Aural Pleasures For The Ride To Brc

Theresa Duncan spent her whole adult life doing development and fundraising work for non-profits. But after she went to her first burning man, she realized she hadn't understood gifts at all. On playa she discovered a gifting culture so powerful that at first she didn't even know how to participate. That's not an uncommon experience: many of us realize, our first Burning Man, that we are so used to thinking in terms of transactional relationships that we simply don't know how to give the kind of life-changing gift that we are sometimes offered on playa. We don't even know how to accept it graciously. I like to tell people it took me about eight years of practice before I got really good at gifting in the sense that Burning Man means it. And I never, never, would have gotten there if I hadn't seen people doing it right, year after year. It's one of the most important things in my life. Today Theresa is Burning Man's director of Philanthropic Engagement, and prefers to talk about a "gift culture," rather than