• 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.

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

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

marginalia is older than writing– it is the same age as storytelling. drawings alongside drawings... interrupting conversations with references orally... never has there been a linear story.

Gods are also created through storytelling, through history writing, cross referencing, footnoting, repeating. They ascend in acts of translation and misunderstanding. If to translate is to carry words from one language to another, it is also „to carry or convey to heaven without death.“ Gods are made when language goes beyond its intentions.

“I think the greatest gift you can ever give is an honest receiving of what a person has to offer.”

“It’s so very hard, receiving,” he said. “When you give something, you’re in much greater control. But when you receive something, you’re so vulnerable.”

"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

"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?"

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

“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.