Summer, Abundance, and Community

Following the sun beyond despair toward a vision of life together...

[Today marks the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the start of what has long been a season of abundance for “all creatures great and small.” As creatures who’ve always overestimated how great we are, we’d rather “improve” Mother Nature than learn from her. So we create systems like predatory capitalism that destroy natural and human communities, yielding abundance for the few and scarcity for the many. No one has more reason to feel despair over the economics and politics of ruination than Wendell Berry. For 70 of his 90 years, he’s been writing prophetically about our abuse of the earth and the loss of what he calls our “membership” in one another. But Berry has always carried on, turning to nature for solace, inspiration, and resolve: the rest of us should do no less. Nature has much to teach us about how to live our lives. In times of wanton destruction like these, despair is not an option.]

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Across my 86 years, abundance has always been summer’s keynote. The forests fill with undergrowth, the trees with fruit, the meadows with wild flowers and grasses, the fields with wheat and corn, the gardens with zucchini, and the yards with weeds. In contrast to spring’s sensationalism, summer is a steady state of plenty, a green and amber muchness that feeds us on more levels than we know.

Nature does not always produce abundance, of course. There are years when flood or drought destroy the crops, threatening the livelihood of those who work the fields and the food supply of those who depend on them. But left to its own devices, nature takes us through a reliable cycle of scarcity and abundance in which times of deprivation foreshadow an eventual return to abundant fields, orchards and vineyards.

This fact of nature stands in sharp contrast to human nature: we seem to regard scarcity as the law of life in both material and nonmaterial goods. Daily I’m astonished at how readily I believe that something I need is in short supply. If I hoard possessions, it’s because I believe that there’s not enough to go around. If I struggle with others over power, it’s because I believe that power is a zero-sum game. If I become jealous in relationships, it’s because I believe that when you get too much love, I will be short-changed.

Even in writing this essay, I’ve had to struggle with the scarcity assumption. It’s easy to stare at the blank page and despair of ever having another idea, another image, another illustration. It’s easy to look back at what one has written and say, “That’s not very good but I’d better keep it, because nothing better will come along.” It’s difficult to trust that the pool of possibilities is bottomless, that one can keep diving in and finding more.

The irony, often tragic, is that by embracing the scarcity assumption we create the very scarcities we fear. If I hoard material goods, others will have less and I’ll never have enough. If I fight my way up the ladder of power, others will be defeated and I’ll never feel secure. If I get possessive of someone I love, I’m likely to drive that person away. If I cling to the words I have written as if they were the last of their kind, the pool of new possibilities will surely go dry. We create scarcity by blindly accepting it as law, and by competing with others for resources as if we were at the last oasis in the Sahara.

In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It’s created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together in ways that allow us to generate, celebrate and share a common store. Whether the “scarce resource” is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection, but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them and receive them from others when we are in need.

I served ten years on the resident staff of a Quaker living-learning community of eighty people whose mission involved adult education in nonviolence. Those of us who had jobs related to keeping things going—from administration to maintenance, from teaching to meal preparation—received a modest salary on top of housing and meals, a salary that was the same for everyone regardless of job title or degrees. As Dean of Studies with a Ph.D., I earned the same as a recent high school grad who worked in the kitchen. Power, too, was equitably distributed: we made decisions by consensus, so power came via persuasion, not position.

The result was an “ecological restoration” of the fabric of the human community. Valuing everyone for who they are rather than for privilege and power encouraged all of us to show up with the whole of ourselves, supporting each other and our mission to a degree rarely seen in the “Darwinian” world. Though I no longer live in a face-to-face community, the lessons I learned about human abundance during that decade have informed my life and work ever since. The lenses through which we look at and relate to each other—the possibilities we see within us and between us—make all the difference.*

Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community not only creates abundance—community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world would be transformed.

Summer is the season when all the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring come due, and each year the debts get repaid with compound interest. In summer it’s hard to remember that we had ever doubted the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the powers of new life. Summer is a reminder that, for this single season at least, we might cease our anxious machinations and give ourselves to the abiding and abundant grace of our common life.

[NOTES: My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post. For more on my experience in the community I mentioned, see “If Only We Would Listen” by Alicia von Stamwitz in The Sun magazine.]

[REMINDER: On June 24, 11:00 AM CT, join author Kazu Haga and me for a conversation on “Inner Work for Societal Change: Healing Individually and Collectively.” For more information, click HERE.]