the connections between gifting and gratitude
“Mama, where are all the chickens?” my child came in asking on a recent late afternoon.
There’s usually 15 fluffy, mischievous hens wandering around looking for new ways into the veggie garden, but on this day, I looked out and saw a few feathered lumps in the bone dry grass. “Uh-oh, looks like it’s harvest season”, I said. Sure enough, we found 3 headless chickens lying limp, but where were the others? Upon further investigation, we deduced that 3 had been killed by some sort of mustelid, 3 were spared, and a whopping 9 were completely gone. WTF? What kind of creature carries off 9 lively birds at a time, in broad daylight? If this wasn’t bad enough, a couple of days later, the hungry bugger came back for the remaining 3, bringing the tally to 15 stolen chickens in 72 hours. If felt like a cruel joke, but not one without an echo of metaphor of what we’ve all been living inside.
This is not the first encounter we’ve had with death on the domesticated animal front, and I knew that to process any of it, I had to change the story of being “stolen from” to one of “offering a gift” – even begrudgingly. We ceremoniously brought the wheelbarrow around and dumped the 3 bodily remains in the way back, along the wild corridor of this land, to join the multiple sheep, chicken, and cat bones that grace the area. As I wandered around, kicking at old bones, I thought about all the meals we’ve offered the wild animals that we work so hard to make space for here: fox, mink, bobcat, quail, even the occasional mountain lion. I also thought about how I would not have given any of them willingly.
These bones have been offered as gifts out of necessity, like a milk-laden mama offers her body. Just like that mother, we do not get to choose how much to give, or even who to give it to. Mothering itself seems to be a bootcamp of sorts in how to continue giving even when it seems like there’s nothing more to give. While I’m not advocating for doing so to the demise of oneself, I wonder if there’s more acceptance that can be cultivated to ease our culture towards generosity, and away from the model of individualized grabbing/owning. It’s such a delicate balance, the one between self-care (or self advocating) and rapacity cloaked in privilege.
Leaning into the roots of maternal giving I get to see a fractal of the bigger picture, one that shows me how much I am gifted everyday. I imagine the willow I recently pruned didn’t want to give up all those branches, nor did the 3 remaining chickens rejoice in the return of the predator, I suspect. Maybe you or I don’t want to donate money to a certain campaign, or spend the day at the food bank, or with your ever-present children, but gifting isn’t about wanting. As my friend Riki Bloom, MFT says, “Giving doesn’t always get to come from abundance or wanting or ease, but it is about maintaining balance, equity, equanimity and sometimes it just comes without warning.”
This is an interesting moment in our culture, when most all of us are feeling the collective squeeze, either with pandemic related issues (food security, job security, human contact), stress about the political climate, or living with an onslaught of natural disasters due to climate crisis. What’s unique, is that we really all are in this discomfort together, and the overlapping crisis is the binding glue. It may seem like a time to curl into a ball and wait it out, but what gives strength and agency in a time of extreme distress, is offering a gift. The magic of a gift is that the hands on either side of the gift get to receive something - a gift gives both ways.
In spending time watching the chicken bodies become cleaned bones, I wandered past a shy oak a few days in a row. On the last day, I finally noticed the bounty of giant valley oak acorns at my feet that I could hardly believe my luck. I use these as a morning breakfast mainstay, and finding such an abundance of acorns lifted my mouth into a wide smile. The tree is quite small, for an oak, and scraggly, but it gave and gave and gave. I looked up into the canopy and saw the lesson of how to give, not based on what we have but what we are capable of.
In practicing giving, our innate capacity to be aligned with the essence of the Earth is enlivened, and like a tree in sunlight, it will grow. In aligning ourselves with what’s needed, we employ generosity as our guide. Giving, in itself, is healing.
Happy harvest season, when the land reminds us what giving is…