37 Ways to Join the Gift Economy

By Irv Thomas

I seem to have put myself into an incongruity bind, in the last piece, by advising you to 'get real' about the expectable outcome of our collapsing economy, after having told you a moment earlier that the economic crunch doesn't have to be the center of your focus. I'd better get busy with some clarification as the next thing in the order of immediate business.

To set the stage for this clarification, I want to remind you that I was swept along in my earlier years by the seeming economic imperatives of that onetime world of mine. It was a matter of living costs that seemed to expand as fast as my income did, and there seemed no way around it. Does it sound familiar?

I never really found an answer to the dilemma during the years I stuck with it. Not until I broke free of the chase in despair did I discover the amazing answer. And be sure of it: I'm not advising you to quit the chase: it's for you to decide what you prefer to be doing with your life, how you choose to fill your time. All I want you to heed from me is the discovery I made after I left the rat-race behind . . . a discovery that has to do with your headspace, not your convictions about what to do with your life, though it might reasonably lead to that.

----------------------------------------

I've already said it many times, in as many ways as I know how: There is a force in life, or above life if you choose to see it that way, that unerringly fulfills your real needs. Either by push-pulling you toward them or by dropping them on you. You'll call it blind luck, or pure chance, or any of a hundred kinds of rationalistic reasoning, but it doesn't alter the simple reality that it happens with a dependable regularity.

We have a general societal fixation on the idea that it only (or properly) happens from gainful employment. Society largely encourages this fixation because it serves many subsidiary purposes along with the central one of providing your provender. But my own discovery, through fourteen contiguous years of comfortable provisioning essentially without gainful employment, disposes of the common belief as 'just another fixation.'

The simple truth, as I usually frame it, is that Providence is real, so that the shifting economic reality may turn out to be a challenge to your way of life, but it need not push you into a desperation state of mind.

Just my saying so, of course, is not likely to free you from concern. The myth of 'necessity' is too deeply implanted to be so easily overcome. Furthermore, you have no way of knowing what your true level of sufficiency might be, without going through some degree of upheaval in order to get there. So I think it probably wise to approach a new way of life from a tangential direction. My advice is that you begin to alter the way you see things: try looking at events that have always seemed unrelated to you as starting to contain or convey personal messages. It takes imagination at first, but eventually it will become second nature. The world comes alive at a new level, and you have a new sense of connection to it.

At the end of my recent cruise, after seeing Adele safely away, baggage and all, on her van service to the San Diego Airport, I heaved a happy sigh of relief and set off on my own subsequent trail. Lugging my overstuffed baggage along the waterfront toward the nearby AMTRAK depot, I was suddenly confronted by a woman begging alms -- a homeless woman, if one should believe the small placard she held.

Have you ever seen a down-and-out supplicant as anything other than a beggar? It's very instructive to realize that they can be! This one was clearly placed in my path as a kind of toll-taker on the Universal Karmic Trail, for I had just come through a harrowing couple hours of experience (described in the second article) that was, in itself, a Karmic passage, testing my sense of responsibility to the companion I had chosen, and I had no doubt at all that I had now to register my gratitude in coin of the realm. Not because the Universe values cash, but because I do. Without a flicker of hesitation I gave that woman a five-dollar bill before continuing on my way. A large gift (for me) because I was feeling immensely thankful at how everything had gone.

This is what giving is all about, you know: being thankful. We need to remind ourselves, constantly, of all that we have to be thankful for.

Getting back to the original point of this, when I moved my life 'beyond-paid-employment' I rather suddenly found myself in the field of a constant flow of blessings for which to be thankful. As you work for your earnings and rely on those earnings for your sustenance, you tend to lose touch with the remarkable worlds of sharing, giving and community that rely on different kinds of relationships with people; and it is here that the notion of gratitude assumes its full stature.

In fact, something called The Gift Economy is again making the rounds, stirring people's interest as it did more than a decade ago when it was first written about in a 'Yes' Magazine article by Beverly Feldman and Charles Gray. They promulgated a marvelous list of 37 kinds of activities that could be shared in a gift economy. Some of them quite commonly known, and some of them remarkably, creatively new.

So I am going to close this article by reprinting their list. Maybe it will set off some sparks in a few of you. Or maybe it will just free-up the framework of your thinking. One of them could, you know, change your entire life! Number 28 (with a little twist) certainly changed mine! And number 3 largely enabled me to spend a year and a half abroad . . . for all of which I remain deeply thankful.

1. Start a dinner co-op. Rotate among the homes of friends and neighbors for weekly or monthly potlucks.

2. Help a local farmer with the harvest in exchange for some of the crop.

3. Put up a traveler.

4. Hold twice-yearly sport supply exchanges so kids can acquire new skis and baseball mitts and everyone can try out a new sport.

5. Harvest wild or unwanted fruits and vegetables.

6. Grow your own, and give some of it away.

7. Share seeds and clippings from your garden - especially native and "heritage" species. Hold an annual plant exchange.

8. Organize a "non-consumption booth" at a farmers' market or street fair. At the Charlottetown Farmers' Market, the Environmental Chat Corner hosts discussions of environmental issues, sustainable building and landscaping, ecotourism, and community development.

9. Buy food or supplies in bulk and share with friends. [This was the beginning of the Food Co-op Movement!]

10. Form a home-repair team to fix your own place and others'.

11. Request help of someone usually regarded as needy.

12. Create your own rainy-day fund with your friends. One group pooled $1,000 each, which they lent to any in the group who needed it. The fund helped members survive a lost job, a stolen bicycle, and a broken arm.

13. Make space available to other people to grow food on your land.

14. Borrow garden space from someone who has extra land; give them,or a food bank, some of the produce.

15. Give co-workers neck and shoulder massages.

16. Offer to mentor a young person.

17. Ask a 12-year-old to show you how to get onto the Worldwide Web.

18. Throw a block party.

19. Show up at a soup kitchen and ask for volunteer work.

20. Rent out extra space to people needing a place to sleep, work, or just to get away, or exchange the space for yard work or baby-sitting.

21. Convert a duplex, apartment building, old nursing home, or seminary into a cohousing community.

22. Convert a barn or warehouse into a space for artists and start-up businesses.

23. Create a space for neighbors to keep and share infrequently used tools and extra garden supplies.

24. Start a baby-sitting or child care co-op.

25. Hold a monthly clean-up of a beach, park, roadway, river bank; get coffee houses to donate goodies.

26. Plant trees. Get the city to select and donate them.

27. Find a person on each block who will help neighbors get assistance when needed - from other neighbors when possible.

28. Share a car.

29. Or start a car co-op with various vehicles for different uses. Share expenses based on mileage.

30. Paint donated bicycles and place them in downtown areas with signs indicating they're for anyone to use.

31. Become a foster parent, a 'big brother' or 'big sister.' Notice the ways everyone benefits!

32. Exchange lessons, for example, cooking for carpentry.

33. Teach a skill, like carpentry, and ask your students to donate time to others.

34. Adopt a stream or a highway to restore, maintain, and beautify.

35. Work with your neighbors to develop a vision for your neighborhood's future.

36. Hold talent shows. Give kids lots of recognition, and everyone opportunity to discover their hidden talents.

37. Create your own money. Start a community currency or skills exchange.

FEEDBACK: CLICK HERE to email comments and feedback. Please note the title of the article or the author's name. Include your own name or type "name withheld" by request. Thoughtful responses will be published in our next edition.