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Hello dear Know Abundance readers,

Thanks for being a part of Know Abundance. We’ve enjoyed writing each week and have appreciated your comments and feedback on our posts.

As of June 2010 we’re taking an indefinite hiatus.

I especially want to thank Sande Smith, Elizabeth Husserl R. and Tuti Scott for adding their wisdom and perspective to this forum.

You can read their previous posts by clicking on their names or browsing the archives on the right sidebar. I’m re-sharing my favorite post (To Be Alive is Enough) for our last “Quote of the Week” and our Know Abundance mantra for our last “Abundance Vocabulary.”

Wishing you all the best and thanks again,

- Lanell

Happy Monday!

I used to think that I had to be something for my life to have meaning.

I used to think that I had to do something to earn my life.

Then I woke up to the fact that I am alive.

Sure, this sounds obvious, but I was so distracted by all my striving to be and to do that I totally overlooked this elementary truth.

Being alive is a new revelation every day.

That’s where the Know Abundance mantra, “Everything I need, I already have” comes from.

Our scarcity beliefs are most prevalent at this fundamental level of our relationship with life. Why is being alive not enough?

We constantly judge ourselves and each other based on standards (created by ?) that say we need to do more, we need to be more, than what we are.

I notice this underlying belief all the time in the women’s movement as we try to make a case for why women and girls should have equality with men. We say, “Invest in women and girls because it is better for society, for democracy, for the family, for the economy, for a future without extremism and violence…”

This might be true – in fact a lot of studies have been done to show that “investments in women yield large social and economic returns.”

But while this recognition of women and girls as vital and important is welcomed after years of marginalization, there is a subtle message that is also carried: we are not valued for being alive, only for what we can produce.

Why are the elderly and people with disabilities often seen and treated as “less than?”

A friend said to me last week, “I always thought the world would be better without me.”

In our striving to be something and to do something – we overlook the fact that each and every one of us is a unique expression of life. This is a given. We don’t have to do or to be anything.

We make up those requirements. That’s our story – added on after our birth. We tell each other and ourselves how we should look and behave, what kind of jobs we should have, how much money we should make and how things should be in our lives.

This week, let being alive be enough.

Happy Monday dear Know Abundance readers,

We’re taking the month of April off for Spring Break.

We want to spend some time enjoying the abundance of new life and (re)creation of spring.

We’ll be back in May.

xo,

- Lanell

p.s. Elizabeth has one last “Creating a Healthier Relationship to Money from the Inside Out“ workshop in April before maternity leave. For more information visit Inner Economics.

(Our picture this week is of the painting “Soliciting Silence” by artist N. Teddy Goldsworthy-hanner.)

Happy last Monday of 2009!

I want to thank you for reading our Know Abundance posts this year.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the mix of topics and the new voices we’ve added the past few months.

Your feedback is always welcome. Let us know what you like and don’t like and if there are things you want us to talk more about in 2010.

This blog was started as the economy in the U.S. was tanking and recovery wasn’t in sight. Even then, the world around us was full of abundance. But our focus was on scarcity and lack, panic and fear as we faced the unknown.

We are being asked by necessity to create new systems and new ways of being with each other and living life on this planet.

How do we untie ourselves from an economic model based on endless consumption with scarcity as a key motivator? We realize that everything we need, we already have.

Start with yourself. Give thanks for what you do have. Let that be enough.

Happy Tuesday!

I’ve heard a lot of speeches in my lifetime and most of them I’ve forgotten. But there is one that stands out. Years later I still have the scribbled notes I took during the speech.

What was so inspiring to me about this particular speech was that it was about politics and love – two words we don’t often put together.

I didn’t know the person who was talking, a man named Van Jones.

He looked at us and said, “In this room we are tearing down social walls.” He began listing all of the ways we categorize each other – race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, etc. – and talked about the divisions we create among ourselves because of our differences.

He pointed out that just by sharing a meal and physically sitting side-by-side we were changing the rules of the game. Historically, “people like us” did not mix and yet there we all were, in a room together.

He stressed the importance of not underestimating the power of simply sitting together, with our differences, as a community. In fact, this was an example of how we could and would build a new kind of politics.

And then he started talking about love. He acknowledged that our hopes for change might seem impossible but, “If you love someone, you don’t have small dreams for them.”

He challenged us to love and to dream big.

Where is the love in our politics today? It’s easy to become lost in the maelstrom of incrimination, accusations and arguments over “facts.” We all have our positions and opinions and rush to defend them. But with everyone in battle stance – what can get accomplished except a fight?

As I notice my thoughts circling in the familiar “us” and “them” mindset I remember Van Jones pointing out the obvious: we are one diverse community sharing life on one planet.

I try to rise to his challenge – can I sit side by side with people who are different from me and love them?

Happy Monday!

Today is “Memorial Day” in the United States. What are we remembering?

Last month I heard the artist Claudia Bernardi speak about her work creating community murals in Argentina, El Salvador and Guatemala. The murals are memory projects of massacres. Made in places where violence is buried in the soil and in the bodies and minds of the living.

Seth Mydans recently wrote in the New York Times about Cambodia, “Beyond the question of age, ignorance about the past appears to be a combination of culture and policy and perhaps also the passivity of a people too exhausted by history to confront its traumas.”

Are we exhausted by history?

“Some older people get so upset at their children for not believing that they say, ‘I wish the Khmer Rouge time would happen again; then you’d believe it.” (NY Times)

Do we really need to repeat atrocities?

How can we expect a child to comprehend that more than 1.7 million people were systematically murdered in a four-year period? As adults we still struggle to make sense of this human horror – and Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Rwanda, the Holocaust, and more. The list continues today, and some would say we are living genocide against ourselves and planet earth on a daily basis.

We dance between forgetting and remembering.

Claudia Bernardi told us about working in a community where some of the members denied that the violence ever took place. How do you create something together when such opposing views are held? When some are denying the reality of what occurred?

They agreed to paint a mural of what the town was like “before” without defining what happened to change the “before.”

What do we choose to remember and what do we choose to forget?