Living In The GIFT
I had not planned on writing about loss for the one blog post that’s supposed to joyously herald the launch of Abuntoo, a platform that facilitates the sharing of resources in a Gift Economy ecosystem. I was going to shout it from the mountain top, wave my Venn diagram, and say, “Here, here, see how each stakeholder contributes to the system and gets something in return, with no downside for anyone, and net positive impact for all. Amazing!” I pride myself as a systems thinker, and I have the blueprint for the Next Big Evolution in hand. Abuntoo is going to be a catalyst for systemic change.
Of course this remains true, only more so in the aftermath of deep loss and grief where, at a consciousness level, I know giving and receiving to be one and the same. The gifts that helped me heal came from the love that I had shared with the world. They came back in unexpected ways to help me recognize this important truth: the goodwill and loving energy that we put out there is never lost. I could never again think of Abuntoo merely from an economist’s perspective. For me, the Gift Economy is an outer representation of my energy and my relationships — with other humans and sentient beings, with “stuff,” with the environment, and the Universe. In this world, everything is sacred.
My sob story is almost banal, because it is the same projection of a compartmentalized worldview that sees humans as replaceable functions (even in a romantic sense), only good enough until the next bright and shiny object comes along or some old baggage shows up from Lost and Found. I had come to regard my falling in love with a man I met last summer as a gift. Accepting this wondrous gift meant choosing each and every present moment to love and appreciate him in his own right, not as a make-up for past failures or hedge for future loneliness. I made it through the holidays with great anticipation for 2016, only to see everything fall apart the first week of January. To learn that his playbook was nothing like mine was deeply unsettling. It called into question my judgment and challenged my sense of trust — and also, who needed this kind of disvalidation just weeks before launching her start-up? The ego’s sense of woundedness was a passing perturbation. I have enough perspective and Jedi powers under my belt to coax myself out of defeatist self-talk. But for losing my beloved companion on this life journey — one to be filled with learning and adventures — I was alternately inconsolable and catatonic.
In start-up time you need to compress the seven stages of grief into 72 hours. I failed miserably in that regard, and I’m still failing, but I have a mental map to look for gifts, and I’m uplifted by what I choose to see. The loss of a relationship does not mean we have a gaping void to fill. We start and end as fully whole. It only means that the larger bubble we were going to grow into — as an extension of our wholeness — is no longer there. It is unspeakably painful to have an invitation to share oneself be casually and callously revoked. But the world is one big bubble, and there are seven billion humans and countless bubble combinations to evolve into. Every time we recognize a GIFT, we are in fact acknowledging a bubble that we already belong to, and to bring that into conscious awareness is the path of healing. When we choose to belong, we experience this belongingness as the self-same acts of giving and receiving.
Here, I share some of my GIFTS. I hope this will inspire you to find yours.
The Card
How do I even get a card with my favorite substance — ice-cream — ensconced in a beautiful flower? My friend Tania is a wonderful artist from Ukraine. I originally found her from one of those sites that let you outsource your graphics needs to mercenaries around the world. Tania worked on creating the different elements on the Abuntoo web banner for weeks (and I cannot wait for the world to see it) with utmost patience and care. She was so giving to this bootstrapping stranger in San Francisco. (I am, by the way, not easy to please.) After the banner was completed, I hired Tania to draw a customized holiday card for [redacted], the proximal cause of my recent bout of melancholia. I poured my heart into designing a funny drawing and a heartfelt message. This project filled me with joy. And Tania helped me. But because we used my favorite cartoon characters on the card — i.e. trademarked materials — we did this “under the table” and Tania created a job for a custom drawing so I could pay her. She could have sent me any old drawing and be done with it. But a tulip with a puffy white center turned into a discussion of ice-cream, into a bowl of ice-cream, into a new composition, resized, enhanced, topped with cherries, deliciously textured, with a silver lining!!! The love that I put into the Christmas card did not disappear into a blackhole. Love is never lost. Love iterates when you put it out there. Now I have the best card ever. Ice-cream FTW.
The Substance
Some nights I could not fall asleep or stay asleep. Even in extreme mental exhaustion, my ears remained captive to delta brain wave music that refused to just fade out. I went down the list of natural sleep aids: alternate nostril breathing, lavender essential oil, flower essences, valerian. Valerian. Miraculously I actually own a bottle of this stuff. (I don’t even know if this herb works as advertised, but usually when I’m convinced that I’ve done everything I could to take care of myself, my brain would give up and let me sleep.)
On a particularly bad night, as I held this bottle of herbal extract in my hand, I had the sudden realization that this was a gift come full circle to help me in a dark hour. In 2009, I met a most awesome, angry, tortured boy who inspired me to reinvent myself. He was a raging insomniac besieged by a neighbor’s yapping puppy. I got him this valerian. I fussed over him as a sister would. Having a special friend made me feel special.
Some years later he moved back to the East Coast. I dropped him off at the airport and went back to clean out his apartment. (What a good bitch I was. Saved him a big bill from the landlord I’m sure.) I found science experiments and other months-old surprises in the fridge. I emptied the pantry and took home anything usable or edible. The rolls of toilet paper were fine compensation for my labor.
I often think about the Little Prince and his flower and how our relationship is like that. At first I only thought of myself as the protector and I wanted nothing but to shield my delicate flower from all the pain in the world. But he is also my Little Prince. He takes care of me, time and again. How this is possible 3,000 miles apart is a mystery that only a true heart can know. I recognize in the bottle of valerian a deep love that has visited stars and planets and other worlds and found its way back to my cabinet. “Happiness doesn’t lie in the objects we gather around us. To find it, all we need to do is open our eyes.”
The Hug
During my stint as donor relations director for Maitri, an AIDS hospice in San Francisco, I became familiar with the name Chip Conley, someone who was very generous to the community. My interest in him only grew when I learned that he was the founder of Joie De Vivre Hotels. One of his properties, the Abigail Hotel, was home to Millennium, the vegan restaurant that made its debut in 1994 and turned me into a connoisseur of tofu aioli. Millennium was the first restaurant that I invited to inaugurate the Dinner at Maitri benefit series. This good juju connection that circled back to Chip created a deep imprint in my mind, years before I got the opportunity to “friend” him, thanks to that miracle called Facebook.
On January 10th, Chip posted this on his Facebook page: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound? If you write a poem in the woods and no one reads it, did it make an impact?” When you’re feeling sorry for yourself, every spiritual teaching turns into utter bullshit. If I’m sobbing in fetal position on the floor and no one hears my cries, did my sadness matter? If I loved with all my heart but at the end of the day, it was dismissed as “not a lot of time invested,” where did my love go? When I reached out to Chip, I wanted a witness to my grief, my doubting, my questioning. But soon I realized that I was calling for a witness to my healing, my coming to an affirmative answer to these riddles. My rhetorical question morphed. If I managed to heal myself from a hurtful situation without anyone knowing, did this whole episode matter? His kind words made it real. On Wednesday, January 20th, I got an opportunity to meet Chip in person; I wrote a little blurb about it here. I had some long-forgotten agenda when I signed up for this Esalen forum on energy efficient design that Chip was keynoting, though in the days leading up to the event, I only saw it as a gift of communion. Chip’s not known for being a hugging saint, but the four hugs he gave me over the course of the evening were pure compassion. We exchanged few words, but at one point he simply said, “Take some deep breaths.” Yes, the giving and receiving of CO2 and O2, and the mindful attention we give to it — when we wake up to the truth of the GIFT, we are one with the Force!
It is said that one cannot get a hug without giving a hug, so I thank Chip for indulging me with those moments of honoring each other through the gift of touch. There’s still much darkness in my life, but I find solace — and joy — when I’m working on Abuntoo. The Gift Economy is about letting go of perceived scarcity and choosing to live in abundance instead. “Only what you have not given can be lacking in any situation.” This teaching from A Course in Miracles tells me that if my loving-kindness is real, then my sense of lack — of love, of resources — is a falsehood, an illusion. Abuntoo anchors me in the GIFT. My work in this world contains the seeds of our collective healing. By setting free our fear of lack, we gain everything. The melding of the ONE heart means saying Yes! to having it all (and eating it too). Welcome to Abuntoo!
