We’ve been eating zucchini bread, zucchini pasta, stuffed zucchini, zucchini “crab” cakes, zucchini salad and pretty much everything else, up to but not including zucchini cobbler. It is zucchini season and we are experiencing abundance.

I am a fan of abundance.

I love watching abundance at work. The first thing it does is forces us to be grateful. We have to be grateful because otherwise we will be suffocated by squash. To avoid this fate, we take stock of what we have and acknowledge it. That’s gratitude. Even saying “damn, that’s a big pile of squash” is gratitude.

We may express our gratitude aloud, in the form of (for instance) a facebook update such as “Holy huge pile of squash, Batman!” Expressing gratitude aloud then results in an abundance of zucchini recipes.

It’s easy with zucchini because there’s so darn much of it, but this is tried and true: the next law of abundance is that if you give, you will receive. I’ve given vegetables from our garden to anyone who expressed an interest. Not only have we not run out, we’ve been on the receiving end of some culinary windfalls – completely unrelated to what we gave and to whom we gave it.

Don’t ask me how this works. It’s quantum physics.

One day I came home to find a huge box of smoked meat and cheese. Since we are flexitarians (read: dietary hypocrites), there are some meats we don’t eat. So we thought of people who would enjoy it and passed it along. Within the week I discovered salmon fillets in my freezer, delivered by a friend who had a windfall of her own.

When things pile up they don’t benefit anyone. We complain about what we don’t have, but then let what we do have sit underutilized. When our focus is on the empty basket, we don’t notice the one that’s breaking apart at the seams. Why would anyone, the universe included, put more stuff in a basket that’s already overflowing? (It does. It’s just harder to tell.)

Other things I’ve tried this with are jobs, baby clothes and a quart of heavy cream. I love volunteering but I can never do it for very long because inevitably someone comes along and hires me. I gave all our baby clothes and baby-related hoopla away, knowing if we had a second child we’d have everything we needed (we did, and we did). The quart of heavy cream scored me a mended slipcover I couldn’t figure out how to fix myself.

Exhibit B: A friend of mine is a very talented sculptor whose work sells in galleries across the country and can be seen in many public spaces. A few weeks ago I saw a knock-off of his work in a gift shop and emailed him about it, figuring he’d want them to stop stealing his designs.

He just laughed, telling me they’d have a heck of a time duplicating his latest, life-size, commission. He knew no one could steal his abundance.

My friend is no more afraid of running out of ideas and commissions than I am of running out of zucchini.

And believe me, I’m in no danger of running out of zucchini. Here, have some cobbler.