(Image for a passage about borders drawn for an Awakin reading and photographed on a mailbox, original subsequently gifted to a traveler activist and now reused here to illustrate yet another blurring of borders.)


For years now, I've been very interested in rethinking the idea of art. My work at greenmuseum.org led me to explore how creative work such as painting, music, installation and performance can serve communities and ecosystems. I see our modern perspective on these artful disciplines, however, as part of a much larger colonial industrial paradigm that infuses our understanding of most things, from healthcare to education to spirituality. Rather than part of an integrated system for living, we are taught to see the arts as separate marketable commodities generated by professional artist genius/specialists. Art isn't part of how most of us live our daily lives nor is it integrated into daily work. It's something we consume, observe or buy in a specialized context, gallery, museum or concert hall. These cultural buildings themselves are often expensive iconic architectural artworks, too, notably different from "conventional" structures, further highlighting this separation from the ordinary.

Many indigenous and pre-colonial cultures developed more holistic and integrated ways of combining what we think of as art with daily life, spirituality, rights of passage, policy and engineering. How people regulated the distribution of water, protected forests or managed salmon populations, for example, was deeply shaped by song, ritual, sculpture and creative expression. Moreover, similar themes and images can be found in people's clothing, tattoos, prayers and bedtime stories, their architecture, on intricately carved canoes and within the metaphorical frameworks for understanding their historical, spiritual and geographical context. That all things are deeply interconnected, was seen as a given. Many of these practices are alive today in rural areas worldwide and familiar to people who are still connected to their cultural roots. It's no accident that many of the founders of ServiceSpace were and are inspired by the spiritual sense of oneness in Buddhist meditation, the service activism of Gandhian nonviolence and the flow of generosity in pre-industrial gifting cultures.

The giftivism espoused by ServiceSpace, reflects emergent systemic properties similar to those in the precolonial integrated and (from my perspective) often healthier and more resilient antecedents mentioned above.

Members refer to the ServiceSpace ecosystem: the growing collection of semi-autonomous yet deeply interrelated projects and websites which share common gift and service principles. These efforts share the same web platforms and are run by many of the same volunteers. There's lots of cross-linking and people often learn about the larger organization through experiencing some smaller part of the ecosystem. As a cultural whole it encompasses everything from handcraft distribution, videos, books, CDs, participation in economic and political think tanks, discussion groups, meditation, sharing food, activism, art interviews, educational initiatives, to offering hugs on the street. Members frequently do extraordinary and notable things for others and then other folks write about them and share those stories online and in person. There's a celebratory oral culture of giftivism and certain examples become well known and inspire other people to try similar experiments.

The rich tradition of story telling and sharing of anecdotes and inspiration interweaves and nourishes this ecosystem and helps it spread. The media can be oral, recorded through public talks, video, audio recordings, written works, even drawings and handmade toys. The physical gift element is easy to overlook from outside but it's crucial to making it work as a whole. Smile Cards are obvious gifting instigators and nice little gifts themselves (available in the form of Smile Decks in numerous languages, as well). They provide opportunities for service since they are distributed as gifts by countless volunteers worldwide (to offer a chance to serve is itself a form of gift). Smile Cards are supported by an accompanying website for additional story sharing and inspiration.

When ServiceSpace members visit friends, attend conferences or go to meetings, they often bring Smile Cards as well as little presents of their own to hand out, books or magazines gifted by ServiceSpace members, handwoven (and spun!) shirts and handicrafts made in the slums in the part of the planet we call India, CDs of music that echo many of the themes from within the ecosystem, vegan brownies, service gifts of dishwashing, cleaning, transportation, leaving decorative flower petal arrangements and countless other creative treats. Many of them are left as anonymous gifts, as well. The astounding thing is that this long list is only a quick overview of the innumerable gifting traditions that help inspire and lubricate this culture.

Ideas mix and flow. People "tag" each other and surprise complete strangers with kindness, good deeds and opportunities. None of it is monetized and those giving do not ask for anything in return despite considerable pressure and opportunity to do so. All this can eventually attract unsolicited conventional currency and donations. These are then regifted or used to create more opportunities within this already all volunteer global network of generosity giftivists. Radical acts of kindness inspire the amazement and open hearts that in turn inspire additional generosity. It's not a "push" model with marketing and hard asks, at all, it's a "pull" model that just serves and draws participants in through its conspicuous lack of agenda and absence of expectations beyond a sense that what "goes around comes around". The ServiceSpace cultural system although deep rooted, is less than 20 years old. Within a network of over 300,000+ members (plus all those they interact with, all the things we think of as art flow back and forth, nourish and cross-pollinate.

People cook, draw, sing, build, decorate, delight, share stories, build support infrastructure, solve innumerable technical and creative challenges, network and manifest creative, beautiful and astoundingly profound artful gifts of their time and attention to delight each other, their friends, families and communities. A good deed inspires a song inspires a video, inspires a talk and a website discussion, sprouts a poem and a meal with strangers and more gift giving and then additional songs and drawings and soon it's hard to trace where any of it began or who really made any specific part of it because we all did, in a way. The whole thing could be seen as a form of collective social sculpture, yet that thought container is itself a relic of the industrial impulse to contain, claim and separate.

ServiceSpace is a living example of how emergent, post-capitalist, systems-based culture can begin to manifest through the active engagement of creative passion, kindness and generosity. Part of the beauty of all this is that you don't need to explicitly say you're going to put an end the industrial growth society or change the role of art and artists in society. You just begin to serve without attachment and with great love and create spaces for others to share those experiences with you in whatever ways they are moved to do so. From there, it all begins to flow naturally.

My friend, the ecological artist David Haley, likes to talk about how the word "art" is derived from the Vedic root word "rta" which means: "the dynamic process by which the whole cosmos is created virtuously". I like to think that rta is alive and beginning to flourish in the fertile soils of ServiceSpace.

Like the micorrhizal fungal and bacterial colonies essential to the functioning of soil, rta is the culture through which our human systems exchange nutrients, information and creative inspiration. The care we put into its cultivation and long term stewardship is likely to transform the "arts" as we understand them now and radically redefine the institutions and policies we have developed to encourage and distribute them. A conscious understanding of these dynamics can help open up new opportunities for creative practice and inspire global transdiciplinary collaboration grounded in kindness and generosity on a scale that was impossible until now.

I can't say whether the ServiceSpace core principles of smallness, not asking and volunteer driven activism will actually help us shrink our collective ecological footprint, build resilient communities and promote a shift to some kind of post-industrial capitalist culture in time to navigate the profound challenges of the 21st century. As a widely distributed organization made up of volunteers, many ServiceSpace members have enormous ecological footprints. Many are active in finance, business, government and industry yet find themselves at the same time, gifting and increasingly devoting their spare hours and resources to radical acts of generosity. Some try to live their entire lives as a gift, without conventional jobs and maintaining few possessions. The dynamic process through which all of this is being created virtuously by millions of people worldwide is clearer to me and I have been blessed to have experienced much of it first-hand through the work of ServiceSpace. I have no doubt that we are witnessing the networked power of small acts of generosity that change the world and I find it deeply and resonantly beautiful.