Gathering #15 September 2, 2021 - Revisiting Money

@Toni Blanco will you be able to setup a Zoom for this gathering?

1. Share a link on discord 24 hours before the gathering.

2. Be ready to record in case Josh is not able to show up.

3. Have a way to share the recording privately (without making it public on the internet) with Josh.

I will be able to show up, thanks for holding space though! :)

Context

This gathering is a space to explore a thread of conversation about the role of money within the generative process. @Jennifer Damashek started this in a comment on a card in the generative sequence and is now contained in this Loomio thread. Jennifer felt that the inclusion of the word "finance" alienated and excluded experiences of solidarity in her life circles

Jennifer and I had a dyad conversation followed by some email correspondence during which a volatile energy arose and was contained (Jennifer: please feel free to correct, comment, expand if you feel that the words I have chosen here are not aligned with your experience).

This gathering is intended to bring this conversation into the wider crew space.

Represent

Our previous gathering on the subject of money was personal. I would like to suggest that the theme of this gathering be slightly different.

It seems clear to me that the generative process has evoked different images and visions in each of us. To me, that is a beautiful outcome and speaks to the generative potential of this approach. It is most likely that the images that were evoked in each of us (by the same GP) are informed by our different life experiences.

In that spirit, I would like to suggest that at this gathering we arrive as representatives not just of our own personal experiences and needs, but of the communities and ecologies which we wish to serve and nourish. Let us try to bring to this gathering not just our personal needs, but the needs of the people and communities we are each involved in.

Remote

In addition, I would also like to remind us all that a key quality in the framing of our shared work in this crew is REMOTE!

If your communal experience has been biased towards physical proximity and face-to-face interactions, please remember to consider and reflect on the context of REMOTE microsolidarity.

The isolation forced upon many of us due to COVID played a key role in the formation of this crew. I did not have access to Microsolidarity until COVID arrived and forced a shift to remote/online work (that before COVID was also biased towards physical communities).

The invitation to form this crew was, on my part, a shot in the dark, a question really: am I the only one, or are there others who, like me, live in isolation and lack access to microsolidarity (or any solidarity?) in their physical worlds? If so, how many others - a handful, millions? Is this something we wish to tend to? if so, how? That is how the generative process was born and what it was designed to address.

This is not intended to exclude other solidarity contexts. But it does introduce an intentional bias: giving priority to the remote experience. COVID has demonstrated that crisis can force the remote context upon even established physical communities. COVID is likely not the last crisis we are going to face. I ask that we keep this in mind when we discuss the subject of money.

I shared what I learned by working on a different GP by myself here. Find there my interpretation of the "noise" caused by the "financial" word in the card.

prompts that are currently alive in me (with awareness of the nearing gathering) - both within the specific context for the gathering:

• How are you arriving at this gathering? What baggage do you carry with you?

• What would you like to take away with you from this gathering?

Post meditation I wrote myself an note outline on my birthday that I've just processed, with synchronic priming from the above comment. It's brought up a lot in me and feels timely in relation to our gathering about money. This is what I'm carrying right now, pretty much a straight stream of conscious:


### 6 August

My birthday, typically the most difficult day in my life for several reasons. 1) I don't particularly like spotlights, 2) the relationship with my mother is quite transactional, this is a date where the expectation upon me is to trade my affection for the profane - material bribes and so forth, gifts with expectation and conditionality - thus not gifts. My wishes not to perform this ritual are never respected and even mentioning them brings discord. Rocks and hard places essentially.

Aside from personal feelings I also see the significance of dates in general as quite arbitrary. The Gregorian calendar is clearly full of errors (regarding the continuity of planetary cycles), so what makes this assignment meaningful? The power to believe and that's about it IMO.

This is the context behind this note.

---

Other years have been very tough to navigate but I'm proud of myself this round. There was little tension and my actions flowed in the appropriate ways. I think everyone got what they really wanted.

A few days before the cursed day, I mentioned to my father the desire avoid transactionality and commerce with my mother. I told him that if we had to go for a meal on my mothers wishes (I'd rather treat the day as any other), then my wish would be to pay for everyone. He was fine with this.

---

The day unfolded pleasantly, no imperatives pushed upon me (especially in the morning) which was pleasant. I set off for a restaurant with my mother, my father following in his car with the dog. We arrived sat down and ordered. Tension between the parents was present but minimal (they were separating and were in the process of mediation). This was smoothed over and after eating my father grabbed the bill, despite my expressed wishes. It was a gift without being explicit and my wish to pay would have probably caused some form of guilt in my mother - though she wouldn't have issues with appropriating from him (as in her eyes he's taken from her). Thus it was a good move on his part to have ignored me and made the gesture he did in such a non-transactional spirit.

Upon return the necessary commerce was scheduled to begin. Overkill as expected; a little bit of weed, an aeropress, a hammock and Є200. I was promptly warned about refusing the currency or returning it and so ate the heartache of such profanity. We had coffee, cake and then they went their separate ways; my father going to sort the boats rigging out and mother doing something across the bay. I gladly smoked a spliff on my own with the dog howling for being left behind. Actually I smoked several before deciding it was time to meditate down by the water to relax after the unfulfilled potential for combustion. I was glad that this possibility went another direction than anticipated but still left saddened by the days transactionality and the inability to be heard on the matter.

As I had somewhat delayed at the table to be on my own for a while I hadn't realised that my father was already back from his dip. Passing through the house to grab my water and timer I entered the kitchen to find him in HIS birthday suit, or at least the bottom half of it. More gestures, this time in a more synchronistic way than intentional. He's often been told to cover himself throughout the years, either by my mother or by myself and the brother (for teenage embarrassment). He still harbours a feeling of being repressed about this it seems. An the lack of fucks given about this day seemed no accident - almost intentional, though not premeditated. My interpretation of this was that he was saying "remember where you came from" in his own way. Had I said anything I'm sure I would have met a rebuttal along these lines; but I said nothing other than excusing myself from the room and getting on with my own stuff. While not expressed, I imagine he was grateful not to be agitated about it "for once" (not that such a situation has occurred in the last ten to fifteen years). He carries the past with him on these kinds of things.

While down on the water, the meditation that came to me was a 369 triad of be loving, act gracefully and think clearly. At the same time, an insight of how to reconcile my desires regarding transactionality with my mothers - take it and spend it on her. She was confusing the language of commerce with correspondence due to her own material value system. Since she had asked me to get her weed earlier in the month, but she didn't like smoking tobacco, while smoked pure it knocked her out - I figured I'd get her a vaporizer. Easy.

This left some anxiety in me as I was in ways rejecting the transaction; she could have just skipped the step of giving me cash and bought it for herself but she'd probably not give herself permission to do such (despite thinking she had cancer and not telling anyone as I've just learnt - happily this isnt the case). Anyway, despite the potential volatility for taking such action (not fitting into her belief system about one way transactionality) I placed the order and later told her that I'd bought HER a birthday gift but it would take a few days to arrive. Speaking of deferred rewards, her response was "I hate when people say these kinds of things" - I realised telling her was a mistake as soon as I mentioned it but too late. On a deeper level I think I wanted her to associate the events of giving and receiving; if she didn't want the gift due to sentimental reasons then at least the situation was symmetrical.

Three days later the vaporizer arrived and I believe she was genuinely pleased. Having heard my use of language over a few weeks, she turned to me and asked "so is this commerce then?". My response was that "it's a middle ground" to which she was satisfied.

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In my eyes, this is a pretty odd note. Without the years of context within my family unit it probably sounds like very little, maybe like the situations are normal or you may wonder what the deal is. Some may consider me an ungrateful brat, at least that's how I've been told to feel - which I don't think is fair. What's big about this experience - and infract the extended trip - is that while together, nobody was triggered. Typically someone is getting agitated every second minute; it would seem to me that the family's defence mechanism is to provoke and agitate each other in a vicious cycle.

Somehow this damage was avoided for the duration of my stay. I can't take credit for the behaviours of others but for me its big as I was able to concede my own beliefs in totality, suspend judgemet in entirity and procees why the fuck my familys so damn screwed up... while taking counter measures (word spells) which felt like a valuable contribution towards harmony. Honestly, I'm glad as hell to be out of that (heratbreaking) environment but the experience of sucessfully holding on to my integrity throughout the entire period was something that allows me to feel proud of my actions, if not a little exhausted.

Thank you for sharing these personal notes, @Josh Fairhead. I feel I know you better because of what you shared. My grandmother is transactional with gifts. I can relate to the discomfort and unpleasantness around such “gifts.”

Link to the Ken Wilber essay I mentioned: https://integrallife.com/right-bucks/

I read most of this article. What struck me most when reading it was that Ken Wilbur seems to believe he knows more than is possible to know about human history. For example, in this paragraph:

Thus, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women was written in 1792; it is the first major feminist treatise anywhere in history. It is not that all of a sudden, women became smart and strong and determined after a million years of oppression, dupedom, and sheepdom: it is that the social structures had evolved, for the first time in history, to a point that physical strength did not overwhelmingly determine power in culture. Within a mere few centuries—a blink in evolutionary time—women had secured legal rights to own property, to vote, and to “be their own persons,” that is, to have a property in their own selves.

I don't think we can know what human life was like for the vast majority of our collective history. My personal sense is that most human societies operated vastly differently than they do now, and our imaginations are severely limited by what we see around us.

Some other perspectives on human history point to the possibility that for most of our human history (which has been lost due to no written documents and few traces left behind to dig up) we have operated cooperatively and in more feminine, earth-centered ways.

http://www.matriarchiv.ch/?page_id=34&lang=en

https://www.amazon.com/Chalice-Blade-Our-History-Future/dp/0062502891

I wanted to add that the article did make me think more carefully about the idea of money being “evil” or “dirty” and I’m grateful you posted it, Alex. I don’t know that I agree with Ken Wilbur’s conclusions, but I also know I really don’t have any idea about what is the best way to get from where we as human beings are with money to where I would like to be.

"Ken Wilbur seems to believe he knows more than is possible to know"

that statement feels so ... whole :)

Thank you @Jennifer Damashek :)