Introduction | Scroll down to access featured content
We have crossed a threshold, and life just a few months ago feels like the distant past. What matters most now?
When we started working on this edition, fires were raging in Australia, new alarms were being raised by indigenous leaders to protect our waters from dangerous fracking and pipelines, and ‘regenerative agriculture’ was finally gaining some currency in the mainstream. Surely, we decided, our forests and animals, clean water, and rich soil are all true wealth!
And now…wellness. Our health and the wellbeing of our loved ones has suddenly come into laser focus, the freedom to simply take a deep clear breath. Take one now and send loving gratitude to your lungs, your body. Yes, it is true wealth just to breathe. The ability to breathe unites us all.
So, where is ‘money’ in all of this? Is money wealth? We know that the race to accumulate monetary wealth has played a historically destructive role extracting, commodifying and exploiting Nature’s abundance and living beings. And, as the dual forces of the stock market – greed and fear – play a tug-of-war with the economy, millions are losing their small savings, needed retirement funds, future dreams. For those with no savings at all, not having enough money to provide for hungry families is a very deep form of suffering.
So, I’m hesitant to uplift other forms of ‘capital’ right now – intellectual, spiritual, relational…or to speak of the pandemic as a unifying force for good. I’m reminded instead of a gatha one of my teachers recently shared. ‘Breathing in, my mind is clear; breathing out, I don’t know.’ We don’t know where things are heading, whether the virus will unify or divide. Mental clarity though, is more precious than gold – awareness of the body, of the breath, appreciation for the sky and the trees, helpfulness toward our neighbors, compassion for our communities.
Still, I find myself wondering, what is the evolutionary purpose of material wealth? What role could and should money play at this time?
We may think that economic disparity is the inevitable result of human economic activity. I’m not an economist, but what I understand from the study of cultures is that for about 99% of our time on Earth, it wasn’t the case. Only with the rise of agriculture and sedentism, living in one place for a long time, did ‘surplus’ emerge. Prior to that, and even to this day, humans bartered. But barter was never necessarily a direct trade, ‘this for that’. Instead, in most pre-agricultural communities, complex systems of reciprocal exchange, based on kinship, communal memory, and trust were the norm. I might give you a basket of fruit today, and you will recall that my cousin helped you build your home last season – and so when my mother becomes ill next winter, you will send your daughter with healing medicines to help care for her. These agreements were mostly unspoken and mediated by the entire community.
Today however, greed is the norm. It is easy to vilify the ‘one percent’, to blame ‘them’ for the entire mess of greedy modernism. But, looking deeper, we can acknowledge that the seed of greed lives in each of us and is baked in the cake of the consumerist mindset. And to be fair, wealth and generosity can go hand-in-hand. Then why do we live in a world where the richest 1% own half the world’s money? Could this extraordinary disparity possibly have any evolutionary benefit?
Sixty thousand years ago, a cascading series of events diminished the entire human population to about ten thousand freezing, scared, resilient members of Homo sapiens. These are our common grandmothers and grandfathers, the evolutionary portal through which each of us has passed. This is our tribe. The human family may be greatly diminished some day again, if not by this pandemic then by some other series of cascading events. ‘Sole’ survival should not be our focus. ‘Soul’ survival should. This is the true wealth we should seek.