Reciprocity is Participation

"Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?" — Bertrand Russell

September 14th, 2026

People in our WE gathering in NYC

📍House of Loto—Salida, Colorado, USA 🇺🇸

Greetings from the wilderness!

Last week, I wrote about my lesson in receptivity after spending four weeks with my right arm in a sling. As someone much more comfortable being the doer than asking for help, I began to see receiving differently—not as the opposite of generosity, but as part of what allows reciprocity to exist in the first place.

But I've also been reconsidering what reciprocity actually means.

For a long time, I think I understood it primarily as equal exchange. You do something for me, I do something for you. You give, I give back. We each contribute our fair share. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But lately, reciprocity has started to feel much less transactional to me.

I'm beginning to understand reciprocity as participation in relationship. And participation isn't always “equal.”

There are seasons when I have a lot to give and seasons when I need to receive more than I can offer. Sometimes I lead. Sometimes I follow. Sometimes I bring the idea, the resources, or the energy to make something happen. Sometimes my contribution is listening, asking a good question, or simply making room for someone else.

The point isn't that everyone contributes the same thing in equal measure. The point is that we participate in one another's flourishing.

People in our WE fishing in Colorado

Nature keeps teaching me this.

Nothing in a healthy ecosystem exists only for itself. Life is constantly being exchanged. What one organism releases becomes nourishment for another. What dies becomes soil for what comes next. Giving and receiving aren't opposing roles—They're movements within the same living system.

I'm beginning to think healthy community works much the same way.

We talk a lot about wanting deeper connection and a greater sense of belonging. But I've been asking myself lately what we're willing to bring to the communities we want to belong to.

People from our WE gathering in Puerto Vallarta

It's easy to approach community just as something we consume. Am I getting something from this? Do I agree with what's being said? Is this meeting my needs?

Those aren't necessarily bad questions, and they’re helpful to ask with regard to alignment. But they also have the potential to keep me standing slightly outside the relationship, evaluating only what it has to offer me.

Participation asks different questions: How am I showing up? What is mine to contribute here? Am I willing to listen? To be curious? To make room? To ask for what I need? To allow someone else's experience to challenge my own?

And perhaps most importantly: Am I willing to let my participation change what becomes possible for the whole?

People in our WE on retreat in Mexico

This is something we've been practicing through Loto. Our Circles aren't classes where someone arrives with the answers and everyone else comes to receive them. We like to think of them more as living workshops in relationship.

The facilitators help tend the container, but the people who enter it co-create what happens within it. Every person brings something no one else can bring—Their stories. Their questions. Their lived experience. Their presence. Their willingness to listen and be listened to.

Without that participation, there is no Circle. There is no WE. Maybe that's what I mean when I say: The WE is woven through relationship.

It isn't something someone else creates for us. We create it through our willingness to participate in one another's lives. And when we do, something begins to emerge between us that none of us could have created alone.

I'll come back to that next week.

With Love, unconditionally—

Jennifer

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