Serviceberries, Lincoln, and shared abundance

Nisha Austin: Around the time when I started getting into ‘Abundance’ (in the way we all think about it here), my mother-in-law gave me Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry. I think she was trying to piece together exactly what I was so excited about and landed on a bestseller about abundance in nature, reciprocity, and community (things I am admittedly also excited about!). Not quite a book about permitting reform or building state capacity, but it turned out to be more relevant than I expected. It named something I’d been circling: that abundance is relational, that all flourishing is mutual, and that wealth means having enough to share. The other book I keep coming back to is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and the issues Lincoln grappled with: What do we owe the extraordinary institutions we inherited? How do we hold them together through profound disagreement? How do we keep building when the whole project feels fragile? All of these questions are still relevant. Ultimately, I came to this work from a lot of different directions, but the thread connecting all of it is stewardship of the places, institutions, and systems that let people flourish. Kimmerer reminds me that abundance only matters if it’s shared, while Lincoln reminds me that the answer is never settled. Every generation has to show up and do the work.