When I was five years old, my grandmother, my father's mother, took me for a walk.

Somewhere along the way, she knelt down and drew a circle in the mud. She talked to me about the circle of life. We played with water and stones, and she showed me how everything is in relationship with everything else, how everything is medicine, and how all of it moves in a circle.

She asked me to keep our day just between us. I couldn't. I was five, and I was so full of wonder that it came bursting out of me the moment we got home: "You wouldn't believe what Grandma and I saw and did today with water and stones! Everything is medicine and a circle! It was AMAZING!"

My parents were devout, and to them, anything that touched our Native heritage felt dangerous. From that day forward, I was never alone with my grandmother again. When we visited her, it was always as a family, always with my parents in the room.

She gave me that walk freely. It cost her the rest of our time together.

I have carried that day for more than seventy years. And out of it grew a question I have never quite known how to say without it sounding like a complaint.

It isn't a complaint. It's a question. And I suspect almost everyone reading this has felt some version of it, about their own work, their own giving, their own version of "free."

Here is the question: 

I built IndigenousHealing.io as a free global healing community. Anyone, anywhere, can walk Nature's 4 Steps (Balance, Harmony, Abundance, Peace) without paying a cent. That was never in question for me. The teaching itself has to be free, or it isn't the teaching.

But I have also noticed something over the years that I want to name honestly.

People often arrive into deep, genuine connection: long conversations, real questions answered with real care, hours of presence freely given. And then, just as often, they disappear without a word.

Sometimes for months. And then they return, often through a private message, asking for more. More time. More teaching. More of the patient, careful attention that took decades to learn how to give.

The offer I have made, $40 a month for live Circle Calls and recordings, is not a barrier. It is, if anything, below fair trade. And yet even that smallest gesture of reciprocity is too often met with silence, or with a quiet expectation that of course this, too, should simply be given, with no flow of gratitude returning the other way.

This is the sage teaching again, the one I wrote about back in June. When a sacred plant is taken without permission, without relationship, without anything given back, its resonance is twisted. It stops being medicine and becomes something else in the hands of someone who never extended any relationship into the exchange.

The same is true of wisdom. Of time. Of presence.

Granted, many "free" things in this world are bait, a lure to get people to buy something later. I want to be clear: that is not what this is.

This is healing and community, offered at its most basic, most loving root. But it can be hard to recognize, in a culture so full of "free" traps disguised as relationship, that something offered freely can still be real, and can still, gently, ask for relationship in return.

Not long ago, a writer reached out with real warmth and real respect. She was working on a story, and one of her characters carried a Lakota name and heritage through his grandmother. She wanted to get it right (the naming, the path to becoming a young man, even whether something like a "warrior induction" exists) so that readers around the world would come away with an honest picture instead of another stereotype.

It was a beautiful intention. And still, the answer had to be: that's not mine to give.

The name she had chosen for her character, Akichita, isn't a personal name at all in Lakota tradition. It's closer to a title, a role given by a community to those who protect and serve. I explained this, and offered what I could in its place.

Handing over the details of a naming ceremony, how and when a young man receives his name, would be a bit like handing someone a costume and calling it a uniform. The shape might look right. But the weight behind it (the years, the relationships, the community standing behind those words) cannot be transferred onto a page, no matter how carefully or lovingly someone asks.

This is where Balance, the first of Nature's 4 Steps, begins: not with anger, not with a closed door, but with an honest naming of what is and isn't available for the taking, and an invitation toward what is freely shared. Relationship itself.

And then, as if in answer, David Swallow Jr. showed up again.

David is from Pine Ridge, and in one of his teachings he talks about how feathers are earned in Lakota life. They are not bought, and not awarded because someone paid a thousand dollars for a war bonnet. Each feather is given in front of the whole community, for a real deed, witnessed, so that everyone there knows exactly who that person is and what they did to earn it.

As David puts it, someone who buys their way into a war bonnet isn't a warrior. That's a politician.

That single teaching is fair trade, spoken in its original language. Nothing about it has ever been about money. It's about earning your place inside something through time, through right action, through being seen, again and again, by the people who matter. A title, a name, a piece of wisdom carried for generations: these were never things to be purchased, requested politely, or extracted with good intentions. They are things you grow into, through relationship, inside a living community that has no need for hierarchy or special titles, only mutual, communal respect, built tenderly, through reciprocity.

This is the same invitation I keep extending here. Not a transaction. Not a gate. A growing, resonating circle, open and waiting for those willing to walk it long enough to be known, and to know in return.

Mitakuye Oyasin, All My Relations. It's all about relationship.

Here is the reframe I have arrived at, after years of quietly wondering why this kept happening.

Abundance flows in both directions, or it isn't abundance. It's extraction, wearing abundance's clothing.

A river that only flows one direction isn't a river. It's a drain.

When I offer Nature's 4 Steps freely (my presence, my time, the songs that came to me in dreams and that I recorded on my own, with no guarantee they would ever be heard), that offering is real. It comes from genuine abundance: the recognition that there is enough, and that giving does not deplete when it flows toward a heart ready to receive it with gratitude.

But abundance is not the same as bottomlessness. Pour the cleanest water from the clearest source into a cup that still holds yesterday's residue, and the water takes on that residue too. Not because the source ran dry, but because of what the cup was still holding when the water arrived.

I have been the vessel this source flows through for a long time. And part of walking this path honestly has meant working to keep my own vessel clean, clearing away what no longer serves so the source can move through unobstructed. 

This year, that has meant selling my home. Not because the work failed, but because keeping myself clear allows what flows through me to stay clear too. That clearing has carried a real cost, year after year, and for a long time I carried it quietly, trusting it would be met by hearts ready to receive, and to give something back in turn.

I'm not telling you this for guilt. Guilt heals nothing, and it isn't what I'm reaching for. I'm telling you because Balance asks for honesty about what is actually happening. And what has actually been happening is this: a river has been giving, and giving, and giving, while most of what has come back has been silence.

So here, plainly, is what reciprocity looks like in practice. Not as an obligation, but as an invitation into the same flowing, circling relationship this whole teaching has been describing.

A small, steady gift. $40 a month for live Circle Calls and recordings: direct access, in real time, to teachings carried for nearly 78 years, for about what many people spend on a streaming subscription they barely use.

Showing up. Joining a Circle Call. Asking a question in the discussion space. Letting your presence be felt, not just your need.

The Library, when it opens. A one-time investment that gives you lifetime access to teachings that have taken a lifetime to compile, and that continue to grow.

Telling someone else. Sharing a post. Leaving a comment. Helping the circle widen, which costs nothing and gives everything the circle needs to keep mending, growing, and reaching our global family.

None of this is a transaction in the way the modern world usually means that word. 

It is reciprocity: 

the ancient, almost-forgotten understanding that relationship moves in both directions, and that when it does, everyone is nourished by it. The giver does not run dry. The receiver does not take something that wasn't theirs to take. The circle remains a circle.

If you have received something from this platform (a blog post that helped on a hard night, a Circle Call that shifted something in you, a piece of wisdom you've carried since the day you first read it), I am not asking you to feel obligated.

I am asking you to consider what it would feel like to be part of the circle's resonance, not only its reach. To let the relationship move in both directions, the way every healthy relationship in nature does.

My grandmother drew a circle in the mud for a five-year-old who couldn't keep a secret. She gave it freely, and it cost her dearly. Seventy-two years later, I am still feeding what she fed in me, and passing it on to you. That is what reciprocity looks like across a lifetime: not repayment, but a circle that keeps moving.

The river is still flowing. It always will be. That's what abundance means.

But rivers are fed, too. And it's a beautiful thing to be part of feeding the thing that has fed you.