The Biggest Myth of All…
… isn’t immortality. It’s money. There’s a TED Talk about it. About how we’ve all just agreed to predicate a great deal of our everyday activities on the notion that a rectangular piece of green paper means value. That it has value, that we need it to do business, buy stuff, stock the fridge, get a pedicure (honestly, my kingdom for a pedicure!).
Lots of folks know currency wasn’t the law in the US until the big landowning white boys decided they wanted to get control of farms. If they took away bartering—i.e. citizens deciding for themselves what something was worth with their communities, etc.—banks could more easily decide for us and therefore tell us what everything was worth, including land. Uncle Sam wanted land, so he made money the law.
I think back to some of my earliest exposures to old ways. Those books I read when I was a kid… the First Nations. Nomadic people tended not to take more than could be pulled in a travois by a pair of adults or a horse. Camp was made where there was food for a time. And camp was moved when it was time to move for what was growing, running or swimming. There was an agreement: we take only what we can carry, and (because) earth provides what we need, and we move in her rhythms to gather her gifts.
Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about this gift economy. It is one of deep trust. That we will all do our parts. That we will take only what we need, but our harvest will encourage new growth. That earth will also provide for us through this cycle from which we cannot be removed. The trust is framed in the mutual understanding of symbiosis. The trust is possible because connection and interdependence is understood. Trust then… is inherent.
Perhaps because this barter, harvest, hunt, gather gift economy was something I was exposed to while young, the notion of a continuously growing economy always seemed ridiculous to me. Nothing “always grows” except cancer. Unmitigated growth is cancer, and it means something is dying unjustly. Out of balance. Something is overtaken, the agreement is broken, balance is disturbed. Yet, this demand and expectation for continuous growth is what capitalism was built on. And its cancer began long ago. Slavery was cancer: taking over brown bodies, stealing their life from them, stealing their souls’ purposes for constant growth. Land theft was the same: slaughtering buffalo and desertizing the land over the centuries, stealing oil and overtaking rivers—capitalism stole their purposes as organs of the body of earth, doing their part to keep us all healthy. Now our earth is covered in cancer, organs that were healthy overtaken by cells that are killing us.
That a Board of Trustees can punish a company whose profits rise and fall with the seasons is ridiculous. Nothing of this earth is exempt from its laws, and the laws of nature dictate the cycle. The sun rises and sets, the moon circles the earth. Spring comes and we plant, summer comes and things grow, fall comes and we harvest, winter comes and we rest. We learn, we tell stories, we feast, we meditate, we sleep, we create new works of art. This is the law of nature.
When we disturb it, when we insist on constant growth so that a very few can make money hand over fist, we break the agreement. We come out of balance. Make more, sell more, buy more is economic cancer and it has brought us to the climate crisis we are in, the health crisis we are trying to survive, the systems of economic injustice into which we fall every day. “But if I reopen my restaurant now and my employees don’t feel safe enough to come work, they will lose their unemployment benefits.”
When we punish ourselves for the laws of nature (companies firing the CEO and laying off thousands)—cycles of growth and rest—we disrupt all of nature including our place in the cypher, and we deprive ourselves of receiving the gifts nature would give us, but also the purpose of our own lives—the meaning felt and adored—of living in balance and interdependence with nature: stewarding nature. Taking up our responsibility. Taking our places as caretakers of our world and each other.
Companies should NOT make more money every quarter, they should NOT grow endlessly; WE should not buy and consume constantly—our goals to acquire another house, another car, a bigger house. This pattern is one of endless growth on the scale of the lifetime. And many of us are caught in it. Required to produce more, to keep up with the machine to KEEP our jobs, to keep our families, to keep from falling, and to prevent collapse in case of a single emergency in a decade or even more. Yet, we are worked so tirelessly that we believe we need the things that would give us comfort or rest because the time we would use to rest spiritually, creativity, physically are taken from us in the demands of the capitalistic work cycle. We are caught. We have to work more, so we have to buy more. Who will cook for our families when we work so many hours? How will I look nice enough to “compete” with the power players in that meeting? How else can I “get away from it all” with my two weeks of vacation, if I can’t truly fly away to a resort on an island?
The corporate cycle is a cycle of slavery, and it is enslaving us and our earth home. Because it is out of balance with nature, it neither heeds nor abides by nature’s laws, it hangs from a thread. Just as we have seen the collapse of the stock market 100 years ago and again now, we see the many vulnerabilities it has created—for everyone.
That myth we talked about earlier, money—money only has the value our corporate system says it has. When nature’s laws prevail and a virus strikes, the systems out of step with nature fail—because they are vulnerable in their obstinance. An avocado, though, an egg, a banana, water—they have inherent value. They feed us, they contain seeds to grow the next generations, to continue the natural cycles that are balance and life. They are inherently powerful.
So, I would ask us… when we begin to consider over the coming months what we want our new world to be, to consider nature’s laws. We are inherently a part of this cycle. When we disturb cycles that support life, we create cycles of death. We have already had intense impact on nature and so we have made ourselves more vulnerable. These vulnerable systems are showing their faulty foundations. They are shifting in the earth, they are unstable, and we know it. If not before the coronavirus then now.
What would “the economy” look like, if it was based on nature’s cycles?
What would our work and rest, and learn and play look like if they were based in nature’s laws?
When we are in harmony with nature, with this earth, we can receive her gifts of abundance, and we can be part of stewarding that abundance responsibly. How should we redesign our relationship with Earth when we recreate our world?
–Mitakuye Oyasin–