, which is based on scarcity and competition. She states, “we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.” She also reminds us that there are other ways of being, and that we can find examples of gift economies all around us, if we only orient towards them. 

If we close our eyes, we see little free libraries, bowls of water left out for pets, and meal trains that we have organized, contributed to, and received from. We see donation only classes, sliding scale workshops, community dinners and potlucks. We see work parties and beach cleanups and not to be forgotten, our neighbors' spaghetti squash, which make it to our doorstep at the close of every summer.

Kimmerer notes many of the ideas we have written about before from the B Corp movement to Doughnut Economics to biomimicry to reverence for the natural materials that we are honored to work with every day in this practice.

We are reminded of the cork oak trees whose bark is harvested every nine years without disrupting the surrounding ecosystem, allowing them to continue to thrive in good health for up to two hundred years. As long as we take a little, not too much, we can continue to work together in this relationship of mutual respect. 

Thinking of the wildfires in Los Angeles, where friends, family, clients, and colleagues have been evacuated and/or have lost homes, businesses, schools, and entire communities, it is hard not to be overwhelmed by grief. The scale of loss is wide and deep and also there are Mutual Aid efforts and pages of GoFundMe's demonstrating the sharing of resources. It centers the truth that in times of crisis, folks show up in communities of care.

Kimmerer asks us to see "enoughness" as a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more. That is how we are choosing to orient in this moment. To find our way, we have been using a question posed recently by a teacher of ours that simply asks, "Is this the path of love?"

The question invites us to think a moment before we respond, to let that car ahead of us merge, to send that check-in text, to write that note of gratitude, to offer a smile to a stranger, to take an extra breath, to make that soup to share.

In The Serviceberry, Kimmerer questions, "If the Sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, what is the "Sun" of a human gift economy, the source that consonantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love."

We hope you are keeping safe and well, friends. We need you out there on the path of love.