Part two of the series on money, belonging, and what I’ve learned since teaching Money EQ with Ken Honda at Mindvalley. You can listen (or read) the first part here.
Hello friends.
I’m working on a series right now that’s opening us up to what it means to relate to money, to belonging. I’m telling you some stories about what I’ve learned on my path since I taught a class called Money EQ with Mindvalley. It’s been six years, and I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing.
I need to say, right at the beginning, that when I write, it’s not writing in the sense of constructing ideas. It’s not like putting Lego pieces together to fit a mold that’s on the top of the box. The writing writes me. I sit down at the computer, or sometimes I walk around the city and dictate to my phone, and I simply get quiet, and I listen, and I let myself breathe into what is brewing within. That doesn’t mean I don’t do research. It doesn’t mean I’m not thinking critically. It means that I’m allowing. I’m allowing something to move, something to be truly alive.
So today I’m going to do something different. And you may find, over and over again, that this series is doing something different — because I’m bringing the poet in me, the storyteller, and the academic all to the table to share a meal and to share some thoughts with you.
Today we’re going to go really wide. We’re going to talk about the weaving of the new story, a story that could sustain us, and we’re going to talk about the story that we’ve been living. I keep asking the question: why are we so tired? Why do we feel so disconnected and lonely? Why are we living in a system that uses money as a form of scorekeeping and fails to see the actual connections we have with other people?
I know this might sound a little heavy. But I want you to know that no matter what, we’re going to end this on hope. It feels important that we talk about what’s actually going on. That we see the world as it is.
There’s a brilliant trans poet and performer named Alok Vaid-Menon, who’s been one of the voices doing this work, telling the truth about what the dominant culture refuses to see. They wrote a line in a poem called “Impossible Lives” that’s been sitting with me: “The job of an artist is to replenish imagination, to say there are ideas we haven’t considered yet. Feelings we haven’t encountered yet.”
That’s what the story weavers do. They give us language for the ideas the dominant culture cannot yet hold. They name the feelings we’ve been carrying without knowing what to call them. And the rest of us, reading or listening, suddenly have words for something that’s been sitting in us for years.
We need them right now, because we’re living in the in-between times.
The old story is collapsing. You can feel it. A lot of what we thought was solid isn’t anymore. The institutions that we were supposed to be held by are not holding. The leaders we were taught to trust have gone quiet, or worse. The systems that promised us safety in exchange for our compliance are not delivering on the deal.
And the new story isn’t fully here yet.
We are in between. In the in-between time. And the in-between is weird. And it’s confusing. And it doesn’t feel good. There aren’t many anchors. There’s a lot of chaos. The maps we were given don’t match the territory we’re walking in.
We’ve entered the chrysalis. Some of us kicking and screaming, wishing we were not there. But that’s where we are. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn’t just grow wings. The caterpillar dissolves, becomes a kind of soup, and inside that soup, something new begins to organize itself cell by cell into a being the caterpillar could not have imagined.
That’s where we are. As a culture, as a species, the form we had is dissolving. The form we are becoming has not yet arrived. And we have a choice. We can cling to the old story while it takes us down into the depths and drowns us little by little. A lot of people are doing this. It’s what the powerful are asking us to do. It’s what the noise is for. Or we can choose a new story. As a culture, as a species, we can let ourselves dissolve into the soup and trust that something is organizing.
This is what the story weavers are doing. They’re part of how the new form is finding itself. They, and in many cases we, are imagining the being we have not yet become.
Amanda Gorman, the phenomenal poet, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, shared a poem called “The New Day’s Lyric.” Listen to what she does with this moment we’re inside of:
This hope is our door, our portal, even if we never get back to normal. Someday we can venture beyond it, to leave the known and take the first steps. So let us not return to what was normal, but reach towards what is next.
Reach towards what is next. That is the work. We’re not going back. We’re going through.
The people listening to this podcast are part of the tribe of the new story weavers. The global souls, the brilliant outsiders, the healers, the neurodivergent. Telling our stories is what moves the world. You don’t have to wait for permission to tell your story. It doesn’t have to be polished. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be honest. It has to be real. That’s what makes it yours.
So I’m going to invite us today to go really wide and look at the systems we’re living in. The systems that, as someone mentioned in our Substack comments yesterday, are possibly what’s broken — not ourselves. So we’re going to look at that system and see what’s possible from here.
To begin today, I’m going to invite yet another one of the characters that I’ve encountered in the cow tales I’ve been writing. She’s an old cow named Bess. In this particular part of the story, she is teaching children. She’s gathered them around, and she’s being a storyteller, as storytellers do.
Bess says:
Come close, little ones. Closer. That’s it. You can lean on me. I’m old but I’m sturdy. Good. Are you warm? Good. I’m going to tell you a story. The managers won’t mind. They think my stories are silly. Old cow tales, they call them. And maybe they are. But silly stories are the best kind, because nobody guards against them. Ready?
A long time ago. I mean a long time ago. Before the farm, before the fence, before the book of good, before any of it. The world was just the world. There was no inside and no outside. There was only the land and the sky and the water and the animals who lived among them. And the animals were not all the same. This is the part they don’t want you to know, little ones. So tuck it somewhere safe.
The animals were all different, magnificently, riotously, absurdly different. There were bears, huge, rolling, mountain-hearted creatures who needed vast spaces and deep silence to become themselves. There were owls who could see what no one else could see, who sat so still that the world came and whispers its secrets to them. There were foxes, quick, bright, clever, who could find a path through anything, who could smell truth the way other animals smell rain. There were hawks who needed nothing but sky. There were herons who stood in the shallows for hours, perfectly still, and the stillness wasn’t laziness. The stillness was how they saw the shape of things beneath the surface. There were elks and wolves and otters and eagles. There were creatures so small you could hold them in your hoof, if you had a hoof, which not everyone did. There were creatures so large the trees bent when they passed. Every single one was different. Every single one was needed. The bear couldn’t do what the owl did. The owl couldn’t do what the fox did and none of them. None of them were cows.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But we’re cows. We’ve always been cows.” It says so in the book. Does it? The book says you are alone. But the animals in the old world, they weren’t alone. They needed each other. The bear needed the owl’s seeing. The owl needed the heron’s patience. The fox needed the hawk’s height. They were different and they were together and the difference was what made the togetherness work. Not sameness, difference.
The book says you are broken. But the animals in the old world, they weren’t broken. They were whole. Each one was exactly, precisely, completely what it was supposed to be. A bear was not a broken cow. A bear was a bear. An owl was not a cow with ideas of upherstation. An owl was an owl. Nothing needed fixing because nothing was wrong.
The book says you are not enough. But the animals in the old world, they were more than enough. They were abundance itself. They ran and flew and swam and climbed and burrowed and sang. They made dens and nests and hives and burrows. They raised their young in the open air, and their young grew up knowing what they were because nobody told them otherwise.
The book says the farm is everything. But little ones, there was no farm. There was the world. And the world was not managed or portioned or scored. The world was wild. And wild doesn’t mean dangerous whatever they told you. Wild means alive. Wild means real. Wild means the food is in a picture of food. Wild means the sky is right there. Look I know you can’t see it from here, but it’s there. It’s always there. And it’s blue little ones. Not green like they tell you, blue.
Now here is the part of the story that’s hard. Something happened. I don’t know what exactly. The old stories don’t agree. Some say a few of the animals got frightened, the world was big and the weather was rough and the not knowing was hard. Some say a sickness came that made the animals forget what they were. Some say it happened slowly, so slowly that no one noticed. One fence post at a time, one story at a time, one generation at a time, until the animals woke up one morning inside a structure they couldn’t remember being built.
And whoever built it or whatever built it, because maybe it built itself the way fear builds itself, one small wall at a time, whoever built it looked at all those magnificent different animals and said, “You are cows, all of you. You have always been cows.” And they said it with such such certainty, and they said it with such love, and they wrote it in a book they called the Book of Good, and they fed the animals something that tasted almost like food, and they gave them spaces that felt almost like home, and they told them stories that sounded almost like truth, and the almost was close enough that after a while the animals stopped remembering what the real thing tasted like.
Almost safe, almost fed, almost free, almost alive. That’s where we are now, little ones, in the almost.
But here’s what I want you to remember. And this is the important part. More important than all the rest. Can you hear me? Are you listening? You are not cows. I know they told you that. I know the book says it. I know the prayer says it. I know the blend tastes like it and the home zone feels like it. And every morning the managers smile at you like it’s true. But it isn’t true. That’s not for me to say. You might be a bear. You might be an owl. You might be something the old stories don’t even have a name for yet. But you are not a cow. The very fact that you’re sitting here, leaning against me in the dark, listening to a story you were never supposed to hear, that tells me everything I need to know about you.
The managers will come soon. They will tell you it’s time for the evening blend. They’ll lead you back to your zones. You’ll say the prayer and close your eyes and everything will feel the way it always feels. Almost safe, almost real, almost home. But tonight, before you sleep, I want you to do one thing for me. Look up. Just look up. That’s all. You don’t have to do anything about what you see. You don’t have to run or fight or leave. Just look at the sky and know that it’s there and know that it’s blue and know that once a long time ago, animals like you lived under it freely.
And one more thing. If you listen very quietly, late at night, when the clusters are still, you might hear something far away. Don’t be afraid of it. It isn’t wind. It isn’t the madness. It’s singing. It’s the ones who remembered what they are. And they’re singing for you. They’ve always been singing for you. Now go on, go to your zones, and if anyone asked what old Bess told you tonight, you tell them that it was just a story. It’s always just a story. Until it isn’t.
So that’s Bess. She’s been with me for a long time, and I’ll just invite you to take in whatever from her story speaks to you in this moment.
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For now, I want to talk not about cows, but about us. Here’s what I’ve been sitting with. Human life right now is out of alignment with the rest of the world. Our bodies are tired. Our hearts are lonely. We are getting sick. We are anxious in ways that previous generations did not know how to name. And we keep getting told this is a personal problem. That if we just meditated more, exercised more, drank more water, did the inner work, set better boundaries, hustled smarter, the tiredness would lift. The loneliness would resolve. The sickness would heal.
It will not. Because the tiredness is not personal. The loneliness is not personal. The anxiety is not personal. They are the predictable felt consequence of living inside systems that were built against the way human beings are actually supposed to live.
And here is part of why we can’t say this clearly. We’re living in a moment of collective amnesia. We’ve killed off many of the elders. Their stories have been forgotten, the knowledge they carried about how to live in time, about how to be in relationship with the land, about how to be in real community with each other. of that knowledge is gone now. And what happens when the elders are gone and the stories go with them is that we start to believe that the way we’re living right now is the way that humans have always lived.
That is not true. We had different relationships with time, with each other, with the land. None of it was perfect. There was no Eden, and I’m not interested in pretending there was. But the relationships we had were closer to what humans were actually built for than what most of us are living inside right now.
In this time in between, the systems built on amnesia are starting to fall apart. The chrysalis is dissolving them. And we’re being asked as a culture and as a species to remember things we did not know we had forgotten. That is the work. Not going backwards, going through. Letting the old form dissolve, trusting that something is organizing inside the soup.
So today I’m going to go big. I want to give you the wider frame before we get to the day-to-day. Because starting tomorrow we’re going to be in the day-to-day. We’re going to talk about money, about wealth. Not the wealth we’re talking about we’re living in now, but honest wealth, about belonging, about the body. And I don’t want you to lose sight of the fact that the day-to-day is held by the larger stories as well. If we do not name what is underneath, anything we do becomes just more self-help, more inner work, more things to add to your already long list. That is not what this is.
So today we’re going to go wide. We’re going to look at the misalignment through four lenses, time, land, community, and money. Four faces reflecting the same pattern. Four places where the farm got built on top of the field. Places where the elders’ knowledge is gone and we have been left to figure it out without them. Although maybe that’s not true. Maybe that knowledge hasn’t been gone, but simply buried within us. So a lot of this work is remembering what we already know.
I want to talk about time first. Most of us are living in collapsed time. And it’s not a personal failing, it’s a survival response. When the nervous system senses threat, time narrows. The body stops thinking about next year. It stops thinking about 10 years ago. All the attention goes to the next thing. The next email, the next bill, the next news cycle. The before disappears. The after disappears. And what’s left is only this moment and the urgency in it.
This is a beautiful adaptation when the threat is short. If something is dangerous, you don’t need to be thinking about it next Tuesday. The collapse of time is what lets the body do what it needs to do. But we were never meant to live there. What’s happening to a lot of us is that the threat isn’t short anymore. The threat has become the whole environment. The economic stuff, the political stuff, the climate stuff, the news on the phone, the proximity to other people’s pain through screens that didn’t exist 30 years ago. The body is registering all of it as danger. And the nervous system is doing exactly what it’s built to do. It’s narrowing. It’s collapsing time. It’s keeping us braced.
We’re busy. We’re very, very busy. But we’re not living. We’re functioning. There’s a difference.
Now, the cult of productivity sits on top of that braced body and tells us we should be doing more. This is actually a relatively new phenomenon. The Industrial Revolution did something to time that had never been done before. It made time measurable, flat, quantitative. Time became a thing you could divide into hours and minutes and seconds, and you could trade those units for money. Time is money. That’s the phrase. We say it like it’s obvious. It isn’t. It’s a recent invention.
And before that invention, time was something else entirely. Time was communal. It belonged to the village. The harvest happened when the harvest happened. The grieving lasted as long as the grieving needed to last. The festival was when the elders said the festival was. Nobody owned time. Time held everyone. Once time became money, time became something you could own. Your time was yours. My time is mine. And if your time is yours, then you better be using it well. You better be producing something with it, because time you aren’t producing with is time you’re losing.
The quality of time disappears. Only the quantity counts. And the only quantity that counts is the kind that you can convert into money. The hour with your kid is worth less than the hour at work. The hour resting is worth nothing. The hour grieving is a cost. The hour with a friend on the terrace is a luxury. That’s the cult of productivity. It comes from there, from the idea that you must produce to be valued. That your time has worth only if it produces. That you have worth only if you produce.
And let’s face it, none of us want to live this way. I don’t know anyone who does. But the farm tells us we have to.
And here’s the part I want to be really honest about. The personal development world has woven this in at the core of its message. This is the first place we can clearly see that the personal development industry is functioning at least part of the time as the agent of the farm in the guise of helping us live better lives. Tony Robbins, the 5 a.m. club, the hustle gurus, the morning routine optimizers. Brendan Burchard with his softer voice saying the same thing in a calmer tone. They’re all teaching us to extract more output from the body that is already braced. They call it high performance. They call it peak potential. They call it best self. What they’re actually selling is more efficient compliance with the cult of productivity. They’re not pulling us out of the farm. They’re teaching us how to be better cows.
And here’s what I find really interesting. Even Tim Ferriss, the person who literally wrote the four-hour workweek, which isn’t about making life short. It’s actually about optimizing. He built an entire empire on optimizing every minute. He measured everything. Even he has changed his tune. In a podcast a while ago, he said that in the last 10 to 15 years, he’s de-optimized a lot. He’s been talking openly about how the obsession with optimization wrecked his life, wrecked his relationship, wrecked his mental health. When the man who built the optimization religion is publicly walking it back, you know something has shifted. The body is telling the truth, even when the marketing isn’t.
You learn the hard way what most of us are also learning. No amount of productivity is going to resolve our survival response. Productivity isn’t what the body needs. The body needs the threat to stop. The body needs to come down out of the brace. So remember that there was a time before and there will be a time after. And then right now in this moment, it’s safe enough to breathe.
Here’s what humans used to know about time that most of us have forgotten. Time isn’t a line. Time is a circle. It moves in seasons. There are times for planting and times for harvesting and times for letting the field rest. There are ceremonial times. There are times held communally. Times when we all must stop because it’s a time to grieve or celebrate or reset or time to mark a passage that matters. Rest isn’t earned. Rest is a season. It’s sacred. The rest is how the work gets done.
And critically, we remember that the threat isn’t constant. The body needs a time to come down. The seasons themselves are kind of nervous system regulation at cultural scale. Winter is the rest the whole community gets. Harvest is the celebration the whole community gets. Grief has its seasons, joy has its seasons, the body is not asked to brace year round. Up until recently the elders held this knowledge. They knew how to read the year, they knew how to read the body, they knew how to push and when to be still. Most of this has gone underground now. We’ve inherited a relationship with time that none of our ancestors would have recognized as livable. And we’ve inherited it without the elders who tell us there’s another way.
Now, let’s spend a few minutes talking about the land. The first thing we got wrong about the land is that we forgot we are it. We are nature. Our bodies are nature. Our breath is nature. The water moving through us is nature. It’s the same water that moves through the rivers and the oceans. The minerals in our bones came out of the ground. We are not visitors here. We are the planet walking around in a particular shape for a little while.
Most of us have forgotten this or we never got told. Our bodies have rhythms like the oceans. They have seasons. The breath has a tide. The heart has a wave. The hormones move in cycles that match the moon more closely than any factory schedule. You already know that your body wants to slow in the winter, that it wants to rise in the spring, that it grieves in waves and joys in waves, and neither one stays.
When we forget that we’re nature, nature becomes other, a thing out there, a resource, an input, something to be extracted from, something to be managed, something to be improved. Whatever we do to the land, we do to ourselves because we are the land. The exploitation of the forest and the exploitation of the body are the same acts performed by the same system, motivated by the same forgetting.
My friend Dr. Wendy Peterman taught me that we are a forest of humans. Even writing that phrase lets something in my body relax, knowing I’m not alone. A forest of humans, not a pile of individuals. A forest, something that breathes together, something whose roots, if you could see them, would be entangled with everyone else’s. We are not what we have been told we are.
Ironically, the personal development world doesn’t know we even have bodies. A 14-hour day in a hotel room with no lateral light and no green trees and no air? A weekend conference where you’re told that your circumstances don’t matter, only your mindset? A course that promises you create your own reality, manifests your desires, transcends your limits, without ever once asking what land you are standing on, what your body is asking for, what your nervous system can actually metabolize.
You create your own reality. Your limits are your beliefs. If you’re suffering, it’s because your mindset is wrong. That message pulls you out of your body. It pulls you out of your environment. It tells you the only real territory is your own mind. And if you would just get that right, everything else would follow. It doesn’t just abstract you, it erases you.
The body the personal development world talks about, when it talks about the body at all, is one body: white, cisgender, neurotypical, able, well-housed, well-fed, endlessly optimizable. But that is not most bodies. Queer bodies are not in the room. Trans bodies are not in the room. Black bodies, Latino bodies, migrant bodies, indigenous bodies, not in the room. Disabled bodies are not in the room. Neurodivergent bodies are not in the room. And the irony, the staggering irony is that women who buy most of what this industry sells, their bodies are not in the room either. The body that bleeds, the body that grows another body inside it, the body that goes through menopause, the body that has been told for its entire life that it was the wrong shape, that body is invisible in the very industry that takes most of its money.
What gets called the body in the personal development world is an abstraction, an idealization, a body without history, without identity, without context, without place, a body that could be optimized into any shape if the mindset were right. But that is not how bodies work. That is not how any of this works.
We had a different relationship with land too once. For most of human history, land wasn’t owned. It was held by communities, by villages, by generations. Land was a commons. It fed everyone. Nobody got rich from it and nobody starved from it. It was the place under your feet and you belong to it more than it belonged to you. Then in England, starting about 500 years ago, the commons got taken, fenced off, turned into private property. The people who lived on that land for generations got pushed off. They had to go to the cities, they had to sell their hours in factories so they could buy back food that the land used to give them for free. This is called the enclosure. It’s one of the most violent things that’s ever happened to human beings. And the cutting never stopped, it just got more efficient.
Indigenous people have held on to this knowledge through 500 years of being told they were wrong about it. Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, member of the citizen Potawatomi Nation, has been one of the people carrying it into the languages the dominant culture can hear. The forest is kin. The plants are teachers. We are the new ones here. The elders of this place are not human. Most of this knowledge has gone underground. Held by communities, the dominant culture has spent 500 years trying to erase. What survives, survives. The rest is buried under the lie of separation, waiting to be remembered.
If this is getting big for you, if you’re feeling in your body, if you’re feeling like you want to say amen or move or cry or breathe or stretch, do whatever you need to so you receive. This is a lot. We have been living in a system that’s crushing us every single day, but we’ve not been able to name it. So there’s something incredibly liberating about the naming of these systems, about the naming of the ways that we have been exhausted by a system not built for us, that we’ve been made isolated and alone by a system that’s not made for us. So feel free to take a breath here. I’ve got two more lenses I want to talk about.
The next, the third lens is all about community. We are fundamentally, we being humans, we are fundamentally collaborative animals. We thrive in community and we die in isolation. That’s not a moral claim. That is a biological one. You can put a human being in a beautiful room with all the food and shelter they need and no other human beings and that human will start to fall apart within weeks. The body knows what it needs and what it needs most is each other.
But we’ve been told a different story. The story we’ve been told is that we’re individuals, that we make our own way, that the strong ones don’t need anybody, that asking for help is weakness, that the goal is independence and the higher goal is being the kind of person other people depend on, but who does not depend on anyone. That story is killing us.
In February of this year, federal agents went into Minneapolis. They raided homes. They put entire communities under siege. People were terrified. Families were being torn apart. The kind of thing that 20 years ago most Americans would have said could not happen here. And you know what happened? People showed up. Neighbors brought food to families who couldn’t leave their houses. Lawyers volunteered their time. Churches opened their doors. Restaurants turned into soup kitchens. Whole networks of strangers organized themselves overnight to protect the people they never met. Teenagers walked out of schools to stand in front of houses where ice was at the door. People had nothing in common, politically, theologically, culturally, came together because somebody needed them to.
That is the forest. That is the forest. That is what we actually are when the lie of separation gets stripped away. A forest of humans, roots entangled, holding each other up. The thing we are told we are not, but the thing we’ve always been underneath.
And here’s what struck me about Minneapolis. Through all of it, through the raids, through the families being torn apart, through ordinary people putting their bodies between federal agents and their neighbors, almost none of the major voices in the personal development world said anything. The industry that sells us love, belonging, courage, integrity, your highest self, stayed silent. The leaders who have spent decades telling us how to live with purpose, how to find our truth, how to be brave, how to show up fully, stayed silent. The accounts that post a quote graphic every morning about boundaries and self-worth? Silent. A lot of ordinary people with no platform, no brand, no monetized course on courage did the actual thing. The leaders did not. That tells you something about what the industry actually is. And it’s not community.
The personal development world is built on gurus, not gardeners. There’s a person at the front of the room and there are people in the audience and the people in the audience are there to be more like the person at the front of the room. That is the structure. That is what’s being sold. And every relationship inside that structure is transactional. You can be my friend but only if you convert. You can be in my circle but only if you buy the package. You can have access to me, but only at the tier you paid for. That is not community. That’s a cult with a payment plan.
A while ago, I started looking at how the personal development industry actually got built, who the architects were, what the people who designed this industry were like as people. And what I found shocked me. The people who built the modern personal development industry, most of them, the major ones, built it out of avoidant attachment styles. They did not trust people. They built the tools to manipulate and control them. They did not believe in real connection. They engineered the performance of it.
Now, I’m not saying, when I talk about the personal development world, that every healer, every leader, every guide, every writer is in this world. I actually think the two are quite separate, but there’s a pretty big gravitational pull. There’s a big microphone that they have and they keep telling us this is who you’re supposed to be. I felt it myself for years. I’m not going to name any of these people here, mostly for legal reasons, but once you start looking at the patterns, you can’t unsee them.
What this means is the industry that promises to help us belong was in many cases built by people who fundamentally did not believe belonging was possible. They were not building a forest. They were building a stage with themselves at the center. And the rest of us have been sitting in the audience, paying for tickets, wondering why we still feel alone. A gardener, on the other hand, tends what’s already alive. A gardener tends what’s already alive while a guru cultivates an audience. You can tell the difference by what happens when the audience needs something the guru cannot sell them.
Now, here’s what humans know about each other that the dominant culture has forgotten. I say the dominant culture on purpose because most of the world still knows. People still live multi-generationally in Mexico, in India, in most of Africa, most of Latin America, most of Asia, most of the indigenous communities everywhere, grandparents helping raise children, aunts and uncles and cousins as a daily presence, not a holiday rarity, people dying surrounded by people they love in the houses they’ve lived in, people being born into communities that know them before they have names. Most of the world still grieves together, the body washed by the people who love it, the food brought, the stories told, the grief held by everyone, and because of that, the grief does not destroy the people closest to it. Most of the world still makes decisions together. The principle of seven generations, that no decision should be made without considering its impact on the people, seven generations from now who do not exist yet and cannot speak for themselves. This is a culture that understands what we are.
The Western culture is actually the outliers, the hyper-individualized, hyper-isolated, hyper-optimized culture that produces this loneliness. This is not the norm. It’s the experiment, and the experiment is failing. The elders are gone where I’m writing from. The structures that held the elders are gone. We’ve inherited the cutting with other people who could tell us there’s another way. But the elders are not gone everywhere. The knowledge is not gone everywhere. The forest is still standing in most of the world.
And this brings us to money. I left it for last on purpose because in the Western world we’re measured by our bank accounts. This is where most of us feel all the rest of it. The collapsed time, the disconnection from the land, the loneliness, they all show up here in the place where the rent is due. We have to make choices about health insurance or feeding the kids. We take on student loans to get jobs that will let us pay the student loans back. We work jobs we don’t want to so we can afford houses. We’re barely in because we’re always at those jobs. If it feels like a trap, it’s because it is.
For most of human history, the question of “how much money do you have” would have made no sense. Resources were held in common. The harvest fed the village. The hunt fed the village. The young were raised by the village. The old were cared for by the village. The unwell were tended by the village. Wealth was not a number you accumulated. Wealth was the health of the system you were part of. Then the commons got taken. Land that had fed everyone got fenced off and turned into private property. And once the land was private, money became the thing standing between you and food, between you and shelter, between you and care. That is recent, not ancient, recent.
And we been handed a story to explain it. The story is, you came into this world alone, you earn what you earn, what you accumulate is yours. If you do it well, you win. If you do it badly, you lose. The bank account is your scorecard. Most of us run that story without ever questioning it. Most of us feel like we’re failing inside of it because the math was rigged before we sat down at the table.
The system runs on extraction. It takes and it does not return. It takes the work of artists and pays them an exposure. It takes the care work of mothers and grandmothers and the people holding their dying parents and pays them nothing. It takes the labor of people who grow our food and clean our offices and build our houses and pays them a fraction of what the work is worth. It takes the land and gives back nothing. It takes the cultural knowledge of indigenous communities and sells it in workshops and never sends a check to the people whose ancestors held the knowledge for 10,000 years. This is not a glitch, this is the design.
And the part that breaks my heart is that the personal development world, the industry that promises liberation, healing, freedom is built on the same extraction. The work made into a course that has reached over 100,000 people. The work still selling. The creator of the practice is not paid. The creator not named on a sales page. Not acknowledged. Made invisible. This is what the extractive system does. It takes the work and does not return. It does this to artists, to indigenous teachers, to caregivers, to almost everyone who builds something the system can sell. What happened to me is one small example. It’s everywhere.
A system designed to liberate would acknowledge its sources. A system designed to liberate would pay the people whose work it’s built on. A system designed to liberate would not need to extract because it would be running on reciprocity. The personal development industry runs the way the banks run, just with better lighting.
And while it’s taking your money and your work and your trust, it tells you that the answer to your suffering is to fix your mindset. That if you just align with abundance, the money will flow, that your wealth is a reflection of your worthiness, and if you’re struggling, it’s because you’re not yet vibrating high enough. That is the cruelest version of the lie. Because if money is a mindset, then the bowl you were swimming in is your responsibility to fix. And the people who designed the bowl get to keep designing the bowl and you get to spend the rest of your life working on the relationship with the water.
This knowledge that we were never meant to do money alone is still alive in most of the world. The economies of mutual aid, of communal resource, of I help you now, you help me later, neither of us keeping score, they’re still running in small towns in Mexico and villages in India, in black neighborhoods in American cities where the formal economy gave up on people generations ago. People built their own in migrant communities and queer chosen families and disability communities where interdependence has never been a choice. The elders of this knowledge are still here. Most of them are not in the rooms where the economic decisions get made, but they’re still here. What they know is what we’re going to spend the rest of the series remembering together.
So that’s the wider frame: time, land, community, money. Four lenses, all of the same contraction. Four places where the farm got built on top of what was actually there. I know that’s a lot to carry. I know it can land heavy. So before I close, I want to tell you the one thing that’s been holding me through all of this.
The farm is not the field. The farm is what got built on top of the truth. The field is the truth. The farm is the construction. The field is what was always there.
The farm may tell us we are alone. The field has never once been alone. The forest has never been alone. The mycelium under our feet has never been alone. Your body, made of the same minerals as the ground and the same water as the rivers, has never been alone. The story of separation is the story the farm sells. It’s not the truth about what you are.
The farm tells us we’re broken. The field knows we’re exactly what we’re supposed to be. Bears, owls, foxes, things the old stories don’t have names for yet. Whole. Each one needed. Each one part of the larger thing.
The farm tells us we’re not enough. The field has been more than enough for four and a half billion years.
The farm tells us this is just how it is. The field remembers when it was different. The mask is not permanent. The truth underneath has not gone anywhere.
And the story weavers we started with are pulling the mask back. Alok, Amanda Gorman, the writers and the poets and the people quietly telling the truth in kitchens and classrooms and group chats. The tribe of the new story weavers, the global souls, the brilliant outsiders, the healers, the neurodivergent. You. You are part of how the field remembers itself.
The fact that you’re listening to this, the fact that something in you nodded when I said, we are a forest of humans, that some part of you has known your whole life that the way we’re being asked to live is not quite right. That knowing is the field speaking through you.
You are not broken. The system you are living inside is. The bear is not a broken cow. The bear is a bear.
And the farm cannot survive forever. No farm built on top of a living field can. The field always comes back. Sometimes it takes a long time, sometimes it takes a generation, sometimes the people who started the work do not get to see the field returning, but it always returns. That’s what fields do.
I want to leave you with Bess again. She was with us at the start, and she should be with us at the close. So Bess says:
But tonight, before you sleep, I want you to do one thing for me: look up. Just look up. That’s all. You don’t have to do anything about what you see. You don’t have to run or fight or leave. Just look at the sky and know it’s there. And know that it’s blue. And know that once a long time ago, animals like you lived under it freely. And one more thing. If you listen very quietly late at night, when the clusters are still, you might hear something far away. Don’t be afraid of it. It isn’t wind. It isn’t the madness. It’s singing. It’s the ones who remembered what they are. And they’re singing for you. They’ve always been singing for you. Now, go on, go to your zones. And if anyone asks what old Bess told you tonight. You tell them it was just a story. It’s always just a story until it isn’t.
Thank you for being with me today. I look forward to your comments and your questions — to really bringing this community to life, to bringing this field into our presence. I’d love it if you subscribed so you can follow along, whether you do that for free or you support the work in a paid fashion. This is the place where you belong. You are part of the forest of humans, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Until then, be well.
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