A BRAID OF sweetgrass sits next to my laptop. When I get overwhelmed by an endless to-do list or the weight of living in the Anthropocene, I run the strands through my fingers like prayer beads and bring the braid to my nose. Big breath in. Big breath out. Even after years of doing this, the scent carries a grounding sweetness, reminding me of something deep and good.
In her iconic book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi nation and professor of environmental biology, writes that when you take in the scent of the sweetgrass, or wiingaashk in Ojibwe, you “start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.”
In her latest slim volume of essays, The Serviceberry, Kimmerer helps us remember what we have clearly forgotten: The world is a gift, and there is plenty of the world for everyone and everything.
Known for its beautiful white blossoms and abundant, nutty-tasting fruits, the serviceberry, also called juneberry, is named bozakmin in Potawatomi, meaning “the best of the berries.” To Kimmerer, the serviceberry is the embodiment of the gift economy. “In a serviceberry economy, I accept the gift from the tree and then spread that gift around, with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry,” Kimmerer writes. “To name the world as gift is to feel your membership in the web of reciprocity.”
In sharing her people’s stories, Kimmerer helps those who follow Christ enter this web of reciprocity — the very web that God used to craft humanity. Just as the sun freely gives its energy to sustain all ecological relationships, God’s love, manifested in Christ, freely gives the energy that redeems and reconciles all creation.
The gift economy, which “has no tolerance for creating artificial scarcity through hoarding,” is a radical act of resistance and resilience to the Trump administration’s economic aspirations — ideals premised on scarcity and exclusion.
Today, as I look out at a cedar waxwing with a berry in its beak, I am reminded that another way is not just possible, but already present, growing wild in the margins of our manufactured scarcity. These plants, and the Indigenous wisdom that honors them, offer us a different story of what it means to live well together. They whisper of an economy older than money, deeper than transaction — one woven into the very fabric of creation. “The serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency,” Kimmerer writes.
Perhaps this is what we most need to remember in these uncertain times: The world was made as a gift, and we were made for gifting. The sweetgrass and serviceberry stand as living parables of God’s economy of grace — where abundance flows not from hoarding but from sharing, where wealth is measured not in what we keep but in what we give away.
As I trace the braid of sweetgrass between my fingers, I am braiding myself back into this ancient wisdom, a radical remembering of something I never should have forgotten.
Avery Davis Lamb is an activist, ecologist, and public theologian working at the intersection of Christianity and environmental justice. He is the co-executive director of Creation Justice, whose mission is to educate, equip and mobilize Christians to protect, restore, and rightly share God's creation.
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