Marya Mann : Blog : The Poetry Of Money And The Cat's Pajamas

The Poetry of Money and the Cat's Pajamas

A lot of people will say money is a stepping stone, a crazy wisdom Zen master, a form of energy, or simply a way to get by in life. Money is all of that, and money is also the cat’s pajamas.

Silky as a kitten when you have it, as sadistic as the worst Halloween monster when you lack it, money is mostly a mirror for the creative imagination. It reflects all our relationships, how we move, and what shapes our thinking.

Like poetry, money echoes the vibration of giver and receiver; it often has a surprise at the end; and it involves metered stresses. These are called monthly bills. Monthly grateful payment of our bills creates a symphony of playful rhythms, just like poetry. If we are alert, we find our rhythms with money reflect everything else we wanted to know about ourselves.

Come, entertain with me a few surrealistic ideas about money that couldn’t possibly be true, and of course are.

money’s secret role: it leads to the Soul

It hones our sensitivity to honesty, our mutual need for clarity, beginning with relationship to ourselves, our gifts and talents, and extending into the joyful work we are born to do in the world.

You can’t eat money, silver, or gold, but money can tell you what you really value, and how you value it. It’s simply an exchange medium that weaves us into the economic engine of community. As the breath weaves us into the mana engine, the planet’s life force, exchanging breath for life, we trade money to operate in the material world, the fabric of our society.

The value we place on work well done – a farmer’s food production, a home well-built, or a piece of magnificent music on a shiny new CD, words well strung – that’s the real beauty of money – it’s a reflection of mana. The money is not the mana.

Reproducing what we value and how we value it, money will show up as the energy of wisdom, a sky of coins worth everything because it makes us so conscious of who and what we are, and gives us flashing signs on the path to enlightened living.

money is a metaphor

The key to money is this: It reflects our state of mind.

If we know our value and earn what we are worth, life feels aligned.

If we have the attitude of getting something for nothing, that is what we will have: Nothing.

If we are greedy, our greed will eat us alive. If we have a hidden agenda, an undisclosed bargain, and we attempt to get another person to do something around money, without telling that person what our goals are, we are sloppy with mana and thus will lose money.

With clear agreements, money stops playing hide-and-seek like the hidden bargains within us do.

money is a way to create partnerships with others for mutual benefit

We offer money to remove a pain, to improve skills, and to support the family, the ohana, the community. In return for another good, we place a green, off-white, and pink-colored paper with a giant eyeball on its face on the counter and say I want one or two, sign me up, help me in some way, protect me, save me, give me skills to make more money or discover my immortal soul.

there’s something funny about this money business

When pianist Artur Schnabel wrote, “Every day the sailing rougher. People at the railing suffer,” he might have been sailing through the stormy waters of the current bank bailouts, executive gluttony, and unregulated usury of Wall Street. Who doesn’t feel a little seasick at how seedy and greedy the money changers really were. They didn’t care about the community.

Barely legal, unethical profit protocols may be evil, but money is not the root of all evil. The root is that we’ve neglected the poetry of money.

How we feel about money is how money will show up in our lives. If we love money because it offers opportunity to feed and educate our children, create more happiness and beauty, explore green technologies and reinvigorate the world, we thrive because we are total in our love.
There’s nowhere for the universe to resist when our desire is in good relationship with our highest self, each other, and the planet.

If we hear that Mark Twain said, “His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine,” and resent its “truth” rather than roar with laughter upon hearing it, we will be in “taint” with money, and that could taint our love affair with money and the rest of life.

A metaphor suggests a resemblance. Euripides called money “the wise man’s religion,” but James Baldwin thought money “was exactly like sex; you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.” Most of my friends and I settle on an idea of money somewhere between the grim reaper and a happy harvester.

We realize we are harvesting mana, not money. Money is nothing but a reflection of life force, showing where our attention is, personally and collectively. If we love money as energy, we can be generous, altruistic, and kind.

No, not like Bernie Madoff and the Enron executives. No, not like those who think countless lives lost and another 100 billion dollars are reasonable costs of war.

And yes, like Mother Theresa. Yes, like Bill and Melinda Gates. Yes, like Andrew Carnegie, we can and do choose.

I wonder if today’s conservative thinkers realize the true heroes of capitalism amassed their fortunes to help the world. “Let us cast aside business forever, except for others,” said 19th century millionaire Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie began life in Scotland as the son of a cotton mill weaver and a shoe binder, and worked his way up in the classic “rags to riches” story. Three aims guided him: to spend the first third of life getting all the education he could, to spend the next third making all the money he could, and and spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.

“…The amassing of wealth is one of the worse species of idolatry,” he wrote at the age of 33, in 1868. “No idol more debasing than the worship of money.”

In order to avoid degrading himself, he retired a millionaire many times over at age 35 so he could pursue the practice of philanthropic giving, for “…the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

Before he sold Carnegie Steel to J. P. Morgan, he set up a large pension fund for his former employees and, in 1905, for American college professors. His interest in music led him to pay for the construction of 7,000 church organs and to build Carnegie Hall in New York City. He created the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1910, which is still honored as a milestone on the road to peace and the abolition of war, his life-long aim.

With a gift of $10 million for peace promotion, Carnegie encouraged the “scientific” investigation of the causes of war and the adoption of judicial methods that would eventually eliminate them. Carnegie contributed to the Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute for African-American education, and to recognize deeds of heroism and honorable intention, he founded the Carnegie Hero Funds in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany.

His appreciation for the poetry of money, for money as his own version of the cat’s pajamas, he graced thousands of libraries, universities, and art installations. He knew money was merely a symbol, a way to work his jazz, and he knew it would be a mistake to read a symbol in terms of itself, to see money as anything but a reflection of what we value.

But people do. This leads us to the current “fine-ancial crisis?” How can people feel fine if they think that money, rather than self-acceptance, love, and joyful work, can make them feel worthy and lead to happiness.

Money will not make us feel worthy or loved. We give money its worth. Worth and love, like happiness, are inside jobs.

I would personally rather feel worthy, loving, AND have money, but to imagine that lavish amounts of money could buy enough roses, Rolls Royces, and gold bathroom fixtures to make me feel appreciated would be to mistake the poetry for prose, the profit for the prophet.

It’s forgetting that money is the cat’s pajamas. And I don’t mean something that’s so rare you hardly ever see it anymore. No, no, no. Money is what we imagine it to be, a gift, a reflection of our appreciation for truth, goodness, and beauty, the fundamentals.

Our ideas about what has worth, core values, and how we exchange energy are there to be seen in the current so-called financial crisis. I say it’s an “All-Fine Crisis of Remembering, Reclaiming, Renaming.”

Like you, I prefer having money to the lack of it, wealth over poverty, but true wealth is to restore the inner comfort of being fine with what is, and with our purpose, as Mr. Carnegie was, and to know the jeweled prophet – the spiritual awakening — was life’s real profit, inside the heart.

There’s just no bank in any town with money like this.

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Favorite Money Quotes:

“In the bad old days, there were three easy ways of losing money – racing being the quickest, women the pleasantest and farming the most certain.” — William Pitt Amherst

“There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What the country really needs is a good five-cent nickel.”
— Franklin P. Adams

“A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.” — Henry David Thoreau

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Aloha nui loa!
Dr. Marya