The first snowfall always makes me cry.

This morning, through tears and twilight, I watched each flake ease through the air and land silently on the dry, tired earth. On the brown leaves of spirea and the pale yellow blooms of the petunia, still open despite the freeze. I couldn’t help but think of grace. Of how each flake settled like a finger placed gently on lips. A hush. Or perhaps like a hanky in the hand of the grieving. Or the kind of gentle smile that lands on the lips of someone who understands.

My tears aren’t lamenting the end of a season. Nor recalling some memory that my humanness recognizes. I think that they fall in the name of kindness. I look outside these windows at that snow, so slowly swaying through cool air and green needles, and I want to be better. I want to take the scene inside me and become more like it. This sounds altruistic. Perhaps only because the overculture has made relationship seem extraordinary. And it sounds simple and it is. Simple and complex as each flake. And all that nuance notwithstanding, I still cry and still think I can do better.

Now I am not sure if better is the right word. I do not like to live in this place of not good enough. Hasn’t that gotten us in enough trouble? Enough debt—emotional and financial? I think I cry because I see something in the first snowfall that reminds my body of another word. A more generous word. This is a deeper knowing. Bone deep. Ancestral deep. It is seeing the life of a season, the life of Earth, as gift. And maybe I am not wholly off when I say I want to do better. Maybe better is just the wrong word. Maybe it is a reminder that seeing does not belong to me alone, nor relationship to the human.

I am thinking of reciprocity. Not a transaction. Not tit for tat. Not a you give me this and I will give you that. The first snow reminds me that reciprocity isn’t a word we type into a search bar for an immediate response. A receipt. A debt paid in full. It is a way of being. Of living. A constant state.

Do you know about snow? How each flake forms? What snow goes through? Sure, there is science for all of that. Are we really beings made only of science? Are we and weather and awe so easily explained away? I tend not to think so. But I can hold many truths. Alongside the science, I hold N. Scott Momaday’s words: “It seems to me that in a certain sense we are all made of words; that our most essential being consists in language.”

I would like to think that when those first flakes fall, even on the road, even en masse, they wake words in me. Stories. I believe that in those moments—and I won’t limit it to snow, because I have cried for fields of flowers and falling larch needles—I am re-minded. Even as I try to escape too much mind and sit in the presence of wonder, or even banality, I am grateful to be minded again.

If snow is made of water vapor frozen and attached to dust or pollen, I am made of words and one of those words is reciprocity.

My dear friend Dr. Cristina Eisenberg, a Rarámuri and Western Apache ecologist and wolf researcher, writes that Traditional Ecological Knowledge is founded on values of “reciprocity, peace, and humility.” And now I wonder if it is more than this generosity that makes me pause. Makes me stop talking and writing and listen. Maybe it is about belonging. Maybe it is because that snow, which is translucent, which only becomes seen as it reflects sky, reminds me that I belong. And despite a culture that might swear this is not so, despite humans who insist this planet would be better without us, snow argues the opposite. Kindly. Silently.

This autumn snow reminds me that life isn’t a bill to be paid. That not every “thank you” demands “you’re welcome.” I don’t think it works that way. This is not to say reciprocity is not a circle. It is to say the circle is not a ledger. The indebtedness I feel has no collector I can see, no due date, no demand for immediate repayment. A list of IOUs would fail here. Reciprocity is not a debt to settle. It is a state of being. As I write this, I whisper: I am reciprocity. It feels silly, a little. And then the overculture, mistaking smallness for humility: Who do you think you are? But the silent snow is so much louder. The overculture, fluent in separation, thinks it knows so much.

This snowfall won’t last, sadly. I could go for being snowed in. Surrounded by tiny particles of reciprocity. Cells of reciprocity. DNA made of belonging. Usually I rush outside and turn my face to the sky and human salt meets vapor that comes from who knows where and both run down my face. But today I am content to sit in my chair and watch. To sit here and write to you. To offer you words from Momaday and dear, dear Cristina, who is in her own way a fierce and gentle snow. To sit here with that fierce and gentle and wise snow falling and offer you a word to build yourself out of. To re-mind you—you and your very old particles, your very small particles—that we have lived this way before. That what is happening right outside, from snowfall to sunshine, tells us we can live this way still. In this constant state. In reciprocity. Nothing between us is paid in full because nothing between us is finished. The language and stories we build ourselves from are ours to choose.

And sometimes the kindest way to live in this state of reciprocity is to be present to the way the snow is landing. So softly. And how, in just a few minutes, the warm Earth on which it lands will transform it back to water and take this gift into her skin.