We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words.

telling a story is an open-ended contract, just like a promise or a gift.

"just because it's a story doesn't mean it's not true"

"But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?"

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive." James Baldwin

• Economies form in collective spaces when people define what they value as a group.

• Economies are an indication that a community has not only defined values but also the means of interacting with one another via exchange.

“Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old–– it is the new combinations that make them new.”

no story is ever truly linear because our relationship to any story cannot be linear. as the audience we can stop, pause, replay, reread, skip, leave, look away, come back. we are always acting agents, and this interactivity is integral to the storytelling experience.

"a way of living where everything is alive to you, every person, space, and thing you perceive holds within it the potential for resonance"

everything is a story. even objects. when archeologists find an artifact the first thing they ask is "what can this tell us about them?"

The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

Unlike a modern money transaction, which is closed and leaves no obligation, a gift transaction is open-ended, creating an ongoing tie between the participants.

The words “ecology” and “economy” come from the same root, the Greek oikos, meaning “home” or “household”: i.e., the systems of relationship, the goods and services that keep us alive. The system of market economies that we’re given as a default is hardly the only model out there. Anthropologists have observed and shared multiple cultural frameworks colored by very different worldviews on “how we provide for ourselves,” including gift economies.

Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.

In order to make this analysis we make a basic distinction between gift giving on the one hand and exchange on the other as two distinct logics. In the logic of exchange, a good is given in order to receive its equivalent in return. There is an equation of value, quantification, and measurement. In gift giving, one gives to satisfy the need of another and the creativity of the receiver in using the gifts is as important as the creativity of the giver. The gift interaction is transitive and the product passes from one person to the other, creating a relation of inclusion between the giver and the receiver with regard to what is given. Gift giving implies the value of the other while the exchange transaction, which is made to satisfy one’s own need, is reflexive and implies the value only of oneself. Gift giving is qualitative rather than quantitative, other-oriented rather than ego-oriented, inclusive rather than exclusive. Gift giving can be used for many purposes. Its...