Liberatory reciprocity.
Even a wounded world is feeding us.
Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Last week I went back to Seattle, where we’d lived for twenty years. I hadn’t been to that familiar city since the beginning of the year when we’d walked away from our home in Banff during the coldest month so we could hike in warmer climes along the coast. Six months was too long away. On this journey, I’d come into Seattle on one of those brilliant days when the city gleamed sunlight and steel against Lake Union blue, and anything seemed possible. I was there to submerge myself in art, music, conversation, and Pacific Northwest beauty.
A rediscovery of a beloved place is one of the grandest forms of wandering. In Seattle for six days, I spent time in gardens, cafés, films, restaurants, museum exhibits, endless walks, late-night talks, a concert, a ceremonial circle, and a picnic in the park. Friends made me meals, let me nap, brought flowers and gifts, told stories. They remembered experiences of mine that I’d already forgotten. I listened and then I kissed my friends on their soft lips. I felt so cared for, in that particular way of being seen even as you demonstrate your fully weird and chaotic self. This kind of relating was a balm for a body lonely for conversations of depth.
My friends and I talked about everything from wild, edible kelp to city politics to whether likability is necessary for narrative characters or life (it’s not.) But mostly we spoke about the enormous transitions that are happening through us and everywhere around us—in kinship circles, community organizations, and work groups. People are speaking about what they’re conjuring for their third act. They’re organizing to block the cutting of old-growth trees. They’re educating on intimacy and sex-positive relationships. Post-COVID, they’re able to talk about death and grief. They’re writing magnificent and honest books, work made from an awareness of mortality and interrogating the uses of power. They’re following the path of Basho in Japan, crawling through the crypts of Egypt, absorbing themselves in making and exploring art.
We sat on public lawns and private gardens to talk and look in each other’s eyes. We weren’t relating simply because we are fascinating people. We were (and still are) building kinship based on mutual regard. These friendships sustain my body and my work, allowing me the capacity to give more, to extend myself toward all of life.
I’ve been thinking about reciprocity for a decade now. I’m in a reciprocal relationship with mountains, a story I’ll relay in a future newsletter. This year, I’ve been reimagining community with humans, asking questions, researching models, and imagining what Robin Wall Kimmerer meant when she said, “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world.”
As I’ve aged, I’ve made my peace with ending relationships that aren’t reciprocal, where caring and attention have a one-way ticket, where drama is centered, gratitude is rarely offered, and boundaries aren’t respected. I’ve written a memoir that caused one reviewer to say they didn’t believe some scenes ought to be included in the book as if to suggest that certain parts of ourselves are to remain forever closeted. As if there were certain exchanges that exile an audience due to art’s intimate reach.1 In the process of these completions, I’ve risked becoming unlikable, and become one of those women who burn bridges and know their own worth.
Writing also requires reciprocity, a kind of listening and exchange of the imagined world. One reason people have certain routines in their writing practice is so they can set up the conditions for whatever it is that’s beckoning those words.2 I’m thinking about how Audre Lorde talks of writing the poem “Power”: “I was driving in the car and heard the news about the cop being acquitted. I was really sickening with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my note book to enable me to cross town without an accident, to continue functioning because I felt so sick and so enraged. And I wrote those lines down, I was just writing—and that poem came out without craft.”
Writing can come to you rather than be a force from you. Writing can be less about the exertion of will, and more related to the notion of a happening, an intervention, a bolt. Feminist author and queer theorist Sara Ahmed suggests that writing can be inclusive of what we’re actively shaping against—patriarchy, racism, colonialism, ableism, ageism, and so on—and can allow us to continue to free up energy to function as activists within those systemic forces.3 To be open to how writing might appear, to refuse bowdlerization of our words as they spring forth, to consider what we may wish to write about, to succumb to the time to write, to live inside the requirements of the writing, is a form of reciprocity toward whatever we might call that force that acts upon us to enact stories.
And oh, how that reciprocity can move, inhabiting others. How that reciprocity is evident in movements—activating solidarity, empathy, love, wonder, joy, awe. How we owe so much to Black African feminism and Indigenous people for these awarenesses.
And what are literary influences except unbridled reciprocity extended in words, consciousness, teachings? How dearly I hold Jhumpa Lahiri, Clarice Lispector, Toni Morrison, Lidia Yuknavitch, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Allison, Jesmyn Ward, Alice Munro, Sarah Polley, Barbara Kopple, Spike Lee—ones who provided a truth that my own kin and community could not acknowledge for a time. How I imagine myself living into extending those gifts with my own work.
I return the gifts provided to me by my life partner, who I met when we were teenagers, reciprocity that has ranged over forty-seven years. We give and take not always equally, but mutually, a care that has extended through major illnesses, disability, addiction and recovery, childraising, homemaking, elder and ancestral care, ceremonial life, conflict resolution, relationship changes, intimacy needs, and the weight of our respective visions. We are responsive to each other, as well as fierce advocates for the freedom of the other to live as they desire. What I’ve learned from this long and sometimes tempestuous, once-young marriage is that reciprocity can’t truly exist with conflict avoidance; reciprocity can’t exist without gratitude for the presence of the other and all the universes carried by them. Offering that essential exchange within the context that we are not separate is why the act of asking for and living in reciprocity is liberatory.
Reciprocity doesn’t mean being invested in what you get to have from (or give to) another being. There’s no reciprocity expected between those who are not equal. I give to those holding signs on the street, and it would be foolish to expect a return offering. Lewis Hyde in The Gift says that “In folk tales, the person who tries to hold onto a gift usually dies.” Tell that to the greatest user of folk tales for market gain, the Disney Company, who, Hyde acknowledges in an addendum to his book, made films and created a marketing empire out of folk culture (SNOW WHITE, PINOCCHIO) but who quickly offer cease and desist notices to any ordinary folk who try to create their own art from these images. Patents are now used to create property rights in those things once thought inalienable--seedlines, human genes, ancestral medicines of indigenous cultures. The New York Times says, “For centuries people have been speaking of talent and inspiration as gifts; Hyde’s basic argument was that this language must extend to the products of talent and inspiration too. Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated—published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation — from being, at its core, an offering.” What will you offer to a friend, to your community, through your art? becomes an anti-capitalist love song.
The joy lies not in the capital but in the exchange, and perhaps the recognition that for a relationship to be just, it must move toward an ability to give not simply from expectation to receive in return but towards an awareness that reciprocity expands any gift beyond our bodies, our time, the worlds we think we live in. Our relationships become free through our responsibility to each other, the responsibility of knowing and acting from the notion that we are they.
I’m sending love to our beloved friends in Lahaina, Maui today. If you’d like to give, consider a donation to The Hawai’i Community Foundation, Maui Strong Fund. Due to conditions on the ground there, there may be trouble connecting.
If you’re near Seattle, get to Amoako Boafo’s debut solo museum exhibition Soul of Black Folks at the Seattle Art Museum. If you can’t make it, check out the paintings, book resources/bibliography, and playlist online.
Notions of reciprocity:
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer & for young adults.
The Gift: How The Creative Spirit Transforms The World, by Lewis Hyde & the companion addendum online here.
Sophie Strand’s Substack & book.
Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake
The Reciprocity Project described in a news article & here on its website.
The Commons and the act of commoning through a book like Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, by Silvia Federici.
Mutual Aid by Dean Spade.
What Is Public? A Case for a “Rich Common,” also by Lewis Hyde.
Happy August friends,
Sonya
You can find Sonya at~
The podcast I did with my kid.
Some folks try to censor certain stories to control their powerful truths, just like some try to prevent knowing that bodily autonomy is a human right.
Humans can be remarkably interested in writing processes, schedules, and rituals, but the reality is, you’ve got to make the patterns that inform your own summoning of the muse.
Ahmed says of her works, including The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, “The words feminist killjoy came to me because she was already out there, a recognizable figure, a stereotype of feminists, those miserable feminists who make misery their mission. Misery is not our mission. But still if misery is what we cause in saying what we say, doing what we do, we are willing to cause it.” I would count this as a kind of movement reciprocity, in the sense that the offering or exchange is a necessary uprooting of harm. See also Ahmed’s work, The Promise of Happiness.
I found this post particularly beautiful. Sending love and support over to Seattle from here on the beautiful and wild Olympic Peninsula.