How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.

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

Each person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious.

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?

We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.

I'm not prescribing non-doing as a universal response to our problems. Sometimes, something obviously needs to be done. And we retreat into a spiritual or meditative state that we fancy up by calling it mindfulness, but really it's an unhealthy detachment and a shrinking back from life. But culturally, it's much more common to be trapped in habits of reaction, whether on a systemic level or on a personal level. That's where the non-doing comes in, which is something that we don't really have room for. I think that it's something we need to embrace as part of the creative process.

Community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors for anything. You can just pay someone to do it.