Land Offerings

So, as I was wandering through a new hiking area a few weeks ago, I started wondering about the fact that when I introduce myself to land, I either don't have an offering, or I use

what I have to hand. I tend to usually forget about bringing anything for an offering, so I usually end up using either water from my water bottle, or just my own spit. This got me thinking about what exactly makes an offering an offering. what constitutes something that you would offer as sacred? I think for me water is cheap, it's everywhere, it's necessary for life, but I've never been so desperate or needy for it that it becomes something sacred and precious to me. It is also one of the elements of magick, so it already exists as a sacred being in my mind, so not something I would intentionally bring as a "sacrifice". Food is something I have a lot of scarcity around and so that could be considered a sacrifice. It's not, however, something I would consider precious, something I consider necessary for survival. I have a complicated relationship with food in that sometimes I'm annoyed by the need for it; so not at all sacred in my mind. So to that end, what else would I consider materially precious that I could use as an offering? Well, non-degradable objects aren't really good for natural world offerings in general. Food, if I were to use that, is something that, depending on what it is, is not necessarily great for the environment or for the creatures that live there. Water's always a good fall back, because it is something at least somewhat precious, even if it's not quite precious in my own mind, and just about any other material offering that is often used I usually don't have. Any other herbal stuff is kind of just, well it's already grown out of the world, it's already a plant, so why would I offer a plant spirit to plant spirits? So that leaves us with the question of what to use that is precious and not really actually found out in nature commonly. the only thing that comes to mind is parts of myself. So when I offer my own saliva as an offering, it is a precious substance, because it is made of the water I drink and it's used to digest the food I need. It's also actual DNA from me, so that way when I offer it to the land spirits they get a sense and knowledge of who I am specifically and physically. So, perhaps until I find something else that would be accurate as a first offering for me, I can only give of myself in the form of spit, until I get to know a place and understand what it is they want as an offering.