Circulating the Gift: Radical Joy Revealed

Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places. We hope you'll enjoy these doorways into places that are both familiar and surprising, and we welcome your suggestions, stories, and photos. Click here to subscribe.

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Each week Radical Joy Revealed comes to you with inspiring stories and suggestions for living with endangered places in creative, life-affirming ways. We send you our newsletter completely free of charge. But it takes thought, imagination, and a sense of timing to uncover and write the stories, choose just the right images to accompany them, and prepare them for distribution.

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Circulating the Gift

"Paying it forward" starts with one person and expands outward indefinitely.

Service Space is a non-profit organization, run entirely by volunteers, that is devoted to the principle that people are inherently generous and that small acts of generosity can change old, addictive patterns of consumerism into new impulses to give.The organization's website invites people around the world to submit stories about the effect in their lives of generosity, either given or received. In an interview with Richard Whittaker Service Space founder Nipun Mehta explains:

Giving changes the deep habit of my mind from everything being me-centered. In that brief moment, there is this other-centeredness. That other-centeredness kind of relaxes the patterns of the ego. Over time, all of those small acts, those small moments, lead to a different state of being where, ultimately, presumably, it just becomes effortless. It becomes who you are.

Service Space encourages people to do generous acts for others, preferably anonymously. For example, you go into a café for lunch and when you pay your bill you give the waiter an extra $5.00 and ask her to apply it to the bill of the next person. Mehta calls this process the "gift economy," where goods and services are offered with no strings attached. The purpose of the gift economy is to keep the gift, whatever it is, circulating. The one who receives a gift has a sacred responsibility to give it away in some form, somehow, at some unspecified time so that it meets the needs of another.

Try this experiment: at least once a day for the next three days, make an anonymous gift to someone--or to some place.

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Radical Joy Revealed.

Radical Joy for Hard Times is a global community of people dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Reconnecting with these places, sharing our stories of loss, and making acts of beauty there, we transform the land, reconnect people and the places that nourish them, and empower ourselves to make a difference in the way we live on Earth.

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Each week Radical Joy Revealed comes to you free of charge with inspiring stories and suggestions for living with endangered places in creative, life-affirming ways. It takes thought, imagination, and a sense of timing to uncover and write the stories, choose just the right images to accompany them, and prepare them for distribution, and we could use your financial help. Please show your support of Radical Joy Revealed by making a tax-deductible donation to our non-profit organization.

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