Abundance is everywhere. We just have to open to it. It's found in your "time to eat sunflower seeds and watch the river, time to think about what it means to be a person, and what it means to be free."
I have just been sitting here at my desk in the early morning, looking at an abundance of stars sprinkled above me. I am so filled up. It's just taking the time to pause and notice isn't it.
Lemme get this out of the way: This is the first time I hear Abdullah Öcalan pronunciation in English. To us in Arabic it's more like "Oujalan". It's been ages since I heard his name.
I loved reading this and I sympathize with it a lot. I was listening to Barry Schwartz talk about how 'too many choices' isn't really good for us, and I see this in the American life as an outsider (https://behavioralscientist.org/is-having-too-many-choices-versus-too-few-really-the-greater-problem-for-consumers/). Everything has reviews, everything has 8-9 variations, every pair of running shoes is compared to 5 others, and you hear YouTubers talk about how 'the material in the tongue is not as comfortable as the other shoes, but the padding is more plush' and we're left to wonder and get paralyzed. I also see this with my New Yorker wife, who wants to take the subway in such an optimized way that she wants to align three trains so she can get off one, and not wait 4-5 minutes for the next one, all while forgetting the 'abundance' of trains coming and going, if we're willing to extend our space a bit more.
From our muslim tradition, we have Umar Ibn Al-khattab (one of the most important figures in Islamic history) when he saw one of his friends buying meat on the regular, and he was quoted saying: "Is it so that whenever you desire, you buy?!" and it really became a sort of a maxim. I take this with me on almost everything, I sometimes refuse to buy things I want because I don't need, and have been trying to live with this distinction. It's true that we won't live the lives of sages, but if we can take glimpses of it, it's a welcome addition.
Thank you for writing this Antonia.
P.S. This came at the same time I was listening to this podcast about how 'optimization of our lives' isn't necessarily the best thing we can do. A tangent, but can be useful somehow.
I have a garage full of the things I canned this season and it definitely feels like abundance. I have the luxury of time on weekends--kids are grown and gone--so I can spend the whole day making jam or using my mandoline to slice things for pickling.
When we moved into this house I set out to turn the yard into food production and habitat--abundance for critters and birds as well as for my husband and me. On weekends we walk to the farmers' market in downtown (Olympia, WA), which also provides abundance. I'm buying food from the people who grew it. I'm fortunate to have a job that lets me afford housing in this kind of location and buying locally grown food that costs more than the big-box grocery store.
Some of the jars are full of food I grew: My tomatillo plants grew like they were auditioning for Little Shop of Horrors and I kept making salsa verde. I have bags of frozen tomatillos from the last pickings as the vines turned black with frost so there's more to come. I made green tomato chutney and zucchini chutney, hot pepper relish and fermented pepper mash.
Some of it is food I gleaned: wild blackberries grow everywhere here so I have seedless blackberry jam (worth the labor to smoosh out the seeds). I live a short bike ride away from pick-your-own blueberry farms, I grew elderberries, raspberries and tayberries so I have bumbleberry jam and more.
A primary source of abundance I can't recommend enough is Buy Nothing, for people who have a local chapter. You don't have to be on Facebook; there's an app. https://buynothingproject.org/. People ask and give freely and it's both community-building and anti-capitalism. A lot of what I pickled this year is zucchini and summer squash I got for the asking, and I turned some of it into a citrus jam (the zucchini just disappears and becomes the medium). I made fruit leather with plums from someone who said "please come pick! I can't use all these plums!" I got canning jars for the asking.
I live close to a friend who bought a 100-year-old farmhouse with a neglected apple orchard she's been bringing back. I help with the press and get jars of ciders, as well as getting to drink cold, fresh cider straight from the press while her dozens of chickens cluck under the trees. I save the tops and seeds of peppers in the freezer because the chickens love them, then I buy eggs from her, and it all feels so wonderfully circular.
I am utterly overwhelmed by consumer choices and I haven’t stepped foot in a grocery store in a few years - online pickup is a pandemic holdover for me. My spouse does our Costco run because I can’t stand the “abundance.”
The big Amazon delivery truck drives through my neighborhood regularly and unfortunately I haven’t been able to break up with it yet completely.
When you write about hunting my first thought is - how do you find the time? For sitting for hours and maybe not catching anything at all? How do we have so many “convenient” choices, and yet still have so little time. Convenience meals and meal kits and one-day delivery and yet I still don’t feel any margin in my life for preserving food or like you said - everyone aligning their schedules for communal gatherings and care. 💔
It is always a pleasure to read your words and to hear your voice.
The abundance I wish to acknowledge today is the abundance I carry inside. I love how I see the world, and the intimate connection that this seeing sometimes brings. I wouldn't trade it for all the consumer goods and services in the world. I am grateful.
I have a small sense of that culture shock you describe still each time I head out to grocery shop on the weekends--so. much. stuff. so many people buying so much stuff. I return home thankful to not have to look at it all, but that is no way to effect change. oof. I realize I have to compartmentalize my reaction/feelings, almost like when I fly--to not think too much about it in the moment because the immense sense of overwhelm that comes with it. I love hearing about your gathering, preserving, efforts--it made me wish we could all hang out and just work on putting all those beautiful foods into jars and candy containers (ha--loved that) and appreciating that abundance too. Really loved this--and of learning more about your experience of the Soviet Union and that history. 💜
This essay has specifically hit close to home with my experiences of the world, growing up in a small town and later moving to a big city. You have brought so much to life—the contrast of what is marketed as abundance and what true abundance really looks like. The strangeness of the supermarket aisles still makes me uncomfortable—the paradox of choice—why? What’s the need for it? Is it another distraction? A way to keep society at large confined to be lost in decision-making for the simplest of tasks? What are we missing out on while choosing our cereals and yogurts?
My experience of abundance, true abundance, was that of summertime in a Himalayan town where I lived during my graduation years. Every houseyard consisted of several lychee trees which would bear uncountable lychees with sweet, juicy flesh. So many would drop overripe due to summer heat, go to waste because there were too many trees than there were people to eat them. I felt so full through those experiences, so satisfied and abundant at the miracle of life and Mother Earth.
There surely is an abundance of flies on a decomposing corpse, and a gustatory treat therein for those suited to such fare, like maggots and worms. More to commodification, production and consumption than meets the unmindful "I." Thanks, Nia.
Nov 22, 2023·edited Nov 22, 2023Liked by Antonia Malchik
Such beautiful writing! As for choice and abundance in supermarkets, I find that plays differently in every country I've lived in. And I remember when I lived in Mexico, a visit to the US would be a shock in terms of the abundance in supermarkets, even though I went to pretty well-stocked shops in Mexico City.
Congratulations on finishing the first chapter! That's a huge accomplishment. I'm psyched that you're bringing in social science, even if your mom's ranch might have been a perfect opener too. My fave lines:
"choice has little relationship to abundance, especially if the choice is a mirage created by advertising, packaging, and small tweaks in sugar and salt content. All I could say was that something felt wrong."
"No matter how much we read or study, it’s never a replacement for lived experience."
The second quote is profound yet simultaneously ironic to me, because in fact one space where abundance feels real is the endless possibility of things to read; the richness of thought and especially, shared thought. (And they tell me reading is abundant in Russia!). But mostly, I struggle with the patience, attention and care stuff. And inability to make choices.
Some other people here are citing books and films (I second the Renata Salecl recommendation by Charlotte!). For myself, the film your post immediately brought to mind, more than any, was that scene from Katherine Bigelow's Hurt Locker when Jeremy Renner returns from a long stint in Iraq (where he invested his entire identity as macho colonialist savior, while internalizing the suffering and deprivation around him), and the camera suddenly cuts from Iraq to him pushing a shopping cart in one of those mega-supermarkets, with piped-in music and obscenely stocked aisles. You can feel his shellshock and existential emptiness.
Another beautiful piece of poetry in prose form. So glad I found you on substack and that we can actually chat in person. I heard a Greg Brown song last night about his grandma preserving the summer in a jar. Thats the beautiful work you have done
Nia -- do you know Renata Salecl's "The Tyranny of Choice"? It's been a couple of years since I read it, but I found it really useful ...
And your grocery store moment -- one of my favorite Robin Williams' scenes is the grocery store freakout in Moscow on the Hudson ...
This is beautiful. And I too, look at my freezer, and my pantry shelves, when I get a tiny bit panicky about Everything ... it's work, but it's work I too find comforting. Someone's going to have to know how to do these things, it might as well be us.
The photos you chose are lovely… and food drying is something that has niggled at me for years… perhaps I shall begin? Abundance has the word dance in it and though it is not something I actually do, it stood out for some reason. Loved this essay. Thank you, as always… 🙏🏼
I followed your link to the Mocetti & Barone study on socioeconomic mobility (or lack of it) in Florence. Those results are stunning! Six hundred years later, people are making 5% more than expected just because of being descended from one of the richest families of the 1400s! Six hundred years of intergenerational effects. It boggles the mind—and seems intuitively right at the same time. I look forward to reading what you have to say about it. And I'm grateful for your mention of Abdullah Öcalan, who is new to me. Tracking his book down led me to Frank & Gills and others who are laying out something I'd come to on my own: that capital accumulation goes back 5000 years, not just 500. For some years I've been delving into how social-economic-worldview patterns today have eerie resonances with patterns laid down 5000 years ago, and these sources are going to be a huge help. Thanks for your work!
Such a beautiful, nostalgic, piece of writing.
Abundance is everywhere. We just have to open to it. It's found in your "time to eat sunflower seeds and watch the river, time to think about what it means to be a person, and what it means to be free."
I have just been sitting here at my desk in the early morning, looking at an abundance of stars sprinkled above me. I am so filled up. It's just taking the time to pause and notice isn't it.
Thank you for your story. Jo 🙏
Lemme get this out of the way: This is the first time I hear Abdullah Öcalan pronunciation in English. To us in Arabic it's more like "Oujalan". It's been ages since I heard his name.
I loved reading this and I sympathize with it a lot. I was listening to Barry Schwartz talk about how 'too many choices' isn't really good for us, and I see this in the American life as an outsider (https://behavioralscientist.org/is-having-too-many-choices-versus-too-few-really-the-greater-problem-for-consumers/). Everything has reviews, everything has 8-9 variations, every pair of running shoes is compared to 5 others, and you hear YouTubers talk about how 'the material in the tongue is not as comfortable as the other shoes, but the padding is more plush' and we're left to wonder and get paralyzed. I also see this with my New Yorker wife, who wants to take the subway in such an optimized way that she wants to align three trains so she can get off one, and not wait 4-5 minutes for the next one, all while forgetting the 'abundance' of trains coming and going, if we're willing to extend our space a bit more.
From our muslim tradition, we have Umar Ibn Al-khattab (one of the most important figures in Islamic history) when he saw one of his friends buying meat on the regular, and he was quoted saying: "Is it so that whenever you desire, you buy?!" and it really became a sort of a maxim. I take this with me on almost everything, I sometimes refuse to buy things I want because I don't need, and have been trying to live with this distinction. It's true that we won't live the lives of sages, but if we can take glimpses of it, it's a welcome addition.
Thank you for writing this Antonia.
P.S. This came at the same time I was listening to this podcast about how 'optimization of our lives' isn't necessarily the best thing we can do. A tangent, but can be useful somehow.
https://www.ted.com/podcasts/rethinking-with-adam-grant/why-aiming-for-the-best-isn-t-always-good-for-you-transcript
I have a garage full of the things I canned this season and it definitely feels like abundance. I have the luxury of time on weekends--kids are grown and gone--so I can spend the whole day making jam or using my mandoline to slice things for pickling.
When we moved into this house I set out to turn the yard into food production and habitat--abundance for critters and birds as well as for my husband and me. On weekends we walk to the farmers' market in downtown (Olympia, WA), which also provides abundance. I'm buying food from the people who grew it. I'm fortunate to have a job that lets me afford housing in this kind of location and buying locally grown food that costs more than the big-box grocery store.
Some of the jars are full of food I grew: My tomatillo plants grew like they were auditioning for Little Shop of Horrors and I kept making salsa verde. I have bags of frozen tomatillos from the last pickings as the vines turned black with frost so there's more to come. I made green tomato chutney and zucchini chutney, hot pepper relish and fermented pepper mash.
Some of it is food I gleaned: wild blackberries grow everywhere here so I have seedless blackberry jam (worth the labor to smoosh out the seeds). I live a short bike ride away from pick-your-own blueberry farms, I grew elderberries, raspberries and tayberries so I have bumbleberry jam and more.
A primary source of abundance I can't recommend enough is Buy Nothing, for people who have a local chapter. You don't have to be on Facebook; there's an app. https://buynothingproject.org/. People ask and give freely and it's both community-building and anti-capitalism. A lot of what I pickled this year is zucchini and summer squash I got for the asking, and I turned some of it into a citrus jam (the zucchini just disappears and becomes the medium). I made fruit leather with plums from someone who said "please come pick! I can't use all these plums!" I got canning jars for the asking.
I live close to a friend who bought a 100-year-old farmhouse with a neglected apple orchard she's been bringing back. I help with the press and get jars of ciders, as well as getting to drink cold, fresh cider straight from the press while her dozens of chickens cluck under the trees. I save the tops and seeds of peppers in the freezer because the chickens love them, then I buy eggs from her, and it all feels so wonderfully circular.
I am utterly overwhelmed by consumer choices and I haven’t stepped foot in a grocery store in a few years - online pickup is a pandemic holdover for me. My spouse does our Costco run because I can’t stand the “abundance.”
The big Amazon delivery truck drives through my neighborhood regularly and unfortunately I haven’t been able to break up with it yet completely.
When you write about hunting my first thought is - how do you find the time? For sitting for hours and maybe not catching anything at all? How do we have so many “convenient” choices, and yet still have so little time. Convenience meals and meal kits and one-day delivery and yet I still don’t feel any margin in my life for preserving food or like you said - everyone aligning their schedules for communal gatherings and care. 💔
It is always a pleasure to read your words and to hear your voice.
The abundance I wish to acknowledge today is the abundance I carry inside. I love how I see the world, and the intimate connection that this seeing sometimes brings. I wouldn't trade it for all the consumer goods and services in the world. I am grateful.
I have a small sense of that culture shock you describe still each time I head out to grocery shop on the weekends--so. much. stuff. so many people buying so much stuff. I return home thankful to not have to look at it all, but that is no way to effect change. oof. I realize I have to compartmentalize my reaction/feelings, almost like when I fly--to not think too much about it in the moment because the immense sense of overwhelm that comes with it. I love hearing about your gathering, preserving, efforts--it made me wish we could all hang out and just work on putting all those beautiful foods into jars and candy containers (ha--loved that) and appreciating that abundance too. Really loved this--and of learning more about your experience of the Soviet Union and that history. 💜
I will never forget that feeling of overwhelm in that New Jersey grocery store. I love seeing you put it to words.
This essay has specifically hit close to home with my experiences of the world, growing up in a small town and later moving to a big city. You have brought so much to life—the contrast of what is marketed as abundance and what true abundance really looks like. The strangeness of the supermarket aisles still makes me uncomfortable—the paradox of choice—why? What’s the need for it? Is it another distraction? A way to keep society at large confined to be lost in decision-making for the simplest of tasks? What are we missing out on while choosing our cereals and yogurts?
My experience of abundance, true abundance, was that of summertime in a Himalayan town where I lived during my graduation years. Every houseyard consisted of several lychee trees which would bear uncountable lychees with sweet, juicy flesh. So many would drop overripe due to summer heat, go to waste because there were too many trees than there were people to eat them. I felt so full through those experiences, so satisfied and abundant at the miracle of life and Mother Earth.
There surely is an abundance of flies on a decomposing corpse, and a gustatory treat therein for those suited to such fare, like maggots and worms. More to commodification, production and consumption than meets the unmindful "I." Thanks, Nia.
Such beautiful writing! As for choice and abundance in supermarkets, I find that plays differently in every country I've lived in. And I remember when I lived in Mexico, a visit to the US would be a shock in terms of the abundance in supermarkets, even though I went to pretty well-stocked shops in Mexico City.
Congratulations on finishing the first chapter! That's a huge accomplishment. I'm psyched that you're bringing in social science, even if your mom's ranch might have been a perfect opener too. My fave lines:
"choice has little relationship to abundance, especially if the choice is a mirage created by advertising, packaging, and small tweaks in sugar and salt content. All I could say was that something felt wrong."
"No matter how much we read or study, it’s never a replacement for lived experience."
The second quote is profound yet simultaneously ironic to me, because in fact one space where abundance feels real is the endless possibility of things to read; the richness of thought and especially, shared thought. (And they tell me reading is abundant in Russia!). But mostly, I struggle with the patience, attention and care stuff. And inability to make choices.
Some other people here are citing books and films (I second the Renata Salecl recommendation by Charlotte!). For myself, the film your post immediately brought to mind, more than any, was that scene from Katherine Bigelow's Hurt Locker when Jeremy Renner returns from a long stint in Iraq (where he invested his entire identity as macho colonialist savior, while internalizing the suffering and deprivation around him), and the camera suddenly cuts from Iraq to him pushing a shopping cart in one of those mega-supermarkets, with piped-in music and obscenely stocked aisles. You can feel his shellshock and existential emptiness.
Another beautiful piece of poetry in prose form. So glad I found you on substack and that we can actually chat in person. I heard a Greg Brown song last night about his grandma preserving the summer in a jar. Thats the beautiful work you have done
You have a beautiful voice Antonia and a very good read as always , those foods are looking delicious, thank you for your kind message 😊
Nia -- do you know Renata Salecl's "The Tyranny of Choice"? It's been a couple of years since I read it, but I found it really useful ...
And your grocery store moment -- one of my favorite Robin Williams' scenes is the grocery store freakout in Moscow on the Hudson ...
This is beautiful. And I too, look at my freezer, and my pantry shelves, when I get a tiny bit panicky about Everything ... it's work, but it's work I too find comforting. Someone's going to have to know how to do these things, it might as well be us.
The photos you chose are lovely… and food drying is something that has niggled at me for years… perhaps I shall begin? Abundance has the word dance in it and though it is not something I actually do, it stood out for some reason. Loved this essay. Thank you, as always… 🙏🏼
I followed your link to the Mocetti & Barone study on socioeconomic mobility (or lack of it) in Florence. Those results are stunning! Six hundred years later, people are making 5% more than expected just because of being descended from one of the richest families of the 1400s! Six hundred years of intergenerational effects. It boggles the mind—and seems intuitively right at the same time. I look forward to reading what you have to say about it. And I'm grateful for your mention of Abdullah Öcalan, who is new to me. Tracking his book down led me to Frank & Gills and others who are laying out something I'd come to on my own: that capital accumulation goes back 5000 years, not just 500. For some years I've been delving into how social-economic-worldview patterns today have eerie resonances with patterns laid down 5000 years ago, and these sources are going to be a huge help. Thanks for your work!