I am giving this to you, as my 12-step friends, my companions on the road to recovery, for your perusal and perhaps your delight.

The True Emily is a quick little read that I hope you enjoy. It is an historical fiction, where elements of the past as we know them to be true are intermingled with ideas of possible alternatives. This novel deals with Alcoholics Anonymous founder, Bill Wilson, before he was sober. It posits that his mother, a very powerful woman that Bill felt alienated from, showed up one night to offer him some strange medicine.

I really do want to let you know how important the maternal gifting economy is to me.

I have always felt uncomfortable with assigning value for exchange to my worth. It never felt good to me. for a multiplicity of reasons, One is that I would willingly give what I could. I give of my time, my kindness and love, LoveLove. I give freely my skills as a writer, or as an organizer, or as a focuser, or as a director, or as a facilitator, as an editor, as a content creator, as an actor the list goes on. And on 😉 . I willingly give. I enjoy giving of myself to my family, my community and the world around me.

The second part was that it felt so false the naming of a price. How much does giving a piece of my life mean? What does the giving of the moments of my existence to a person or a project or a business mean? I jokingly said if you had to pay me what I am worth, you could not afford me. How awkward it has been to try and put a price on what I do. I’m not certain why I didn’t learn the naming of exchange rates or if I refused to learn. Instead I would say whatever you want to give me, which I then felt as a limitation in my ability. I now see it as a gift because I trust life!

One explanation for this tension is that as a species, as a society, we fell into a lack of trust in life. We lost trust that life would give us what we need. We became fearful and with fear comes the need for the appearance of control (of course we cannot really control anything but that’s part of fear’s great illusion; that we have control over things) using money hoarding and accumulation as a means.

There is sadness and a tinge of bitterness and tenderness with that statement because of the system in which we currently operate. This system.extracts value whether from humans, the Earth and it gives that value to the punitive few. I heard that term today from Genevieve Vaughn, and I really like it, the punitive few who get their money from extraction, accumulation and money hoarding. They have been taught to take and keep money garnered by exchange from labor or extraction. That the accumulation will bring them joy or happiness or power is part of the lie. The exchange economy is the economy of extraction capitalism, which is killing us. Greed is a byproduct of extraction capitalism.

The maternal gifting society says that we are and always have been creatures of caring, giving, and receiving. As young babies born into this world we come completely trusting that our requests will be answered and that our gifts will be received. We are quickly trained out of that trust into this world of exchange. There’s great sorrow in this.

Yet we have within us the capacity to remember or recreate a maternal gifting society now and that is what I’m asking you to consider.

It is my intention to give this book to you as I have given of myself throughout my life, freely and joyously.To practice cultivating trust, that when we take what we need, not more and not less, there is enough. I am asking you to consider giving in the trust in life way. Trust that in the giving there is receiving and in the supporting of each other we can learn to support life in a way free of greed and scarcity and separation. We can support each other as miki kashtan would say in choice, togetherness, and flow. It feels so good to give. And so I am asking you to consider giving to what you value and what matters to you. Giving because you love. Giving because you see the benefit to the world. Giving because it’s pleasurable. Giving because you want to save the planet and doing economy the way we have been is destroying us. Giving because you want the earth and its creatures to continue in a different way.

Now I say whatever you give to me is wonderful, even 0.

I guess there are two additional things I can speak of. One is how to determine how much to give using capacity and willingness as guidelines. I could add that here.

The other is to express my own personal need for Life supporting gifts to come my way, to flow through me. I am getting older. my hands are getting less… I always feel the sadness here. And yet I continue to ask myself what can I do? So far life has put in me both the desire and the capability to continue to be curious and learn. To continue to synthesize ideas and open my mind for new ways of viewing existence. To share what I learn with people. I’m full of LoveLove for you and tenderness for all of us in this unusual space we find ourselves in. I trust fully we have the capability of salvation for ourselves and the world and everyone in it, no exceptions, because we can remember our caring, giving nature and act in accordance with it.

I was talking about my need and got onto my gifts, I guess because I want to be supported to give those gifts.: )

I have, you know I want to say harsh realities, but they’re not harsh. I want to say pedantic, perhaps pedestrian needs. My car is 21 years old and I love her.

When I saw the prices of renting a place I knew I could not pay and I skidded against homelessness in a way that shocked me and is still traumatic for me. I go on despite that. I have friends and family who would have cared for me enough to not see me having the streets as my home like so many have right now. It turned out that with my sweet friend of many years, together we were able to get a loan for a place to live. I am grateful and I am also wondering about why exactly we qualified, given what happened in 2008 where they gave people they knew could not pay the mortgage loans and then the people lost everything. I wonder because it is such a struggle to make this mortgage payment every month. I am grateful and there is stickiness that I would call distrust of f****** extraction capitalism. There is tension within me as well about “owning” a place (the bank owns it). I never really wanted to own anything and it felt like the best option for me to survive. Those are a couple big reasons why I’m asking to receive support. I bet you can see why I prefer to dwell on the beautiful things that I give.

There is one other thing and that is about money itself. Right now money is the means that we have created to make exchange invisible, to make the true costs of what we get so cheap or such a gonga deal, invisible. We are not seeing that somebody is giving up their life to create in a manner that might not be supportive of their life, or that is exploitative. That’s one use for money.

Another use for money is to keep ourselves separate from how we spend it, just how much we consume and accumulate. Considering those is a pathway toward the maternal gifting economy, consuming much less and deaccumulation.

I’m not sure where it comes from but somebody said that in a society that works for all, money will not be a part of it.

However, right now, in what I’m going to call the transition phase between the patriarchal extraction economy and the maternal gifting economy, money will be used. Please don’t be offended by patriarchal and maternal. They are not about men or women, they are about economic structures that represent far more than individual people. They represent the destruction of life or the tending to life.
In tending to Life, please give generously.

If you want to know more about any of what’s introduced here, let me know. I have tons of resources to share : )

peace and pleasure,

dlyn