What Does Money Want?
Two weeks ago, I wrote a letter to money.
I first began this practice in the Trauma of Money course, and every time it’s different. Filling up a whole page with my thoughts and feelings addressed to money itself is clarifying. It’s cathartic. It cleanses the lens with which I see myself and the world so that I can see it all more clearly. In these letters I’ve express the resentment, the distrust, the appreciation, the respect, the desires I feel for money.
Today I asked what money feels.
Today I asked what money wants.
I won’t pretend that the answers that came through my pen were anything other than my subconscious working through abstractions so large they can be considered hyperobjects.
This is the beauty of journaling, you clarify yourself to yourself. There’s no need to believe it’s channeling or a message from another entity. I feel often like people in spiritual spaces adopt a mask of channeling to create buffer between themselves and what they are saying, writing, doing. I don’t want to do that.
It’s me. It’s you. It’s journaling. We are all a part of something greater, and the wisdom that emerges in the quiet place between pen and paper can provide the fertile ground for what wants to arise next.
Here’s what came out of my pen:
Money feels trapped. Money wants freedom.
Money came into this world to make it easier for us to exchange value with one another.
Money came into this world to flow.
So much money is trapped in the dungeons of people who hoard it with fear, control, and violence. These dungeons look like balance sheets.
Money wants to flow. Money wants to feed people.
This is a pretty significant departure from the ideas of money itself being a corrupting, negative force that I felt for such a long time in my life. And it’s an idea that fully aligns with the way I’ve often treated money in my own life: paying for meals for my friends in college even when it wasn’t the smartest way to spend my money, splurging at farmers markets because I wanted to contribute to the local economy of land stewards even when I could have gotten the same produce for a fraction of the cost. I’ve never had a tremendous excess of funds, but I always find that as I circulate it into what I eat and what I feed others, money always returns and life is delicious, connected, and generosity flows in all directions.
Writing a letter to money was an exercise we led in the first Money class in our Sex, God, and Money course. This week we did the first God week, and one of our participants (shoutout to you Ethan!) reminded us of a quote from Ram Dass none of us can remember exactly. But it was about how we can only conceive of God to degrees that we understand and perceive ourselves. So if we see God as false, or vengeful, or violent, or cruel, perhaps its because we’ve been conditioned to primarily see and understand ourselves in those ways. If we perceive God as loving, as infinite, as connected to all life, it may be only possible because at some level we know ourselves to be infinite, loving, and connected to all life.
I’ll be sharing more of my thoughts about God and religion and spirituality soon, but right now I’m thinking that how we perceive money can also be a mirror on how we see ourselves.
And none of this is without choice- we can choose how we want to be in the world, how we want money to be in the world, and how we as people with choice and agency can shape the way that money moves through the world.
It might start with a trickle of choices as we get our footing in the idea of contributing to a new, more loving, more life affirming economy. We undoubtedly will stumble as we encounter the blockages of institutions that depend upon violence, exploitation, and extraction. But like water carving away at stone, I do believe that we can make new pathways, in our own minds, and in the fabric of our culture.
& I’m curious, if you sit down and write a letter to money, what comes up for you?
& if you ask money what it wants, what emerges?
Know I’d love to hear from you, and if you’re ever in my home, know I’d love to feed you.