Aung San Suu Kyiback in 1999:

This is a very explicit acknowledgement of the bonds that gifts produce, and why RECEIVING is not always the best thing to do. Freedom comes from the ability to give, not the ability to receive.

At the end of chapter five in “The Gift” Hyde warns against this in using the example of a university unwilling to receive a donation from a dictator. To receive is to establish the bond, to attach strings. In Chapter six of “The Gift,” called “The Gift Community” Hyde buries a gem of a quote in a note to a discussion on the polarity of the individual and the community:

Last month I was blogging about stories and I mentioned sitting in on a teaching with Nuu-Chah-Nulth Elder Julia Lucas who was using traditional stories to talk about contemporary sexual awareness with First Nations youth. This happened at an Open Space meeting I facilitated last year.

My friend Crystal Sutherland, who was in that session, just phoned me to talk about an idea coming out of that gathering. She is musing about finding someone to produce these stories on video and use them to reach street kids and other kids at risk. We kicked around the idea of animating these stories and showing at the end how the Son of Raven story applies at this day and age to real life sexuality issues for First Nations kids.

So imagine this: a collection of five minute vignettes all done with world class computer animation of stories narrated by Elders and told with a contemporary moral. These stories would be beautiful to look at and listen to, engaging all of the senses that storytellers play with. They could run on TV, on networks like the Aboriginal People’s Television Network or Maori TV in New Zealand. They would find a home on the web of course.

Street Kids International does this kind of stuff, working with animation. Aboriginal kids would love to see their stories up there, not as a cultural artifact, and not as a preachy lecture, but offered to them in the way in which teachings have always been offered: as a gift.

So anyone know some world class Aboriginal animators and production companies who might want to be involved? I can think of Ian Taylor in New Zealand. Who is closer to home? Who can we mentor in this project? And who might be interested in underwriting something like this?

We start to put out the tendrils, and I have people in my network who can actually get the project off the ground in terms of working with Elders, framing the stories and getting them to air. If you’re reading this, can you think of some way of contributing?

Link to posting about Julia fixed

Rebecca Ryan notes that thought is not the most productive form of work. She has spent a day playing with her family…

Of course this is known as flow and flow IS the most productive form of work. When we are in flow we bounce around WITHOUT thought in fact. Everything seems easy to the point where we look back on our work and wonder who actually did that. It’s a common phenomenon among writers who write in flow and then read back their own work with amazement.

I’m a big fan of inquiring into people’s flow practices. I think we all have them, as I have written here before, and it’s clear from this posting that any flow practice in life brings a new awareness to work that can even transfer to that realm.

I’ve talked a little about teachings as gifts and recently corresponded with folks about the authenticity of various “Native American” teachers.

For the real deal, check out Wisdom of the Elders, an archive of stories and teachings from Native American life that is being broadcast on public radio in the States and American Indian Radio on Satellite (which you can listen to online).

Now we get into the juicy stuff, as if the book hasn’t been juicy so far.

Chapter four of “The Gift” is called simply “The Bond” and it is this chapter that took Susan Kerr’s interest by storm at the Giving Conference. The essential point of this chapter is that gifts create bonds and commodities create boundaries.

There are all kinds of places we can go from this statement. One major thought that triggered for me was around the nature of markets. Our traditional sense of markets are changing largely because of the world wide web, but have we got to the place where markets are actually places where people create bonds? Seems to me that modern branding, and even the “markets-as-conversations” theory of Cluetrain operate within a transactional type of commodity exchange. Having said that, they do recognize that people do not form bonds with companies (or countries or other brands) but rather that bonds are formed between people. What is missing is companies (and their people) figuring out how to actually use the power of corporations to become givers. Corporate philanthropy is a step in this direction, but can it be taken down to the individual level? What is a corporation took a portion of its philanthropic budget and gave it to individuals within the company to pursue their personal giving plans in their communities, encouraging individual staff members to bond through sharing their gifts of time and money? Can we enable that for our staff? For our citizens? There must be some companies that do this. Are there countries that support their citizens’ engagement with their gifts?

Markets come up for me because I think of them as simply places (real or imagined) where people connect. What people choose to do there is up to them. People can connect in a gift relationship or they can connect to give something value and thus exchange it in a transactional deal. I think the kind of connection we forge here on the web is bulging forward a breach or a blurring in this traditional dichotomy. Even the revolutionaries are getting in on the act (thanks Tutor!).

Hyde goes on to talk about the social implications of these two kinds of relationships, giving and transactional:

Yes, I am advocating more bondage and less freedom in this sense. And it starts with more political freedom, leading individuals to be free to create their bonds and connections to communities that operate far from the madding trap of commodification.