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Becoming a Gift to Life

A Meditation on Giving Back to Earth

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© alba1970 from Pixabay

From the Practice

A bird bath is a human creation. And it’s a gift to birds. It doesn’t benefit us at all. Maybe a little bit of bird watching, but it truly is just a gift to a species outside of our own.  And I think this is truly what human beings we’re born to do. We were born to be givers.

I truly believe that when we offer our heart to the birds, to the microbes, to the megafauna, even horses or buffalo or sheep or goats or what have you, when we offer our heart out to a species not our own, our spirits are elevated, our spirits grow because we’re doing what would be the kind thing to do as homosapiens.

We live in a community of life. And even though the city is so good at creating this artificial reality where it doesn’t seem like there’s anything but human life and that that’s all that matters, that’s ultimately not true.

The transcript for this practice can be found here: Becoming a Gift to Life – Lyla June

This podcast was originally published on The Science of Happiness podcast at The Greater Good Science Center. It is republished here with permission.

Picture of Lyla June

Lyla June

Lyla June is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective, and ecological healing. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. She recently finished her PhD on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.
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