With a hat tip to Episcopal Cafe, Bp. Marc Andrus of California writes on his blog from the House of Bishops meeting in Quito, Ecuador about the second day of the meeting:

' The opening song had this refrain: "May we always have hearts without doors; may we always have open hands". I remembered what I learned this past spring about the Guarani people, they call themselves the people with open hands. What that means is that as they receive something - money, material possessions, emotional investment, ideas - they are thinking about how they can enhance the gift, and pass it on.

The Guarani, through several centuries of experience with colonizing Western culture have learned to call us the people of the closed hands; people who immediately invest energy in how to hold onto possessions of all kinds.'

I am particularly taken by the concept of ideas as gift, and enhancing and passing on the idea as a gift.