Week 3: Abundance
How might we tap into abundance as a practice of being and having enough?
We know racialized capitalism works to control and alter our relationship to abundance. As adrienne maree brown describes, “A small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us happiness, sell us back to ourselves.”
We have been made to worship the gods of consumption and control. We have believed the lies of white supremacy: that success equals individualism, perfectionism, and the accumulation of excess even amidst vast inequality. This narrative not only robs us of our own abundant worth, safety and joy, it also removes precious resources from our lands, waters and skies that living beings need to survive.
The myth of scarcity amidst global wealth-extraction has been strategically used to divide oppressed peoples and pit us against ourselves—from the Plymouth Rock to the plantation to the Chicago city budget. Living in a hyper-competitive, capitalistic, and oppressive society that has always disproportionately harmed Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples, we are conditioned to forget our worth and feed into the vicious circle of acquiring more.
Grounding ourselves in a foundation of abundance—as we define it—we can begin to heal from these colonialist logics. We can work to relinquish our own longing for excess and reshape our relationship to enough. By “tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet,” as adrienne maree brown invites, we can access authentic pleasure.
What would be different in this moment of time if we could feel in the deepest recesses of our beings that we are enough, we have enough, and we have the vast stores of strengths in our bodies and our lineages to move us towards the liberatory world we are fighting for? What would be different if we could push back against the scarcity narrative driven by local and national officials, and ground ourselves in the radical truth that there IS enough—resources are often just being hoarded and allocated to the wrong things. What if, instead of resources spent on death-making things, our resources fueled things that are life-affirming?
From this place of abundance, our work is to end the extraction of resources that serve and protect the few, and to instead sow, harvest, and distribute in manners that allow for the thriving of our communities and our land. May we ground ourselves in the abundance of enough, to support the flourishing of all life on this planet.