“Ephemerality is a virtue,” she writes. Failure and transitoriness should be endemic to the utopian attempt.

They renewed their relationships to one another and to their history and the natural world by foraging, clamming, farming, gardening, cooking, and eating together.

We are all giving and receiving, and through those interactions, we become like one organism.

I’d taken for granted what was required for women in the sixties to reimagine their lives and cut against the cultural grain, but it wasn’t a subtle shift. It was a cataclysm. Rejecting cultural norms took a strength of conviction fierce enough to oppose the status quo.

The most compelling way to share something is to share it, not to scold or whine or patronize. In return, you have to listen.

Corey woke up not long after, between six and seven o’clock, energetic and alert, like a dog who’d just pooped.

But when a gift moves beyond two people, the terms of the engagement change. In our household, we were not indebted to any one individual but to the community we helped build. This gave us the confidence to receive without guilt and to give without a sense of meagerness or competition.

Equity does not mean charging everyone the same price. I began bringing sliding scale into my personal life.

Instead, this was like a gift circle, a practice in giving and receiving without the burden of debt.