Department of Earthly Gifts

Taurus 2 // conjuring gratitude & generosity with 6 of pentacles

Well, once again my best laid plans for posting have had to shift with the tide of family and illness. It was my turn for the stomach bug over the weekend and the post-virus fatigue is hitting me hard. Thanks, as always, for reading. XO Linds

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I am rereading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and I feel the same soul-connection that I felt the first time I read her beautiful words. She has a way of writing that speaks right to my heart. She makes plain the ways our dominant culture has dampened our senses and disconnected us from the earth. And she beautifully writes about the many lessons that plants and animals can teach us if we take the time to listen and learn.

One of my favorite books, Braiding Sweetgrass, next to the 6 of Pentacles from the Gentle Tarot.

Before having my children I was a high school science teacher - How can 13 years feel like an entire lifetime ago? Not only was I a science teacher, but my main areas of interest were life and earth sciences: Biology, Geology, Ecology. The living, breathing earth is what I wanted to love and explore with my students. I couldn’t teach at the school I went to because they taught young earth creationism (google it), but I also didn’t see myself in a big, public high school cranking out science fairs and pre-made lab kits. I ended up at the perfect spot for me at the time: a small, all-girls, Catholic school. I still had concerned parents who would ask me pointed questions about my curriculum and Darwin (human evolution is still tricky for some people of faith), but all in all it was a wonderful environment to talk about how yes, I am a spiritual person who also loves studying the natural world. All of this is to say, Kimmerer’s writing resonates so deeply with me because there is no compartmentalizing her spiritual self and her love for science: they are the same.

When I saw that the 6 of pentacles was our card for the week, I just knew I had to write about reciprocity. Kimmerer writes about “healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.” This is what I see in this card. A reminder, or a call to be in right relationship with others and with the earth. Exploring how to give and take where everyone has what they need, and no-one is exploited or left without.

In the traditional card we see a wealthy merchant standing over two beggars and offering them a golden coin. Perhaps they’re the two outsiders from last week’s card? It can often be interpreted to be about wealth and generosity, or the inverse - lack and humility. These are not fruitless themes to consider, there is a lot of work to be done in the realm of power dynamics and giving/receiving. BUT, if we think of the pentacles as the element of earth, I want to think about this reciprocity not just for human relationships, but our relationship with the more-than-human world too! Kimmerer talks about imagining a world on the other side of the Anthropocene - one where the needs of all beings are considered and tended to, something like a Symbiocene¹.

5, 6, 7 of pentacles from the Gentle Tarot

In a recent podcast² I listened to, Kimmerer wondered: what would the world be like if we had a Department of Earthly Gifts, instead of a Department of Natural Resources? If we thought of the earth as the most generous gift-giver (because she is!) instead of an inanimate object to be studied, exploited, plundered. When we consider the gifts that we receive every single day from the earth: Clean air! Trees! Sunshine! Rain! Birds! Fungi that break down our waste! Insects that aerate the soil! Every single thing that we eat! Our only sane response should be gratitude. My teacher, Erin³, talks so often about creating a culture of gratitude because it reminds us of our enoughness. When we feel like we are enough, when we know we have enough, it frees us to be generous in return. Like Kimmerer says, reciprocity leads to Joy and Justice!

The other night my child was cleaning their room and sorting items to be thrown away or donated. They looked at me and said with heartbreaking sincerity, “Sometimes I feel bad that we have so much and some people have so little.” Moments like these make me wish for a parenting manual, but I did my best to honor their feelings, celebrate their empathetic heart, and remind them that we can be grateful for the things we have and generous with others who cross our path - with our money, but also with our time, energy, support and kindness. A more just world, is a more generous one.

Abundant gifts! Lilacs foraged for simple syrup by the same child mentioned above. I wish you could smell them.

The 6 of Pentacles asks, Where can you contribute to the flow of reciprocity? Where can you be more generous? Where can you be more open to receiving? How are you caring for the earth as much as she is caring for you? Maybe you can just start to notice one or two things as gifts from the earth that you haven’t noticed before. Maybe you can think of a small (or large) way to honor her and give back - start composting? Plant a native plant? Put out bird feeders? Walk more? Find a special tree to nurture and love? The last few months, any time I’m waiting to pick up a kid (which is often), I turn my car all the way off and try to acclimate to whatever temperature it is outside. This seems like such a small, stupid thing - but consider how many people sit with cars running, burning fuel, to stay in a climate controlled space while they wait every single day? The most painful for me to witness is when we line up for fuel at Costco! Idle cars, burning through fuel, filling up with more, more, more.

This weekend is Mother’s Day - I won’t go into all the ways this “holiday” is a shell of what it could be (including that it was originally Mother’s PEACE Day⁴, after so many mother’s lost children in the Civil War) and how we often do a poor job of acknowledging the pain of people who’ve lost their mother or can’t be a mother themselves. Instead, I want to end with a short quote from Braiding Sweetgrass that reminds us that like a mother, the Earth holds us and gives unconditionally to us. May we find ways to accept with gratitude, and to give as generously in our own lives. And if you are someone grieving this weekend, I hope it’s a balm to you.

Loading the kayak onto the car in the fading light, I was doused with the leftover pond water draining onto my head. I smiled at the illusion of my grief-containment system: there is no such thing. We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us.

The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves. I hadn’t realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed. I had a good mother. She gives what we need without being asked. I wonder if she gets tired, old Mother Earth. Or if she too is fed by the giving. “Thanks,” I whispered, “for all of this.”

1. For anyone who hasn’t been in a Biology class in a few years, symbiosis is that magical relationship between organisms that is mutually beneficial to both - living organisms working together in reciprocity! Lichen is a symbiotic relationship between algae & moss, birds that eat the pests off larger predators in exchange for protection, clown fish living with sea anemones, ants that harvest fungi to protect their colonies, to name a few examples…

2. Confluence Podcast: The Earth Calls Us to Reciprocity

3. You should absolutely consider taking Erin’s Radical Gratitude class!

4. This article explains some of the original ideas behind the 1870s Mothers Peace Day: Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.