As the old adage goes, “money can’t buy happiness.” Of course, money often allows folks to meet their materials needs – which is an important prerequisite for happiness and security. But beyond that, what happens when we reframe our relationship with luxury and decadence by striving for the simple pleasures in life? Maybe rather than shooting for a fancy vacation abroad, the next gadget, we would get more fulfillment and satisfaction from long slow walks, sunny naps, fresh cream, and splashing in the creek. What other creative sources of decadence have we not even considered, and what stands in our way to reclaiming them?

Carnival is a radical break from the norms of everyday life. As David Fleming says it is "the reminder that normal, good behavior is not a habit, but a matter of choice." A chance to get silly, creative and wild together in community breeds a sense of camaraderie, unity, and unlocks ideas and relationships that may not be possible in the normal course of life. It teaches us about ourselves and our greater physical, social, and emotional environment in a new way. How can we make space for more carnival as the summer winds down?

At harvest time, awash in abundance, we are faced with many choices. choices about what to keep and what to give away, about what to eat quickly, and what to store, and the best way to make use of all that we have. In this session, we can literally and metaphorically assess our harvest and decide what we offer in feast, what we pickle, what we ferment, what we sweeten into jam, what we pause in the freezer, what we salt, and what we dry to reconstitute later. In this conversational online gathering, we will swap stories about when and how we’ve made choices about what to salvage, valorize, or toss, and exchange some techniques for literal and metaphorical preserving and upcycling.

We have been taught by the hyper-individual dominant culture to hoard our excess, to save for a rainy day, as our mainstays against the intentionally insecure competitive economy. Many of us are hyper-aware of the inequality all around us, and deciding how, and how much to share can be daunting and paralyzing. As with so much un- and re-learning, it takes practice to be generous. This conversational gathering will help us to explore generosity (amid material abundance and scarcity and mindsets of the same). We hope to also support attendees in identifying how to engage in giving without feeling taken advantage of.

Different containers are appropriate for storing, carrying, and collecting different contents. As the contents change, the container might need to change as well. You can store yarn in a loosely woven basket, but you cannot carry water. You can ferment kefir in a glass container, but it requires attention and active care, so that you burp the container before it shatters. Some containers are temporary, and others hold forever. Some carry seeds, others carry ancestors. In this discussion, we will discuss the oft-overlooked importance of the vessels we carry and those that carry us.