The Bridge Back to Abundance

From scarcity and fear to trust and wholeness.

Not every apple becomes a tree.

Separation — How Scarcity Was Invented

There’s a story. You may have heard it. It starts in a small village.

The people of this village lived simply. They traded eggs for grain, firewood for cheese, childcare for bread. On any given morning, you might see someone chasing a chicken through the square, because chickens were a form of wealth — and sometimes also the currency. There were no banks, no ledgers. Just relationships. Reciprocity. Trust.

Then one day, a man arrived from far away.

He wore shiny shoes, a sharp hat, and a grin that curled like a question mark. He walked with the air of someone who knew something others didn’t. The villagers were curious. He looked nothing like them — too clean, too polished, like he had never carried firewood or knelt to tend the earth.

He stood in the village square and watched as a woman chased a chicken through the dust, laughing as she stumbled.

“Is this how you trade?” he called out, smirking.

The woman finally caught the bird, clutching it under her arm, cheeks flushed with sweat and triumph. She turned toward him, annoyed. “Do you have a better way?” she snapped.

The man didn’t flinch. In fact, he seemed pleased by her challenge.

“I can make things easier,” he said, with a voice like velvet and steel.

He pulled a piece of thick leather from his bag and, with a knife, began cutting perfect circles into it. “These,” he explained, holding up the tokens, “are money. You won’t have to run after chickens anymore. You won’t need to count sacks or weigh grain. These represent value — standardized, measurable, tradable.”

The villagers gathered around, intrigued. They had never seen anything like it. The tokens gleamed in the sun, their edges clean, their form familiar yet strange — like something both new and ancient.

“This way,” the man continued, “you can trade anything for anything. Eggs for cheese, cheese for firewood, firewood for shoes — all without chasing chickens.”

There were murmurs of agreement. Nods. The tokens did seem easier.

“But I won’t give them away,” the man added, smiling. “I’ll lend them to you. Ten tokens per household. Pay me back eleven next season. Just one more. That’s how the system works. It keeps things moving. It ensures growth.”

Some villagers hesitated. Others shrugged. “Just one more,” they thought. “What could it hurt?”

And just like that, the game changed.

At first, it seemed manageable. But soon, a problem emerged: there weren’t enough tokens in circulation to pay back the interest. To repay their debts, villagers had to compete. Some prospered. Others lost their land, their herds, their autonomy. What was once shared became scarce. What was once relationship became transaction. What was once enough was never enough again.

When the first summer storm rolled in, the change became clear. In the past, the whole village would rush to help the wheat grower — gathering the sheaves, covering them with cloth, dragging them under shelter before the rain hit. It wasn’t about whose crop it was. It was about survival, together. But now, no one came. Each was too busy protecting their own debts, their own assets, their own risk.

The man with shiny shoes eventually left the village, pockets full.
But the system he introduced stayed behind. It was efficient, yes.
But something invisible had broken.

What had arrived that day wasn’t just leather tokens — it was Separation.

This is not just a parable. It is the myth that underlies our reality.

Because separation is not just a feeling — it is the architecture of our economic system. It begins with the belief that we are not connected. That we are not enough. That the world must be controlled, calculated, dominated. From this belief, we enclose the commons. We assign value to life only once it can be measured. And in doing so, we manufacture scarcity.

And scarcity, in turn, demands extraction.

Just like in the village, where each person now needed to produce more — not just enough to live, but enough to repay with interest — scarcity created pressure. Pressure to extract more from the land, more from labor, more from time itself. Extraction became the engine of survival.

This is the paradox we live in: we extract to create wealth, and in doing so, we create scarcity.

We drain aquifers, and water becomes scarce. We commodify housing, and homes become unaffordable. We monetize time, and we never have enough of it. Extraction becomes our logic. And like the man with the leather coins, we forget the cost we’ve imposed.

But it didn’t begin this way.

There were, and still are, cultures that operated by a different logic. The logic of reciprocity. Of the gift. Of commons held in trust by the community. Elinor Ostrom showed the world that people, left to their own devices, could sustainably manage shared resources without top-down control. They did it not through scarcity, but through relationship. Through trust.

That’s what we’ve lost — not just the resources, but the relationships that made them abundant.

And now, as the Earth begins to say no more, as the planetary boundaries close in, we are not just running out of oil or clean air. We are running out of time to remember.

Because this is not a technical crisis. It is a spiritual one.
And its name is separation.

Abundance — The Gift of Right Relationship

The village in the story did not begin in scarcity. It began in relationship. It was the arrival of separation — disguised as progress — that introduced scarcity into the system. That’s the great sleight of hand: scarcity wasn’t a natural condition. It was manufactured, by severing life from relationship.

To return to abundance is not to deny material needs. It is to remember the way the world actually works when it is alive, not abstracted.

I return often to a wild place in Patagonia. I paddle my kayak across a glacial lake to a secluded forest island. There, far from roads and routines, stands a gnarled apple tree, growing untended. Each autumn, it overflows with fruit — thousands of apples, fragrant and crisp, falling to the forest floor.

Some I gather to make jelly or apple pudding. But most rot where they fall. And that’s the point.

Because not every apple is meant to become a tree.

Some feed birds preparing for winter, who carry seeds across the forest. Others nourish the mycelium beneath the soil, whose delicate threads break down the fruit into nutrients. Bacteria complete the process. The tree itself, in return, absorbs this living compost through its roots. It survives — and thrives — through a quiet agreement with its ecosystem. The apple is not a product. It is a participant.

This is not waste. This is reciprocity. This is relationship. This is abundance.

In living systems, nothing is singular in purpose. Everything feeds something else.
The apple doesn’t ask to be useful. It is useful — because it belongs.

And it’s important to say clearly: abundance is not infinite growth.
It is the overflow of well-tended relationship.

We lost sight of this when we turned the orchard into an industry, the forest into timber, the soil into a factory. We broke the loop. We mistook richness for wealth.

Richness hoards. Wealth flows.

Richness isolates. Wealth circulates.

Real abundance cannot be enclosed, and when you try — when you force it for personal gain — you return to extraction. You kill the tree to sell the fruit.

Nature does not operate this way. A thriving forest is not a race for sunlight, but a symphony of sharing. Trees communicate underground. They feed the weak. Fungi distribute nutrients like a cooperative economy. Nothing is wasted because everything is in relationship.

Human communities once lived this way — and some still do. The commons, in its original form, was not a resource — it was a relationship. Land was not owned, it was held in trust. Governance was participatory. Stewardship, not extraction, defined wealth. Elinor Ostrom called this a “design for the commons.” Others have simply called it home.

And abundance, in this context, is not measured in stockpiles. It’s the felt sense that you will have enough — because you belong to a system that works. That gives. That adapts. That includes you.

This is not utopia. This is ecology. This is what life does when it’s left to be alive.

Trust and Courage — Belonging at Heart

What happens when a community remembers how to live in relationship?

Trust returns.

And when trust returns, fear begins to recede — not because the world becomes perfect, but because you are no longer alone. The soil remembers how to grow. The people remember how to share. The systems around you are not there to extract — they are there to support life. In that ecosystem — ecological, social, spiritual — courage becomes possible.

Courage does not mean the absence of fear. It means fear no longer defines your decisions.

We’ve forgotten this, because we’ve built an entire culture on distrust. Contracts, insurances, firewalls, surveillance, credit scores — these are the scaffolds of a world that expects betrayal. When trust dies, we build systems to contain the damage. But they only deepen the separation.

In a functioning commons, no such walls are needed. Not because people are perfect, but because relationship is the operating principle. Governance is participatory. Resources are shared by those who depend on them. Needs are met not through dependency, but through belonging.

And belonging births courage.

Because courage comes from cor — the heart. And the heart does not flourish in fear. The heart flourishes in presence, in reciprocity, in meaning. A mother caring for a sick child does not ask for incentives. A farmer tending soil for future generations does not measure in quarters. This is the logic of life. This is courage in action.

But there is another dimension — one that opens when fear dissolves and relationship is restored. It is beyond economy, beyond social organization, beyond culture. And yet, it holds all of them.

It is the dimension of wholeness.

Because what we call economy, society, governance, even culture — these are not isolated systems. They are nested wholes within a greater living whole. A whole that includes land and water, spirit and soil, ancestors and futures. A whole in which everything is in relationship.

When we enter this dimension, we are no longer managing systems — we are remembering ourselves as part of something indivisible.

Thich Nhat Hanh called it interbeing. The understanding that nothing exists alone. That the cloud becomes the rain, the rain becomes the tea, the tea becomes the smile you give your neighbor. In Plum Village, I learned that silence is not emptiness — it is fullness. Each step in walking meditation is not toward a goal — it is toward home.

And once you truly inhabit interbeing, you enter what I call interbecoming.

You are not just connected — you are part of the becoming of the world. You are no longer a separate agent acting on life. You are life, in motion. And when you live from this place, abundance is not just economic — it is existential.
It is spiritual.
It is wholeness.

It is the felt experience of being in right relationship — with yourself, with others, with Earth. It is the aliveness that arises when we are aligned with the patterns and principles of living systems — where nothing exists in isolation, and everything contributes to the health of the whole.

What Now? — Rejoining the Living World

So, what now?

We’re told we face a global crisis. But this is not just an ecological crisis, or an economic crisis, or a governance crisis. Those are the symptoms.

The crisis is a rupture in relationship.

And what that means is that the way forward is not merely technical.
It is cultural. Emotional. Spiritual.
It is a crisis of memory.

Because paradoxically, the way forward… is back.
Back to something we once knew. Back to relationship, to reciprocity, to the patterns that sustain life.

We don’t need to invent the new paradigm.
We need to remember the old agreement.

For most of our history, humans lived by a pact — between each other, and with the more-than-human world. This was not romantic primitivism. It was ecological wisdom. Spiritual alignment. Governance embedded in care. Economy embedded in reciprocity.

We’ve lived this before. And in many places, people still do.

Our task now is to reconcile. To repair the broken pacts. To create new forms of cooperation, new institutions, new technologies, new patterns of exchange — but all rooted in relationship. All flowing from a new cosmology. Or perhaps, the oldest one.

We are here to build biocultural ecosystems — places where ecology and culture are no longer in conflict, but co-create the conditions for life. We are here to create systems of governance that listen, not control. Economies that give, not take. Technologies that heal, not dominate.

This will require humility. It will require courage. It will require new stories, and the ending of old ones. But most of all, it will require a return to the original truth:

We are not separate.
We are not alone.
We belong.

We do not need to save the Earth.
We need to rejoin her.

And when we do, the logic of separation will fade.
The scars of extraction will begin to heal.
And abundance will not be something we chase.
It will be something we become.

This is what we aspire to develop at SEVA.

SEVA, in Sanskrit, means to be in service.

And when we realize that we can be in service of life — when we place our intention not in control, but in connection — something begins to shift. We find ourselves aligned with the aliveness of the world. We enter into a deeper rhythm. And it is there, in that quiet act of service, that the bridge to true abundance begins to unfold.

And what now?

We hope these lines are not an ending, but a beginning.
That what now becomes not a question, but an intention.
A quiet vow to walk together — toward reconciliation and remembering.

Because when we remember, we reconcile.
And when we reconcile, we come alive again.
Not as individuals chasing abundance,
but as communities becoming it.

Let this be the first step.