Never taking more than half
Happy Sunday, Soothers. I'm still on my sort of a summer break maybe?? from the Soother, especially as I gear up and prepare materials for the Highly Sensitive Person Leadership Academy (opening Sept 5 to the waitlist!) but this idea for this essay popped up for me as I was re-reading Braiding Sweetgrass and I thought you all might like to hear about it. (Basically you can expect every single Sunday Soother essay from now until infinity to take some inspiration from Braiding Sweetgrass, my new bible.)
Here's the excerpt from the book that sparked so much thinking for me on this:
Early colonists on Turtle Island were stunned by the plenitude they found here, attributing the richness to the bounty of nature. Settlers in the Great Lakes wrote in their journals about the extraordinary abundance of wild rice harvested by Native peoples; in just a few days, they could fill their canoes with enough rice to last all year. But the settlers were puzzled by the fact that, as one of them wrote, “the savages stopped gathering long before all the rice was harvested.” She observed that “the rice harvest starts with a ceremony of thanksgiving and prayers for good weather for the next four days. They will harvest dawn till dusk for the prescribed four days and then stop, often leaving much rice to stand unreaped. This rice, they say, is not for them but for the Thunders. Nothing will compel them to continue, therefore much goes to waste.” The settlers took this as certain evidence of laziness and lack of industry on the part of the heathens. They did not understand how indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered.
I once met an engineering student visiting from Europe who told me excitedly about going ricing in Minnesota with his friend’s Ojibwe family. He was eager to experience a bit of Native American culture. They were on the lake by dawn and all day long they poled through the rice beds, knocking the ripe seed into the canoe. “It didn’t take long to collect quite a bit,” he reported, “but it’s not very efficient. At least half of the rice just falls in the water and they didn’t seem to care. It’s wasted.” As a gesture of thanks to his hosts, a traditional ricing family, he offered to design a grain capture system that could be attached to the gunwales of their canoes. He sketched it out for them, showing how his technique could get 85 percent more rice. His hosts listened respectfully, then said, “Yes, we could get more that way. But it’s got to seed itself for next year. And what we leave behind is not wasted. You know, we’re not the only ones who like rice. Do you think the ducks would stop here if we took it all?” Our teachings tell us to never take more than half.
When my basket holds enough leeks for dinner, I head home. Walking back through the flowers, I see a whole patch of snakeroot spreading its glistening leaves, which reminds me of a story told by an herbalist I know. She taught me one of the cardinal rules of gathering plants: “Never take the first plant you find, as it might be the last—and you want that first one to speak well of you to the others of her kind.” That’s not too hard to do when you come upon a whole stream bank of coltsfoot, when there’s a third and a fourth right behind the first, but it’s harder when the plants are few and the desire is great.
In a separate article but one that's based on an essay in Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer also shares this story:
This “problem” of managing decisions about abundance reminds me of a report that linguist Daniel Everett wrote as he was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest. A hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t he store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.
“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.
God, I felt these writings in my BONES, and at the same time I felt so much grief that oppressive systems like capitalism and colonialism have indoctrinated us into deep scarcity and fear so that trying to live the tenets beautifully written about above seems like it would be nearly impossible.
It's easy to read these gorgeous words of Kimmerer's and want to have a life dedicated to those ways of never taking more than half, or never taking the first plant you find, but LIVING it, TRUSTING it — so much harder.
Like, I want to say confidently I will store meat in the belly of my brother... but in actuality what I'm doing, what I'm conditioned to do, what my little lizard brain WANTS to do is TAKE ALL THE MEAT! ALL THE MEAT IS MINE! I WILL CUT YOU IF YOU TRY TO TAKE MY MEAT! MUST HAVE MOAR MEAT! And then you go down to my basement and it's full of 17 meat freezers full of meat and I'm still insisting the logical and safe thing to do is... get more meat at all costs.
This is not the way I want to live, and yet...here we are.
So how can we begin, even if in extremely small ways, practicing, the tenets of not taking more than half? Of trusting abundance? Of believing in enoughness, sufficiency?
A lot of you had really positive responses to my last newsletter on animism as a guiding light, so may I suggest you start there if you haven't read that one. But here are some other ideas I came up with and am practicing in my own life:
Regulating my nervous system. I have a joke in my workshops and client work, when I do presentations and include a slide on regulating the nervous system, I often say, "This would not be a Catherine Andrews' workshop if I didn't include nervous system work." But, it's so true. It's foundational to trust. Most of us are deeply conditioned to exist permanently in the fight or flight state of the nervous system. The assault of news, potentials of danger, not enoughness, scarcity conditioning, has most of us on tenterhooks, walking the tightrope of utter hypervigilance and not-enoughness. BUT, when we can consciously regulate our nervous systems into rest and repair, we are calmer. More cool-headed and collected. Making decisions from our higher selves. I have a mini nervous system regulating routine I do here (Instagram) that's 10 minutes, I offer it to you in case it's of use. I also regularly practice being in nature, earthing, removing stimulants from my diet, etc. The goal is to stay as grounded as possible so I can store meat in my brother's belly and make that decision (regulated nervous system), rather than my punching my brother in the face and then throwing him off a cliff so I can steal his meat (uh, dysregulated nervous system - fight).
Deciding my unique sufficiency levels. In my Secretly Ambitious business course, I have my students walk through and calculate their "survive" and "thrive" numbers. Survive is figuring out at the basic level what they will need to make in their business to have housing, food, pay taxes, etc. Thrive adds in wonderful garnishes — travel, dining out, hiring a team member, donating, etc. I don't think each of us spends enough time figuring out our unique sufficiency level. And that's what it is — extremely unique. Somebody may genuinely have a "survive" number of $20,000 a month, and somebody else's "thrive" number could be $2,000 a month. It really depends, because as unique and individual as each of us are, so are our desires, costs, and needs for living. Figuring out what is truly sufficient for each of us helps us calculate an "enough" number that may give us some peace instead of feeling like we always have to be scrambling for more, just because.
Sufficiency doesn't have to mean frugality and restriction. I think we get this twisted. Enoughness is fullness. Enoughness is a plate of delicious food that is exactly as much as we individually are hungry for. Enoughness is leaving behind the bounty of the harvested rice for the ducks, because what you have harvested will get you beautifully through a season. Frugality and restriction is eating less than we're hungry for or starving ourselves. There's a line here I am not quite yet able to articulate yet but will work on it...I just want to make clear that when we work for sufficiency, that is a huge gift to ourselves, and it's not about DENYING ourselves what we need, either. Because we have our little black and white binary brains, I think when we're thinking about not spending/purchasing too much or the concept of enoughness, we swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, and it becomes about denying ourselves our needs. And I don't want that for you. The earth wants a sacred steward and partner guardian, not a self-loathing repenter.
Understanding that gifts are 1. not always material 2. should be given to the land and animals, not just people. This relates again back to my post on animism as a guiding light but I know with all the truth in my heart that when I am in a stupor of gratitude and appreciation to a beautiful place in nature, the land I am appreciating, worshipping — it FEELS that and RECEIVES that as a gift. Of course, I want to do other things — vote in ways that will protect it, donate if I can, clean it up, feed the wildlife. But I honestly think a perfectly beautiful gift back to the land is whispering, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," or singing it a song, or reading about its history to know more about it and show it respect, or calling the maple tree Maple, or the squirrel Squirrel, or even naming them, because then we begin to realize these other entities as Persons with all the respect that should be afforded them. I've walked through nature spots with a trash picker and that has been my gift. I've left a flower or a crystal or a piece of fruit at a base of a beloved tree. And then of course, think of all the other gifts we could receive and give from others in our lives. A huge gift I'm being given right now is a neighbor is taking care of the nature witch cottage while we're gone. She sends me photos of her and her pup in our yard, watering the plants. I took care of her rabbit while her family was out of town, and honestly, that was a gift she gave me, to spend time in his presence and the gift of trusting that I would ably protect for and care of him. "If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is -Thank You- it will be enough." — Meister Eckhart
We know this for a fact: The earth literally provides endless abundance WHEN stewarded correctly and regeneratively. Reading about the tenets of regenerative farming and those championing that give me hope on this front. Just as surely as a cut on my finger will heal on its own because my body knows how to do that without me mentally efforting towards it, the earth knows how to give us food and water... when we don't take more than we need. That part is the hard part. But it's not that the earth doesn't know how to provide endless abundance when stewarded as the great and precious gift it is. It truly can and does. It's the rapacious systems of endless taking that have warped its ability to continually provide for us. And that's what you and I, in writing and reading this, are working on, right?
Learn your own capacity for giving and what season you're in. I can't tell you the amount of times people have told me they wish they could be as prolific as I am. I know I am. I create newsletters, podcasts, courses, Instagram, I teach, I coach. And also, bitches, I am childless. I do not have caregiving duties. I am privileged to work for myself. I'm in a relatively able body. I'm a generator (if you know Human Design you know this means I can basically work endlessly as long as I'm lit up by it). I have economic privilege. I honestly don't have much of a life outside of my work and I kind of like it that way? I am in a season of great creation which may change at any point. AND ALSO: producing more is NOT better! Please consider that if you envy my prolificness in content creation and think you SHOULD be able to do that, that is capitalism warping your brain and telling you more and faster is best and better. There are people on this planet who will produce exactly one book in their entire lifetime that will have 1000x the ripple effect of my work ever will, which is fine and how it all goes. Figure out YOUR unique capacity, understand the season of your life (young children? you may not be producing the height of your creativity and that is fine) and allow what is true to be your truth, and rest in its rightness.
Speaking on giving, you probably actually need to work more on receiving. Peep this quote from Ingrid Fetell Lee's newsletter recently: "Let yourself receive: Every Friday this summer we've been going to toddler yoga. The teacher, a grandmother of a toddler herself, walks the kids through breathing exercises and compares the yoga poses to familiar shapes. The whole thing is about as sweet and hilarious as you'd expect. My favorite part of the class comes at the end. As the children lie on their mats in savasana, she and her assistant (a 10 year-old "graduate" of her class) come around and give foot massages. At first I thought it was kind of silly, but watching these little kids lie back at perfect ease as the teachers gently rub their feet, I was reminded that there's a lesson in being able to receive. Kids aren't thinking about what they have to offer in return to make it "fair." They aren't worrying they don't deserve it. They're just allowing someone else to make them feel good. If they can do it, maybe we can too."
Could you freely receive a foot rub, a compliment, a gift, somebody running an errand for you just because? I truly think one of the reasons we are stuck in a hoarding economy is we don't really trust receiving. When we practice and get better at receiving, we can get better at true and authentic giving, because we trust the flow of the process. So practice receiving. Ask for help. When somebody compliments you, simply say, "Thank you." And so on.The last and final one which I cannot stress enough: WE CAN TRUST THE PRINCIPLES AND RHYTHMS OF NATURE. Because WE ARE NATURE. Ugh, nothing gets my goat more than when humans act like we are evolved aliens who plopped down on this planet a few thousand years ago and nature is outside of us and we are better and smarter and know more than nature. Bitches, nature LITERALLY CREATED US. So when we observe the natural world and its principles, we are observing ourselves! We can trust nature! We can trust winter. We can trust shedding of leaves. We can trust rest. We can trust the phases of the moon. We can trust that seasons exist for a reason. We can trust that when we are sustainably stewarded, we too can produce exactly what we're meant to produce. WE CAN TRUST OURSELVES BECAUSE WE ARE NOT A MISTAKE BECAUSE NATURE CREATED US. Man, sorry to get all caps-letters but I believe this one so deeply. You are here because nature, the same universal intelligence that created this entire got-damn galaxy, chose to create you, and so all of you is perfect and brilliantly designed just as you are, and you can trust that. If you are interested in disabling tenets of capitalism that have warped your brain, as I am talking about here, I truly believe you MUST create a sacred and regular relationship with nature as it has the most to teach us.
I could go on, but for now, I will practice what I preach, because ending here feels like enoughness. I don't need to mine my brain to forcibly extract more content or lessons.
Here's to never taking more than half.
And not as a matter of denying or punishing ourselves.
Never taking more than half is a gift. To you, to the land. It imbues us with a sense of stewardship, responsibility, sacredness, that is deeply missing from this world.
Never take more than half because you and all around you are sacred elements that deserve the chance to replenish and grow again.
And in this never taking more than half, may we all send up a prayer that we can unlearn the false lies of scarcity that those who would have us believe there is not enough have tried to warp us with, out of fear and domination and control.
There is enough.
You are enough.
We are enough.
May this be our prayer today.