being

There are new things, good things, that I can see for the first time in a while. It makes me smile to finally understand this, that we have only the things we are given, and we must be thankful for them, the tiny, almost imperceptible feeling on our fingertips.

Cyrus paused for a second. He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.

“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

He wondered if it had maybe been the sheer weight of his wanting, or his watching, that strained his eyes till they saw what they’d wanted to see. He wondered if maybe that was how God worked now in the new world.

I’m there to see it, and I do feel something like religious ecstasy, but not because I long to understand God, but because I long to better know what it means to be human.

In the Anishinaabe worldview, it’s not just fruits that are understood as gifts, rather all of the sustenance that the land provides, from fish to firewood. Everything that makes our lives possible—the splints for baskets, roots for medicines, the trees whose bodies make our homes, and the pages of our books—is provided by the lives of

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.

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?