Words&Dirt

“How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?”

––Blindsight, by Peter Watts, pg. 307

“To fully receive is to willingly put yourself in a position of obligation, either to the giver or to society at large. Gratitude and obligation go hand in hand; they are two sides of the same coin. Obligation is obligation to do what? It is to give without ‘compensation.’ Gratitude is what? It is the desire to give, again without compensation, borne of the realization of having received. In the age of the separate self, we have split the two, but originally they are one: obligation is a desire that comes from within and is only secondarily enforced from without. Clearly then, reluctance to receive is actually reluctance to give. We think that we are being noble, self-sacrificing, or unselfish if we prefer to give rather than to receive. We are being nothing of the sort. The generous person gives and receives with an equally open hand. Do not be afraid to be under obligation, to be in gratitude. We are afraid of obligation because, quite rightly, we are wary of ‘have to’; we are wary of forceful compulsion, wary of the coercion that underlies so many of our society’s institutions. But when we convert ‘have to’ into ‘want to,’ we are free. When we realize that life itself is a gift, and that we are here to give ourselves, when we are free. After all, what you have taken in this life dies with you. Only your gifts live on.”

––Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein, pg. 357-8