It begins like this:
At the Oregon Country Fair (OCF) campsites, a wandering camp tenant can find dozens of trade blankets with the sign "take 1/leave 1" above a neatly arranged pile of stuff.
The idea is to take one thing you want to take and leave one thing you want to leave. Some people trade up between blankets one at a time, increasing value incrementally until they leave with an equivalently improved value for all the time they put into carefully rearranging blankets. Others, I'm sure, just take, take, take, and feel like assholes. In most cases, people aspire to leave something of the same value, sentimental or otherwise.
The cool part is it doesn't really matter who takes what when or what leaves where who because nobody's tracking the transactions. Everyone who's left something on the blanket has already let it go. Some people put energy into the collective value of all the trade blankets added up, and others take from the trade blanket energy. I like to believe whoever has more to pour out from their life leaves more energy (or net worth) and those who take more need the energy. In observing the camp blankets, one can learn about the camp tenants available resources.
This is what the trade blankets look like:
The difference in this case is all of this stuff once belonged to the person who stole my car.
This is what they left me.
The first thing I noticed when I saw my car parked was, in the passenger's seat, a fully spun spider's web. My car was a home, part of its environment's ecology.
It had been abandoned for at least a day, maybe two, maybe a week. There were two dents on the driver's side. The car was coated in a sticky film, rendering the windshield unusable. The radio was turned low and set to a pop station. The CD I had in was set carefully in the otherwise unmolested glove box. The windows were all in one piece, the locks still worked great, and a gentle CHECK ENGINE light gave me some comfort as to why it may have been abandoned for me to find again.
Having had my car stolen two weeks ago taught me release, taught me both how I react to invasion and what a car is worth to me. Losing my car was reflective of the difficulty of my own exchange with a trade blankets at Oregon Country Fair. In understanding the blankets to be a place for telling stories, for leaving energy behind, footprints, I left behind a childhood toy that I held onto like a sentimental battery. That I held onto as a comfort to bring out nostalgia on tough days.
An unmolested slinky. Somehow leaving that perfect childhood slinky was harder than my car being stolen.
I imagined the skill of whoever took my car. The practice it takes to make a car disappear in a careful neighborhood. What was his or her motivation? Was it a habit? What started the habit? How many cars came before mine? How many will be after?
I tried to imagine what they thought of me when they saw how my car was arranged. What stories they invented. The stories I invented about them. Now I know he or she is a painter. He or she works or knows someone who works at a construction company. He or she knows how to find tools and the usefulness of a headlamp. He or she had something to do the weekend they took my car. He or she got something out of the experience. He or she stopped by McDonald's and had a drink at some point, and at another point the cupholders broke. He or she took my CD wallet and left the ten or so discs I'd set up on the visor. This must have been a last minute decision because the console was open when I entered the car. I imagine they picked the music they liked and left me my own taste.
And now in losing those two weeks, but finding my car, I get to learn how to receive with grace. I get to withhold vengeance and offer grace. To practice forgiveness to my neighbor so that I can continue to practice forgiveness with Myself.
I get to continue to treat my life in terms of energy exchange. The energy I take is my breath, my Life. The energy I leave in the world, the energy I give away is my Legacy.
