The Serviceberry
Cut along the dashed lines and pass the cards around the table.
What is a food you have picked with your own hands, from a bush, a tree, a backyard, or a roadside, and who were you with?
Before tonight, had you ever heard of a serviceberry? What did you picture when you read the title?
Kimmerer writes about gifts that come with no invoice attached. What is something you have been given that you still feel quietly indebted to, in a good way?
Where in your own life does a gift economy already quietly run, the shared tools, the dropped-off soup, the overflowing zucchini? How does it feel to be inside it?
The book treats gratitude as a practice rather than a mood. Did any passage make you want to say thank you out loud to something that cannot hear you?
How did reading this change the way your own neighborhood or street looked on your next walk? Did anything suddenly feel more generous, or more stingy?
Kimmerer holds Indigenous teaching and Western economics side by side without demanding you pick. Did that gentleness land as comforting, or did you find yourself wishing she pushed harder, and what does your answer say about you?
By the last pages, were you left feeling soothed or quietly unsettled about how you live? Share the feeling rather than the conclusion, and tell us one small thing you might actually do differently.