Fresh writing
Essay
“The Currency of Love”
I believe it is possible to partner with money.
What do I mean by that?
What I mean is that intention makes the difference. Intention is the life-blood, or currency of money, or anything in terms of exchanges and in terms of relationships.
My premise is that “It all Rests on Relatedness,” and from this context, the currency, energy, consciousness, intention, frequency, valence, or similar metaphors we hold in the social construction of our shared concept of money and the agreements we hold together, are the basis of our experience of being in a relationship with money, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.
The more aware we become, the more choice we have in partnering with others in mutually beneficial ways in which money is very often the medium of value we exchange between participants, parties, people, and so on.
When we elevate our awareness of the role money plays in our lives, we can begin to examine the assumptions and beliefs as well as the experiences associated and attached to these assumptions and beliefs that give us our unique mode of being in relationship on a feeling level, as well as a transactional level, with money.
Our experiences color our feelings and associations about money. Not just on a personal level either. On every level. We all share in the soup of sadness of the conditions of most of our citizens on the planet who struggle with so much poverty, and not just the poverty of money, and yet often includes money.
Poverty takes many forms.
One of the most striking examples of how our mass beliefs about money betray us is the belief in pop culture on fashion, materialism, status, wealth, position, power, beauty, sex, intellectualism, or anything else we compare ourselves to or judge ourselves or others on what it means to be rich, wealthy or to somehow have made it, and it is very easy to associate money being the basis of all of these popular or desirable conditions, status, and so on.
But at the same time, for example in America, despite our wealth, status, power, position, military strength and many other outer measures of wealth many ascribe are status symbols, we struggle with so much violence, violence on every side from self-inflicted violence that sometimes tragically ends in suicide, to mass shootings in public, in schools and more.
These, I submit, are forms of poverty. Poverty of humility, poverty of wisdom, poverty of core humane philanthropic values shared by the United Nations, poverty of a literacy of peaceful language, poverty of emotional intelligence or emotional fluency, poverty of an ethos of empathy in child rearing, family relations, and poverty in education, the workplace, politics, and every aspect of our shared lives, we swim in poverty, while surrounded by the wealth of the currency of money available if we only knew how to begin to partner with the wisdom of money.
Let us invoke and invite love to begin to bring us to a transformation infused, not just a transaction informed partnership with money, where we cherish ourselves, each other, and the ecology of relatedness money serves in our lives.
It becomes a love story of the heart with money as the currency we share together in exchanges of caring, sharing, giving and receiving of all things necessary in our lives, both personal and collective, in a greater appreciation of how money is here to serve us, to love us, to nourish us, even as the love of water, sunlight and gentle rain on our fields to flourish harvests of goodness together, far beyond what we have ever known possible of war torn eras ravaging our planet. We are capable of sowing seeds of kindness, and these will yield in kind, generations to come.
We develop an ethos of money love.
Love becomes the basis for our relatedness, and heals,nourishes, transforms and empowers our lives in a relatedness context.
“When the power of love surpasses the love of power, we will know peace,” – unknown.
We learn to care, honor, respect and to treasure the moments of our lives together, and money can happily supply the invisible yet very real fuel needed to power us on our way, as a way of being.
Written by Thomas M. Clute
See Kate Northrup, author of “Money, a Love Story”
Kate Northrup: Money A Love Story
Comments welcomed.