Few of you know her, but my behind-the-scenes assistant, Shanon Dean-Milon, is an amazing woman. Not only does she run many of the administrative tasks at Sacred Centers, as well as create graphics, maintain the website, and much, much more, she is also an avid gardener with a very green thumb. In the five or so years that she has worked for Sacred Centers—whenever we have a meeting—she shows up with a basket of tomatoes, zucchinis, eggs, or berries—as a gift, all from her backyard farm.

Yesterday as I passed by the “Shanon box” in the kitchen, teeming with fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and summer squash, I thought about how people used to naturally share their crops with each other. After all, how many zucchinis can we eat before they go bad?  How many tomatoes can we handle before they are coming out our ears?  It seems that nature, in producing so much at once, has designed it so that we must share. Somehow, in our supermarket packaging of individual items, we forgot what that was like.

 But no longer. As I mention in the economic section of THE GLOBAL HEART AWAKENS, “We are developing more cooperative and collaborative means of sharing resources, and this in turn cuts down on the use and pollution of those resources, while allowing people to come together in community, and cuts down on cost for individuals.”

Today, there are movements afoot to share cars, bicycles, home schooling, software (shareware), information, food, real estate, lawnmowers, money, and much more.  It is forming a new subterranean economy, a low hum against the din of the larger world’s economic system of self-interest and greed.  I highly recommend this article by Neal Gorenflo from the Kosmos Journal, describing how the sharing economy works for us all. Thank you, Neal, for inspiring this blog!