What is Giving?

25 Jul What is Giving?

Each year the Institute hosts a Community Meeting and Fundraiser. We design each gathering around a theme. This past May our theme was Giving in a Culture of Getting and Loss. Among the elements were original poems written by six Institute supporters (referred to below). At these gatherings it’s always a privilege and pleasure for me to speak briefly to our audience on what’s on my mind.

Here’s a portion of what I said.

“What are we doing when we write poetry or an essay or give a talk?

Most people think we’re expressing our thoughts and emotions.  Here at the Institute, we have a different understanding, one we learned from Lev Vygotsky.  Words, he said, don’t express our thoughts.  Words aren’t like clothes in our closet that we pick out for the occasion. No. Words, he said, complete our thoughts. “Complete” here doesn’t mean “finalize.”  It means “transform.”  When we speak or write we are transformingour thoughts, making them material, bringing them to the world. We don’t know what we we’re going to say until we say it. That is what we mean when we say that speaking and writing complete our thinking.  But it’s even more radical than that because it’s not just me that can transform what I’m thinking when I speak, or you whose words complete your thoughts. Someone else can complete for you!

We can see that most clearly and magically in poetry.

Our six poets did that wonderfully.  Each of their poems completed their own thinking on giving, getting and loss. And each of their poems transformed my thinking on giving, getting and loss.  And most likely, yours too. In their completion, there is a disruption of the normal—the logical, the rational, the descriptive. Which is a good move, with enormous developmental potential.

I want to share another poem, this one by Alberto Rios, the poet laureate of Arizona, who completes my thoughts about what we have been doing during this gathering.

When Giving Is All We Have 

                                              One river gives
                                              Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

The Institute’s work in reaching and connecting people who work to make people’s lives better has given us a new way to think about making something greater from the difference. We think of these activities as growing a rhizome—a plant that grows horizontally underground. Think of this community as an underground field of ginger or what grows underneath a patch of water lilies. Think of yourself like this too. No beginning and no end; no central authority; no preconceived plan; no intended direction. What we dohave is a desire to reach out and connect, to connect with all we encounter. A rhizome may be broken at a given spot, but it can start up again at an old place or at a new one. If we are a social rhizome, a historical rhizome, then who we are is always transforming, without losing anything of who we were and who and what shaped us. And if we are all that, then the most giving thing we can do is to use it, use all of ourselves. There’s so much of you and of me that we don’t even think of using to create with.  As individuals and as the communities and groups we are part of we have a lot more to give than we realize.”

What more do you have to give?