What is Abundance?

a poem and a prompt

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

Exuviae

I invited abundance into my life
as the guru on the app had suggested,
then sat back and waited. But in my
anticipation, I failed to notice its arrival 
as a cluster of white crocus wearing 
a crown of singing bees. I didn't see
the budding olive trees full of golden
promise swaying in the August breeze.
Regal hoopoes skittered in the bushes, 
bee eaters wind-chimed the sky. Swallows 
nested in roof rafters, their young 
songs unheard while I wondered when 
the riches would come my way. 
Then one bland morning, hanging laundry 
in the sun, I noticed a cicada's gossamer 
exoskeleton still gripping the stalk of a dying 
weed, the insect itself now high in a tree
clanging its tiny cymbals together, having joined
the chorus of lusty heat. When I die, may I 
leave my own shell behind so easily, attached 
to nothing, at peace with everything
as I slip out to sing with the others.


(Originally published in Braided Way Magazine, April 2025)

The Latin word exuviae refers to the remains of an exoskeleton after ecdysozoans (including insects, crustaceans and arachnids) have molted. I find them fascinating. If you've ever seen one up close, the detail is astonishing—a feather-light, amber-shelled imprint of every moving joint and segment, every socket, thorax and abdomen, leg, pincer, or wing. And yet empty, abandoned, shed. Lighter than air.

I began this poem about abundance— a word that gets used a lot these days in tandem with the notion of manifestation— at a time when things felt financially unstable. I was feeling worried and sorry for myself, wallowing in the comparison of what others had that I didn’t, which was wholly unproductive.

My perspective began to shift, and as a consequence my understanding of abundance, when I took myself out of the wallow and into nature. That shift was literally a matter of lifting my head from the screen and looking out the window, then taking myself outside and just observing, just allowing, just taking in my surroundings through the senses. I realized I didn’t need to call forth abundance. It was here all the time. I just needed to see it and be grateful for it.

It was summer, when mother nature is past the flirting stage of spring and in full seduction mode. And I fell for her in all her vibrant, buzzing beauty. It was a reminder that abundance is the opposite of attachment. We witness birth, death, and rebirth through the seasons, of which we are all an integral part. Nature is the best teacher of impermanence. There is so much to let go of in a lifetime, so much to send on its way.

What does abundance mean to you? How do you experience it in your life?

I’d love to know your thoughts or read your poems, so please let me know in the comments.

With gratitude,

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