At the risk of excessive navel-gazing, your post raises things in my memory. I’m thinking of a college friend, Tania, an Egyptian Jew who ran away to NYC from home in Paris at 14 bc she was a supporter of Palestinian rights, not popular in her family of refugees/survivors of the Jewish expulsion from Egypt. A natural-born Anthropologist, a “tumbleweed” as she put it, with roots everywhere and nowhere, who studied human cultures and could ‘feel with’ the best of each of them.
She taught me about gifting. I came from a long line of rooted (I should say transplanted) New Englanders, proud, self-sufficient, unconscious of our expropriative past or our Anglo culture that displaced a native culture much closer to the interdependent model Adam’s friend’s story describes. Tania was an enigma to me…she rarely came into my room at college without a gift in her hands, a pastry she had made, a bit of colorful handwoven ribbon that holds on a keffiyeh, that she brought back from travelling in Israel/Palestine. I felt uncomfortable and a bit overwhelmed by her constant, casual generosity. We talked about our cultural differences: my New England sense of not wanting obligation, her Semitic sense of making visible good will and relationship by way of exchange, which I tried to convince her was totally unnecessary, as I loved her for her intense curiosity and sharp intellect, and her wonderful laugh that burbled like a Winter Wren. Tania’s love of exchange extended to flea markets and tag sales, where she would always barter, to negotiate a mutually acceptable price, which I found totally embarrassing. But it was her native landless home-place, her culture, and she argued that marketers love the game, the interaction. I dunno, maybe I was missing something?
While I am still uncomfortable with personal gifts, (I’m trying to get over it), I love the “cult of gratitude,” mostly toward the natural world, and making the effort to bring my excess produce to the local food cupboard, and sharing wood from the family land on which I’m squatting with my neighbors, and the casual opportunity to pass on what I no longer can use to a friend in need (my perfectly lovingly-maintained chainsaw, for example, which I can no longer start.)
I fear our well-meaning super egos may tend to over think and make judgments about cultural norms different from our own, that exist in an entirely different historical context. If the word “gift” becomes as fraught to us as the word “free,” if we get too precious about our use of language to describe the non or less-transactional community we’re seeking, I fear we may become exclusionary or holier than thou. And how can we eschew gratitude, when Henry Schermerhorn kept that land intact for the Sand River farm community to do what they do? I am grateful for that, for your collective inspiration, and I am unabashedly much obliged to all of you. Sorry, I just am.
I’d say the Inuit man didn’t want to be seen or labeled as a Giver — didn’t want all the fuss around what he understood as a basic and unexceptional act. After all, people in reciprocal networks don’t thank each other for existing in their roles and simply doing what others need and do themselves in their own ways.
A gift requires a giver, who has the uncomfortable status of benefactor, and a receiver, who by definition is a beneficiary — a discrimination immediately arises. Why not see “giving” and “receiving” as equally necessary to the normal flow of life, part of an infinite web in a way that doesn’t give special status to either party?
And seeing oneself as a Giver demonstrates hubris, doesn’t it? This may be the most essential part of the story you’re telling here. But in fact, a “giver” should thank a “receiver”, not the other way around, if thanks are in order.
The whole cult of gratitude has been making me nervous for a long time. The cultivation of gratitude especially. I think joyous participation in the abundance of life aligns better with the whole shebang. Giving and receiving simply serve to connect people with each other as fellow beings. A hug expresses that better than the overused phrase “thank you”, which leaves the distance undissolved.
It all depends on how we use the words. The gift givers are the ones who came before, the Earth, God(s). We just keep it in moving, or, in the case of the world we've made, obstruct the flow.
Yes, i've always felt something not humble about the word 'gift'. Let's see if we-all can find new languaging for the interconnectedness in which the Inuit hunter lives
In my phrase, "This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason," the one(s) doing the offering are decidedly not human. Our act of donation toward one another is how we feed them in return. Does that make any sense?
Yes, to what you are saying, the language of dissociation, as I call it, fostering trauma responses through time never pausing to breath faster and faster, more and more, extraction of the earth and soul.
One way that has helped me, after 40 years in the pastoral care world, is to understand relationship itself as a container that people construct together. We will fail at times. We may even speak from the very language of dissociation we are trying to understand and heal. Acting out of unhealed deep woundedness does not need to break the covenant between people.
Being hooked by the past does not equal abandonment, punishment, or shame or the activation of the internal judge. Instead, it is met with care, when possible. The community helps hold the woundedness that is still driving the dissociated language. That is how relationships by their very nature heal.
Also, Eric Fromm's Book: The Language of Possession might be helpful.
I brought home lots of seed packets from Petra’s seed gifting event in CT this past winter. Some seeds were chosen specifically for one person, a man who gifted me so much of his winter squash harvest last fall my porch was literally overwhelmed. A simple thank you doesn’t cover the wall of feeling in my chest. So I spent a considerable amount of time picking through Fruitions brightly colored seed packets thinking of my friend and what he might like.
“You can’t buy these anymore,” I said when I handed him the packets. I explained Fruition’s gift practice, that I went across the state to retrieve these seeds for him. Well, hopefully I wasn’t as obvious as that. He had no comment other than “interesting.” Still, between this short exchange and the pleasure of seeing his garden and what is growing, it’s altogether a better experience than Stop N Shop!
I remember that passage in Debt. After Greaber had been a Bishop in our Synod it was hard to find an acceptable means of recompense. Eventually we agreed on malt Whiskey.
The idea of what a gift is or is not is a very big subject. Just recently I did a little sermon on it. My view is that to understand the gift - and especially any notion of a pure gift - we have to understand sacrifice. We have to understand the act of FOREgiving - of giving forward with our expectation of return.
At the risk of excessive navel-gazing, your post raises things in my memory. I’m thinking of a college friend, Tania, an Egyptian Jew who ran away to NYC from home in Paris at 14 bc she was a supporter of Palestinian rights, not popular in her family of refugees/survivors of the Jewish expulsion from Egypt. A natural-born Anthropologist, a “tumbleweed” as she put it, with roots everywhere and nowhere, who studied human cultures and could ‘feel with’ the best of each of them.
She taught me about gifting. I came from a long line of rooted (I should say transplanted) New Englanders, proud, self-sufficient, unconscious of our expropriative past or our Anglo culture that displaced a native culture much closer to the interdependent model Adam’s friend’s story describes. Tania was an enigma to me…she rarely came into my room at college without a gift in her hands, a pastry she had made, a bit of colorful handwoven ribbon that holds on a keffiyeh, that she brought back from travelling in Israel/Palestine. I felt uncomfortable and a bit overwhelmed by her constant, casual generosity. We talked about our cultural differences: my New England sense of not wanting obligation, her Semitic sense of making visible good will and relationship by way of exchange, which I tried to convince her was totally unnecessary, as I loved her for her intense curiosity and sharp intellect, and her wonderful laugh that burbled like a Winter Wren. Tania’s love of exchange extended to flea markets and tag sales, where she would always barter, to negotiate a mutually acceptable price, which I found totally embarrassing. But it was her native landless home-place, her culture, and she argued that marketers love the game, the interaction. I dunno, maybe I was missing something?
While I am still uncomfortable with personal gifts, (I’m trying to get over it), I love the “cult of gratitude,” mostly toward the natural world, and making the effort to bring my excess produce to the local food cupboard, and sharing wood from the family land on which I’m squatting with my neighbors, and the casual opportunity to pass on what I no longer can use to a friend in need (my perfectly lovingly-maintained chainsaw, for example, which I can no longer start.)
I fear our well-meaning super egos may tend to over think and make judgments about cultural norms different from our own, that exist in an entirely different historical context. If the word “gift” becomes as fraught to us as the word “free,” if we get too precious about our use of language to describe the non or less-transactional community we’re seeking, I fear we may become exclusionary or holier than thou. And how can we eschew gratitude, when Henry Schermerhorn kept that land intact for the Sand River farm community to do what they do? I am grateful for that, for your collective inspiration, and I am unabashedly much obliged to all of you. Sorry, I just am.
This is a real pleasure to read, Sally. Let us eschew only certainty!
I’d say the Inuit man didn’t want to be seen or labeled as a Giver — didn’t want all the fuss around what he understood as a basic and unexceptional act. After all, people in reciprocal networks don’t thank each other for existing in their roles and simply doing what others need and do themselves in their own ways.
A gift requires a giver, who has the uncomfortable status of benefactor, and a receiver, who by definition is a beneficiary — a discrimination immediately arises. Why not see “giving” and “receiving” as equally necessary to the normal flow of life, part of an infinite web in a way that doesn’t give special status to either party?
And seeing oneself as a Giver demonstrates hubris, doesn’t it? This may be the most essential part of the story you’re telling here. But in fact, a “giver” should thank a “receiver”, not the other way around, if thanks are in order.
The whole cult of gratitude has been making me nervous for a long time. The cultivation of gratitude especially. I think joyous participation in the abundance of life aligns better with the whole shebang. Giving and receiving simply serve to connect people with each other as fellow beings. A hug expresses that better than the overused phrase “thank you”, which leaves the distance undissolved.
It all depends on how we use the words. The gift givers are the ones who came before, the Earth, God(s). We just keep it in moving, or, in the case of the world we've made, obstruct the flow.
Yes, i've always felt something not humble about the word 'gift'. Let's see if we-all can find new languaging for the interconnectedness in which the Inuit hunter lives
In my phrase, "This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason," the one(s) doing the offering are decidedly not human. Our act of donation toward one another is how we feed them in return. Does that make any sense?
Yes, it does. Languaging is where i get stuck. I'm awed by non-human gifters who uplift me daily without these clumsy words.
I'm nonetheless grateful for yours!
This is one of the. Most profound ponderings that now I will wrestle with. Whoa!!! So much to learn and now to shift
I'm glad this worked on you, as it has me.
Best last line yet!
Hi Adam, Gregory here, over in Vershire Vermont.
Yes, to what you are saying, the language of dissociation, as I call it, fostering trauma responses through time never pausing to breath faster and faster, more and more, extraction of the earth and soul.
One way that has helped me, after 40 years in the pastoral care world, is to understand relationship itself as a container that people construct together. We will fail at times. We may even speak from the very language of dissociation we are trying to understand and heal. Acting out of unhealed deep woundedness does not need to break the covenant between people.
Being hooked by the past does not equal abandonment, punishment, or shame or the activation of the internal judge. Instead, it is met with care, when possible. The community helps hold the woundedness that is still driving the dissociated language. That is how relationships by their very nature heal.
Also, Eric Fromm's Book: The Language of Possession might be helpful.
I brought home lots of seed packets from Petra’s seed gifting event in CT this past winter. Some seeds were chosen specifically for one person, a man who gifted me so much of his winter squash harvest last fall my porch was literally overwhelmed. A simple thank you doesn’t cover the wall of feeling in my chest. So I spent a considerable amount of time picking through Fruitions brightly colored seed packets thinking of my friend and what he might like.
“You can’t buy these anymore,” I said when I handed him the packets. I explained Fruition’s gift practice, that I went across the state to retrieve these seeds for him. Well, hopefully I wasn’t as obvious as that. He had no comment other than “interesting.” Still, between this short exchange and the pleasure of seeing his garden and what is growing, it’s altogether a better experience than Stop N Shop!
Thanks, as always for your work Adam.
There is a wound at the depth of the emotional cut off.
I can’t wait to read your book!
I remember that passage in Debt. After Greaber had been a Bishop in our Synod it was hard to find an acceptable means of recompense. Eventually we agreed on malt Whiskey.
The idea of what a gift is or is not is a very big subject. Just recently I did a little sermon on it. My view is that to understand the gift - and especially any notion of a pure gift - we have to understand sacrifice. We have to understand the act of FOREgiving - of giving forward with our expectation of return.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZ4hEX3tSRY/?igsh=MWY2cnJ1aDI0Zm9vdQ==