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Being an introvert, interacting with other humans is tiring. And yet I must, not only because the world is full of us, and I will be more healthy and live longer if I do, but because we all need each other in order to make our lives better. Every day we get help from others even if we never step outside our home or answer the phone. Short of moving out to the woods, building a shelter and finding all our food – an activity statistically likely to result in death – we are enmeshed in a web of human assistance.

This spring, my husband and I bought a house we are fixing up. We aren’t doing it alone thank the gods. We don’t have the time or skills to do everything that needs doing. We have a plumber, Kenny, and Steve, the fellow who did the gutters, but the fellow who has done a great deal of our work is Rey. Rey and his various helpers have re-roofed the shed in the back of the house, replaced the boards on the deck, cut doors in concrete and brick walls, and installed doors and windows. I too am a maker. I can do construction, sew things, and create art. But I physically cannot do everything. My body is not strong enough to do what Rey and his crew achieve in the space of a few weeks. If I did not have their help, it would take months, if it got done at all. I like very much that my energy is in this house. It is an act of magical creation to transform an space that has been empty and lonely for two years into warm and inviting nest. But it is not my energy alone. Rey enjoys his job. He takes pictures of everything he does. He teaches his helpers how to do things, and he keeps doing it, even when they abandon him to make more money working on their own. He helps me, he helps them. Yes, we pay him, and he pays them. But that doesn’t change the good feelings I have about a man who has made my life better. And he feels good about us too. He’s so happy with the amount of money that we have given him over the summer, that he offered us a half day of work for free. (And for the cynical, no, he doesn’t over-charge for his work.)

One of my friends finds the idea that things having prices is downright offensive. College, for example should be free, because you can’t put a price on something that has such a powerful effect on one’s life.  Many of my friends believe the healthcare should be completely free because you can’t put a value on human life. To even attempt to do so is morally wrong. But lets unpack this concept.

To say that all life has infinite value is the same thing as saying it has no value. In the realm of the non-embodied, there may (I wouldn’t know) be no need to pick and choose between one thing or another, or how one spends one’s time (whatever that might mean in such a context). But we live on Earth. If all things are equally valuable, how can we decide how to designate the limited amount of time and energy we have to use? If both Mary and Eva want to spend time with us, how do we decide? One might say “Both!” But it is a fact that spending a bunch of time with Mary and Eva together is not equivalent to spending less time with each of them individually. A judgment must be made. We are limited by our physicality.

There is a cookbook titled The Joy of Cooking. It was the go-to book in my mom’s household when I was growing up. Don’t know how to make something? Go look in the book. It had everything from how to cook nearly any kind of meat, [I believe I recall frog legs!] vegetables, pastry, desserts, aspic and an assortment of other things. When I moved out, mom gave me my own copy, and at my request, she gave me another when I got married many years later.

I’m not sure how much she actually felt joy about cooking. She’s an artist and has ADD, and cooking is not one of the things that grabs her attention. In fact, she can find it difficult to remember to eat, with the exception of sweet baked goods. Such was my introduction to cooking. Ie. I learned how to make cookies and bake bread, but had to teach myself to make a pot of soup. I don’t blame her for this lack. She did make food everyday, and if it wasn’t fancy, it was nourishing and I did eat some things that scared my friends: sea food was a regular at our dinner table in Pennsylvania, as was calf’s liver. But she didn’t teach me to cook any of it myself. I don’t think she had the energy, as a single mom, she wanted far more help from me than she got, and she didn’t have the will to fight with me once I hit my teens.

Listening is more than you being silent when other people talk. It is about giving what is in front of you your complete attention. That might be a person, or it might be a fur friend. It might be a tree, or a plant, or a river. Listening allows the voice of the other to sink into us and become part of who we are.

And that can change who we are.

In some ways, I’m glad I wasn’t in CT when Hurricane Sandy ripped through our lives. I have had enough stress in my life, that my adrenals are no longer high functioning. Too much, and I’m a wreck for days. But I’m almost sorry I missed seeing the land spirits save our house.

Gardening is one very effective way of connecting with land spirits, and I’ve been doing that since I moved to Connecticut. We don’t own the wooded lot behind our house, and because our own plot is tiny, we had lots of shade. I longed to grow vegetables, but made do with cherishing native shade perennials. Growing these is a slow process. They take years to spread, and I lost some of what I put in to slugs. My long term goal was to spread them into the woods where non-natives had taken over. I spent a lot of time outside talking to trees, and plants. As my spiritual practice became more defined, I set up a cupped stone as a place to leave libations for the land spirits.

Not everyone finds it easy to communicate with the gods, and even when we talk to them, they don’t always answer. And that is perhaps for the best. Being too god-touched makes being in the embodied world difficult. Driving for example demands one be present in one’s body. Raven Kaldera describes different ways of being god-ridden, and one involves being “locked in the trunk.” Raven has a human driver to make sure he gets from place to place, and I’m sure that’s a very good thing for other people on the road.

Our ancestors understand the requirements of embodiment. They’ve been there, and while most of them will never have driven a car – it is, after all, a fairly recent invention – they have used sharp tools, and had to get away from danger. And they want us to succeed. An Ancestor practice is one of the best and dare I say, safest, ways for an inexperienced beginning Pagan to connect with the non-embodied world. This is true because our beloved dead care about us in a most personal way.

Prosperity - a successful, flourishing, or thriving condition, especially in financial respects

We all want to be happy, and see those we care for to be happy as well. To be successful at what we do, to flourish and thrive is what all humans hope for. But why does it so often involve money? To be sure there are tribes that do not use money. The Bushmen of the Kalahri are happy to be eating ostrich eggs and boar’s heads, cooked in hot sand and embers, and feel extra privileged to get a bite of mostly cooked boar anus or a roasted beetle. Jakob Malas, a Khomani hunter from a section of the Kalahari that is now Gemsbok National Park says "The Kalahari is like a big farmyard, it is not wilderness to us. We know every plant animal and insect, and know how to use them. No other people could ever know and love this farm like us." * They do not feel poor. They have few material possessions, but they dance and sing.

And we might envy that happiness, that simplicity. Life in the Western world is hard apace, and filled with choices and conflicts. We lack the deep knowledge and support of each other that comes with living closely in groups. Modern economists call this social capital. And money can be very hard to think about. My mother, raised during the great depression, used to agonize over balancing her checkbook to the penny. She would sit at the kitchen table and moan and swear. The consequences for not thinking about money are high. We can loose our mode of transportation or our home. But it is worth noting that the consequences for the bushman who fails to think ahead are even higher.

In truth, even in the developed nations, we have the option of checking out of the economy. People have been making communes for generations, some of them non-monetary where resources and labor are pooled for a common goal. And yet only a small portion of the population chooses to do this at any given time.