What is wealth to you?

Some while ago a series of bank advertisements on the management of wealth appeared in the glossy weekend media. One of these featured a lone and pretty girl cantering away on a lovely white stallion into the beautiful and totally unblemished distance. ‘What...[is wealth]…to you?’ the headline asked. ‘It’s being able to tell the world to get lost.’
How can any single one of us afford to turn our back on the world in this way in any sense. How can any of us ride away to an unblemished horizon while so many basic human rights are not available to so many? That surely diminishes us as human beings. But someone, indeed a team of people, wrote that advertisement.

I have written quite a bit over the last year on this blog about the flaws in our economy and indeed the flaws in human nature! An enormous intellectual effort has been and continues to be directed towards the perceived flaws in the economies of the world and how we may be able to overcome them – and I have written much about that as well. We now have to make our own contributions. With the worldwide web there is no shortage of informed opinion and support; some would say there is too much. The internet is an extremely powerful tool in this regard, enabling rapid dissemination of information and coordination of activities worldwide.
Before we take an intuitive leap into action, before we can make positive changes in our lives, in our work and in our leisure, we need strength, hope, determination, optimism and prayer. But we also need courage, and trust and most of all love and compassion. As long as we feel driven by greed or insecurity or envy to make as much money as possible for our own material well being and to covet unnecessary possessions, we fuel consumerism and ultimately self destruction. It is too easy for our materialistic emotions to override any fleeting feelings of spiritual conscience!

To be continued…

Adapted from Healing this Wounded Earth © Eleanor Stoneham 2011