Never too old to learn to be grateful

 N. Scott Momaday has a new book that will be released or published on Tuesday, May 3: Dream Drawings, Configurations of a Timeless Kind. It’s on order and should be delivered in about a week. That will give me a decent opportunity to get several other recently acquired books read before the pile grows much higher. Part of my “problem” is that I keep rereading books I’ve already read as new material reminds me of certain passages or themes. There may not be a grand synthesis of knowledge and wisdom, but that’s not likely to keep me from trying to conjure one. It all goes back to learning that Joni Mitchell was accurate and truthful when she wrote:

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

much of May, Earth showers us with beauty

Photo by J. Harrington

Even if we’re not living in the original garden of Eden, during much of May Earth showers the North Country with many kinds of beauty. Too often, I’ve found myself taking it for granted. That lack of gratitude was disrupted the first time I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. That’s also when I learned that my basic understanding of reciprocity, which I took to mean the biblical “an eye for an eye” was wrong. Gratitude, properly understood, is more like the golden rule. In fact, to welcome May properly, and help celebrate Beltane, I want to quote extensively from a Kimmerer essay on reciprocity.

Reciprocity—returning the gift—is not just good manners; it is how the biophysical world works. Balance in ecological systems arises from negative feedback loops, from cycles of giving and taking. Reciprocity among parts of the living Earth produces equilibrium, in which life as we know it can flourish. When the gift is in motion, it can last forever. Positive feedback loops, in which interactions spur one another away from balance, produce radical change, often to a point of no return.

How can we reciprocate the gifts of the Earth?

1. We must recognize ourselves as only one member of the great democracy of species and understand that we, like every other successful organism, must play by the rules that govern ecosystem function. The laws of thermodynamics have not been suspended on our behalf. Unlimited growth is not possible. In a finite world, we cannot relentlessly take without replenishment.
2. Long before the descent of humans, a solar economy of plants created a living world from inanimate materials, constantly regenerating life through networks of reciprocity. Industrial economies are hell-bent on reversing that process, converting the gloriously animate to cold dead products with stunning efficiency. Our paths on the Earth are shaped by what we love the most. We participate in economies that appear to love profits for a few members of one species more than a good green world for all. We have a choice to invest our love otherwise. We must align our economies with ecological principles and human integrity.
3. Ecological restoration is an act of reciprocity and the Earth asks us to turn our gifts to healing the damage we have done. The Earth-shaping prowess that we thoughtlessly use to sicken the land can be used to heal it. It is not just the land that is broken, but our relationship with land. We can be medicine for the Earth, partners in renewal.
4. Reciprocity is rooted in the understanding that we are not alone, that the Earth is populated by non-human persons, wise and inventive beings deserving of our respect. We tolerate governance that grants legal personhood and free speech to corporations but denies that respect to voiceless salamanders and sugar maples. The Earth asks that we be their voice. Indigenous-led movements across the world are conferring legal personhood on rivers and mountains. The Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth has been presented to the United Nations. I think the Earth is asking for our vote.

Gratitude is our first, but not our only gift. We are storytellers, music makers, devisers of ingenious machines, healers, scientists, and lovers of an Earth who asks that we give our own unique gifts on behalf of life.

Let us live in a way that Earth will be grateful for us.

As I’ve become more involved in sustainable development and resilient living, or vice versa, I’ve come to believe more and more that many Native Americans have philosophies and world views that are more aligned with the values I now hold dear than I can find in neoliberal capitalism or anything like it. That brings us back to my looking forward to the arrival of Dream Drawings and sometime soon rereading Braiding Sweetgrass again.

Worms

By Carl Dennis

Aren't you glad at least that the earthworms  

Under the grass are ignorant, as they eat the earth,  

Of the good they confer on us, that their silence  

Isn't a silent reproof for our bad manners,  

Our never casting earthward a crumb of thanks  

For their keeping the soil from packing so tight  

That no root, however determined, could pierce it?  

Imagine if they suspected how much we owe them,  

How the weight of our debt would crush us  

Even if they enjoyed keeping the grass alive,  

The garden flowers and vegetables, the clover,  

And wanted nothing that we could give them,  

Not even the merest nod of acknowledgment.  

A debt to angels would be easy in comparison,  

Bright, weightless creatures of cloud, who serve  

An even brighter and lighter master.  

Lucky for us they don't know what they're doing,  

These puny anonymous creatures of dark and damp  

Who eat simply to live, with no more sense of mission  

Than nature feels in providing for our survival.  

Better save our gratitude for a friend  

Who gives us more than we can give in return  

And never hints she's waiting for reciprocity.  

"If I had nickel, I'd give it to you,"  

The lover says, who, having nothing available  

In the solid, indicative world, scrapes up  

A coin or two in the world of the subjunctive.  

"A nickel with a hole drilled in the top  

So you can fasten it to your bracelet, a charm  

To protect you against your enemies."  

For his sake, she'd wear it, not for her own,  

So he might believe she's safe as she saunters  

Home across the field at night, the moon above her,  

Below her the loam, compressed by the soles of her loafers,  

And the tunneling earthworms, tireless, silent,  

As they persist, oblivious, in their service.

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