Living In Scare City…

Each day my mail delivery includes pleas for contributions to a variety of causes: save the whales, protect wildlife, endangered species, redwood forests, our water and food supply, feed the children and fix their cleft palates, build homes for families and schools for Native children and fund research for scientific health breakthroughs –so many worthy causes.

I parcel out $3, $5 as often as I can, even risking $50 to support to PBS or the latest natural disaster relief efforts. It isn’t much, but $5 is a day’s worth of food for me, on my carefully wrought budget over the past few years. At 65, I even opted out of Medicare Part B, unwilling to part with 25% of my meager Social Security monthly check. Now I’m nearly 76, with eleven years of accrued penalties against buying in….

But back to my mailbox. The entreaties to send money come with enticements: offers for tote bags with membership, inclusions of calendars, note pads and my address labels, dozens of them, most with my name spelled correctly. Yet my carefully wrought thrift consciousness dictates using as few postage stamps, and therefore envelopes, as well. The excess labels are waste. They perturb my green sensibilities, and my thrift efforts. And while I empathize with the causes involved, who is looking out for my needs?

My thrift habits evolved years ago, including going without most health services except daily food supplements and a monthly foot massage — which I quit doing along the way, pre-pandemic. Many of you, too, are conspiring to do without goods and services –including mine: my teaching, counseling, healing, mentoring, editing, creative and theatrical services, for instance. “I can’t afford a massage,” “I can’t afford to hire an entertainer for my senior residents,” I hear you say, leaving me holding an increasingly emptier bag from which to offer money to you for your goods or services. Have you noticed?

“Lack” is breeding more of itself. At face value, belief in it seems readily justified. It’s starkly real for a majority of us, worldwide. But at my deepest level of being, I get that lack of financial income belies my lack of faith and belief in a Greater Source of wealth, energy, supply, pulling me to live smaller and smaller. So, as we offer less and less to one another, as employers, supporters of non-profits, as consumers of healthful foods and products and services, and we experience receiving less, as well. Not to mention rising costs. Lately it’s gas and food items. But I still remember buying fewer postage stamps, watching the price of a stamp rise… And when the local J.C. Senior Ed program dropped classes as its budget disintegrated, and as I clamored for more work, I tossed your requests for donations to help save the wolves. And the beat goes on. And neither of us rests easy.

But maybe it’s possible to reverse the downward spiral into a bottomless black hole of economic depression, oppression, suppression: how? By choosing to bravely share what we have. At first, on faith that in doing so, we will thrive in “living larger.” And it does just feel so much better, yes?

Today my mailbox was deluged as well with pleas from local merchants enticing me to buy all manner of stuff. But today, as I respectfully toss it, I also am cognizant that people’s lives and economic wellbeing may be tied to those adverts, so maybe today I’ll splurge and buy something. Oh, not with the glib overconsumption of my more moneyed bygone days, or current, uneasy under-consumption… which is sometimes mistakenly praised by friends as wise and careful behavior from this still “in the black” aging survivor.

So, these days I’m re-examining my frugality. I’m leaning in to more fully embrace “voluntary simplicity” –and acquiring the discernment to tell the difference. Tightening my belt seems to be participating in the global problem of “not enough-ness.” Bartering? Yes, if it is uplifting, rather than a result of mutual scarcity.

I’m not denying the hardships we may be facing. Rather, it is exactly because of them that I must change my tune, become part of the flow again, help us spiral out of despair. I want to act as if there is a Greater Source awaiting me/us to allow Its assistance more profoundly by giving again, giving more freely. Moving out of Scare City…

Maybe I will call you for your services , or treat myself to a massage. And trust that each dime or dollar I consciously spend is really a way of sharing with someone else, to enable their well-being, too.

I like this a lot.

[This tale was originally told in my 3rd memoir, LOVE, THY WILL BE DONE: Tales of Awakening A Wild Heart, Vol. 2 , 2020.]