I’ve been reflecting a lot on my time in Hawaii lately. Here is a letter I sent out to my family and close friends in my last days on the island: a reflection on the word “giving” – very much in consonance with the Magical Words series. I hope you find something of value.
Giving has an enormous horizon and a breadth that is hard to compass: it is both a practicality—it creates bonds and dependencies necessary to our communal well-being—and an essentiality—the essence of giving being that the other person is simply alive and, by corollary, not only a privilege to know but a living privilege themselves, who has the astonishing ability to acknowledge both the somebody who has given and the something that is given to them.
— from David Whyte’s Consolations
To my family and friends,
As I pack up my things to move, the idea of “giving” has come up more times than I could ignore, in the most far-off places:
In The Gift by Lewis Hyde, a lovely book about the culture of giving. Everywhere, people pass around certain objects in a spirit of communion and generosity, rather than as commodities – it seems to be essential to human bonds.
In an interview of a Zen teacher: “It’s like love to find that this nothing is producing everything, generating everything – infinite generosity.”
In an audiobook (Consolations1) that I’d set aside for months. It resumed at a chapter called “Giving.”
And finally, in the time of year, Thanksgiving. As I donated my loose ends, I watched the warehouse volunteers scurrying around, with barely enough time to look me in the eye and smile. I drove away from each place feeling heavy with a strange guilt.
It seemed like the world was asking me, personally, “What have you been hoarding?”
Gifts need to move through you, as Hyde points out. When people pass food around the campfire, when Papua New Guineans sailed across the oceans to give away Kula shells, when ancients sacrificed and spilt blood back into the earth, they were saying exactly this: Everything that sustains us moves through us. We use and we give back.
Symbolic acts are powerful, and my rejection of gift giving as an essential virtue has made me miserly in a larger sense: prone to creating things that never see the light, prone to aloofness and refusing to give myself. Everything that matters is a gift. Life itself is a gift.
My time in Hawaii is ending. In a small way, I feel deathbed syndrome. I almost couldn’t look people in the eye as I donated my things. I’ve been receiving this place’s generosity and giving nothing in return. But as on a deathbed, I can see clearly why this time in my life came into being. (The magic of writing is that you can die all the time without leaving anything on the table.)
If you’re receiving this, you’re a gift to me. I promise to keep it moving.
Love,
Miles
✤
Related art with commentary
I love the way this piece has no center of movement – like three ghosts moving in an unpredictable braid. Kind of how it feels to leave a place.
My last couple months in SF have been my best yet, but I’ll be gone in a month; my heart is pulled toward people close and far.
A direct inspiration for the Magical Words series.
You have been giving all your life. You were unaware when you gave it. Giving comes from an overflow which you might have not had in Hawaii. You received because you needed it. When you return, you can give.