Charles Eisenstein

This new understanding is actually quite ancient, echoing the indigenous understanding of nature as a web of gifts.

they are divine gifts.

a simple expression of our innate generosity.

keeping us in deadening jobs out of economic necessity,

witness the phrase “the cost of living.”

e live in an omnipresent anxiety, borne of the scarcity of the money which we depend on for life

“I was not put here on earth to do this.”

the feeling that we are not living our own lives, but only the lives we are paid to live.

view of biology as consisting of myriad discrete, separate competing selves—organisms or “selfish genes”—is more a projection of our own present-day culture than it is an accurate understanding of nature

Nitrogen-fixing bacteria don’t directly benefit from doing so, except that the nitrogen they give to the soil grows plants that grow roots that grow fungi, which ultimately provide nutrients to the bacteria.