40 Days of peace Day Five
The Heart Berry
The gift of the strawberries
In Indigenous culture, the Creation story continues with Skywoman’s daughter, who was carried to Turtle Island in her womb and grew up in harmony with all the earth and all beings. Sadly, she dies giving birth to her twins, Flint and Sapling. Heartbroken, Skywoman buried her daughter in the earth and from her body grew one of our most revered plants… the STRAWBERRY arose from her heart. The Heart Berry.
Strawberries, like all plants, are our teachers. The “heart berry” is here to teach us about the art of giving. In the wild, they grow every year, scattering their sweet gift at our feet. “A gift comes to you through no action of your own. A gift is free, you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts appear in the realm of humility and mystery- as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.” -Braiding Sweetgrass
Wild strawberries are a gift from the earth but in our disconnection from Her, over the years, the land where wild strawberries shared their gifts, has been swallowed up by neighborhoods and strip malls. You can still find them growing in the wild, but today, they are a rare gift. “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.” This idea of “MUTUAL RECIPROCITY”.. a circle of giving and receiving.
Our gift back to the earth, is our time and attention and care. Our intention to pay attention to nature as our teacher and honor Her as we walk gently on the earth. If we don’t take care of the earth, how can she share her gifts of abundance and love? The heart berry teaches us a powerful lesson. Are we listening?
Indigenous culture operates in a gift economy. “In a gift economy, one’s freely given gifts cannot be made into someone else’s capital. This is the reason we do not sell sweetgrass. Because it is given to us, it should only be given to others.” The same goes for sage. Sweetgrass and sage are gifts that the earth gives us to pray with and use in ceremony. These gifts are just that, gifts to be shared, not traded for currency. But colonial culture operates on a system of “property and ownership”. Colonial mindset introduced the concept of “mine and yours” and soon enough the circle was broken and the gift is no longer valued in the heart of “mutual reciprocity”. Now the strawberry is a product to be owned, bought and sold. I wonder which berry tastes sweeter, the one in a package on your grocery shelf, (many which are poisoned with pesticides), or the bright, wild berry growing wild in the woods?
Sweetgrass belongs to Mother Earth. It is picked in a ceremony of prayer and those who pick the gift, return a gift to the earth and take care of the plants so they are able to return the gift the following season. Tobacco is a gift that is given in prayer and exchange of this sacred gift. “The sweetgrass braids are given as gifts, to honor, to say thank you, to heal and to strengthen. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.” -Braiding Sweetgrass
I share the heart of the strawberry
When I first read the chapter on The Gift of the Strawberry, I cried a lot. I remember thinking, “ I have the heart of the strawberry. Perhaps I was a berry in another life.” I LOVE TO GIVE GIFTS! I have always struggled with the exchange of money for my gifts. I’m learning how to think of money as a form of energy and I know in our modern world it is part of the “system” we live in and I use my gifts for good, so in this new system, I can still share my strawberry heart with the world in a good way!
“How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? … in our market economy, can we behave “as if” the living world were a gift?” Because it is!
It has only been a short amount of time on the earth that we created mass farming, pesticides, monculture farming… My grandparents, like many, provided our family and our community with home-grown-with-love vegetables. We stored our potatoes in the cellar with jars of jams, beans, tomatoes and lot of goodies. I can still smell my Great- Granny Grace’s kitchen, beans in the pressure cooker, my aunts, my Mamaw, my mom and cousins all sitting around snappin’ beans and cookin’ a feast. These memories shaped my life. My Papaw and Mamaw, on both sides of my family, shared their gifts with the community. My Papaw Poe was a preacher and a farmer. He pastored 16 different churches and always had a garden, no matter where they moved, and he shared his harvest with his community and my Mamaw was always in the kitchen cooking up something to share. I loved being in the garden and I loved delivery the GIFTS! My Papaw Neal was always busying himself with helping others. He and my Mamaw always had food stored up to share and Mamaw always had a purse full of treats to share at church. These examples of generosity shaped my view of the world, and for that I am grateful!
How do we return to a gift economy?
Is it possible to live again in a world made of gifts? Is it possible to reclaim our old way of living? How can we integrate a gift economy in the new world?
3 billion people live on less than $2.50 per day, including 1.2 billion people in extreme poverty who live on less than $1.25 per day.
Over 800 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat and 3 million children die from malnutrition each year.
40 million children worldwide live without adequate shelter.
More than 750 million people lack adequate access to clean water.
270 million children have no access to health services
Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read or write.
2 billion people do not have a bank account or access to basic financial services.
It’s up to us!
We’ve created this story of “competition” ~ Us vs. Them. We’ve created a story of scarcity and poverty and the gloom and doom of “climate change”. But its just a story and we have every opportunity to open the next page and write a NEW STORY!
I woke up to the truth about the media during our 7 months living at Standing Rock. Let’s just say, the media is bought and paid for by a few select and they are putting on quite the show. If you’ve ever watched the movie “Tomorrowland”… its kinda like that. A big projection of lies that become truth because we believe them and then help them create “their story”.
One day at camp, I was on the phone with my grandmother and she asked me about the massive amounts of “trash” that she saw we had made. It seemed that the news ran a story showing a mountain of trash, trying to make us out to be “trashing the land” not protecting it. Well, I have a video of dump truck after dump truck coming IN to our camp and dumping those mountains of trash. We watched them come in one day… and then a news reporter got out of his truck and stood in front of it, reporting “his story”.
Don’t believe everything you see on the Tel-lie-vision
WE CAN WRITE OUR OWN STORY
WE CAN HEAL MAMA EARTH
WE CAN HEAL OUR BODIES
WE CAN HEAL OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE STRAWBERRIES!
Monet and I ran an organic farmers market in Charleston for 4 years. It was our gift to our community and to our farmers and local makers. With all my heart, I want to connect you back to the earth. With all my heart I want to connect you to your food. With all my heart I want you to see that Creator gave us EVERYTHING we need to heal, to thrive, to live in JOY, abundance and YES>...PEACE! With all my heart I want to see you heal and I know its possible!
With all my heart I want our farmers markets to “save the world”. I really believe that having that sacred space each week to join together as a community, to EXCHANGE our gifts (our money energy for the farmers gifts, the candle maker, the seamstress, the chef, the cookie lady…) I believe its part of the Great Healing of the earth. When we can once again SEE THE EARTH AS A GIFT.. and see each other as a gift, we may not be so excited to buy that $5 tshirt from walmart that we know wasn’t made in a good way. We may not want to buy the eggs from the farm that houses 1,000s of sweet chickens in cages. We may start to look at our choices and how we spend our time and money a little differently. We may even start to speak the language of the strawberries once again.
Peace comes from understanding. We’ve been disconnected and lost our understanding of the Earth and her gifts but all is not lost. We’ve let religion and culture and borders and money and silly differences divide us. But the language we all speak, is the language of the heart. The language of the strawberries can be heard by all of us. And Her story teaches us about the language of gifts and mutual reciprocity.
A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts.
Journal Time
As we head into the “giving season” let us rethink our language of giving.
Spend some time in prayer~ meditation asking how you can rewrite your story this season to give the “gift of the strawberries”.
Gathering together in community we can give and create powerful stories that have the power to truly cultivate great change! One strawberry is a yummy treat… but a bushel of strawberries can be shared and used to bake pies and cakes and cookies for everyone to enjoy.
Self care is also important… where do you need to give yourself a little more sweet strawberry love?
Shams of Tabriz’s 40 Rules of Love
