Collaborative Nourishment with the World Around Us

How do we actually live this sort of reciprocity?

This week's archetype and tarot about the Mother and Three of Pentacles (see post here) was all about nourishment and collaboration. When I wrote the post, I’d been thinking mostly about humans nourishing and collaborating with one another. But we also are in relationship with many types of non-human beings, so I began to wonder how we might be in collaborative nourishment with these ones too. As I spent some time thinking about this, it brought to mind something I had read in a book a few years back. I found the book on a shelf, dusted it off, and found this quote:

“Many Indigenous authors speak of the ongoing conversation with all beings—animals, plants, humans, stars, ancestors, spirits, etc. In the Sámi language, this has been expressed as humalan eatnama: ‘I converse with the Earth.’ In Aymara, it becomes nayasa kollo achachilampi uywayssatssta: ‘I am letting myself be nourished by the apu—the spirit of the mountain—as I am nourishing the spirit of the mountain.’ Peruvians use the Spanish criar y dejarse criar: ‘to nourish and let oneself be nourished’ as equivalent to the Aymara wording.”¹

I am deeply touched by these phrases for collaborative nourishment. And I couldn’t help but wonder what would this actually look like in practice. How do we nourish a mountain and let ourselves be nourished by it in return? How do we actually live this sort of reciprocity?

One thing that came to mind as a possible starting place is to gain a deeper understanding of reciprocity itself. Historically speaking, the culture I live in struggles with the notion of reciprocity. It seems to me we have had a tendency to favor transactional relationships instead. So, what’s the difference?

Just as the name implies, transactional relationships are based on transactions. An example of this is the relationship we might have with growing a tomato plant. We give the plant water and keep it in a sunny place, and, in return, we expect the plant to give us a tomato. A transaction has taken place that forms the basis of this relationship.

A transactional relationship is: I gave something to you and so now I expect something in return.

These types of relationships can feel disempowering because within them, we wait for an external force to make us whole. It causes us to place a focus on what is missing; on scarcity and lack.

For relationships where we want an emotional or intimate connection—that deeper nourishment—a transactional model isn’t going to cut it.

Reciprocity is the flip side of a transactional model and it makes all the difference. Relationships based on reciprocity foster gratitude and place the focus on giving back, rather than keeping score.

Reciprocity is: Because I received something, I will give something.

In reciprocity we really do collaborate in nourishing one another.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of “Braiding Sweetgrass”, writes about this extensively. She talks about what she calls ‘gift thinking’, or a gift economy. She says that when we think about the things that come into our lives as gifts (versus as commodities or products), our whole relationship to them changes. She writes:

“In the presence of such gifts, gratitude is the intuitive first response. Gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver. If our first response is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return.”²

Through my work with the ancestors, I had the privilege of learning that this “gift thinking”—this collaborative nourishment—is the way all humans once lived. In this work, I met an ancestor guide who lived about 40,000 years ago in what is now called Germany, and he showed me some of what his life was like. At first I couldn’t quite understand what I saw. I had to stretch beyond the edges of my worldview in order to grasp what he was showing me.

In this ancestor’s time, consciousness was expressed in a collective way. The individual perspective simply didn’t exist, at least not in a way we would recognize now. In fact, when this guide appears to me, he always arrives with a group. The paradigm that people lived in was based on an understanding of the self as part of a whole. The whole was what mattered, what held the greatest meaning. This whole, of which he was a part, was not limited to his human kin, but to everything in his awareness.

As part of this, there was no belief in a separate spirit or soul that inhabited the body. Nor was there a belief in an afterlife. When a human died, they became the grass and the earth and the vultures. And the grass became the deer. And the deer, then, became the human once again. In this way, all was ancestor and all was descendant. Every life was nourished by every other life in profound collaboration. Every resource was received as a gift.

Knowing all of this, I decided to revisit this ancestor guide and ask him if there was an easy way to put this idea of collaborative nourishment into practice. How can I nourish the spirit of the mountain? How can I let myself be nourished by it? He smiled and said that I’d had the answer all along. Just as the quote from the book I’d dusted off said (“I converse with the Earth”), we can use the magic of our words. He said to me, “Never discount the power of human speech.”

(Those of us who use prayers, spells and incantations in our practices already know this, but I, for one, seem to often need a reminder.)

The ancestor guide continued with this specific advice:

Step into the morning sun and let its rays nourish every cell in your being. Then, speak aloud to it sweet honeyed words of love. As you let your food nourish your body and mind, speak shining words of praise to it. Step barefoot onto the mountain, letting its beauty seep into your soul while you sing to it the poem of your heart. It need not be more complicated than that.

And then my guide reminded me that I had already had a profound experience of putting this sort of collaborative nourishment into practice. In fact, I’d written about it in one of my first Substack posts. (Am I the only one who can easily forget what I’ve already written?)

Below is a link to that early post. In it is a story of my life-changing experience of speaking aloud to sacred waters.

Please let me know in the comments what your experiences like this have been. How have you put collaborative nourishment into practice?

1. Werner Kremer, J., & Jackson-Paton, R. (2014). Ethnoautobiography: Stories and practices for unlearning whiteness, decolonization, uncovering ethnicities (p. 48). ReVision Publishing.

2. Wall Kimmerer, R. (2022, October 26). THE SERVICEBERRY An Economy of Abundance. Emergence Magazine. Retrieved March 5, 2024, from https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/