Today, I signed up for Charles Eisenstein’s online course Living the Gift. Something about Charles’ writing and way-of-being resonates with me, and even though signing up for something like this is throughly uncharacteristic of me, I found myself not only enthusiastic but hopeful about it.
At this time I find myself with my credit card almost maxed out (at a very low cap, fortunately) and I find myself utterly unable to articulate the importance of my plight. I think I could get a work-from-home job with relative ease and pay my debt, but I feel like I have a lot of “gifts” to offer to the world which need the proper conditions to incubate.
I currently take freelance work and I choose work that is synergetic with my gifts (like customizing Method Draw with new features that I can release Open Source). This has somewhat worked out for me, but I find myself working long hours while being unable to keep myself out of the red, so debt creeps up on me even while living a very modest lifestyle (around $600 USD/mo).
I have redesigned my donations page twice in the past two months, each redesign generating less donations than the last. It is strange: the more causal I was about it, the more donations I seemed to receive. I’ve felt like I’ve failed to express my plight: if I take job I will have to freeze Method of Action again, because I know from experience that a full-time job sucks all my creative energy, and I quickly become a cog in the machine, but I’m not a good cog and the machine usually spits me out after I’m worn out. I know this process all too well.
I see Charles not as a spiritual teacher, but as a spiritual example of someone who is expressing his spiritual gift. He offers this course at a pay-what-you-can basis, and this to me resonates deeply. If there was a strict charge, I would not be able to take this course. I feel the same about the things that I do: I cannot put them behind a paywall, because otherwise people who cannot pay will not be able to enjoy it.
My intention in taking this course is that I can redesign my donations page while expressing my gift with humility. I consider this course work too, work of the inner kind, so I will surely write about it on this work log.