by Ben Hewitt
Ah, money. It had been on my mind of late because, much to my consternation, things were a little tight. Not threateningly so, but a recent spate of car trouble had cut a pretty wide swath through our modest savings, and I worried that it would not be replenished before something else broke. Of late, I had found myself obsessing over our finances, not quite able to convince myself that everything was going to work itself out. This was humbling to me, for it revealed the weak links of my assumptions regarding monetary wealth: namely, that while money can serve as our master it can also serve as our liberator. Suddenly, my entire thesis—that the accumulation of money beyond our immediate needs demeans and impoverishes us—felt a bit shaky. Because what I really wanted at the moment, if I’m to be entirely frank, was a bit more dough.
As it turns out, Heidi’s truck had also broken recently, in a fairly catastrophic way that suggested its next journey might be on the back of a flatbed, bound for the nearest scrapyard. No one seemed in any hurry to resolve the situation, however, and so for now it sat forlornly in the driveway, awaiting its fate. I parked near it, but not too near, in case whatever affliction had felled it was contagious.
Erik stowed his battered skis in the back of my Subaru and directed me up the same hill we’d driven nearly a year before, on our way to liberating a dozen or so pounds of morels from the forest floor. He wore wool pants, a wool sweater, a wool sweater vest, and a wool hat. I’d no doubt his socks were also wool and that if he wore underwear, it was the product of the sheep species. All his visible wool garments were frayed at the edges, suggesting years of use. There was large smudge of soot on the side of his nose; it curled around and disappeared into his left nostril. I considered mentioning it to him, but realized he wouldn’t care; it had long been obvious to me that Erik placed minimal stock in his physical appearance.
As we climbed out of town, the patches of bare soil between the islands of snow began to shrink, and soon the ground was white . . . almost. It was not the soft, pure white of a cold winter’s day; instead, it was dingy and almost gray, possessing a granularity that did not look very inviting. But at least it was snow. Earlier in the day, I’d doubted the conditions would enable us to ski, but of course Erik had known differently. He’d known where the snow would be.
We nosed up a dirt road, barely wide enough to accommodate a single vehicle. My car sputtered worryingly. “I used to live in a real sweet cabin up here,” Erik said, and for a moment I became confused and a little disoriented: Was it the same cabin we’d stumbled upon during our mushroom hunt? Erik chuckled. “No, no. A different one.” The road dead-ended into a misshapen snow bank, and we disembarked. We strapped on our skis, then glided into the woods on an abandoned logging road. I could see the parallel indentations of an older ski track, faded by a few days of above-freezing temperatures. I pointed to the tracks with my eyebrows raised; Erik nodded. They were his.
Soon, the logging road began to climb, and shortly thereafter, I fell in behind Erik. Shortly after that, a distance opened between us, small at first, but growing to become considerable. I huffed and sweated and paused a moment to gather myself; Erik shuffled on with apparent ease, his body tuned to the rigors of self-propulsion. It was a little dispiriting, but then, I’d expected it, remembering how effortlessly he strode up the mountain the previous May. Before long, Erik cast a glance over his shoulder, saw that I’d been spit into the distance, and pulled up. For the rest of our outing, he checked his speed and we skied in sync.
Toward the top of the hill, Erik veered from the logging road and I followed. Away from the cleared path, the forest was dense and we picked our way through the meager openings between trees, mostly maple, but also some ash and yellow birch. A rough branch scraped hard across my cheek, and I paused to pull off a glove and place my fingers to the wound. A red drop. I flicked it to the ground, and the crimson dot spread as it melted into the surrounding snow.
We crossed the tracks of a moose, pressed deep and still crisp at the edges, only hours old. After a few hundred feet, the forest began to thin a little and then, rather abruptly, we came to a wall of stone. It was maybe 3 feet high, and assembled from roundish specimens, some small and manageable by human strength; others large and beyond the capacity of any man or woman, no matter their stature or will. The stones were various hues of gray and brown, and many had tumbled from where they had been perched decades or even centuries before.
I gazed along the line formed by the wall, which ran in both directions as far as I could see. So many rocks, so much toil, and I thought immediately of the Yapese, who’d used stone as currency. To gather their money, they’d frequently traveled to distant islands, where they’d quarried the stones and then rafted them home behind canoes. It sounds absurd, crazy even. But of course it’s no different from what happens with gold, which holds value simply because we decide it should.40 And it’s hardly different from paper money, minus the devastation wrought by mining and processing. I wondered for a moment about the feasibility of using a stone wall as currency. Hey, if the Yapese could do it. . . .
Erik broke the silence. “I’m really curious: How long did it take to build a wall like this?” He rested a bare hand atop it, as if feeling the stone against his palm might somehow give him a sense of what had gone into the wall’s construction. I reached out, too; it was cold, rough. It felt old. Erik was quiet for a moment, and then: “It’s kind of cool to think about the soil under this wall. I wonder how different it is. . . . I mean, it’s been under there for all these years.”
I nodded but did not say anything, primarily because I did not know what to say. Maybe Erik’s observation meant little; maybe it was nothing more than the musings of a man whose observations had a tendency to fall far outside the boundaries of the contemporary American experience, for try as I might, I could not think of anyone else who would come across a tumbledown stone wall deep in the woods of rural Vermont and wonder about the soil lying beneath it, and it occurred to me that perhaps this meant nothing more than that Erik was a little nuts.
But if Erik was nuts, what did that say about me and my own musings on the value of stone? Suddenly, I felt a bit—no, not merely a bit: a lot—silly for having allowed myself to wallow in such senselessness. Here I was, with a barely running 18-year-old car, an even older, even more barely running truck, and a severely depleted savings account, and I was hanging out in the woods, thinking about the value of a freakin’ stone wall? I was spending my day—this small bit of my life—skiing over a barely skiable crust of granular snow with a man who saw fit to ponder a patch of soil he would never see? I mean, really: What the hell was wrong with me? I should be home, at my desk, chasing work that, even if it weren’t entirely meaningful, would at least generate the income I so desperately needed to provide for myself and my family, conscious economy or no.
Yet despite my misgivings and sudden crisis of confidence, I suspected there was a deeper truth lurking in Erik’s curiosity, and I wondered if it was this: Most of us have aligned ourselves so thoroughly with the unconscious economy that it has occupied us not only physically, but also emotionally and intellectually. To pause to consider the history of a wall, or the state of the soil beneath it, strikes me as a bit crazy only because I cannot articulate any rational justification for doing so. But of course the parameters for what I deemed “rational” had long ago been set by the unconscious economy, in which so many of my actions and thoughts were oriented around the business of making and managing money.
For the first time, I considered how it was that Erik’s indifferent relationship to money freed him not just physically, but intellectually. In other words, it wasn’t merely time (life) he gained by reducing his reliance on money to a bare minimum; it was also the capacity to think for himself, simply because so few of his waking hours were consumed by either the task of earning or thinking about money. Try as we might (and I’ve tried), we are capable of but one thought at a time, which means that time spent dwelling on matters of finance is by
default time not spent thinking about, well, much of anything else. We tend to think of freedom in the context of flesh and blood, but of course our thoughts can be shackled too, and this explains, in part, why I could not help questioning the value of standing beside a pile of stones in the middle of February and considering what lay beneath it, or how and why it had been constructed. My body was free. My mind was not. I had given myself only half a gift.
How often, I wondered, do we deny ourselves these gifts, much in the same way we deny ourselves the pleasure of offering our gifts to others, be they intellectual, artistic, or of pure toil? I can’t afford that, we say, and we believe it, because we inhabit the unconscious economy where everything, not least our time, has value, rather than worth.41 It is not hard to understand why this view is seductive; as Lewis Hyde so poetically points out in The Gift: “The excitement of commodities is the excitement of possibility, of floating away from the particular to taste the range of available life. There are times when we want to be aliens and strangers, to feel how the shape of our lives is not the only shape, to drift before a catalog of possible lives, staring at the glass arcades of shoes that are sensible and shoes for taking a chance, buses leaving town and the gray steam railway depot where men and women hurry by with their bags.”
In other words, the autonomy and faux-individualism offered by the unconscious economy may well be undermining our true wealth—they may well be driving wedges between us and also between humanity and the natural world, keeping us from offering our true gifts to the world and even to ourselves. But damned if doesn’t feel good to avail ourselves of all the easy choices we are offered, the impacts of which remain invisible to us through the prism of distance and dilution. The world is so vast and resilient, it offers the illusion of absorbing the ramifications of the unconscious economy. But of course there is a point of saturation, and, in so many regards, we seem to have reached that point.
Erik and I skied on, and once I was moving again, I felt better. Lighter. Nothing had changed, really: My car was still in poor repair, and my bank account wasn’t doing much better. I had paying work, but only just enough to meet my family’s ongoing needs, and there seemed to be no immediate prospect of evading my need for money by acquiring more money. I would need to be resourceful, but I’d done that before and could do it again. We fell into the rhythm of skiing, our arms pistoning forward and back, forward and back, our skis sliding over the snow, reluctant at the onset of each stride, but then overcoming some law of friction that I will never understand, to glide effortlessly over the ground.
We reached the top of a long climb and then turned the tips of our skis to face downhill; a logging road lay before us, curving through the forest, as if following a path laid by an unfurling ball of twine. I pushed off first, and soon found myself achieving a precarious velocity. I heard Erik push off behind me.
At once I whooped. It was an act so spontaneous and uncalculated even I was surprised by the ring of my voice, and as it came I had the strangest thought: Lewis Hyde described the excitement of commodities as the excitement of possibility, of “floating away from the particular to taste the range of available life.” But why should we allow the range of available life to be defined by the commodity marketplace? Could it not include two men, on a late winter’s day, careening down a logging road on their skis, riding the ragged edge of control? Could it not include wondering about the soil under a stone wall?
Commodities—and the money required to procure them—offer us one view of the possible. Or maybe it is multiple views, all connected and defined on some level by the unconscious economy. Indeed, it is fair to say that for most of us, our lives, relationships, and even our thoughts have come to be dominated by the unconscious economy, which we believe offers the “range of available life,” as if anything and everything worth experiencing can somehow be priced and marketed. We know this is not true, and yet we are barraged by messages insisting that even the path to those experiences that lie outside the commodity marketplace is paved by the procurement of those very commodities. Consider the notorious MasterCard “priceless” advertising campaign, whereby the realization of that priceless moment, the Holy Grail of what we know to be the richest of human experience, comes only after the acquisition of multiple commodity products, all conveniently charged to our credit cards.
Lewis Hyde is clearly not articulating his personal beliefs regarding the range of available human experience and their necessary link to the unconscious economy, but rather, I think, our unspoken cultural belief that our choices—regarding what we do and even what we think—are limited to, and by, what can be bought.
As I shot out of the woods at the bottom of the logging road, with my cheeks flushed from pushing against the cold winter air, and my legs pleasantly fatigued from our journey, I was again reminded that the unconscious economy’s power to define my life was in large part dependent on my granting it this power.
In other words, the power was mine.
* * *
40 It’s worth pointing out that gold does have industrial value, primarily in electronics. But this accounts for only a fraction of world supply; the vast majority is made into jewelry or held as a store of wealth, and it is these uses that largely determine the price of gold.
41 This is not to say there is no overlap between “value” and “worth,” or that both cannot be peacefully embodied by the same object or experience. Consider Erik’s bicycle, which he’d purchased at a fixed price (value) and which could be resold for particular price (value), but which also represented to him the sum total of all his experiences aboard it (worth), as well as the manner in which he earned the money necessary to assume its possession (value and worth).
[ CHAPTER ELEVEN ]
IN WHICH I LAY IT OUT.
I HAVE now spent the better part of 2 years in the frequent company of Erik Gillard and the even more frequent company of my thoughts regarding money and wealth. In full candor, I sometimes worry that 2 years is not enough, that even 2 decades might not be sufficient to fully unravel all the threads of my expectations and associations relating to these matters. These are threads that have been spun and woven for the better part of my life; they are like a cocoon I have wrapped around me, and at times I still find myself struggling to emerge from its embrace.
I call our society’s way of life the “unconscious economy” and the way of life I’m striving for the “conscious economy” because I fervently believe that the only sane way forward—indeed, the only possible way forward—is to become conscious of both our actions and our intent, and to understand the ramifications of each. We must awaken to the issues and then choose, with mindfulness and deliberate process, to move toward a personal economy that acknowledges and reveres true wealth. We must understand that this economy and wealth are not rooted in the language of money. They are inclusive of money, of course, but they return it to its rightful place by recognizing it for what it is: a tool; a means to an end, but never an end itself; a thing not inherently good or evil, but capable of being a conduit for either; and a poor substitute for the relationships and interconnectedness—in both the human and natural realm—it displaces.
People often ask how my life has changed as my views on money and wealth have changed, and this is a question that is at once very easy and very difficult to answer. The easy answer is that I feel liberated. The more I’ve let go of the notion that the accumulation of money should serve as a measure of my “success” or “failure” or even my “wealth,” the closer I come to understanding the true definitions of these things. I don’t know if the accumulation of money and an understanding of wealth as being something other than the accumulation of money are mutually exclusive; I suspect they are not. Surely there are people who are capable of holding each of these birds in a separate hand, never confusing one for the other. But that is not I, and, I suspect, it is not most of us. I have come to see how, in my life, the perception of money as a metric for my well-being tends to be a self-fulfil
ling prophecy: The more I believe the story it tells, the more I want to live this story. And the more I live it . . . well, you get the point.
But it’s not really so simple, is it? Because of course I need money, as do you and as does pretty much everyone else on the planet. And in a sense, the freedom to reframe my relationship to money and wealth is the freedom of someone who is already privileged in these regards. I am not blind to this truth, or the irony inherent in it. We are all connected to the diseased system of contemporary monetary policy and the unconscious economy. We are all dependent on it for our very survival, and one of the highest tragedies of its sickness is that our dependence forces us to make decisions that only make us more dependent, as we continue to erode the underlying resource and relationship bases that form the core of a conscious economy.
To be clear: My interest is almost entirely on what can be done at a personal and community level to propagate a conscious economy. It is not that I don’t believe there are systemic changes that can and should be made; indeed, there very much are, and for anyone interested in big picture thinking on these matters, I would again refer you to Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics. Eisenstein’s thinking is at once logical, clear, and refreshing, and he’s not afraid to put forth proposals that, were they to be adopted, would bring sweeping, transformational change to both our perception of wealth and our relationship to it.