All flourishing is mutual
Summer comes in fits and starts in the mountains that cut through the western edge of Massachusetts, where I’ve lived for the past three years. As winter peels away, buds constellate the tips of branches and birds start to sing earlier, waking me up at dawn, teasing us with fleeting sunshine before blanketing us in weeks of cold rain. Last week, we had one of those misleading hot, balmy days, so my partner and I got in the car and wove our way over the mountain pass to our favorite pond for the season’s first swim.
North Pond sits in a cluster of marshes and small bodies of water in Savoy Mountain State Forest, formed from the tug and pull of receding glaciers almost twelve thousand years ago, on land originally home to the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians. The pond itself is small, simple, with a thin sandy beach, bordered by trees and wild blueberry bushes that bear fruit in July.
North Pond, Savoy, MA, July 23rd, 1979 (Photo credit: Berkshire Eagle)
When we got up there, we took a lesser-known trail through the woods, past half a dozen stone fire pits built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the ‘30s—the same group that my grandfather helped establish with the Roosevelt’s, and the antecedent of the Peace Corps—before landing at a large granite outcrop on the water’s edge, where we set up our picnic blanket, slathered on sunscreen, and pulled out our books.
After finishing the final pages of Maggie Nelson’s Jane, a haunting, poetic expose of her aunt’s self-searing and searching journal entries and later murder, I opened up The Serviceberry, by the Indigenous scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer—a much lighter and hopeful read. In its pages, Kimmerer tells the story of a fruit-bearing bush important to the Anishinaabe people, and how its sweet offerings illuminate both the wonder and fundamental nature of nature itself: The earth is a circular system of gift-giving, where one life is always in service of another. She writes:
“In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity…the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.” (Pg. 32-33).
I think we all inherently know this to be true. We sink our teeth into capitalism without realizing the apple is poisoned, but our lives are full of moments that disintegrate the idea that wealth is only tethered to cash. We know we are rich in many other ways: The quiet of a morning, neighbors who shovel your sidewalk, friends who send a text on a hard day.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how, as a business owner, I’m tethered to exploitative economies—but my moral heart wants different circuitry. For the past few months, I’ve been researching and taking workshops on leading an anticapitalist business with two other female entrepreneurs, Kate Tyson and Emily Eley. A question they offered guides me: “What would each of us build if the goal was to care for everybody?”
Although I don’t have the answer, I’m starting in ways that I can—like by starting the Common Ground Mentorship program to provide First Gen, Low-Income students with 10 free hours of college counseling support, mentored by FGLI college students who will be paid for their work. I’m also constantly moved by the wisdom of my own students, who not only understand Kimmerer’s concepts of reciprocity but try to take deliberate action to create a more flourishing world. One of my seniors last year—soon heading off to Dartmouth—wrote her Personal Statement on these ideas and her own activism:
“When I walk in the woods, I absorb stories of connection visible in the understory: reciprocity, the cyclical exchanges through which we support one another. As a local in a tourist town, I rooted myself in the community by forming connections with fishermen who seemed to be thriving. But over time, I saw patterns in their stories: worse yields than years before, poorer quality fish, and a growing stream of polluting microplastics from marine gear in Maine’s waters. I then researched how a plastic-free marine economy could benefit both the planet and people. Alongside a team of local students, I found the solution in mycelium—in those distant lessons of the Chanterelles. We built on the work of mycologists before us, using this ancient material as an alternative to disintegrating styrofoam dock floats. I found purpose in engineering, grounded in mutualistic tenets.”
It’s a gorgeous paragraph. As all good college essays do, she brings us into the fold of her life with descriptive language, illustrates her own intellectual curiosities, and gives an impressive example of what she’s done to solve a pressing problem. But it’s more than that: Readers get a small window into her heart—who she is, what she values, what she cares about—and therefore we see her as a compassionate, driven human, defined by more than test scores and grades.
A few months ago, Robin Wall Kimmerer came to speak at Williams College, the prestigious liberal arts school nestled in the town where I live. I arrived at the stone-columned and vaulted ceiling of Chapin Hall early (we heard seats were going to fill up) and ended up sitting next to a professor who—by nothing short of serendipity—happened to know my old neighbor, a preeminent Buddhist scholar who inspired my gap year to Nepal at a yard sale twelve years ago. The world is vast and the world is small.
During her lecture, Kimmerer told a story about one of her former college students who believes now is the best time to be alive, despite the wars, impending fall of democracy, and threat of earth’s extinction. Her student explained it was like in an old cartoon, where a character stands on a board perilously wobbling over the edge of a cliff. One step farther and down they go—but with intention and balance, they might not. That’s where we are, she said. We’re in a pivotal moment where our decisions shape our future. “It matters where you stand,” Kimmerer’s student wisely explained.
Despite the chilled, icy water, my partner and I managed to go out on North Pond on a paddle-board, cautiously balanced over the dark surface rippling with reflected beams of the sun’s light. We noticed a large bird of prey on a distant tree, still and observant until it suddenly swooped down from its perch, flashed down to the water, and snared a fish in its talons, the gift economy on full display. Then in a moment of absolute abundance, as we floated in the middle of the pond, skies deep, unclouded, and blue, the bird returned with its wingmate—two bald eagles with feathers fretting in the wind, circling right above us before flying away.
