“Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community not only creates abundance–community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.”

— Parker Palmer, http://fetzer.org/blog/summers-abundant-community

I am reading this Palmer piece for a small community of professionals at my university, and yet here’s what it brings to mind for me:

On Sunday, my husband and a friend rented a pickup and drove to the city’s woodchip pile. They helped themselves to free woodchips, forked and shoveled them into the tarp-lined truck, and then drove back. First two loads to Jon’s house, to cushion the heads of those who fall from the playset. Second two loads to our house, to lay atop newspapers and cardboard, to smother the weeds that grew up through the last load of woodchips we’d dumped. And through it all: assorted children at our house, neighbors and friends, playing elaborate games with sticks, wheeling a tiny plastic wheelbarrow, climbing Woodchip Mountain, helping carry away the deadwood of the old spirea I saw fit to attack while waiting for the truck.

This, I thought, is abundance in my world: the ready company of children and friends, the shared interest and investment of neighbors, the stewardship of a little piece of land that connects to so many others. Homemade watermelon ice pops. What more could we ask?