THE GIFT
“What is good is given back.”
— Native American saying
The myth of the “Indian giver.” Native Americans had a tradition of giving gifts that would be shared, re-given throughout the community. However, when they gave the early European settlers gifts, the settlers would keep them to themselves. The Native Americans would then sneak into their houses and take back the gifts so they could be passed on to other people. So it was the pilgrims who were the gift-takers, turning them into personal property, and the Native Americans who were committed to giving all around.
Earlier cultures (and still our own in some ways) practiced the giving that explicitly circulated through the community.
The gift that is just consumed is a commodity – giver-to-receiver. The gift that is truly given “moves” and carries spirit along. Giver – receiver – giver – receiver – until it may arrive back at its origin. Ultimately the deepest gifts move in a circle. These gifts are fertile – they bestow life.“Circulate among us as reservoirs of available life.”
Along with the generous transmission of “property” then goes the transmission of spirit that keeps transforming, dismembering property into spirit. “When a gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.”
Every business is a form of farming – perhaps every life! The image and act of planting and cultivating crops is always a circular “rotation” from labor to fertility to growth to harvest to nourishment of energy to labor – fertility – growth-harvest nourishment and on and on. After all, agriculture root meaning is “the cultivating of the field.” What field are you cultivating with your business and in your life?
Every genuine labor done with one’s whole heart can ultimately turn into one of the “infrequent lessons in living that alter, or even save, our lives.”
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” – Gospel of Thomas
What gifts did you receive that “moved” beyond you?
As a child
As an adult
In business
In personal life
What gifts have you given that “moved” beyond you and your receiver?
As a child
As an adult
In business
In personal life
What can you think of that could be given to you that you would want and would pass on?
What gifts would you like to give in your personal and professional life that could alter others’ lives in a positive way?
What value can you, in your work, add to your products and/or services that would be passed on and ultimately returned since all shared wealth ultimately moves in a circle? How can added value be a catalyst?
“The gift is the connective tissue of the body politic.”
"In an essay called "Childhood and Poetry," Pablo Neruda once speculated on the origins of his work. Neruda was raised in Temuco, a frontier town in Southern Chile. To be born in Temuco in 1904 must have been a little like being born in Oregon a hundred years ago. Rainy and mountainous, "Temuco was the farthest outpost in Chilean life in the southern territories." Neruda tells us in his memoirs. He remembers the main street as lined with hardware stores, which, since the local population couldn't read, hung out eye-catching signs, "an enormous saw, a giant cooking pot, a Cyclopean padlock, a mammoth spoon. Farther along the street, shoe stores - a colossal boot." Neruda's father worked on the railway. Their home, like others, had about it something of the air of a settlers' temporary camp: kegs of nails, tools, and saddles lay about in unfinished rooms and under half-completed stairways.
Playing in the lot behind the house one day when he was still a little boy, Neruda discovered a hole in a fence board. "I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared - a tiny hand of a boy about my own age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white toy sheep.
"The sheep's wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I looked back through the hole but the boy had disappeared. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pine cone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep.
"I never saw either the hand or the boy again. And I have never seen a sheep like that either. The toy I lost finally in a fire. But even now...whenever I pass a toyshop, I look furtively into the window. It's no use. they don't make sheep like that any more."
Neruda has commented on this incident several times. "This exchange of gifts - mysterious - settled deep inside me like a sedimentary deposit," he once remarked in an interview. And he associates the exchange with his poetry. "I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses - that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
"That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all humanity is somehow together...It won't surprise you then that I have attempted to give something resiny, earth-like, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood...
This is the great lesson I learned in my childhood, in the backyard of a lonely house. Maybe it was nothing but a game two boys played who didn't know each other and wanted to pass to the other some good things of life. Yet maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light."
All quotes and much of the inspiration for this blogpost come from Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift.”
