A Heart to Earth conversation with Money
A conversation initiated with Dorothea Eitel in an Emotional Healing Process and finished with these lines.
I still have a foot in modern culture. I am coming from a culture that is not grounded, not rooted in the laws of Nature. There is still one part of me that is inside of it and that wants to escape. There is a new culture that I want to live in and embody.
I am still stuck in the old pattern which reveals through money.
It’s actually a different kind of conversation than a deep one. It’s a deep deep one into my heart.
I have spent 10 years dealing with money issues. 10 years is probably 1/7th or 1/8th of my lifetime, that’s huge!
Wasn’t that enough? I feel really angry that I haven’t been able to tackle this issue and really deal with it — as if it was secondary. There is a responsibility somewhere that has not been taken, but where?
Here I’m gonna expose some root causes of it. I invite you into my journey.
1How do you prune the tree of Possibilities? How do you get rid of your own indecisiveness?
“How did you came to this point in your life that you don’t allow your Magic¹ to hold space for money to be alive and do your things ?” Is what Dorothea, a friend of mine, asked me.
Here is what I answered.
I disperse. I don’t prune the tree of possibilities. Instead, heavy branches of foliage bend and crack when snow or storms come. I have killed the possibilities by having too many. What scarcity led me there? What self-love of self-nature² made me prune the tree of possibilities by itself, as trees do when the wind does for them?
For me Scarcity comes with an excess of abundance. That is why abundance is not connected to this new culture I want to embody. It is rather a trick, a spiritual bypass, that creates the same old thing. The abundance triggers scarcity. Because A-bun-dance is everything. This is a dance of Everythingness in the vast ocean of Possibilities, without any decision, this is not real. So, first face your own indecision — I face my own indecisiveness first, to get real.
Profound Nature reveals itself with the help of a human culture rooted in Gaïa.
It is not by looking at nature that it will unfold. It is through the syntropy of nature and culture that nature unfolds, as the Aborigines and the Amerindians did².
If a tree is well pruned, the fruit will be larger, easier to harvest and the structure of the primary branches will be stronger. Depending on the variety, the fruit even can be tastier.
Pruning is an interaction with the tree.
Which branch am I cutting? For what reason? And why this one and not that one?
It’s all about personal choice and intuition. Perhaps this intuition can come from Gaïa herself, the great Goddess of Everything or from something else, like a branch or a part of it.
Who am I to decide? As if there was a resentment towards me and my cultural origins. This is the question I unfold afterwards.
Pruning the tree is not only pruning Possibilities. Sometimes it is a project: I can do a cemetery with crosses on the ground for each project and idea that is dying. Whatever you name the branches with, there are things you can prune. Will you? Or will you wait for the overwhelming state?
2 Who am I to decide? As if there was a resentment towards me and my culture. Question culture and its resentments.
I were resenting my origins: the modern petro-patriarchal empire, which is not my origins by the way, but more where I was raised. I was breastfed as a baby with lies, manipulation, control, domination, competition and scarcity. My parents were barely alive, screaming in terror on the inside, wearing an invisibility mask on the outside, and doing what they could when sudden outbursts of Love or other feelings sprouted clumsily from their armor, nerve-wracking. They and the kindergarten ghosts of Europe are now the compost, the fertilizer for my evolution.
Modern “civilization”³, where developers now think of implementing the basics of philosophy in algorithms, so that the machines that govern the destruction of our living ecosystem planet Earth, crush the Spaceship in disillusion, collapsing endlessly. It is not mature, as many primitive cultures have been, honoring their gardens: those within themselves, their inherent source of aliveness, their feelings, and those outside, in original forests, tended by years of cooperation between culture and nature. Pruning the Possibilities by a deep grounded culture, this is what matters.
A ‘civilization’ that erect techniques and engineering on top of everything like a God or an obsession about protocols lead it to confuse the reality with verbal reality, the map with the territory, the theory with the practice.
This is a basic distinction, a practicality that modern western civilization have not, except maybe for creating wars.
Cultures like the Aborigines, are those respecting so much their land so you can still find Dinosaurs’ footprints on rocks. Cultures where when you kill a tree, an aborigine dies because he is so rooted, so grounded in nature, that it is like killing an uncle or a dear friend. Who are we to not die in grief about what is done to planet Earth?
Modern culture is full of lies and barely mature. A 2-years-old child having a tantrum is what it looks like from another culture. Some members of the ancient African civilisation⁴ came to the modern side of the world, so arrogantly called ‘developed countries’, and saw an amazing abundance of technology with an stunning use of the emotional body. Here you can live with comfort, ‘techno-cocoons’⁵, assistance you can pay for, but with such a hungry heart and a permanent reactivity⁶.
Modern Western culture, materially overdeveloped, is the playground of the underdeveloped Emotional Body.
- Gabriel Lechemin, inspired by Michael Brown, The Presence Process
A cultures that give so much space to resentments is a dead culture.
There is so much resentment in this part of the world that you often cannot speak to your neighbor. It is hell on earth made by modern culture.
A friend of mine came from Colombia and arrived in Strasbourg (a large city in France). She was terrified by the impossibility of reading the face of people passing by in the streets and therefore their emotional state was unreachable. She took refuge at a friend’s place. Living in such a dead culture, where feelings and emotions are banished, leads to a very frightening kindergarten way of dealing with life. There, Europeans live with hammers in their hands, ready to strike, ready for war — their hammer is called resentment, and their heart is therefore filled with hatred and fantasy worlds.
If you are a westerner, my apologies, there is a high percentage of chances that you are a numbed creature, an outcast from your feelings, resenting the world and what surrounds you. The destruction of Planet Earth is that consequence, it is the direct result.
So, even stop resenting your ancestors, they didn’t have the agency to have and experiment an evolutionary thoughtware. Stop even resenting modern culture, only expect poison and numbness from stagnant waters⁷.
3Something is holding me back. What is the foot that I still have in modern culture ?
Scarcity. If I have more seedlings, I’ll be more resilient when an attack strikes. Even though my seedlings are the most important actions I take, if I cannot bear them, the seedlings will die and never become plants. In fact, this is an attack on myself in advance. Wanting to resent myself: grief and regret to come. If I keep doing this, I am cultivating lies and regrets instead of the projects that I care about. This is real madness.
Then life becomes non-sense.
And living in non-sense is a huge power. You can resent the whole world and declare it is not worthy. Better than tranquilizers.
I am off being off-grid, I am a connector, I love humans, nature, and the exchanges-value-systems that exists here : money, and other currencies such as Creation, Love, Friendship, Collaboration, Transformation… and so on.
Seedlings are like born commitments. I decide when I honor them and when I let them die because I don’t choose them.
What is it that I am paid with in this life ? More than money, and also with money. I am paid with Significance.
I won’t avoid it !
4What about you ?
An experiment to prune your tree of Possibilities…
If you have probably experimented with being overwhelmed, then I suggest you prune the tree of possibilities before it happens again.
How many branches can you take care of to get the best fruit?
Use your artistic skills (in case you think you do not have them) and draw a tree with several branches.
The roots symbolize the intentions, the purposes: write them here. The trunk are the Values, the Bright Principles that inherently shine through your Being wherever you go: write them here. The branches are the projects and the canopy the results: write them as honestly as you can. In the compost, the litter will be put the old branches that will give life to your seedlings, that are your growing commitments. What are they?
Observe.
Breathe.
If the tree is not working, or you want to deepen your reflection, you can also create a quadrant with 4 areas and 2 axes: important and urgent.
See what you can get from there.
Good pruning!
- ¹ The magician that creates his own life because he really knows what he wants
- ² Nature of self and Nature through the ecosystems are coming together, I don’t distinguish human nature and nature itself.
- ²Amerindian were not living in a pristine preserved nature when the colons came. They where living in a well tended garden. Their culture was and still is — whenever they have the right to live — in syntropy with the nature. Culture is therefore a way of distilling the essence of nature.
- ³As Gandhi was saying to a journalist answering the question « what do you think of western civilazation ? »
G: « it’s a good project » - ⁴Members of Massaï culture
- ⁵Techno cocoon is an expression of a french writer, Alain Damasio in its novel “les furtifs”
- ⁶often confused with being hypersensitive, or hyper-reactive, which is another shadow.
“I used to think reactivity meant that I blow up when someone says something that upsets me and then I get really mad and upset (emotional anger).
And yes, that is one aspect of reactivity.
Now I discover that reactivity is much more: if I don’t act at all because no one has asked or invited me to and because I always need a request or invitation to be able to act, then I’m also reactive. I react to a stimulus / I do not react because there is no stimulus….it is the same!
If I do not act reactively, I act out of myself, because it is my need to act, to talk, to set a limit.
With acting — and not reacting — the motor is the necessity in me, and I can sense it in all my 5 bodies.”
- Martina Riccarda Niklis, Possibilitator - ⁷”Only expect poison from stagnant waters”, William Blake, in “The marriage of heaven and hell”
This article emerged from a conversation with Dorothea Eitel, was edited again thanks to Experimenter Isabel Esterl and feedbacks from Derrick Jensen’s writing class. Many thanks to them!
