I can't give a formula for how to spread joy, but I know that the source of the joy is one's own joy, and that that is not distinct from pleasure and fulfillment of desires. So I ask: What makes me feel alive? What is the expression of my inner wild? What would really feel good? What if what makes me feel alive leads me toward the deeper joys, which are found in generosity and service, in creating things that are beautiful to me? Maybe the world needs more of that. How many petroleum company executives are doing their work because it's beautiful to them? Not very many, I bet.

The word "spiritual" normally means something that's distinct from the fleshly or the material. It's not of the world. But that version of spirituality is bankrupt today. It had its use when the program of science divested matter from the spiritual qualities - - the qualities of a self, or of a being. When science divested the world of those qualities and made it into just a thing, rather than a self, it gave us license to treat it as just a thing, and not as something sacred, conscious, alive, intelligent. So this is tied into the whole trajectory of our civilization.

In a gift economy, the more you give, the richer you are.

I am certainly not proposing that we wait passively for the people in power to change their minds. I think we need to be confrontational, to expose the truth in ways that are uncomfortable and that, yes, require courage. What I caution against is using hateful rhetoric to inspire action, and I see a lot of that today. We strengthen the underlying field of hatred, dehumanization, and conquest. It certainly doesn't engage what allows people to do courageous things and to commit deeply, which is the experience of beauty, love, grief.

The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.

What makes you care about nature, about the planet? Is it really that you're afraid of what's going to happen if you don't take care of it? Or is it that you actually love the planet, and regardless of your self-interest and regardless of its instrumental use to you, you want to take care of it?

Real change doesn't come without crisis. Childbirth doesn't come without crisis. I think that's happening with humanity now. Our growth has generated multiple crises...and these are the contractions that are propelling us into a new world, whether we like it or not, but I think we're going to like it.