How We Contribute

Each year we consider best wishes and pathways that lead to happiness. We evaluate the past and heave sadness and regret, for now it becomes clear what overshadows. Another year gone by and we think the future looms… such daring resolution, gleaming before us like a crystal wine glass unsure of itself, half empty or half full.

We watch the ball drop, pour a drink, put on the TV, stuff our mouths with fine dining or grapes, coloring our reality– and yet, we find ourselves alone and unsure, especially about how we got here and what does it all mean?

There is an illusion in our aloneness and in our solidarity. This is non-duality. How when you really think about it, our entire existence is both/and, a multilayered, relational experience, involving yourself and society, starting from the very beginning when we slide out of the womb and fall into space-time called life. We are an individual and a contextual reality, forming part of and coming from another, a person and a tribe, an interconnected species and in this way, very early on, we learn to move through life in an earth body with an infinite (and wild) soul flailing and we’re left to our best judgement to try to figure it out, this non-duality of an existence, this not two, but One being.

Oh, the great mystery of life and how to do it right…

Each year, I try to think of one word to define the upcoming year, like an intention of sorts, a symbolic planting of a seed. This year this activity felt constraining and tricky and I wondered what could be happening because I couldn’t settle on just One thing.

I kept thinking two words actually, a pair of two things, a both/and thing and it was what I was really wanting so I hesitated for some time as if splitting my thought energy into two would have some sort of negative repercussion on cause and effect theory.

My words are Gratitude and Generosity.

Gratitude and generosity. Gratitude and generosity. This is what came to me, these two words, but they’re not two thoughts really, they’re One interdependent idea, One energy. It’s like a new element on the periodical table of my mind:

Gratitude is for all that I am, for all that I can be, for all that I’ve received by the grace of God and magical circumstance, for all that I’ve inherited, for all those who have passed on before me, for those who continue to walk alongside me, sharing.

Generosity is for the spirit of giving and receiving, offering vulnerability, give unto others what they need, giving away freely and generously without fear, becoming an instrument of hope and offerings.

Nonduality of mindset requires trust, a leap of faith and a knowing that there is enough in love and space for both/and, for non-linear reality, for the retracing of steps, to go back in time and say: thank you, thank you! and to always put oneself back out into the world where there is abundance.