Over 100 pay-what-you-can cafés have sprung up over the US since 2003. In these cozy restaurants, one can sit down to a meal of quality, locally sourced food, either by paying the suggested price, paying less, volunteering one's time, or overpaying so others can eat.

The F.A.R.M. Cafe (Feed All Regardless of Means), Healthy World Cafe, S.A.M.E. Cafe (So All May Eat), Panera Bread, Bon Jovi's Soul Foundation...the numbers are growing as people try to find new ways to make healthy food accessible to all in a way that does not discriminate or centre out. 
At Healthy World Cafe in York, none of the diners knows who paid the full amount, who worked in the kitchen for their meal, or that the piano player plays every day in exchange for his lunch. There is no guilt in paying less. There is no applause for paying more.
And it works.

Denise Ceretta opened one of the first of these cafés in Salt Lake City in 2003. She now runs the One World Everybody Eats Foundation, helping others replicate her pay-what-you-can model. “I think the community cafe is truly a hand up, not a handout,” Cerreta says. "You can maintain your dignity."

Judith Manshanden is starting a similar movement in Amsterdam with her GEEF! (Give!) Cafe. See her TED talk below for how the pay-what-you-can model creates connection and trust between people, and how this altruism is part of our DNA and helps our species survive.

These places aren't just in the US and Europe. When you start looking, you find them everywhere. 
In my own hometown of Hamilton, ON, I came across the 541 Barton Eatery and Exchange (also known as the Button Cafe). Here, meals are sold at cost. Breakfast might run you $3. When you go up to pay, you have the option of adding one dollar buttons onto your bill. The buttons you buy go into a jar which the area's homeless (and anyone else who needs to) can use as currency to buy meals. (http://m.thespec.com/…/4724170-buttons-at-541-barton-are-ma…)

However, as Judith Manshanden points out in her TED talk, you don't need to start your own restaurant to spread the benefits..."The pay-as-you-can business model is merely a tool. It is the intention behind it that makes the real difference." All businesses and all of our interactions can benefit from the intention, she says. How?
1. Trust that people will respond to you in an honest way. 
2. Dare to be vulnerable. Be the first to give. 
3. Let go of the assumption that other people are only after maximizing self-interest. They're not.

Here's to bringing sharing, giving, and trust back into commerce!

Woo. Doing a festival is more work than I imagined. That was a 12 hour day, baby. ...hot sun, physical labour (yes all that stuff came in and out of my van in one trip AND I set up the tent singlehandedly thank you very much!), and working all day at engaging people who preferred to skulk outside the perimeter of the tent and peer in from a safe and noncommittal distance. A challenging task for an introvert. The three coffees and chocolate officially left my body around 3pm, with 3 hours still to go, which is right around when I lost the fight to a bronchial infection. 
BUT ALSO...I covered my costs, met some really cool people, had some great conversations, got some really positive feedback, gained lots of beginner experience, made a contact for a store that might sell some of my cards, and successfully did something new and scary.

Another go at it in 2 weeks at the cherry park festival in Kitchener. That's all I've committed to for now, God help me, but who knows...I've got all the stuff for it now! (Including the banner that I hand painted last night at 10pm!! I MIGHT have drunk some rum, straight up, as I was doing it).

Hooray for new experiences and trying new things! (the festival, not the rum...ahem).

One year, the year of this photo, I planted a row of sunflowers to hide the farm junk that was directly in my line of sight when sitting on the front porch. I spent hours digging up the rock hard ground in 30 degree heat, adding manure, planting seeds, and watering. 

Then I sat back, panting,and left them to do their thing. 
Unfortunately for me, it turned out that their thing was to remain dormant in the ground all summer. 

Meanwhile, back in the garden, hundreds of sunflowers began poking out of the ground where birds had dropped seeds the previous fall. In the middle of my potatoes, in the raspberries, between the squashes...sunflowers rose gloriously and majestically wherever they damn well pleased. Which did not happen to be in front of the junk heap that was in my line of sight from the porch.

Bloom where you are planted? Hmm.

Sometimes a worthy goal, no doubt, and I am not denying the wisdom in this pithy statement!

These particular sunflowers, however, seemed to be trying to teach me about how things flourish when they are in the right place. 
As great as my junk barrier idea was, the sunflowers knew that that wasn't the best spot for them to grow. In fact not a single sunflower that I planted grew that year, beyond a few sickly looking seedlings that soon withered away. 
Yet my garden was bursting with beautiful flowers in spots that I certainly never would have thought to put them.

We don't always have the conditions we think we need to flourish, but perhaps those conditions are not as complicated as our minds make them out to be! Our bodies and our spirits know what we need, though it's sometimes hard to hear.
Though my tendency is to replant over and over, gnashing my teeth, until the rotten flowers decide to grow where I planned for them to grow in the first place, I am going to try to keep my eyes open for beautiful things coming up unexpectedly. 
Here's to a summer of unplanned beauty!

The view from where I'm having my coffee, combined with a Ray Bradbury quote that came across my path this morning. 
Oh that we can enable each other to let the beautiful stuff out, and that we can be brave enough to see the beautiful in our ugly stuff!

For some more quotes about life by the sci fi master, go tohttp://www.notable-quotes.com/b/bradbury_ray.html.