The Human Wallet

Capital moves throughout the world. Money exchanges hands, pockets, and accounts. On any given day, I feel like one of my main roles and programmed purposes in life is to move money from one place to another. Either I move funds from my checking to savings account, I swipe my card to purchase a coffee, or I cancel subscriptions to online supplement deliveries. I am astonished, when I take a step back, at how many interactions are about monies. HOA group meetings are mainly concerned with budget. When these Boards approve services that are finally utilized, seeing tree trimmers or trash collectors on their job is because money was moved from one account to another. Those workers, then, are given funds which they then deposit into accounts, which in time gets transferred to another account and…ad nauseam. The process just keeps repeating, on any scale, cash or card. And at the end of the day I feel like a human wallet.  

I feel like a symbolic wallet when it comes to money - of course because that is traditionally what wallets are used to keep accessible. But I also feel like a wallet when it comes to food: my body as the vessel/purse, food stuffs come in, hangs around other food, and then is deposited outside my body later. The kinds of foods directly effects the kinds of depositing of energy that happens later. If I deposit processed chemicals, modified starches, and sugars into my body “wallet”, the return on my investment becomes an unhealthy exchange of that energy towards others. The disease, discomfort, lack of health and vitality are the symbolic transfers which I am in charge of moving from one person/account to another. 

It would be worth linking to see the connection between the food we eat and the movement of capital. If we are creating culture by forming society based on our how we spend money as our choices, then we are responsible for the Big Agrarian industries. Our purchasing power is a vote, it’s a voice, it’s the social currency we obtain, horde, and invest. Given the current health crisis related to Covid 19, it is paramount to examine the state of the bodies which are being affected. Chronic disease, stagnating life expectancy, immunity deterioration, inflammation, hypertension, diabetes and obesity are just a few afflictions wreaking havoc on the American and Global public. What the heck are all those illnesses doing in our life? Did we bring them upon ourselves? 

We move money indirectly into our bodies. We are buying our health complications and our health liberations. If we use whole, plant-based foods as money in our human “wallet”, perhaps the exchange of energy towards others won’t be riddled with fear, anxiety, depression, and violence. We are not healthy, as over 40% of Americans are obese. That is NOT health. Our community, is NOT healthy. As Charles Eisenstein states in his essay The Coronation: “Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.” We are more sick now, and currently a virus is burning holes in our pockets. Our wallets are depleted, from money and from health. Counter to the standard American diet, the wellbeing of spending money on organic fruits and vegetables is long lasting. The health investment is a high-yield portfolio that cannot be taken by a virus. If we, however, spent our money on low quality, processed and highly refined foods, not only does the virus rob us of our physical wellbeing, but our low-yield portfolio of “health” disappears right along with it. 

Now let us connect the way we invest our money to the health of the planet. Divestment is the opposite of investment - it simply means getting rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds that are unethical or morally ambiguous. Many people know that oil companies are funding extractive industries. They can be classified as morally ambiguous and/or unethical. The continued operation of these industries, by our demand, keeps the air polluted, the waters toxic, and our bodies at risk. Many people don’t know how to take on this massive monster that is Big Oil using Big Money to destroy the Small Planet. But we the small people of this small world have one big advantage: our money. 

Our bank accounts, our portfolios, universities, retirement funds and religious institutions are all active participants in the investment and money market. These companies hold assets, and those assets are invested in stocks and bonds. Some of these institutions might not even know where their money is invested. But just like you manage your money and decide to buy a steak or a vegan meal, these big institutions hire investment managers to put their monies into Big Oil or Alternative Energy. If we, the people who own this money, pressure the institutions to divest from fossil fuels, then those institutions tell their investment managers and then divestment helps break the hold that fossil fuels have on our economies, governments and livelihood. 

So ask yourself, are you in charge of your ‘human wallet?’ When you buy groceries, are the majority of products seemingly predetermined to contain subsidized, harmful ingredients? Is there a cultural bias towards certain foods, or are we subject to institutionalized doctrines, programmed through media outlets that benefit from selling certain goods? Regardless of the size of the store, most aisles have similar products, in plastic bags, with additives, marketed with bold colors and fonts. Who is your investment manager? Well, it’s you actually. You run your own “body bank,” the safe for deposited value in the form of food, water, medicine, thought and energy. Are you free to rebalance the value of your assets and investments, and perhaps reinvest in whole-plant based foods, alkaline water, non-toxic/narcotic medicine, affirming thoughts and confident energy? Or, maybe you and I are caught in the cultural tropes of meaning and goal setting that have guided us to making specific choices based on “free will.” If that seems like a stretch, consider that your mental state is a direct result of the invested ingest-ables you purchase with your money. You are a repository for products, and the more pure, diversified, and environmentally just your shares of ‘wealth’ become, maybe reinvestment of your worth becomes more attainable. 

Perhaps we are not just pushes for dollar bills, runaway capitalism and pills. Maybe we are inherent and inalienable capacitors of human life, and the freedom to question, chose and progress is possible. It then might be possible during this Covid-19 pandemic, where the world has a pause, moments of silence, where we can reflect on the abstract and the concrete.  

Connections, Constellations. Chemicals.

HOW IS IT ALL BUILT. What is the shape of love as it moves through all existence? Does that mean carbon, helium, zine, gold, creatine, DHA, serotonin, all these have love in them? Does love come from within us? Where would it originate? We are the ones who feel love, our perspective on any situation can be either love or any myriad of emotion. So because it seems in our capacity to love, the function and origin of love is in us, our cells. Gold in you loves; zine has love; silver contains love. Every tissue and cell made up from their trillions of parts have love in them. So then do strings and quarks also have love? They must - if gold is made of atoms and we are made of those atoms, and we feel love, then quarks feel love also. 

Or, love comes from another source, and that love is endowed unto us. If so, we then connect to it as we fall in or give love, and because love comes and goes and it just happens, then that love must be everywhere, at all times. So either humans chose love, or it is given to them. Iin both cases, this act pursuable through switching perspectives gives zinc, gold, DHA the perception of participation, so those molecules and particles also love, only because of something else making them. They are in service of a connection of action, and their function is now cogged in the machine. They have to if we chose to participate, as they are the one participating with us.

Choice or Doing: either the capacity to love is writ by humans on the idea that love originates and emanates from our natural, Earthen selves, or we are presented with an A/B decision to love, making the author of said multiple choice a force outside ourselves. And what to be extrapolated from this inquiry if not that the very idea/feeling/truth of love is perceived; from our sensorial subjection, the species has attempts on record the world over in pursuit of describing the lived phenomena of love. History and herstory can be attributed to many a story about love. Greatness in loss, and achievement, can arguably be traced to the ideal of love permeating all goals and desires. So the rising inquiry becomes contextualized to cultural evolution. Love is perceived by humans and somewhat utilized to forward progress the species. Is it really something more than a human-centric motivational perspective? Does it come from a Divine source or have humans been conflating and grandstanding in the harnessing of this feeling turned concept - to then elevate personal or tribal success? Is the divine motivation to make humans dance the game of devotion, as the chess match of Time is played out by the granting instigator, who benefits only by our birth and death - because the more of us exist, the more chances for love. If it does come from within, at the subatomic level, then what goal other than reproduction would quarks and strings be aiming for? The detailed and intricate highway system of perception as hierarchical from cells up to eyeballs structures a gating system for a seeming reason: either quarks recognize energy and likeness of other quarks, or the functionality of quark love sublimates the need for the complexity of human design to filter all things into distilled feelings. And then these feelings are expressed in chemical terms, as more definable signaling of a perception becomes smaller and smaller interactions. I wonder why are chemicals the way they are - how come dopamine function like X and not Y? Is that a Divine maneuver, and X takes Y as the least resistive assignment? Or, are these parameters and designs of chemicals a larger version of quark love? Are we all the sizable, adaptive, carbon beings of quarks learning to love, and we masquerade on inquisitive rumination so feeble yet all encompassing?  

Bright or Bereft

Wood
Pillars
Archways

Shelving pressed trees,

Filaments above

See
To
It

That

Old wiring, synapses new
And

Necks cramp to the right,

Left pages turn in squinting
Strain

Necks turn

Again, heads move,

Eyes scan for the source,

A multiverse of illumination

For dead flies,

One hanging light

flickers,

Oragami moths scatter

Lucretius begs in connection

Ahab forming the abstraction

Translating wind, licking the gusts of thought

Goaded toads jump lilypad islands of
Human semblance

When the light flickers,
And dies,
Above

Does someone in this world,
Die
Below?

When electrons cease here,
Do they there for them, though?

Where is our light, our switch?

Twixt injustice's scales
Doth slithering molters
Bequeath experiential elixirs,
Blindly

Do people die with the same frequency
Each time light switches are offed?

Earmark a page:
Does a bone break?

Bend a book spine:
Scoliosis?

Burn literature in protest:
Has a monk self-immolated?

Fill a pen with blood,
Twist fingers into sockets,
Ideas will flow,
Bright or bereft

You Have Become A Pillow

a lifeless, bedside nighttime companion

squeezed between my legs

propped up against my back

huddled for comfort and safety

You exist, just not here

Anymore

And not literally transformed

But your soft, snoozing partnership 

In horizontal headspace

Is now mine in reverie 

To ponder why, and how, and for how long

I am soloed 

Your pillow was never yours

Since I in fact bought it, but bought it for you

But does ownership play part in love?

Whats mine is yours and yours is mine

And yes, you gave me a pillow, too

But because I liked it more

And you liked my pillow, this pillow, more

I would wake refreshed and eager to 

Exist, if I used your pillow, that pillow

So that was mine, and

Yours was yours, too

Because when you slumbered as deep as our

Ocean of love, you rose, ready after the night to 

Share your catch, an entire net of consciousness

As the boat bed, not on water, sailed the 

Seas of sight, light, and sound

As beautiful dreams of you

And now in darkness

Whirled to a world of Z’s

By only the humidifier

I intentionally create humidity

In futile attempts to make an ocean in the air

So your presence in ulterior worlds might be

Absorbed through nostril and skin

That I might glean more reasons, more justifications

For your departure

And if any clarity through dreams or dewiness

Comes, I squeeze it, tight between my knees

My arms protecting what little I have of you left

My sheets still unwashed since your last night

Here, as Her, The One

Nature Walk Number One

frozen strands of wind

reflect in the purple lava waves of the lake

a bold blue, 

red shoulders on flapping black wings

sear the air that holds the floating river above,

what grand tweeting amongst beige amphibians, 

variable calls of sun-derstanding

Namaste-inside the bipedal observer once thought

imbued by calls and croaks, light feet and new thought

like the rain dropping when there are no clouds

Z

Zebras are zapped with zoom microphones

As Zurich serves zabagliones das is zer gud, along with zingy microwave tea

Steeped from Zimbabwe by zany zookeepers in zoic era of zilch

Y

Yesteryear yields yarn you use, Yes. Yet yell for, why,

yack and yearn, new yuan with yoked fork, gather ye yonkers,

your yummy yuck of yolk is yellow yelle, a caus de garcons

X

Xylophones Xeroxed from Xanadu did decree extraordinarily X-rated xeric exempt

W

Would wicks blown by wind burn fire to wire wood,

womb and water wasted on willingness to worry over world wide web and war?

Why work, win, want, and whine whistle wicked witches

make sammies from the worst wheat in the west?

The waddles of walrus’s wink to wolves, right or wrong,

they wince and weaken through wreck less writing.

Woah, the wool wills lambful worship upon swollen wonders

V

Vilified visitors veer through vortexes and varied venerations

of vicious volunteers, varnished by valleys as revamped victories

varying through inverted apex torn by inverse votes for vast versioned

vehicles and high occupancy villagers