Blog by Valerie

When I was growing up, I watched my father hoard food, books, even household cleaning items. I remember the pain I felt when he told me the story of realising as a young teenager that he’d read every book in the library van that visited his small town every month. He went to university, the first in his family, so there was no shortage of books to read from the age of 19, but he couldn’t shake those early experiences, he worried he’d have to do without if he didn’t have things on hand. Coming from a home where I had access to multiple libraries, and many used and new book shops that we frequented regularly, I was happy to give away and trade books with trust that if I needed one again I’d find it. I didn’t need to be weighed down by a home library. But I also remember the pain I felt when I went with my dad to our favourite used book store with some boxes of books from cleaning out my room at my parents’ house. He didn’t understand why I wanted to let them go, and kept asking if I was sure. But he didn’t try to stop me. (Image from here)

Growing up, I watched my mother hoard money (and related to that, jewellery); and though it may sound strange, she also hoarded social privilege. But it felt more intense than my father trying to rebalance some pain from childhood. Hers felt existential, as if she hoarded and guarded these things like her life depended on it. The first time I earned money through babysitting, I came home with a twenty dollar bill feeling proud of myself. I had gotten the little girl to sleep despite one of her dogs nonstop fearful bellowing about a thunderstorm. My mother asked how much I made, and when I showed her, she took it, and said that she needed a cut. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. It didn’t feel like it. Then she wouldn’t give it back to me, and taunted me, hiding the bill and waving it out of my reach. That felt scary and deflating, one of many power and control games she played with me. It was as if she needed money more than she needed to be connected with me and would abuse her power and trusted role in my life to get it.

When my father died many years later, that was my experience with her as we entered into estrangement. My mother chose money, lies and trickery over me. I have come to see that as rooted in her Jewish wounding, where through being disconnected from country for milennia, she learned to existentially cling to money, jewellery, and social status to survive. I understand that’s her survival strategy, integrated with identity and culture. I can’t be intimate with those wounds though, it feels too destructive and desolate to me, like I’m spinning in a hopeless vortex of nihilism and materialism, disconnected from the planet and my body. (Image from here)

I don’t yet feel respectful of what I experience as collectively acting out a traumatic and highly destructive wound. I focus most of my energy on deepening compassion and processing grief. I have been feeling this a lot lately with actions in the Middle East. I feel like Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian peoples are my spiritual kin. The hatred some of us feel towards ourselves and each other is so intense, it makes my heart feel heavy with grief. The material greed and holding in supremacy certain people and lands while dehumanising and exploiting other peoples and lands pains me deeply. I have been to Jerusalem, which many consider to be the most holy city in the world. I felt its deep and rich history. It also felt very layered in pain and messiness. There was tension, some bombing, and UN vehicles patrolling when I was there. It felt like a powder keg with everyone on edge, and that was fifteen years ago.

I choose a worldview in which all lives lost, of any culture, of any animal or plant, are existentially equal, though I obviously experience some of those losses with much more intensity than others because of my own identity and connections. As this worldview and my values have solidified over time, I have found myself recently with more material ease than ever before in my adult life. I had gotten used to embodying ordeal, living without enough material wealth, devaluing its importance to rebalance growing up with my mother putting material wealth über Alles, humbly acknowledging that I needed to find ways to be more financially stable and secure, trying things and burning out, growing savings and going through them.

I’m grateful for some material ease and abundance now, and I’m grateful for experiences of lack so these experiences have more meaning to me. I don’t think I’ve now got it all figured out. I do know that weeding by going into trauma and negativity have been more valuable to me than trying to plant positive affirmations. I’ve found healthy beliefs emerge when I clear the way. And, at the moment, some material wealth has emerged. I’m allowing myself to feel more ease when we buy groceries, practicing saving without hoarding, and humbly sharing as we go. I have started to feel lately like for the first time in this life I am living the life I want to and am meant for.

Here’s hoping your relationship with material wealth feels balanced and centred too. Blessings at a season of reflecting on thankfulness. I’m thankful you care enough to read this blog. And if you are able, I humbly ask you to consider leaving a review of my book Healing through Indigenous Wisdom on Amazon, giving a copy to a friend, or otherwise passing on the word. Sacred reciprocity makes the world go round (fodder for a future blog).

 If you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.