Our human world is stuck in a mindset of fear and scarcity. There’s not enough food, water, wealth, power, status, beauty or love to go around. An ethos of scarcity breeds a reality of scarcity, with a grab what you can social order with little regard for our impact on each other or our Earth home. From this miserly place, our scarcity ethos bears the fruit of poverty, social injustice, war, environmental destruction, and the countless greedy, fearful ways we wreak havoc on our world.
The natural realm offers a simple, glorious, counter-ethos: abundance. The wondrous thing is that this abundance exists now; we’re already living within its loving, generous embrace. At no time is this truth more evident than at the Summer Solstice when the Mother Earth lavishes us with goodness and beauty for our hungry bellies and souls.
Bees are busy making honey from the sweet nectar of flowers. Flowers are scenting the air with their stunning blooms. Fruits are dripping from the branches, ripening in the heat of the summer sun. Farm stalls are overloaded with fresh-picked produce. These things are the gifts of the Earth, given with an overflowing, life-centered munificence.
Abundance is not a fantasy. It is real and solid, woven of the raw elements of sun, soil, rain and seed. It springs from a natural generosity, an ethos of giving more rather than less.
A little seed blossoms into a whole plant, or a bush, or a tree that proffers a plethora of food stuff and the seeds of future plants and harvests. The pit of a single plum grows into a tree that year after year offers up its fruits for our tables.
Imagine conceiving this same abundance in our human world, where power, worthiness, love, joy and other markers of personal satisfaction and social value are infinite and available for all.
Imagine embracing the notion that we each have gifts to offer, seeds of our best qualities and nature. And that we bring these gifts to the collective table of our humanity in a spirit of generosity and giving more, and only taking what we need in return.
Imagine that we work together to combine the raw elements of this amazing human potential to solve the problems we’ve created economically, socially and environmentally. Within an ethos of abundance, we trust that anything is possible if we stay committed to a life-centered munificence that includes our human and non-human kin.
Know that an ethos of abundance breeds a reality of abundance. Though we cannot make these choices and changes for others, we can begin to live this vision of abundance with ourselves, and within our family and communities. Through our little seeds offering up their fruits of generosity, kindness and abundance for all, change can spread outward, inspiring others to act in kind. And in this way, our little seeds can be the making of a vision of abundance that can heal and transform our world.
Photo Art by June Ferrol