Bossypants

Another holiday read - Bossypants by Tina Fey. Some laugh out loud parts for sure. No excerpts flagged. Here is how Amazon describes it:

Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update," before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV.

She has seen both these dreams come true.

At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon -- from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.

Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.

Unbearable Lightness

I read Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain by Portia de Rossi while on holidays this summer. I was surprised that I didn't have any excerpts flagged as I really enjoyed the book.

Here is how Amazon describes it:

Now in paperback, the New York Times bestselling memoir from Portia de Rossi explores the truth of her long battle to overcome anorexia and bulimia—“an unusually fresh and engrossing memoir of both Hollywood and modern womanhood” ( Los Angeles Times, 5 stars).
In this groundbreaking memoir, Portia de Rossi reveals the pain and illness that haunted her for decades, from the time she was a twelve-year-old girl working as a model in Australia, through her early rise to fame as a cast member of the hit television show Ally McBeal . All the while terrified that the truth of her sexuality would be exposed in the tabloids, Portia alternately starved herself and binged, putting her life in danger and concealing from herself and everyone around her the seriousness of her illness.
She describes the elaborate rituals around food that came to dominate hours of every day and explores the pivotal moments of her childhood that set her on the road to illness. She reveals the heartache and fear that accompany a life lived in the closet, a sense of isolation that was only magnified by her unrelenting desire to be ever thinner, ever more in control of her body and the number of calories she consumed and spent.
From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to a life of health and honesty, falling in love and marrying Ellen DeGeneres and emerging as an outspoken and articulate advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues. In this remarkable and landmark book, she has given the world a story that inspires hope and nourishes the spirit.

Life

Life by Keith Richards

A few favourite excerpts…

Levitation is probably the closest analogy to what I feel—whether it’s “Jumpin’ Jack” or “Satisfaction” or “All Down the Line”—when I realize I’ve hit the right tempo and the band’s behind me. It’s like taking off in a Learjet. I have no sense that my feet are touching the ground. I’m elevated to this other space. People say, “Why don’t you give it up?” I can’t retire until I croak. I don’t think they quite understand what I get out of this. I’m not doing it just for the money or for you. I’m doing it for me.

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The five-string took me back to the tribesmen of West Africa. They had a very similar instrument, sort of a five-string, kind of like a banjo, but they would use the same drone, a thing to set up other voices and drums over the top. Always underneath it was this underlying one note that went through it. And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realize that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty. Gus used to point it out to me: just listen to that one note hanging there. All the other stuff that’s going on underneath is crap, but that one note makes it sublime.

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There’s something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there’s not one. Listen to “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It’s just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn’t have to be pronounced. This is where they got it wrong with “this rock” and “that rock.” It’s got nothing to do with rock. It’s to do with roll.

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Of the musicians I know personally (although Otis Redding, who I didn’t know, fits this too), the two who had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine were Gram Parsons and John Lennon. And that was: whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial; that’s just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier. You’re going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who’s selling. But Gram and John were really pure musicians. All they liked was music, and then they got thrown into the game.

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You can get into a bubble if you just work with the Stones. Even with the Winos it can happen. I find it very important to work outside of those areas. It was inspiring to work with Norah Jones, with Jack White, with Toots Hibbert—he and I have done two or three versions of “Pressure Drop” together. If you don’t play with other people, you can get trapped in your own cage. And then, if you’re sitting still on the perch, you might get blown away.

An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction

An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction by Brendan Mullen

 A few excerpts...

JANE BAINTER: I lived there about a year and I ended up kicked out of the house, voted out because it was run by community and we had these house meetings . . . like that weird reality TV thing. It was three to four, with Perry on my side. Perry was very open and fair, but they were including Chris and some others from downstairs that voted me out. What sucked was the people that they let in after were much worse junkies than I ever was.   KARYN CANTOR: Perry was really upset because he didn’t want her to leave. She and Perry were really close friends and he was the only one defending her. Jane was their scapegoat. It was like “As soon as we get rid of this Jane problem all our problems are gone. It’s Jane’s problem, it’s all because of Jane’s addiction. . . .” Perry said, “We all have one, you know, we all have an addiction, but we all sort of say, well it’s her problem or it’s his problem, but it’s really all of us, we’ve all got one.”

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CARLA BOZULICH: He was going through this furious change, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It was that dramatic. He told me, “I’m changing my name!” And I was like OK, yeah. And he said I’m changing it to Perry Farrell. And I was like, huh? And he goes, get it—Peri Pheral, Perry Farrell—get it?

The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives

The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives by Katie Couric

My favourite excerpts…

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I now realize that everyone struggles, and that my mom was right: Very few of us get through this life unscathed. Scratch beneath a stranger’s surface and you’re likely to uncover professional setbacks, broken hearts, unspeakable loss, unfulfilled dreams, or worse. Everyone seems to keep going but, God knows, navigating through it all isn’t easy.

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Last year, when I was giving the commencement address at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I decided to try something new. What else could I tell these young, bright students who were about to take flight into the world, eager to make their mark? Because I’ve had the privilege of meeting and interviewing so many remarkable people through the years, I decided to ask a few of them to share their personal insights. What have you learned? What lessons from your own lives might be useful and instructive? I reached out to about thirty people, and after a few weeks many of them reached back to me with their responses.

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Scholarship America’s programs have had a huge financial impact on the lives of students across the country, but as I’ve learned, it’s about more than just dollars and cents. It’s also about giving students confidence, inspiration, and some supportive words to carry with them: “I believe in you.”

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Scholarship America’s programs have had a huge financial impact on the lives of students across the country, but as I’ve learned, it’s about more than just dollars and cents. It’s also about giving students confidence, inspiration, and some supportive words to carry with them: “I believe in you.” That’s what a scholarship really says.

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The more fake and commercialized the world gets, the more people respond to things that have a real core of truth. I believe that every human being is hardwired to recognize that. Whatever you choose to do with your life—whether it’s running a company or cooking dinner—stand for something you know is true. If there’s a recipe for success, it’s staying real and true.

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Here is my favorite biblical direction: Be not afraid. It’s truly the secret of life. Fear is what stunts our growth, narrows our ambitions, kills our dreams. – Anna Quindlen

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Reverend Beckwith gave me the task of envisioning the bone healing faster than was humanly possible. Of playing over and over in my mind the doctor saying to me, “It’s a miracle!” And so I did. Every day I participated in the healing of that bone. I felt those negative thoughts coming through and told them to shove it! I kept my eye focused on the task at hand. I did not have the luxury of negative thought; of listening to the lies we so often tell ourselves; of being talked out of success by my fears. And within two weeks a doctor did say to me, “Wow, I have never seen a bone heal this quickly.” – Christina Applegate

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I used to love Michael Jordan’s “Failure” commercial for Nike. You might recall it: I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot … and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

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The latest piece of advice that I’m living by is this: When making a very important business decision, I ask myself, “Would you still do it if you’d never see a dime from it?” I know that may sound crazy—who in the business world doesn’t base part of their decisions on the prospective riches that some action might bring in the future (preferably the near future)? But I find that if the answer to the Question is yes, you will be following the path of your most authentic self. It’s one of the easiest ways to figure out if that small voice in your head persuading you is your true instinct or that “other thing,” which doesn’t necessarily have the best motives. – Alicia Keys

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You can’t figure out what you want to do from the sidelines. You need to jump into the pond and splash around to see what the water feels like. You might like that pond or it might lead to another pond, but you need to figure it out in the pond. – Ina Gartner

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Learn to trust the feeling of “not knowing.” For most of us, most of the time, that is the truth. – Hugh Jackman

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The English poet William Blake once observed, “He who would do good to another man must do it in Minute Particulars.” Minute particulars. Not grand gestures but everyday acts of kindness. They accumulate, and together provide the threads that make up our moral fiber.

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Marx was smart about a lot of things, but not about the end justifying the means. Actually, the means dictate the ends. We won’t have laughter and kindness and poetry and pleasure at the end of any revolution unless we have laughter and kindness and poetry and pleasure along the way. – Gloria Steinem

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Take at least twenty minutes every day to be still and quiet. Time to sit in complete silence. Think. Reflect. Dissect your thoughts and feelings. Relive any mistakes from the day before. Decide how to be smarter and tougher, how to be more committed and considerate of others and more sensitive and aware of your surroundings. Choose something you learned that will make you a better person. - Beyonce

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We doctors are taught early in our training that if we really listen to our patients, deep insights will shine through for us. – Dr. Oz

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Skepticism is about asking questions, being dubious, being wary, not being gullible but always being open to being convinced of a new fact or angle. Cynicism is about already having the answers—or thinking you do—answers about a person or an event. The skeptic says, “I don’t think that’s true; I’m going to check it out.” The cynic says, “I know that’s not true. It couldn’t be. I’m going to slam him.” – Thomas Friedman

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In life, you will inevitably encounter criticism. Never, ever read your own reviews. Good ones or bad ones. It is not a critic’s job to tell you how to feel about your own work. That is your responsibility alone. Never allow anyone to tell you how to feel about your work. Or limit your view of yourself or of who you are. The most interesting artists are those who aren’t too afraid to fail. As the late great Jack Lemmon once said, “Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.” You will never achieve a deeper understanding of your work, or learn the tough lessons, if you are liked or comfortable all of the time. – Laura Linney

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The book is titled Letters to a Young Poet, and was written by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke wrote a series of letters to an aspiring young poet advising him on art and life.

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Sadness has been misunderstood. Sadness is the soul recognizing change. - M Night Shyamalan

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He said, “You see, the city is fundamentally a practical, utilitarian invention—and it always was. And then suddenly you see this steel poetry sticking there and it’s a shock. It puts everything to shame and makes you wonder what else we could have done that was so marvelous and so unpresumptuous. It carries its weights, it does what it’s supposed to do and yet … I mean they could have built another Manhattan Bridge and [Roebling] didn’t. He really aspired to do something gorgeous. So it makes you feel that maybe you, too, could add something that would last and be beautiful.” Quote by Arthur Miller

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“I can see why you’re tempted,” he said, “and this job will certainly make you more interesting to others. But that’s the wrong reason to accept a position. Instead, you should focus on being interested rather than interesting. Now, tell me how this job will truly give you a chance to serve others rather than a chance to serve your own career.” John Gardner to Jacqueline Novogratz

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No matter how good government policies are or how much economic growth we enjoy, there is always going to be a gap between what the private sector can produce and what the government can provide. In that space, citizens have to take action to bridge the broken places in our society and around the world. – Bill Clinton

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André would have none of it. He just stopped and said, “You know, Marissa, you’re putting so much pressure on yourself to make the right choice. You’re approaching this as if there’s one right answer. And I have to be honest, that’s just not what I’m seeing here.” He gestured toward the matrices and charts strewn across the floor. “I think you have a bunch of good options, and then there’s the one that you’ll pick and make great.” Via Marissa Mayer

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Find a way to say yes to things. Say yes to invitations to a new country, say yes to meet new friends, say yes to learn something new. Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids. Even if it’s a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means that you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference. Yes lets you stand out in a crowd, be the optimist, see the glass full, be the one everyone comes to. Yes is what keeps us all young. – Eric Schmidt

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Instead of trying to get back at someone because she has hurt you, think of one nice thing about that person and put that out into the universe instead. If you don’t let it go, that person’s negativity will stay inside you, and that’s exactly where you don’t want that energy to be. So the next time you’re hurt by someone, wish that person well in your heart and tell your brain to move on and think about something else that really matters. You will be amazed at how it releases your negative energy. People can’t control you if you won’t let them. – Wendy Walker

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Instead of internalizing the negative emotions of these people, forgive them for being unhappy souls. That goes for a friend, a co-worker, a lover, or even the guy who stole the parking space you were waiting so patiently for. Any frustration you can guard your body from, do it. Forgive, let go, breathe, and respond to these negative energies with love. You will be amazed at how much lighter, happier, and healthier you feel. – Wendy Walker

The Soul of Money

The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life by Lynne Twist

My favourite excerpts...

The Soul of Money offers a way to realign our relationship with money to be more truthful, free, and potent, enabling us to live a life of integrity and full self-expression that is consistent with our deepest core values, no matter what our financial circumstances.

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I believe that under it all, when you get right down to it and uncover all the things we’re told to believe in, or things we are maneuvered and manipulated to believe in, or even things we choose to believe in, what deeply matters to human beings, our most universal soulful commitments and core values, is the well-being of the people we love, ourselves, and the world in which we live.

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We realized that our previous scramble to accumulate and upgrade everything about ourselves and our life was another kind of hunger, and we addressed it head-on by realizing that what we really hungered for was to have lives of meaning. We hungered to make a difference and began to devote ourselves to doing that. Some of us turned our energies to hunger initiatives, some to education, some to poverty, some to stopping abuse or providing shelter and healing for victims of abuse. This change of heart brought about a change in our relationship with money. Once we began to align our money decisions with these deeper core values and our highest commitments, we experienced a dramatic shift, not only in what we did with our money but also in how we felt about money, about our life, and about ourselves. Eventually, we came to know ourselves not for what we had or owned, but for what we gave; not for what we accumulated, but for what we allocated.

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Money itself isn’t the problem. Money itself isn’t bad or good. Money itself doesn’t have power or not have power. It is our interpretation of money, our interaction with it, where the real mischief is and where we find the real opportunity for self-discovery and personal transformation.

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You may have to look closely to find the money thread in your own story, but it is there and it has meaning. You can begin the process of examination, and transform the mystery of money, and the field of play that money represents, into a different kind of place. Your relationship with money can be a place where you bring your strengths and skills, your highest aspirations, and your deepest and most profound qualities.

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What is less obvious and goes almost completely unacknowledged is the vicious cycle of wealth. There is no recognition of the trap that wealth so often is, and of the suffering of the wealthy: the loneliness, the isolation, the hardening of the heart, the hunger and poverty of the soul that can come with the burden of wealth. She said that I had extended little or no compassion to the strong, the powerful, and the wealthy, while they need as much compassion as anyone else on earth.

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What became clear was that when people were able to align their money with their deepest, most soulful interests and commitments, their relationship with money became a place where profound and lasting transformation could occur. Their money—no matter what the amount—became the conduit for this change.

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Who do I need to be to fulfill on the commitment I’ve made? What kind of human being do I need to forge myself into to make this happen? What resources do I need to be willing to bring to bear in myself and my colleagues and in my world?

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We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of. We don’t have enough time. We don’t have enough rest. We don’t have enough exercise. We don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough profits. We don’t have enough power. We don’t have enough wilderness. We don’t have enough weekends. Of course we don’t have enough money—ever. We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough—ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.

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Whether we live in resource-poor circumstances or resource-rich ones, even if we’re loaded with more money or goods or everything you could possibly dream of wanting or needing, we live with scarcity as an underlying assumption.

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Contemporary European author, Bernard Lietaer, former senior officer of the Belgian Central Bank and one of the chief architects of the Euro currency, in his book, Of Human Wealth, says that greed and fear of scarcity are programmed; they do not exist in nature, not even in human nature.

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It would be logical to assume that people with excess wealth do not live with the fear of scarcity at the center of their lives, but I have seen that scarcity is as oppressive in those lives as it is for people who are living at the margins and barely making ends meet.

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This mind-set of scarcity is not something we intentionally created or have any conscious intention to bring into our life. It was here before us and it will likely persist beyond us, perpetuated in the myths and language of our money culture. We do, however, have a choice about whether or not to buy into it and whether or not to let it rule our lives.

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The first prevailing myth of scarcity is that there’s not enough. There’s not enough to go around. Everyone can’t make it. Somebody’s going to be left out. There are way too many people. There’s not enough food. There’s not enough water. There’s not enough air. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money.

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The second toxic myth is that more is better. More of anything is better than what we have. It’s the logical response if you fear there’s not enough, but more is better drives a competitive culture of accumulation, acquisition, and greed that only heightens fears and quickens the pace of the race. And none of it makes life more valuable.

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In the pursuit of more we overlook the fullness and completeness that are already within us waiting to be discovered. Our drive to enlarge our net worth turns us away from discovering and deepening our self-worth.

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The third toxic myth is that that’s just the way it is, and there’s no way out. There’s not enough to go around, more is definitely better, and the people who have more are always people who are other than us. It’s not fair, but we’d better play the game because that’s just the way it is and it’s a hopeless, helpless, unequal, unfair world where you can never get out of this trap.

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This is when and where the blindness, the numbness, the trance, and, underneath it all, the resignation of scarcity sets in. Resignation makes us feel hopeless, helpless, and cynical. Resignation also keeps us in line, even at the end of the line, where a lack of money becomes an excuse for holding back from commitment and contributing what we do have—time, energy, and creativity—to making a difference.

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The word wealthy has its roots in well-being and is meant to connote not only large amounts of money but also a rich and satisfying life.

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In 1977, when I first committed to working to end world hunger, I assumed that people were starving because they didn’t have enough food, and if we just got food to the people out there who are hungry, that would solve the problem of chronic hunger in the world. It all seemed so logical. But if matching the world’s food supply with the world’s hungry people held the solution, what explained the stubborn, tragic statistics and realities of hunger that would seem to make us incapable of resolving it? How could it be that in a world with more than enough food to go around, 41,000 people, most of them children under the age of five, were dying each day of hunger and hunger-related causes?

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History teaches us that lesson. The flood of aid that went into Ethiopia in 1985 fed many people for a period of time, but did not resolve that country’s hunger issue. Ethiopia remains a hungry, impoverished country. The food aid that was sent into Somalia during the crisis there in 1993 and 1994 fed a hungry few, but actually exacerbated the violence and corruption that was taking place during the civil war there.

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In those events of massive infusions of food aid, time and again, to the point of becoming routine, the food supplies were stolen and resold by the corrupt power brokers who thrive on the greed and graft that is rife in embattled countries. Further, the massive amounts of food aid deflated the local market, meaning that those farmers who did grow grain could no longer sell it because free food was everywhere—at least for a time, as the scramble to hoard and control it played out. The disastrous cycle of aid, corruption, disrupted markets, and disastrous farming investments became part of a problem instead of a solution. The cycle only perpetuated the root causes of the crisis.

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The Hunger Project, by systematically challenging false assumptions about chronic hunger and food aid, exposed the myth of scarcity and opened new avenues of inquiry and possibility, eventually succeeding in making a significant contribution to the eradication of hunger by empowering people to author their own recovery. In every situation, from individuals to large populations of people, uncovering the lie and the myths of scarcity has been the first and most powerful step in the transformation from helplessness and resignation to possibility and self-reliance.

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We often philosophize about the great, unanswered questions in life. It’s time we looked instead at the unquestioned answers, and the biggest, most unquestioned answer of our culture is our relationship with money.

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For the Achuar, wealth means being present to the fullness and richness of the moment and sharing that with one another.

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The people were Muslim, and as we sat together in a circle to discuss the situation, the men did all the talking. The women were not in the primary circle, but sat in a second circle where they could hear and see, but they did not speak. I could feel the power of the women behind me, and sensed that they would be key in the solution. In this barren orange land, it didn’t seem possible that there could be a solution, but the attitude, sense of resilience, and dignity of these people argued differently. There was a way through, and together we would find it.

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After many conversations with both the women and the men, we made an agreement with the mullahs and the chief that we would start our work with the women because the women had the vision. With our partnership, the men agreed to allow the women to begin the work of digging the well. Over the next year, as the community rationed its existing supplies of water carefully, the women dug both with hand tools and the simple equipment we brought them. They dug deeper and deeper into the ground, singing, drumming, and caring for each other’s children as they worked, never doubting that the water was there.

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Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

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Sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough.

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I am not suggesting there is ample water in the desert or food for the beggars in Bombay. I am saying that even in the presence of genuine scarcity of external resources, the desire and capacity for self-sufficiency are innate and enough to meet the challenges we face. It is precisely when we turn our attention to these inner resources—in fact, only when we do that—that we can begin to see more clearly the sufficiency in us and available to us, and we can begin to generate effective, sustainable responses to whatever limitations of resources confront us.

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At Microsoft’s sprawling corporate campus, I was escorted into an elegant office building, to a conference room for afternoon tea with a small contingent of the women who would be at the evening talk. I had asked for this smaller afternoon meeting because I wanted to know more about these women as a group and have some conversations with a few of them to learn how I could connect more easily later with women of this unusual life and career experience.

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Most nursed a quiet regret: Each day they promised to get home earlier, to get more sleep, to get more exercise, to do the things that were missing in their lives, and each day they failed to make any headway toward those commitments.

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Each day, each week, each month they made promises to themselves, their husbands and children, to get through the next project, meet the next deadline, and then be home more, be more available, have more nurturing relationships with their children, but it rarely happened, and they felt a chronic frustration over these unfulfilled promises.

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Then I asked them about their knowledge of the world, who their friends were, and what kinds of conversations they were engaged in outside of work.

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I remember standing before them, seeing their faces reflect an experience of their fullness rather than lack. I remember their gladdening expressions when I invited them to find a partner and take a moment to list for each other all the things they appreciate and are grateful for in their families and immediate relationships at work and home. There was an overwhelming sense of fullness in the room as one by one they stood up and shared the recognition of the completeness and sufficiency in their own lives and how absent that experience had been previously in the rush for more.

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Some of them wrote to let me know they had reframed their experience of working at the company and were living basically the same life, but seeing it from the lens of fulfillment and gratitude rather than fear, competition, and survival.

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What is enough? Each of us determines that for ourselves, but very rarely do we let ourselves have that experience. What is that point at which we’re fulfilled, where we have everything we want and need, and nothing in excess?

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As Buckminster Fuller said in the 1970s, this is a world that can work for everyone with no one and nothing left out, and we have the power and the resources now to create a you-and-me world rather than a you-or-me world. There is enough for everyone. To access that experience of enough, however, we have to be willing to let go—let go of a lifetime of scarcity’s lessons and lies.

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 “Girl,” she said, “my name is Gertrude and I like what you’ve said and I like you,” she said. “Now, I ain’t got no checkbook and I ain’t got no credit cards. To me, money is a lot like water. For some folks it rushes through their life like a raging river. Money comes through my life like a little trickle. But I want to pass it on in a way that does the most good for the most folks. I see that as my right and as my responsibility. It’s also my joy. I have fifty dollars in my purse that I earned from doing a white woman’s wash and I want to give it to you.”

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Gertrude taught me that the power of money is really derived from the intention we give it and the integrity with which we direct it into the world. Gertrude’s gift was great, and her clarity helped me regain my own.

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The next day I mailed the $50,000 check back to the food company executive, and was relieved to feel I was returning the guilt and shame that it carried, too. I felt unburdened. With the check I sent a letter suggesting that the CEO choose an organization they felt committed to and thanking him for considering us.

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In this condition of scarcity, money shows up not as a flow, but as an amount, something to collect and hold on to, to stockpile. We measure our self-worth by our net worth, and only and always more is better. Any drop on the balance sheet is experienced as a loss that diminishes us.

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It could be said that a great fund-raiser is a broker for the sacred energy of money, helping people use the money that flows through their lives in the most useful way that is consistent with their aspirations and hopes for humanity. It could be said that the best financial advisor is really someone who can inspire a client to do the same—to invest money in ways that contribute the most to a meaningful, fulfilling life. It could be said that each of us has the opportunity in our own lives to steward the flow of money; whatever level comes our way.

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In philanthropic interactions, we can return to the soul of money: money as a carrier of our intentions, money as energy, and money as a currency for love, commitment, and service; money as an opportunity to nourish those things we care most about.

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What you appreciate appreciates.

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We have the opportunity to direct our attention in the way we relate to money, and when we do it empowers us.

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There were plenty of independent relief agencies in Bangladesh already doing heroic and inspiring work, but what seemed to be making sustainable improvements were the initiatives that came from the Bangladeshis themselves.

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As the first step in the process of forging an effective partnership, together we looked deeply into the Bangladeshi culture, their attitudes and beliefs about themselves, their resignation and hopelessness. It became clear that after so long subsisting on aid, the people had lost touch with any sense of their own competence or any vision of their country as capable of success. In our meetings together, the Bangladeshi leaders determined that the thing that was missing, which, if provided, would enable these people to become self-reliant and self-sufficient, was a vision of their own strengths and capabilities. The Hunger Project committed, as a partner, to develop a program designed to enable the Bangladeshis to reconnect with a vision for themselves and their country, with an awareness of their available assets, and strategies to put their ideas into action.

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Then we began the program, asking everybody to close their eyes and envision what a self-reliant, self-sufficient Bangladesh would look like:

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At first, people sat there very still, eyes closed, expressionless, shoulder to shoulder in the park. A hush settled over the crowd, and the sea of faces remained still, eyes closed, in thought. After a few minutes I noticed tears streaming down one man’s face, and then another and another. People were still sitting with their eyes closed, but they were silently weeping. And then it was not just three or four, or ten or twenty faces with tears streaming down. In this crowd of more than a thousand, it was hundreds of weeping faces. It was as if they had never in their lifetime even thought they could be self-reliant or self-sufficient or a contributing nation, that they had never imagined they could be a nation that made a difference for other nations, that they could be a nation that stood out, that had qualities that people admired, a unique role to play in the world community. It was a brave new thought.

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We walked the fields with Zilu and the rest of the Magnificent Seven, and visited the fisheries and the training fields. We were overwhelmed by the people’s vitality, joy, and success. I realized as I walked with them that they had accomplished this feat with almost no help from the outside. They had had what they needed all along—the land, the water, the intelligence, the muscle, and the capacity to put it all together—but had lost touch with those resources and capabilities in the climate of “Third World” aid and the hopelessness and presumed incompetence that had come with it. Once they were inspired to see themselves differently, to see themselves as strong, creative, and capable, their commitment knew no limits. Success was inevitable.

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Mother Teresa once noted what she called “the deep poverty of the soul” that afflicts the wealthy, and had said that the poverty of the soul in America was deeper than any poverty she had seen anywhere on earth.

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Buddha told his followers that whatever they chose to give their attention, their love, their appreciation, their listening, and their affirmation to would grow in their life and in their world. He likened one’s life and the world to a garden—a garden that calls for sunlight and nourishment and water to grow. In that garden are the seeds of compassion, forgiveness, love, commitment, courage and all the qualities that affirm and inspire us. Alongside those seeds and in the same garden are the seeds of hatred, the seeds of prejudice, the seeds of vengeance, the seeds of violence, and all the other hurtful, destructive ways of being. These seeds and many more like them exist in the same garden. The seeds that grow are the seeds we tend with our attention. Our attention is like water and sunshine, and the seeds we cultivate will grow and fill our garden. If we choose to invest our attention in the seeds of scarcity—acquisition, accumulation, greed, and all that springs from those seeds—then scarcity is what will fill the space of our life and the space of our world. If we tend the seeds of sufficiency with our attention, and use our money like water to nourish them with soulful purpose, then we will enjoy that bountiful harvest.

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Charles Darwin went on to describe “survival of the fittest” in large part as the competition for scarce resources, as the basis for the evolution of species. Contrary to those models of Nature as innately, intensely, and almost exclusively competitive, more recent scientific study has illuminated the powerful role of mutuality, synergy, coexistence, and cooperation in the natural world and the more accurate picture of life that presents.

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Economics says: Compete. Only by pitting yourself against a worthy opponent will you perform efficiently. The reward for successful competition will be growth. You will eat up your opponents, one by one, and as you do, you will gain the resources to do it some more. The Earth says: Compete, yes, but keep your competition in bounds. Don’t annihilate. Take only what you need. Leave your competition enough to live. Whenever possible, don’t compete, cooperate. Pollinate each other, build firm structures that lift smaller species up to the light. Pass around the nutrients, share the territory. Some kinds of excellence rise out of competition; other kinds rise out of cooperation. You’re not in a war; you’re in a community.

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I have seen its cost again and again in my work in the developing world. I see people with a dependency hangover. I see the consequences of a welfare state worldwide that goes beyond rich and poor, that is actually inside of institutions, families, nation-to-nation relationships where people “help” other people in a way that is patriarchal—from the top down—and creates dependents, and dependence, instead of supporting self-reliance and healthy interdependence. It diminishes everyone.

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We have dreamed it: therefore it is. I have become convinced that everything we think and feel is merely perception: that our lives—individually as well as communally—are molded around such perception: and that if we want to change, we must alter our perception. When we give our energy to a different dream, the world is transformed. To create a new world, we must first create a new dream. —JOHN PERKINS, The World Is As You Dream It

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In our interactions with the Achuar people of Ecuador and the other indigenous peoples with whom we now have begun to work, the message is the same: “Change the dream.” They say that we really can’t change our everyday actions because at their root will always be the dream we have for our future and we will always act consistent with that dream. However, they say, the dream itself can be changed in the space of one generation and the time is now to do the work that will change the dream.

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I have looked deeply into what our dream is and where it comes from. I have seen that we must redream, learn to question the cultural dream of more and begin to create a dream and a future that is consistent with our reverence toward, respect for, and affirmation of life. Changing the dream may really mean to see the world completely differently—as indigenous people do. They see a world that is totally sufficient, animated with spirit, intelligent, mystical, responsive, and creative—constantly generating and regenerating itself in harmony with the great diversity of resources that support and collaborate with one another through the mystery of life. They see human beings as part of that great mystery, each human being having an infinite capacity to create, collaborate, and contribute.

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As Gandhi said, “There is enough for our need but not for our greed.”

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This experience of aligning our money and soul is available to us every day in even the smallest or most mundane transactions with money, or other choices we make in daily life that lessen money’s grip on us.

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With the December holidays approaching, we also shared that people we knew were participating in what could be called a great “gift shift.” They were shifting from buying gifts to donating money or time, from spending money on presents to spending time with people, from making rote gestures to expressing deeper connections.

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The gender and money distortion exists in dramatic proportions worldwide, but it starts right in our own homes, in our own families, in our own hearts, where helplessness or entitlement drive our feelings about money. Until those deeper issues around money are reconciled—between one woman and one man and between all women and all men—money will continue to be at times a blind spot and at other times a flash point in our relationship with money and with each other, from our most intimate relationships to the most public arenas of life, work, and public policy.

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Money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency of love. Money moving in the direction of our highest commitments nourishes our world and ourselves. What you appreciate appreciates. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. Collaboration creates prosperity. True abundance flows from enough; never from more. Money carries our intention. If we use it with integrity, then it carries integrity forward. Know the flow—take responsibility for the way your money moves in the world. Let your soul inform your money and your money express your soul. Access your assets—not only money but also your own character and capabilities, your relationships and other nonmoney

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The profound experience of those short days returns from time to time, and it is clear for me now as I think about the nature of this human experience of ours, and the fact that one of the most defining, demanding aspects of being engaged in the human experience is our struggle, our challenge, and our interactions with money. I saw again as I had seen many times before, but this time even more clearly, that money—an arena of life that so hooks and seduces us—can be our greatest ally in our own transformation and the transformation of the world in which we live.

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As a colleague of mine has said, the job of our time is to hospice the death of the old unsustainable systems and structures and to midwife the birth of new sustainable systems and new ways of being.

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When I first heard this caterpillar-butterfly metaphor I loved it because it gave me a way to see the world the way it is, even its state of voracious greed, as a kind of evolutionary phase. It is such a fitting metaphor for our time. When I look at the inspired, devoted, and brilliant people at work in so many ways to repair and nourish the world, in families, communities, and sustainable enterprises everywhere on Earth, I see the imaginal cells of our own transformation. That’s us, people like me and people like you, people whose stories I’ve shared in this book, and people appreciating them, people creating new ways, seeing new possibilities.

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Provides life-coaching and life-changing workshops based on Dave Ellis’s book Falling Awake.