Abundance Is a Communal Act
By Karen Kahle, CGC Executive Director
On a recent evening walk, a neighbor called out to ask if I wanted some of the tomatoes growing in front of his porch on one of the fattest tomato plants I’d ever seen.
August is when we experience the fullness of the summer season. All the initial growth from late spring and early summer is now steady, vigorous and strong. Plants have thicker stems, broader leaves and many blossoms.
It’s the height of abundance. The sun burns hot, the rain falls hard, the wind drives strong. We simply must immerse ourselves in summer’s vibrancy, richness and fullness. Everywhere, everything is abundance, flourishing, delight—all colliding at once. Watermelons, peaches and ice cream cones drip with sweet nectar, rolling down our chins and arms. Walking through the pungent grass, we disturb entire colonies of creatures; growing weeds and grasses scratch bare legs, pesky mosquitoes and chiggers feast on our bare skin. If you take a shovel to the dark, hot soil, you’ll find the earth simmering with life—every scoop wiggling with worms and slugs and bacteria so small you can’t see them.
It’s like winter and spring are just a kind of green room for the theatre of summer, a time when Mother Nature restores and then grooms her collection of oddities, her most avid performers, and even the reluctant late bloomers—she coaxes them all to become part of her spectacular cabaret of wonder.
Or course, nature does not always produce abundance. There are summers when flood or drought destroys the crops and threatens the lives and livelihood of those who work the fields. But nature normally takes us through a reliable cycle of scarcity and abundance in which times of deprivation foreshadow an eventual return to the abundant fields.
With all the cacophony of summer going on, I can feel rather quiet inside. It is so much to take in, and it seems so unlikely that such a showcase is on display for such a very long summer’s day, that the audacity of it all can be silencing. What can one say that goes anywhere near the wonder of it all? How can it be that there is such an incredible amount of abundance on Earth?
Around the CGC, I still feel the quiet awe I felt as a child, a sense of well-being that feels right somehow. All of creation is actualized now, demonstrating extravagantly that it exists for a purpose. That it exists in a startlingly interconnected form and fashion.
The word purpose sounds boring, grown up and lifeless; corporate branding and self-help books have squeezed the meaning from it entirely. But there is nothing boring and lifeless about living on purpose. Summer always seems like the time when the mission and purpose of the CGC feels most vivid. The time when our on-site community garden is producing robust weekly harvests, our new hoop house is packed with rapidly growing native plants, and numerous volunteers are smiling and sweating their way through workdays on our grounds.
It seems we long for meaning deep in our bodies, minds and souls. Significance draws us like a magnet. We crave confirmation that we’re more than accidents taking up space, intended for more than surviving a span of time before death, that our life’s energy is as needed and purposeful as the blazing sun and buzzing bees of summer. The whole point of beginning and becoming is the adventure of living into our purpose.
These are fundamental questions on the human condition, questions that can inspire, motivate and manifest important realizations.
In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the wisdom to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common store. 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, each part has its purpose 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 might be transformed. We would embrace the growing sense that the transformation we need must go beyond a merely instrumental approach to dealing with environmental concerns and touch on the very depths of what the world is and who we are in the world.