For many indigenous people in the northeast part of North America, Windigo is a monster whose greed and hunger are completely insatiable. A human might become a Windigo when lost, starving and freezing. Or when the response to starvation is cannibalism. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes very eloquently about it: “The more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes. It shrieks with its craving, its mind a torture of unmet want” (Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 305).

She also finds the lesson, the cultural meaning behind it: “Born of our fears and our failings, Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else.”

The answer to the danger from Windigo is to take care of each other and to tame our greed, to know when we have enough. We look around us and see a world where too often greed is the operating principle. We are told from some quarters that taking care of each other is weakness and empathy is a sinful flaw. And yet today is the Christian celebration of the resurrection of one who taught the very opposite. One who would tell us to sell what we have and give it to the poor. That theme, taking care of each other and sharing what we have, is taught as wisdom in places all over the world.

And yet we live in a system that celebrates those who accumulate riches and allows a tiny fraction of us to hold unimaginable wealth while most of us struggle and some of us starve. If only there was a way to help everyone become satisfied, to say “enough.” I wish all of us had a sense of when there is enough and could stop with our acquisitiveness when we reach that point.

That would mean not creating that never ending sense of want, making us crave more no matter how much we have, making ourselves a Windigo that cannot be satisfied. We are capable of knowing when we have enough, knowing how to share when there is plenty. We need stories about mutual flourishing and care, about gratitude for abundance and banding together to get through hard times. We need teachers and role models who can say, “enough.”

A short, readable book about living in this way, from one of the great teachers, is The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I wish I could give a copy to everyone who hasn’t read it. Please get it and share it. It’s $20 from the publisher, or only about $10-11 at Amazon if you must.