By Sarah Holyfield

This is such a time of overwhelming dysfunction and fear out there in the world, but life here in my bubble appears to be fine and safe - on the surface – with somewhere to live, food to eat, my own little problems to deal with, and being part of the natural world. I want to be able to think of myself as being part of an interconnected, beautiful, complex and rich world which includes everything from the microscopic to the cosmic, where each element exists and belongs in an intricate web.

Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about the ‘chain of reciprocity’ – and the ‘Honorable Harvest’

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”

But we are being confronted with disaster on many fronts at once – climate change, inequality, a pandemic and war, all of which are intimately connected. A sort of mechanistic paradigm is slowly and surely infiltrating and taking over everything that we thought to be a constant part of our world - the forests and seas, but also the looking-after-each-other things like health and learning. This paradigm is the polar opposite of the gift economy. The neoliberal market now decides.

How to challenge and resist the huge monolithic forces that are being so thoughtless and destructive is a big puzzle and conundrum, and Utopias Bach has been so inspiring for me in offering a way forward…