“Once, a man visited a market where a shop owner sold a beautiful array of coloured paints. Every day the man would go to the market, and his spirits would be uplifted as he walked around the shop where the walls were stacked high with pots of paints of all different colours. It was like standing in the middle of a beautiful rainbow, and his soul felt uplifted and happy. If only he could capture this beauty and keep it with him all the time, he thought as he visited the shop more and more. How could he do this conveniently and could be carried around by him so he could keep it with him all the time and feel happy all the time?

Then, one day he had what he thought was a wonderful idea. He thought he would take a sample of all the various colours and put it into one bigger pot that he could keep with him. So, he made his pot and then went to the shop, and he asked the shop owner if he could take but a tiny free teaspoon sample of every single beautiful pot of colour in his shop to put into his one bigger pot. The shop owner smiled at the man and said, ‘be my guest’, yes please take my free samples of paint.

The man excitedly began to fill his pot with all the free samples, carefully putting each in a different place in his bigger pot until he ran of space, and they had to start overlapping. By then, the man was so excited to be collecting all the free samples that he didn’t care anymore and continued to fill his pot. It wasn’t until the end of the day that he looked into his bigger pot with dismay to find that all the bright colours had combined to create a pot of the colour grey. ”

“Any portion of gift labour in a job will tend to pull it out of the market and make it a less lucrative – and a ‘female’ – profession. To quit the confines of our current system of gender means not to introduce market value into these labours but to recognize that they are not ‘female’ but human tasks. And to break the system that oppresses women, we need not convert all gift labour to cash work; we need, rather, to admit women to the ‘male,’ moneymaking jobs while at the same time including supposedly ‘female’ tasks and forms of exchange in our sense of possible masculinity.”

“The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The World is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.”

“Once there was a woman who lived alone in a small, wooden hut in the middle of a forest. The hut was basic but reasonably comfortable, although water would drip through holes in the roof onto her bed when it rained. The woman kept meaning to fix the roof, but as soon as the sun shone again she forgot about it until the next time it rained. In front of the hut was a small pile of old bricks left by the previous owner. She kept meaning to tidy up the pile of bricks up but never got round to doing that either.

The food that grew naturally in the forest was enough for the woman. Sometimes, she would talk to a traveller who passed by her hut but most of the time she was happy alone. Then one night out-of-the-blue, she had a dream in which she owned a beautiful house made of brick. This house was big and strong and it had a nice garden too. The dream was so vivid that when the woman woke up the vision of this house stayed with her until the middle of the next day. She thought to herself, ‘How wonderful it would be to have a house like that’.

Days, weeks and months passed and she still remembered her dream and she realised she needed this house to be happy. At the same time, she started to feel bad because she was doing nothing towards achieving her dream. So she made a bold declaration, ‘I am going to build myself a house’ and as she did so, she remembered the pile of bricks lying in front of her wooden hut. She stared at the pile of bricks forlornly with no clue as to what to do with them.

Day after day, week after week and month after month she stared at the bricks, hoping some inspiration would come to her, but it did not. She began to lose hope. Then one day she wandered a bit further outside the forest and noticed a group of houses just like the one she had seen in her dream. She was so excited that she ran towards them and, more than ever, she wanted to live in a nice, big, brick house.

The woman returned to her hut in the middle of the forest and knew she could never live there happily again. She thought she could maybe learn how to build a brick house by going back and looking at the ones outside the forest. She went to study the houses, walked around them and tried to understand how they had been built. Despite gaining a few, small insights by doing this, she was left with too many questions.

On a visit to the brick houses one day, she saw a woman come out of one of them. Startled and a little frightened, she ran back into the forest to her hut. There she thought, ‘Perhaps if I talk to the people in the houses and ask them about their lives I will learn the secret of how their houses were built’. She went back, knocked on the doors and introduced herself to the people in the houses, and made friends with them. She learned about their lives but no one could tell her how the houses were built. They had all bought them ready-made. She felt worse. What was wrong with her? Why was she incapable of understanding how to build a house? Had problems in her childhood stopped her living in a beautiful brick house like the ones outside the forest?

She began to sink further into despair. Her thoughts were going in two directions - forwards, towards the dream of the house, and backwards trying to understand why she was unable to build and live in a brick house. She started to feel very depressed and took up looking at the pile of bricks again. As she did so, she noticed a man in front of her dressed in simple clothes and carrying what looked like a small bag of food over his shoulder. He looked at her, smiled and said, ‘What is wrong? I can see you are sad?’ Noticing how simple his dress was, she thought that this man would never understand her sadness and he would not be able to help her. She half-heartedly described how she felt, what she had done to try to resolve her sadness and how she felt she would never own a brick house. The man listened to her very carefully and smiled. ‘The beautiful home you seek is right there in front of you’ he said and he pointing to the bricks in front of her hut. The woman looked at the pile of bricks, and then looked up at the man and said, angrily, ‘That pile of old bricks is no home! How can you be so silly?’ She felt bad for being rude to him but she was feeling so upset. The man did not stop smiling though, and he spoke once more. ‘May I suggest you try putting one brick on top of the other and you will see what I mean?’, and with that comment he smiled yet again and left.

For days, weeks and months the woman continued to stare forlornly at the bricks, tormented by her dream of the brick house with the man’s words fading in and out of her thoughts. One day, without much focus, she picked up a brick and placed it on top of another. She looked at the two bricks, but her mind was still full of many thoughts about how difficult her life was. Then, as if appearing through a thick mist she also noticed something else. She started to feel a bit better. She was surprised but she wanted the good feeling to continue and grow, so she picked up another brick and placed it on top of the other two.

As the little bricks started to form the beginnings of a wall, her confidence built with it. She became so engrossed in the task that she completely forgot all her other thoughts about her past and the houses and people outside the forest. She began to delight as the pile of bricks in front of her slowly transformed into the beginnings of what she now could see would be a beautiful house. She wondered who that smiling man was. ”