“Abundance doesn't follow giving until giving becomes its own reward.” - Jan Denise
In August, the tree in the back yard is full of fruit. The branches hang low, heavy with lots of crisp, green, crunchy apples. More apples than we can possibly eat, even if we made apple pie and apple crisp and apple pancakes and applesauce and apple Brown Betty and of course, ate an apple every day because, even though we like her very much, we do want to keep the doctor away.
And still there are apples. So we give them away.
Many years ago, when I was in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and living in Montana, I took a trip north to visit a group of fellow volunteers living in Hays, a small town on the Fort Belknap reservation. One afternoon, my friend Linda took me with her to visit a family that lived on the outskirts of the reservation. There were 6 of them in all. A mother and father, their three young children and the father’s mother, a beautiful woman in her 60’s with long flowing silver hair, all living in a simple, one room house.
The house was a simple structure, made of sheets of plywood nailed roughly together. The windows were covered in plastic sheeting to stave off the drafty winds that would blow through the cracks in the glass. It was snowy and cold and despite the plastic sheeting, the biting wind found its way in. There were no rooms to speak of. Instead, where there should have been walls, tattered sheets hung, separating bedroom from kitchen from living room. In the corner, a fire burned in the old cast iron wood stove that served to warm the tiny space.
We arrived in the late afternoon, the sun beginning to set on the red reservation soil. The grandmother stood at the stove, stirring a pot of venison stew. To her right, her daughter-in-law dropped rounds of soft, doughy fry bread into the cast iron skillet. They greeted us warmly as we entered and the grandmother, who was the matriarch of the family, motioned to the table and invited us to join them for dinner.
“Oh no,” we said. “Thank you. We just stopped by to say hello.” I glanced at my friend and smiled in an uncomfortable sort of way, the way you smile when you are unsure of what to do next. These people have so little, we thought to ourselves. There was no need for them to be polite. We did not expect them to share. We could not take what little they had.
But they insisted.
And so we did. We sat down together and passed the bowls of rich venison stew and warm, crispy fry bread and we ate, together. We sat for a long time, telling stories and laughing and sharing as a community of friends, new and old. It was a wonderful couple of hours and on the ride home, as we chatted excitedly about this and that, a realization, an understanding of sorts began to percolate up from a place deep inside. They had so little and still it was enough to share.
Many years later, the lesson of that moment stays with me.
Abundance is not about excess. It is not about having too much. Like the apples that fall from the tree because they cannot be picked fast enough, abundance is not waste. To experience abundance means to embrace a sense of fullness, a richness of life, a sense of having enough.
Sitting at the table all those years ago, I received more than a warm meal and friendship. It wasn't about waiting for the right moment or hanging on to what we have in the hopes that someday we will have more. No, this lesson was about sharing what we have. Now. Today.
No matter how big or small, we all have something we can share. Abundance lies within.