Living the Gift

Even 
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
“You owe me.”


Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

– Hafiz

Five of us have been in a passionate conversation for over a year now about gift consciousness and how it is manifesting in our world right now. We are Manish Jain from Shikshantar, India; Filiz Telek and Ayşegül Güzel from Zumbara, Turkey; Lina Cramer and Richard Durning from Wisdom Exchange, USA. As a result of this ongoing dialogue, GIFTIVAL was born! We are sensing that it is a crucial time to bring together visionaries and practitioners of the Gift in a peer-to-peer, playful, collective inquiry to share our ideas, experiments, practices and burning questions. We envision activating our collective intelligence & heart by being in this inquiry and celebration together.

There is a fundamental shift going on in our world: we are both witnessing and participating in the co-creation of a new human culture on Earth. A core piece of this transformation is the gift consciousness–a shift to a perspective of gratitude and abundance and deeper sense of security that comes with recognizing our interconnectedness.

Those of committed to living in and bringing forth a paradigm based on gifting, believe that NOW is the time for us to celebrate our work, share our stories, and deepen our learning and understanding of the Gift–as individuals and communities. Many of us have been feeling, imagining, envisioning, creating, collaborating, practicing and prototyping to cultivate new economic and monetary principles, new ways of being and doing, and new values and practices related to the gift paradigm in our local communities and the world at large.

Engaging in gift culture transforms our understanding of ourselves and our world by reminding us that we are being offered gifts all the time from many known and unknown sources. It graciously invites us back into our sacred role as active gift-givers–from homo economicus to homo giftus. We are able to recognize and find new value in our own gifts, as well as those of others. This is critical for de-institutionalizing our lives and communities–moving beyond experts, money, technology, nation-states, and “rights” that define our identity and purpose in life. It is also key to rediscovering our dignity as diverse co-creators of learning and life.

Giftival is a global gathering of visionaries, practitioners and co-creators of the gift paradigm hosted by Zumbara, the fast-growing time bank and gift economy movement in Turkey. The gathering will take place in Istanbul from October 11-15, 2013.

Some of the questions we will explore together include:

• How have we been inspired by the gift culture?
• What are the different traditions of the gift culture around the world?
• What are the possibilities of the gift culture for these significant times?
• How can we bring the gift culture practically into our lives, communities, organizations?
• How can we liberate ourselves and others to offer our/their gifts to the world?

Currently we are reaching out to our global network and inviting participation. Potential co-players include Charles Eisenstein, Stephanie Rearick, Genevieve Vaughan, Edgard Gouveia Jr, Katie Teague, Manish Jain, Shilpa Jain and many other inspiring visionaries.

If you feel you must be there, be in touch with us. If you know someone else who must be there, please connect them with us.

We will be organizing ourselves and coming together in gift economy. There’s no participation fee and yet there are resources needed to gather our tribe. We trust that we have what we need in our community. So we invite you to practice generosity if you feel this gathering needs to happen. Please contact the organizers if you would like to offer support to GIFTIVAL by helping to cover some of our participants’ travel costs. Air miles would be a wonderful gift, too! Thank you.

Learn more. Contact Giftival organizers.