Category: Uncategorized

Long before I cared at all about global value exchange, I was passionately concerned with others’ happiness.

I collected stickers that other kids liked, gleefully waiting for the playground trading floor that opened up spontaneously between jax tournaments. My trapper keeper notebook came away looking ragged. Satisfyingly so, as I had deftly distributed the very best stickers I could find for those I knew would love them. These were amusing entanglements among mates in the quest for puff, sparkle, and shazaam! I loved the stickers for their design and dazzle, and I liked giving them away even more.

Now I keep an eye out for busy colleagues who need a grocery drop-off. I aim for an unexpected gift when stuck in the mud of love. I pull dissertation committees down from hot, high air. A draft memo to a circle of colleagues may deliver only two ounces of understanding.  Perhaps meant to go unpublished, but it can’t be unwritten.

With a measure of my career in the rear view, I can see the pattern clearly. There are certain operators (I am one) who utilize commonplace principles like ‘pay it forward’ to precede and preset conditions for all sorts of value generation – personal, social, educational, cultural, environmental, and yes, economic.

Like my forbears, I trade in social tender. I move stickers, share burden through fractional householding, and provide dedicated defense lines for cultural workers. I have been described as the person you call when no one else responds. The potent values produced in my work are expressed in others’ progress, well beyond my own expertise or control. My best investments rarely appear in revenue projections or on balance sheets, despite these conditions being essential to operations and long-term equity.

I put appreciation, curiosity, and joy into an amalgam of shared silence, listening, and careful inquiry. I get my reward in warm text updates and hand-written thank you cards after a big transition or transformation. What happens next keeps me in professional awe.

Washington Writer’s Retreat is an example of my efforts to blend generosity into the value exchange of an enterprise, not just a practice I do in other parts of life. I wanted to test an economic theory that it was possible to deal transactionally with non-negotiable values in a way that generated novel resources in predictable and unpredictable ways.

It mattered that I opened my own home to research scholars without much regard for the costs; whatever they could comfortably afford. Simply saying so made room for quieter conversations that always guided us closer to getting the most out of a stay.

I listened as deeper intentions were revealed through progress. That often led to critical breakthroughs, or sometimes a crushing rupture. Hosting the retreat was an effort to feed and comfort people who were furiously proposal-ing to great consequence. NSF grants flew out the digitals windows with my cats contentedly lap-napping. Three babies appeared while all that art and science was also happening.

I can fill volumes with what was necessary for creative work to commence. Coffee, of course, and a pillow upgrade. Windows that opened and temperatures just so. The largest room had red walls. No way for one writer, no matter how big the desk.

One artist couple took over the kitchen with epic relish. Then, they abandoned the greasy worktops to the meticulous lab scientists also in residence. The latter are chosen family, having rescued me from a dozen other mishaps in those days. Their longer stewardship of the retreat let me fall in love with Louise, halfway around the world.

The retreat was contemporary with AirBNB as a fresh business model in the sharing economy, though at a very different scale. I was an early host on the then-new platform that boasted an active DC network, and the only operator focused on longer stays involving writing and research. VRBO was just getting started as a sabbatical swap. I wanted to host, and serve as an outpost reporter. I managed the house as a creative space in those heady days when experiential and shared economies met with door-opening technologies that changed the global economy forever, most especially in the cultural tourism industries.

In developing the retreat, I also related closely to the many strains of tradition that came before me. I leaned into familial habits of communal cultures, adopting and adapting those many ways that immigrating generations host each other for short study trips and longer sojourns into their personal and professional futures. I looked at the formal study and cultural exchanges that already abound in the DC region, a nation’s capital replete with opportunity though bereft of kindness, somedays.

Many artist retreats around the world informed me (formal and informal, past and present) along with my own road trips and self-directed residencies in the US, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.

I read a lot about Depression-era housing, when the only way to keep ownership was to share space. I stood over the stove top, making a new soup of my assets. Boiling an old carcass down to the nourishing bone.

It turns out that commodifying the obvious parts of the experience (without sense for the ineffable) reverses certain parts of the original value exchange. In today’s shared economy, instead of humble and curious guests, we’re often greedy jerks with high expectations of our anonymous hosts. As hosts, we can accidentally trade in the facsimile of experience. The super-powered subscription models are largely unaware of the babies they dumped out of the bathwater. There is also a need to be entirely inefficient with oneself and others.

I can hear you worrying about me. Attachment, enmeshment, boundaries, and bad actors. Dollars are crisp curators of fair value. Why blur the lines? When I moved into the dank basement of my own home, I left the full upstairs to the retreat. For me, it was more privacy and a separate bathroom. A family member called with real concern. What was I losing in my quality of life? What amount of self-effacement is too much? She knew her line, and I had crossed it.

I have gained in life by being this way. In Liz Lerman’s time, the Dance Exchange had a prompt, What are you in praise of? It is calming to me as a secular Buddhist to rest my praiseful gaze outside myself. I walk through the world appreciatively, not because I deny suffering or my own self-worth. Rather, I smile in our shared trials and triumphs, only half-knowing the tug of my own. We all have something undiscovered.

Latent value is a secret stash in the economy of favors. Having listened over time, we know a friend’s need better than our own. We are studied in how to caringly deliver in the right way. We can arrive at a precise moment previously unknown and help put the dots together again.

So it was with the retreat, where every engagement began in potent mystery about our short time together. What would a ‘love first, ask questions’ approach beget? What value would I find in it for me, now and so many years later?

Well, I kept my house in the midst of a global market meltdown. I wrote a lot, much of it still in the drawer. Cats died, new ones arrived. I came to the now-obvious conclusion that animals make humans better. It was the Washington Writers with Cats Retreat, if I’m honest.

I studied creative practice intensely – improving my own, supporting others, reading about it, teaching, coaching, and toiling in community dilemmas.

Cooking and eating among friends has to be the greatest gift. The smells, sounds, tastes of all those worlds mingling – nothing I could have imagined and a bank of memories I linger in still.

Yes, I now see how friendly favors were the pond drops that rippled out. I owned the house, only a small part of all that is ours to keep.