Instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they changed themselves. Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance, by going to meet it when and where it arrives.

But those colonizing plants find they cannot continue this rate of growth and resource extraction. They start to run out of resources, disease may attack the overdense populations, and competition begins to limit their growth. In fact, their behavior facilitates their own replacement. Their rampant growth captures nutrients and builds the more

What would it be like to consume with the full awareness that we are the recipients of earthly gifts, which we have not earned? To consume with humility?

“Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.” If the community is flourishing, then all within it will partake of the same abundance—or shortage—that

The ones who come next are different, growing more slowly in a resource-limited world. Stressful conditions incentivize nurturing relations of cooperation alongside competition.

The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods.

But since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition.

I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else.

Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.