I can’t stop crying about food and groceries.
As we pulled into the grocery store the other night I went from laughing to weeping, knowing I was going to go into that store and get anything I wanted and spend any amount of money on it without thinking about it.
In truth, “not thinking about it” has never been a thing. I don’t have a tone of fear around spending money on groceries or anything else. I have no thoughts of “not-affording” or restricting money. But crying in the grocery store parking lot has been a feature of this prosperity practice since I began. I do think about it. I think about how easy it is, and it brings me to grief.
It is this grief the fear which used to rule me was coming in to mask. The grief of being in privilege and prosperity is so immense that many people of privilege and prosperity choose to stay in fear and scarcity so that they don’t have to face it. I know because I found myself in that practice, and shifting it showed me the roots.
I go in that store, and it is so easy for me. I get every single thing I want, and I KNOW the sorrows of the world, that it wasn’t that way for my parents, or friends I grew up with, and it’s a looming threat on thousands of American families now.
This is the knife-edge of privilege, to keep receiving, to stay ridiculously nourished, and to be OVERCOME with grief for the sorrows of the world, for every way I imagine someone else struggling or suffering in a way I would prefer not to.
I meet my sorrow with commitments to practical prosperity. I will get every single thing I want in the grocery store, and as I do I will know it feeds my community as well as myself. I stay grounded in the way I know I can show up in the world when I am fully nourished and overflowing.
I know, too, that I will stand in the gap so that anyone in my field of awareness gets what they want in the moment I am in the grocery store. I refuse to bear witness to another human in front of me being deprived of anything they want in the grocery store, and I can be the one to make sure they’re fed on my watch.
Prosperity is about feeling good, staying nourished, staying focused on positive and practical (aka existent) elements of nourishment, comfort, and ease. Prosperity is available exclusively *within* my locus of control.
The largest part of feeling good is accepting and allowing BAD feelings associated with all that I imagine which is not within my purview. How I meet that which violates my preferences and lies outside my locus of control will make or break my experience of the world.
I don’t expect that walking prosperity will feel good all the time, in a primary sense. It does not and will not feel good to Have while I acknowledge that others Lack. It does not and will not offer any nourishment whatsoever to others if I choose to starve along with the lacking.
It could not be wealth if I were able to look away from the human realities.
Wealth is concerned with distribution. It MUST allow that it HAS resources, and that others are in a position to receive of those resources. Wealth cradles the gulf between my personal Having and the wants of the world.
Practical Prosperity keeps me, efficient, effective, agile, of service; within my locus of control. Practical Prosperity wisely invests my resources and freely gives and receives of the gifts of grief.
The swollen coffers of capitalism are NOT wealth.
Wealth lives in sacred stewardship, in practical prosperity, in the actions which distribute love via various vehicles, dancing in the infinite flow.