Extra notes about Chapter 19 – The Giving Half
in the book, The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent.
Other notes are found here.

Quotes

I would give anything to show even the smallest kindness to my ex-wife.
– Post Secret

We have all been given a gift, the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back.
— Edo

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 up the whole sky.
– Hafiz, The Gift, translated by D. Ladinsky

Whole and Total Practice — As soon as one becomes totally honest, automatically the wisdom of unselfishness arises. One becomes loving in a natural way because one is no longer trying to get or be something other than what is already true.
–Jack Kornfield, Living Dharma

I like to envision the whole world as a jigsaw puzzle…if you look at the whole picture it is overwhelming and terrifying, but if you work on your little part of the jigsaw and know that other people all over the world are working on their little bits, that’s what will give you hope.
– Jane Goodall

Necessity may be the mother of invention but interdependence is the mother of affection. We humans need one another, so we cooperate – for purely selfish reasons at first. At some point, though, the needing fades and all that remains is the cooperation. We help each other because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we’re counting on some future payback. There is a word for this: love.
– Eric Wiener, The Geography of Bliss

A fundamental premise of this book is that human beings naturally desire to give. We are born into gratitude: the knowledge we have received and the desire to give in turn. Far from nudging reluctant people to give unto others against their lazy impulses, today’s economy pressures us to deny our innate generosity and channel our gifts instead toward the perpetuation of a system that serves almost no one.
– Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics

On the surface, I appeared to be the picture of encouragement, but things got out of balance. My resentment grew in direct proportion to my ‘selflessness’. I gave up my computer and office so he could write about war. I stayed out of his way. Sometimes he’d wake me up late at night to read me what he’d written, and I’d listen, both as a supportive spouse and as a writing teacher. When I tried to talk about my feelings or my writing, he’d often cut me off, interrupt me, or tell me to go to sleep. I shrank further into his shadow, wondering, when will it be my turn?
– Cynthia orange, Shock Waves: A Practical Guide to Living with a Loved One’s PTSD

[About Buchenwald] This is what you had to do to live in the camp: be engaged, not live for yourself alone. The self-centered life has no place in the world of the deported. You must go beyond it, lay hold on something outside yourself. Never mind how: by prayer if you know how to pray; through another man’s warmth which communicates with yours, or though yours which you pass on to him; or simply by no longer being greedy. Those happy old men were like the hoboes. They asked nothing for themselves, and that put everything within their reach. Be engaged, no matter how, but be engaged. It was certainly hard, and most men didn’t achieve it.
– Jacques Lusseyran
, And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II

Clearing

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

~Martha Postlewaite

Charity and Donations

The Life You Can Save, by Peter Singer, is a book about giving money as an effective way to save lives. He points out that a relatively small amount of US dollars can make a very big difference in third world countries.

Here is a list of world wide charities: charitywatch.org/