Neeyati

“Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“And maybe that’s it: You do things in the moment for the person you hope you might be two years from now.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message