Like all my newsletters, this one has a "Celebrations and Mournings" section. This time, that section is spilling over. One of the celebrations is so big that it's the main thing I am writing about here: more and more of the work that we do here at BayNVC is happening within a flow of trust and generosity involving more and more people and having growing impacts. It is also affecting my own life in dramatic ways.

Like most of us who live in patriarchal societies, I've lived much of my life with a semi-permanent sense of scarcity. It seemed like a natural part of life. Some day I hope to write the personal story of several significant losses that turned into milestones along the journey of liberation from scarcity, which I rarely experience these days. For now I will say only that the unfolding of this process doesn't necessarily result in having more, because we do live in a finite world and "more" can't be infinite. The shift comes from relating differently to what is there, learning better how to match available resources to needs, and surrounding the inevitable losses with tenderness. Such liberation cannot be done alone. As I wrote in my recent post, one powerful pathway to releasing scarcity involves acknowledging finitude and making decisions together with others when facing it. It has been my consistent experience that this results in feeling aligned with a mysterious sense of flow all around.

Two twin practices have increased the flow for me and around me: giving without restraint and asking without limits, ready to receive a no. I want to provide three different examples of what I mean.  

• The Fearless Heart has committed to this year's plan for the Empowering Palestinian Women Leaders project, with a budget of $34,000, knowing that the money would need to come from the generosity of people besides the participants. Supporting the community-based Palestinian women who are called to participate is a core commitment now, and we are lovingly taking the risk. In February, with generous support from everyone we asked into the process, we were able to seed our call for support with $12,000 in matching funds. Since making this broader call on March 1, we have received $4,315 of the total we asked for. We celebrate this and ask you to support us with your donation, if you are able and willing, to bring us to our full budget. Many of the donations we have received in the last year were $50 or under, but they all added up to a powerful contribution. Some of our donations were larger than we dared ask: over $20,000. You can find more information about this project, including how to support this work, here.

• The Nonviolent Global Liberation community and retreats operate almost entirely within the flow of gifting, with the exception of room and board costs for the retreats. While the retreats have so far sufficiently sustained themselves on the material plane, the financial contributions within the online community have been far less than the combined sustainability needs of those of us doing the work. And still, there is no sense of scarcity. In terms of the work that needs doing, it's all done through voluntary commitments, without any tallying of who has done how much. In terms of finances, decisions about what will happen with the small amounts of money relative to the needs have been made in full transparency and collaboration. So far it's been clear where the money will go, without any one person making that kind of decision. And people are continuing to contribute time and energy, with full willingness, knowing that it's unlikely there will be money to contribute to their sustainability in the near term. Meanwhile, we are working on ways to increase the financial flow. When I was invited to present on the gift economy at a conference in Colombia to honor the publication of a Spanish translation (not yet generally available) of For-Giving: A Feminist Critique of Exchange, a book by Genevieve Vaughan, I chose to illustrate the principles with concrete examples from this community.

• Starting in 2002, my late sister Inbal and I created an amount of learning materials that continues to amaze me. One of Inbal's wishes, for years, was for us to find a way for these materials to become useful and available to the public. We never figured it out together. In the last few months,  I found a way to do it, and began the work. With this newsletter, I am officially releasing to the public the first six of the thirty-three packets of the work that we started and that I have continued to develop. (Twenty-one additional ones are in progress and available to people in the Nonviolent Global Liberation community. And six more require foundational work to even start.) Beyond just celebrating that this work is finally flowing, I am also celebrating that it's made available on a gift basis -- anyone can have access to the packets regardless of money, while, at the same time, money is being asked for. Curious to see? Here's the link to the work that Julie Lawrence has done to make it technologically possible - nothing simple about this task. And, in another illustration of the theme of this piece, Julie is gifting her work to BayNVC.

This is not all. Because no amount of examples can fully capture what it's like to be part of the BayNVC staff or the Nonviolent Global Liberation community, the actual felt sense of the flow we are witnessing and co-creating. Or the delicious experience of having asked for and received money to create the All Voices Fund, which seeks to address the historic and current gaps that keep people who have been marginalized from fully engaging in principles of nonviolence. As I am writing this, the All Voices Fund has received its first request for financial support, and we are heartened that we could say YES. The joy of giving is immense. The mourning of how little we can do is just as immense. The family of life is in dire need, and recognizing and opening to experiencing that need is part of what creates the flow.

The future is forever unknown, one of the conditions of mystery that life is made of. I said earlier that a dramatic change is happening in my life, and I want to close with that. After thirteen years of living in the same place (the longest in my entire 63 years!), I am moving out. At the end of March I am off to Palestine, Israel, and several stops in Europe. Immediately after I leave, all my things will be packed and put into storage. I don't yet know where I am going other than I am committed to staying in the Bay Area and to being part of an intentional community here. I am jumping into the unknown, allowing my need to be part of the flow, and surrendering to the outcome. For decades now I have wanted to find a way to live in community with people I know and love. Now I also want attending to the flow of resources to be an integral part of our community life. Within the Nonviolent Global Liberation community, which is either transient or virtual, I am finding seeds of such possible life for me. I surrender, without knowing whether these or other seeds will blossom into my next living arrangement.
  P.S. If you want to hear more of what's been happening in the last couple of months, click here for both work and personal celebrations and mournings, including my recent trip to Colombia, why I ended a project I was working on, what's happening with NGL, and more.