There is enough
Guidelines for the Honorable Harvest
There is enough. That is the message of the book of Holy Scripture and the book of Nature. There is enough. In fact, we live in a world of abundance.
This sacred truth is underscored by a story that biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells. In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, she describes bringing her undergraduate ethnobotany class to the Cranberry Lake Biological Station, surrounded by the Adirondack wilderness. The students experience a five-week immersive summer course: three hours from the nearest Walmart.[1]
At the beginning of the class, the students brainstorm a list of human needs with the goal of discovering which of them the Adirondack plants might be able to meet. The top ten include food, shelter, heat, clothing, oxygen and water. So they began with shelter.
Harvested saplings create a circle of maple poles that when bound together create a comfortable wigwam. Its spherical shape has the maximum ratio of volume to surface area, minimizing the material needed, and it sheds water and evenly distributes the weight of a snow load. It heats efficiently and is resistant to wind. It is finished with walls of cattail mats and a birch bark roof tied with spruce root.
Then they go shopping across the lake at the cattail marsh – Wal-marsh instead of Walmart! The students are quickly amazed at what they discover there. The underground stems of the cattail – the rhizomes – are white and starchy on the inside like a potato – and taste good roasted in the fire. Soak them in clean water you have a pasty white starch that becomes flour or porridge.
Cattail leaves, split and twisted, are source of plant cordage for string and twin. The leaves are long, water repellent, and packed with closed-cell foam for insulation – perfect for making walls, clothes, shoes and sleeping mats. When you pull the leaf base apart, globs of cattail gel are released. Clear, cool, and clean, the gel is a soothing and antimicrobial; the equivalent of swamp aloe vera gel to treat sunburns and bug bites.
At the center where the leaves merge with the stem there is a soft of column of pith as thick as your pinkie and crisp as a summer squash. It tastes like cucumber. One day’s shopping excursion provides clothing, matts, twine and shelter. Buckets of rhizomes for carbohydrate energy and stalks of pith for vegetables. Add a little sulfur-yellow cattail pollen to the rhizome porridge and you have a pure protein additive. The tightly packed ovaries of the plant taste like an artichoke, and each tiny cattail flower matures into a plume of fluff like cotton batting for stuffing pillows or making bandages or tinder for starting a fire. The remainder of the plant is fuel for the fire.
Little wonder that in many Native languages, the word for “plants” translates as “those who take care of us.”
Shelter, clothes, bedding, food, medicine, light, heat – all from this one plant. And I haven’t even touched on the varieties of fish and game in the marshlands, or the wonders of white Spruce roots or the rich soil of the nearby forest. The smell of rich humus stimulates the release of the hormone oxytocin, the same chemical that promotes bonding between mother and child, and between lovers. We are created to love the Earth in a relationship marked by respect, reciprocity, and gratitude. Mother Earth is a biological reality, not just a metaphorical imaginary: she who takes care of us.
There is enough. We live in a world of abundance, and worship the Merciful One who can do abundantly more than we can ask for or imagine. Just look at the cattail marsh.
Or look at the boy who brought his five loaves of bread and two fish to Andrew, so that it could be shared with the crowd of five thousand people gathered around Jesus.[2] He, like Jesus, understood that there is enough – with leftovers no less. There is enough when we trust one another. There is enough when we relate to each other as companions rather than competitors. There is enough when invite others to relax into the joy of generosity and reciprocity. There is enough when we see the Earth as source of abundance to be loved and shared rather than as a source of scarce resources to be exploited and hoarded.
There is abundance and there is power. Not the power of kings and rulers – the power of domination that Jesus rejected. There is the power of lovers – the power of relationships. That is the power that God unleashes, which is abundantly greater than we can imagine, though for the sake of our children’s children and the whole earth community we need to stretch our imaginations to the limit.
Where Philip and Andrew saw scarcity, Jesus and a little boy saw abundance. What do you see? What do you imagine the world to be like? How does that shape the choices you make? Is the earth so much dead matter to be used and abused, or the body of our Mother who gives us life and teaches us to grow into mature responsibility for this sacred gift?
Jesus gave thanks for the loaves and the fish. When the crowd finished the meal, Jesus said, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” [3] Honor what is given, share what you need and make use of everything. This is the sensibility of indigenous people everywhere. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes this sensibility as the guidelines for the Honorable Harvest:
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. This is an invitation to renewed intimacy the earth community.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Again, it is all about relationship.
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. If we are attentive, we will know when the harvest is ripe or what the ecosystem will bear. Sustainability requires that nature’s “no” means “no.”
Never take the first. Never take the last. When the annual salmon run began, the indigenous people of California would wait for days before they harvested a single fish, so that the salmon might return in perpetuity.
Take only what you need. This is an act of trust based on experience.
Take only that which is given. Everything is gift, but not all gifts are for us, or for now.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. What is given isn’t just for us.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. This is no pollyannish teaching. The reciprocal feeding process that sustains life requires death, but we can participate in it in a way that is reduces unnecessary suffering.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share. It is more fun that way!
Give thanks for what you have been given. Again, everything is gift. This undermines the ethos of entitlement in our society. The act of thanksgiving is radically countercultural.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. This is a recognition that sustainability requires mutuality and the cultivation of respect for the whole earth community.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.[4] This is “eternal life,” the life that keeps coming.
Let the Honorable Harvest be our creed, and may our gathering around the Communion table always remind us of its practice. There is enough.
[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), p. 223-240.
[2] John 6:1-15.
[3] John 6:12.
[4] Kimmerer, p. 182-183.