Like most Americans, especially those of us whose parents survived the depression, I have grown up believing that there is Not Enough. Not enough food. Not enough money. Not enough to go around. My mother told stories about kids in faraway places who didn't have enough to eat. Stories about saving buttons in the button tin. Stories about turning the lights off and the heat down and double-checking the grocery store receipt. And it may be that having never lived in a real depression, I cannot understand what it's like to stand in a soup line, or huddle by the oven for the heat.

Still, I don't think that a depression of economics has necessarily anything to do with a depression of joy, faith, or creativity. My sister, eight years older, followed the teachings of my father instead. He believed that money is like a stream, ever flowing unless we create a dam with our own terrorized thoughts. It's not about working more, but about allowing prosperity to come to you through its natural tributaries, not blocking the flow.

But for me, it was my mother's stories that had the greater impression, and I tend toward a natural efficiency, although not frugality. I do flip the light switches, twist the heat down, and eyeball my receipts as I roll groceries toward my car. But over the years I've also developed a sense of the art of life, and how important it is to have that nearby, physically nearby. I wear silky and soft clothing. Sculpture and art, the kind that made me tremble when I first saw it, litter my home. I am seduced wholly by my passion for toy cash registers, which don't really do anything but amuse.

It would be easy to measure my life on the scale of those clothes, and art, and collectible things. I also have the back porch that leads to a gentle expanse of grass, the car new enough to not worry, the job that pays the bills. And in easy times, these things seem enough to validate my work, my self. But there are times when my job productivity doesn't seem to amount to much, and I'm left to wonder if I'm adding anything special to the universe or just keeping busy. In the back of my mind, a voice still talks about productivity being the most important thing, something like cleanliness being next to Godliness; those kind of ideas that reflect the Puritan ethic that has steeped the tea of our culture.

On the other hand, I'm reading a book by John Randolph Price where he talks about prosperity, and how to bring it into our lives. Not just money, but other things too - love, health, faith. He writes that "The Universe does not compensate individuals based on the activity of work, but on the activity of consciousness." This is so foreign to my upbringing that it brings me up short. Consciousness? Could it be that I am valued not for the things I produce? There are so many that I imagine that without that waterfall of products, there might not be much left to me. I even sometimes doubt my writing, especially the columns that I'm not paid to write. One reader told me that she had cried a little, because my words had been just what was on her mind. How to you measure the impact of making someone weep?

What is consciousness then? Is it my ability to love even when I know how that vulnerability puts me at risk? Is it how I hold a friend tightly even when I know he is afraid to be touched? Is it how I sing to my kitties? Is it how I am sometimes kind to someone who I didn't even know was having a bad day? Is it stepping away from making and doing to just being? Can I live and think and pray in such a way that my soul is open to the abundance of the universe? Is that consciousness?

Life keeps bringing me to times where that home, that car, and that job seem to be at risk. Is it only an apparent lack? Is Spirit trying to tell me something by bringing these issues into my life over and over again? I imagine this is so, and that it will happen again and again until I finally get it. At times like this, the blinders are on so tight that I forget that every drop came from a pond or a brook or a snow-covered mountain in that interdependent web of waterways.

It's at these times that the real questions haunt me. Am I am deluding myself? Am I using my faith as an "opiate" as my mother used to refer to religion? Am I anesthetizing myself to the Real World? I am inundated with cruel questions. Does God really value me just as much if I'm not making a living? Are all the times that Spirit came through for me before just coincidence, maybe just my own need to make sense of things?

It's easy to have faith in good times, when joy and passion and strength are flowing. When I am facing fear, it is so much harder. Sometimes my friends tell me that they will have faith on my behalf, faith enough until my own seems sure and whole again. They ask me if I would act differently if I were an atheist, as my mother was, believing only in the strength of her inner self. I guess it's easier to get through the rough spots believing that I am loved, not only by people but by spirit. But no, I wouldn't be acting any different, only having more panic attacks, and so having less love and goodness of my own to give. Yes, Spirit is an opiate in that it quiets the fear that gallops through my nights. If it is a rest for the weary, for my weariness, it is not a false hope. Everything, or nearly everything in my heart and soul and mind tells me this is true. I know too, that if I give in to doubts, that the gifts of my life even now, will detach and drift off, even as I spiral down into my own loose ends.

I do know this. There is Enough. There is enough love and kindness and passion in my life. There is enough work and money and time. There is hope. It may appear at times that there is Not Enough, but that, that is the real delusion.

Copyright May, 2001

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