On Gift-giving

    

I always associate chrysanthemum flowers with the sweet little mouse protagonist named Chrysanthemum from Kevin Henkes's children's books, and today I felt a bit like a field mouse while drinking this tea blend. This Song Tea Meadow + lime slice + chrysanthemum flower bud blend seems exactly like what a field mouse would brew if given a glass infuser teapot and hot water. Although I'm guessing chrysanthemum would have been a bit bland on its own without a massive quantity of buds or over-steeping the blend, the lime and Meadow was a nice additive combination that helped me enjoy the first half of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer. 

I should write a book called If You Give a Mouse a Teapot.

rating: 4/5

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This excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass really touched me. 

I'm not a huge fan of personality tests or quizzes that try to commodify you under a branded label that is curated to generalize an entire population, but with every love language test I've always earned "gift-giver". I don't think it's my love reception language, but I definitely think it is the way I show appreciation for my beloved ones. Some associate gift-giving with Western notions of materialism and facade acts of grandeur, but I've never associated gift-giving with expectation of reciprocation. When I give, I give with the entirety of my heart and weight of appreciation that cannot fathomly be expressed through verbal communication. I think this excerpt expresses it quite nicely and I resonate with it deeply.

"That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage.

The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more

something is shared, the greater its value becomes. This is hard to grasp for societies steeped in

notions of private property, where others are, by definition, excluded from sharing. Practices such

as posting land against trespass, for example, are expected and accepted in a property economy

but are unacceptable in an economy where land is seen as a gift to all.

From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the "gift" is deemed to be "free" because we

obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the

gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root,

reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a "bundle of rights," whereas in a

gift economy property has a "bundle of responsibilities" attached.

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? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers -- the

living world could not bear our weight -- but even in a market economy, can we behave "as if" the

living world were a gift?"