I'm reading a wonderful book, called Gift, by a writer Hyde, which has been around for 25 years, but is new to me. I've only read a couple of chapters, but I'm already slowing down, savoring each page, because I feel how much this book is going to mean to me. He relates several folk tales, the object of which, he thinks, are to highlight that a gift needs to be moving and not clung to. When the gift is hoarded, it loses its power, and the commodification of the object circumvents the intention. He gives as an example the Potlaches in Northwest Tribes, which used to be about giving away - generosity and sharing of honors - but became, as the colonial culture infiltrated the tribes, about overabundance and waste.
I wonder if this is why so many of my friends and I, at our age, are wanting to pass on our treasures instead of keeping them as a form of identity. We feel that these objects should move on, make someone else happy, and follow their destiny independently of us. After all, these treasures are in our hearts, and we can call them up when we will. But our signifying of them is narrow, and others may see them in new and different ways.
I always think of our hundred year old house as not "mine", but an abode I share with those before me and those afterward. I've met a man born in this house in 1914, and another father and son who lived here when the son was a boy, and a man who raised his four children here. His wife died in this house in the bedroom where my husband and I sleep. I occasionally talk to her, Geneva was her name, and feel her presence. Do I own this house? No. I delight in it for a brief time, but others will breathe in these rooms and transform the place to their liking. We don't own. That would mean staying still, in stasis, whereas in reality everything is changing and transforming and we can't hold onto anything. It's very relaxing when I realize this is so. The strain, the effort, is no longer necessary. I have only to appreciate each day I have, and be grateful.
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