perhaps you have reckoned with this old story before. i first recognised it, as the mother of a newborn, as i learned to read the cues of my tiny child. the midwife, an elder, expressed without wavering a deep trust in me, my body and my child to know just what to do. she placed our child on me and let the baby creep up to nurse, that first time. i didn’t need to work at anything, the inherent knowledge was in us.
to learn the pattern language of another became a pleasure and a fascination. it stepped outside of the cultures’ rationalist schedules, the fear of spoiling a child. we understood a core truth somehow, that a spoilt child is rather one who has not had their needs met, who has had to find other means to wheedle and compete.
when I first read that most babies on this good earth don’t even wear a diaper, yes, because their families read their cues, i was astonished and tried it though the little one was already ten months old.
we became fluent in reading her patterns. the morning after our second baby was born i took her to hold her over the bowl, gave her a cue and she accepted it. from then on we would just know. if she was still, she’d get busy, wiggling, and if she did not want my milk i’d know to take her to pee—-or if we were off in our day and the busy one became still and thoughtful, we’d offer the potty. it was magic, really.
we have that magic. we can listen, we can learn the patterns of our bodies and the body of this good earth, without fear of ‘spoiling.‘ we can trust that when a need is met, it goes away. when instead we push our young ones away and demand their independence, we are not attuned. our love becomes conditional.
you’d think we’d know this, as we learn to read the cues of a pet with greater acceptance and willingness to be of service than we offer most others.
yet the biosphere provides in reciprocity, in interdependence. we could never be separate from it because we are it, our microbial selves alone are more than half of us, and as we breathe and eat and drink the earth we know we are the earth, everything is circulating, in exchange. as we parent children who have been carried in our arms as much as they needed, set down to run as they indicated they were ready— – as we grow strongly attached, yes, we grow capable, responsible, attuned.
let us give up the thought that in refusing to meet another’s needs we are making them independent. not so. we are making others needy. there is no scarcity in a parents’ love but that we rationalise it into being. the scarcity we create is in the image of a domination economy, the structure we’ve been surviving under, barely, that takes away natural abundance and demands that we work to earn it. must our children earn our affection or be punished? yet that is how we have behaved.
then it follows that we act as if there isn’t enough food for all – yet we know there is so much it is wasted. we act as if there isn’t enough that everyone could have a home – yet some have many homes and others none. we create artificial scarcity in every mode of our social and economic structures, in grades, in clubs, in degrees, in neighbourhoods, in finding any possible way to other, to compete.
but there is no competition. our hearts are big enough and so is the abundant biosphere. we can meet a need unconditionally, sufficiently and when we do, like a contented child, the needs go away. let us become fluent in sufficiency now, as effortlessly as we learn the language of a newborn or the cues of a pet, trusting abundance, giving it freely. from the roots of sufficiency, of needs met, we can transform our societies and regenerate this abundant planet.
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this appleturnover letter is the first of new and reinvented writing that explores the possibilities of living in ways that make more life, while adapting to profound uncertainty and imagining positive, regenerative futures.
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