When Giving is All We Have

I've been in a self-absorbed rut.

Today is Giving Tuesday.

I'm no philanthropist and have difficulty with the philanthropy model, so much so that I've long given up fund-raising for medical charities, etc.  But today, on Giving Tuesday, I'm pulling my head out of my navel and raising money for a non-profit foundation that is particularly dear to my heart. It's the place where Sophie goes each day that she is able, a community of disabled young people and their aides or "coaches," who help them to access the community, to work, to be a part of something bigger than themselves and their diagnoses. The staff of Creative Steps/Aurelia Foundation expands these young people's lives and sees beyond their limitations, and it's a beautiful thing. They run on a shoestring budget, partially reimbursed by the State of California, but I learned yesterday that they also run on a consistent $350 a month per client deficit. I'm reaching out to you today to donate whatever you can to The Aurelia Foundation -- even a tiny amount is a good thing!

Here's Sophie's and my page:

Aurelia Foundation/Creative Steps





Here's a poem:

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. 

From “A Small Story about the Sky,” by Alberto Ríos (Copper Canyon Press, 2015). Reprinted with permission from Copper Canyon Press.

Grace

Dear You,

I have neglected to thank you in any timely fashion but won't undercut my apology with any excuses or defenses. Had I not been so stunned by it, I would have thanked you for your gift months ago. A mutual friend emailed me one day in March to tell me that you wanted to pay for Sophie's cannabis medicine. My friend told me that you read this blog and that I had helped you and that you, in turn, wanted to help us. My friend told me that this is something that you do. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. My friend emailed me again and stressed how important this was to you, how customary. Sophie's medicine is expensive. It is expensive for most people. Some people move their entire lives to states where they can have access to cannabis oil. Some people can't afford the medicine at all. We could hardly afford it, but I felt there were people far more worthy than I to receive such a gift. Yet the stress and strain of paying for it was considerable. I struggled for weeks in conflict over whether to accept such generosity. I am a strong person with sharp edges, my softness worn thin by the years. I am proud. I can do it. I can't do it. I can do it.

Accepting help is curiously one of the most difficult challenges I've faced over the two decades of caring for Sophie, and it's something that many of us who do this caregiving find we have in common. I think it has something to do with the chaos of our lives, our need to find order and meaning, to perhaps assuage our guilt and stem our suffering when we can't fix our children or control, really, anything.  There is a grace to accepting grace, and while I have had numerous opportunities to do so in this grand world, I confess to feeling more resistance than yield.  I accepted your gift and thank you for it. Thank you with all my heart. Sophie thanks you with all her heart.

Not a week goes by that I am not asked by someone for help, for advice, for information or for comfort. Graced, I try to live with grace. I feel like the woman at the well, dipping buckets down to the deep and pulling them up, overflowing. I don't know who you are, but your generosity is the water and the water keeps coming up, in buckets overflowing, and it's sustaining all of us. Thank you.

Love,
Elizabeth

Free Money Day

via FreeMoneyDay.org

I like to say that behind all the stress that comes with seizures and Sophie's disabilities is love and there's so much love that it more than makes up for the hideous stuff. I also say that behind financial distress is absolutely nothing, just a big, black hole that sucks up fear and spits it back out. I've been fearful of late, in micro ways and macro ways, stepping very close to the edge of that black hole.


Then I read this about Free Money Day, organized by Post Growth Institute, a group that is exploring alternative paths to global prosperity across six continents. It sounds completely wacky and utterly idealistic, perhaps even ridiculous, but I like it. Here's what I like:

"The idea is simple: participants take any amount out of their pockets—whether it’s two coins or five dollars—and give it away to a complete stranger. The gift can happen at work, on a plane, in the streets, on a bus, or even online. Instead of paying it forward, the project is all about paying half forward—each person who receives a gift is asked to pass half of the funds to somebody else."

The co-founder of the institute, Dr. MaClurcan says that "one of the biggest myths that we believe is that there isn't enough money to go around. It's inequality in how resources are divided, not a lack of abundance, that makes resources seem more scarce than they are." There's also this:

"Our obsession with making more money as individuals is mirrored by our societal addiction to unending economic growth, despite the fact that neither of these, at the end of the day, makes any of us any happier," the founders write on their site. "The money systems in which we are currently enmeshed are fundamentally unstable—they create bubbles, and a destructive boom-bust cycle, which result in loss of jobs, homes, health, and even lives."

A solution is to give participants the opportunity to step back from the growth-minded Western culture, even for one day, and flip the fear associated with losing money into an opportunity to share it.

I've got to deliver a cake to a park in Burbank tomorrow morning, so I think I'm going to do it. I'm going to take ten dollars and give it someone and ask them to give away five of it. Call me silly, but I'm glad there are people out there thinking up these nutty things. It gives me hope.

Go here for more information about Free Money Day from the wonderful publication Good News or go directly to the site FreeMoneyDay. And for all the cynics out there, the hard-core conservatives and haters of "liberal crap" (someone said this to me recently), I'm thumbing my nose at you. So there.