I have been reveling in a new book.  Braiding Sweetgrass is a combination of memoir, meditation on ecology, and exploration of the contrast between a western scientific world view and an indigenous world view.  (The author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a professor of botany and ecology at a SUNY school upstate, a poet, and an award-winning nonfiction writer.) This book is going to take me a while to get through.  I have to frequently stop to reread and savor her writing and ideas. 

Generosity and the reciprocal nature of healthy relationships between humans and between humans and the natural world are a theme woven throughout the book. She writes that gifts are ways “to honor, to say thank you, to heal and to strengthen.” But she is not focusing on gifts as commodities.  This book, was to me, a gift in that the new friend who recommended it to me attended to who I am and shared her own love of the book with me.  The gift was in the connection and honoring of our relationship, not in the presentation of the book wrapped in paper and given to me. 

The idea that gifts need to be physical presents is a story that many of us have grown up with. “The stories we choose to shape our behavior have consequences,” Kimmerer writes.  We can choose to focus on a market economy story where presents need to be purchased, or we can choose to focus on a story in which we “bestow our own gifts in kind, to celebrate our kinship with the world.”  

I see lots of benefits for this worldview — environmental and economic sustainability, a framework for caring for others, a reminder to be in “amazement at the richness and generosity of the world.” 

What gifts have you received or recognized lately?