The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance

and I can see how my delight levitates her, too.

When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes.

When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don’t mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal “payment.” I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of be

Making good relationships with the human and more-than-human world is the primary currency of well-being.

I don’t think it’s pie in the sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy.

The wealth and security we seem to crave could be met by sharing what we have.

when you open your awareness and give them a name, you can see gift economies all around you.

The currency of relationship can manifest itself as money down the road, because Paulie and Ed do have to pay the bills. Free berries might translate to better pumpkin sales, because people will want to come back to a place they have a relationship with. “People feel like they got something more than they paid for,” she explained. “They learned abo

The relationships created by the gift weave myriad relations between insects and microbes and root systems. The gift is multiplied with every giving, until it returns so rich and sweet that it burbles forth as the birdsong that wakes me in the morning.