THE TRADELOVE Project

INTRODUCTION

TradeLove is a community project meant to help switch the balance of hate and love on our planet, by increasing the input of love and decreasing the input of hate in the system we inhabit.

We all love doing certain things and hate doing certain others. Doing what we love makes us happy, and results in putting love in the system. Once we make something with love, that love is stored in the object we are making and is received by those who touch, see, taste, use or eat, what we made. If we perform an action with love, those who receive that action benefit from it, and their wellbeing rewards us for making them feel good.

Exchanging love is not just beautiful, but it is desirable from a health, spiritual, and quantum physical standpoint. We are what we give, and we become what we receive, and what goes around comes around.

Imagine a world in which everyone of us does what they love, and, when they hate doing something, they ask someone else who loves doing that to do that for them, in exchange for doing something they love doing instead. Imagine a world where you will never have to do what you hate doing, but you will still be living in abundance despite avoiding doing things you hate? Only love would be going around, and coming around. We all would be much happier, healthier, and richer in a way that money could not define. Sounds like a utopia, but it’s a pretty simple task instead. We just must start.

Instead, what do we have going around today? What are we giving? What are we receiving?

Our current society is based on hate: from mass animal farming to call centers, hate is what governments and corporations put in the system, and hate is what we receive, what we breathe, what we eat, and what we ultimately exchange with one another. We work for corporations and pay taxes to governments, taking part in the system with love and passion, and we are manipulated, abused, or oppressed, to the point of hating our job, of hating our tasks, of hating our institutions, of putting frustration in everything we touch, use, produce, and sell. However, because we don’t have an outlet to disperse that hate towards those who give us hate from the top of our societal and corporate hierarchy, we disperse that hate through the only other outlet we have: our families, our customers, our colleagues, our friends, the things we make, the services we provide, the people we interact with, and ultimately ourselves.

But we can reject that hate, and we must indeed.

I was born and raised in a rural society in Calabria, the tip toe of the Italian boot, where people would constantly give to one another, trading things they loved to make, or goods they had in abundance and therefore loved to donate, or services they loved to provide, with things and services they lacked, needed, or simply loved to receive. I have been a witness of miracles: people with very little resources, in extreme financial poverty, were constantly content, happy, satisfied, at peace, surrounded by a constant abundance in every sense, away from the fear of homelessness and helplessness, surrounded by people who loved them and took care of them in the most beautiful way, all things that allowed them to maintain an abundance mentality and fearless mindset even in times of scarcity, during and after the loss of beloved ones, during health and sickness, close to death, during time of losses, or in times of political and social crisis. No money were involved in the exchange, what they were trading was the only currency we can sustainably use: love.

I have therefore decided to launch the TradeLove project, but I can’t do it alone. This project requires a shift in our mindset in order to stick, put roots, and grow, and it cannot therefore be done in any other way than as a community.

TradeLove cannot be just a catchy name, because love is made of time, effort, and attention, that must be dedicated by all of us to prioritize the increase of love in our system. Love cannot be replaced with any other surrogate, because doing so would defeat the entire purpose of this project, sabotaging it from effectively reaching its objective. Therefore TradeLove is not my project, it is OURS. We must give love to this project as if we were watering a plant we would love to see in its majestic full self. Giving love is the only way of making things grow sustainably, of building a fertile and abundant environment, and in that abundance we will then be living. But we must first plant the seed, water it, give it love, and make it grow. It doesn’t take much, it only takes some love.

We are what we give, and we become what we receive. Let’s give and receive LOVE.

THE PROJECT EXPLAINED

The purpose of this project is to propel the wave of love to raise above hate, but understanding the difference between love and hate is fundamental, because love and hate can look very similar on the surface. We live in a society that teaches people to dissimulate their real intentions, their true self, teaching them to acquire behaviors that look like love and compassion, therefore helping people who put hate in the system to mask it as love.

Love is simple. Love is the ultimate truth. Love is genuine. Love is authentic. Love does not need fancy words or gestures. Love does not need to be politically correct. Love sometimes is yelling a truth in someone’s face, and sometimes is patiently waiting for them to realize their truth on their own. But Love does not need to ego-feed others, to walk on egg shells. Love does not need dissimulation of one’s emotions. Love does not need to pretend compassion. Love is fearless. Love is confidence. Love is empathy. Love is presence. Love is.

Instead, hate pretends to be. Hate ego feeds. Hate lies. Hate is careful. Hate is fearful. Hate masks insecurity under excessive confidence. Hate smiles with anger, cries while lying, stays quite while planning on revenge.

Hate is a massive black hole. Love is an eternal star.

Hate is unsustainable and finite. Love is sustainable and infinite.

In the universe there’s nothing else than pure love, or pure hate, pure healing and pure trauma. Pure love, the brightest, most joyful and compassionate white light, can be diluted, corrupt, by the darkest darkness of hate. But the grey that emerges is not love any longer, is not healing any longer, it is trauma instead, it is, although mildly, hate. There is a fine line between love and hate, but, because we live in a world that is traumatized, in a universe that is healing but is not healed yet, most of us are somewhat traumatized, most of us are hateful. In a society that does not accept hate, that does not want to see trauma, that tries to hide every mirror to avoid seeing its own darkness, peole have learned to dissimulate hate masking it as love. Because that happens from our families to our schools to our society as a whole, that creates associations between the idea of love that we have and people and behaviors that are hate instead. All that generates a grey area that is simply a reflection of the attempts to use love as a mask while hiding hate underneath. The grey areas are just the result of the gaslighting we receive from those who want to pretend to give us love, and instead give us hate. As a result, we tend to place in the “box” labelled as love behaviors that are hateful, people who don’t love us at all and who hate us instead, and that leads to cognitive dissonance, PTSD, and to the spreading of their trauma. to us, in the form of a disconnection from our intuition. Hate has been the protagonist of the 20th century, and of most of our history, because hate is simply the trauma that travels in our universe through time, and that pushes us to awaken to consciousness, so that waves of love can raise and bloom. But we are the hands, the feet, the minds, the bodies, the voices, that constitute those waves. Let’s make the wave of Love raise. 

TradeLove entails the exchange of what someone loves to do, make, or loves to donate because has it in abundance, and that someone else lacks, needs, or simply loves to receive, with what someone else loves to do, make, or has in abundance. 

Things you love to do can be services you love to provide, things you are good at and you love to do.

Things you love to make can be baked goods, clothes, or other handcrafted items.

Things you love to donate because you have those in abundance can be produce from your garden, or eggs from your chickens, or clothes.

Doing what you love makes you feel good. Doing what you hate drains you, disorients you, forces you to find an outlet to dissipate the negative energy you have received, complaining with others about what you’re doing, or even talking about it in a seemingly positive way to mask the fact that you deeply hate it but feel obliged by social norms to pretend to love it.

Loving to receive something makes you feel good, understood, taken care of. Receiving things you hate makes you feel frustrated, dissatisfied, unhappy, lonely.

Love is the word, and therefore there are items that cannot be exchanged and behaviors that are forbidden. Those who break the rules of the community will be banned forever from it.