How to Think About Wealth-Building That is Good for You & Nature

07 Jun How to Think About Wealth-Building That is Good for You & Nature

Here is how to think about wealth-building that is good for you & Nature. Also how to have feelings about it. Feelings and thoughts will guide you to wisdom as this tree-woman’s heart and mind flow into leafing branches. Image by DG-RA.

How to Think About Wealth-Building That is Good for You & Nature

There is a secret in this image about how to think about wealth-building that is good for you & Nature. I’ve cropped the image from our previous post in this series, on the idea of wealth-building that is good for you & Nature to create a thinking + doing dichotomy. I know this is simplistic, but I’ll highlight thinking this week before doing by using the top half of last week’s image. Notice the woman’s mind and her heart unite in this image, and that they flow into fruition in her leaves and branches.

That is our inspiration for a fresh starting point how to think about wealth-building that is good for you & Nature.

The Most Important Thing

If you take just one thing from this post, make it this: Think, and feel, before doing. Start (anything) with thinking and feeling. You can make all kinds of possibilities happen in your mind. This gives them form but it’s not physical form. This is very important. You can invent worlds and allow them to melt away, put things together and break them apart. It takes mental energy, and is an important form of creation. (This is the only actual creation humans do, but that’s for another post.)

Working this way saves you and Nature time, resources, and energy, which is an intangible kind of resources.

What are Thinking and Feeling that Build Wealth?

Here are how to start thinking-feeling about how to build wealth in a way that’s good for you & Nature:

Thinking

Use your rationality. Allow comparison, duality, and multiple options to arise and be entertained by your rational mind. Rationality has gotten a bad rap in the past few decades. Don’t succumb to the hype. Refine, don’t throw away this part of yourself! We have rationality for a reason. Weighing pros vs. cons and researching to gather information, including financial information are also part of thinking.

Feeling

Here, start by grieving. If you have trouble, start by acknowledging all you need to grieve about how you and other humans have built wealth in a way that was not good for the Earth. Remember our Lake Erie example from last week, and realize it was not good for you either. Once you have a clear sense of how you do not want to build wealth, you are light-years ahead of everyone else. This is essential work that has to be done before we can even consider building wealth in a way that is both good for us (as we conceive ourselves separately from Nature), and Nature. Once you have done this, use feeling and imagination to create worlds and uncreate them, allowing yourself to begin wherever you begin and then helping yourself zero in on the ways very generally you want to build wealth. Continue refining your creating in this way, until you have creations you feel good about and you are in alignment about. That means they feel good with your heart, mind, gut, abilities, and intentions for yourself and the planet.

Wisdom-making

Now bring your thinking and your feeling together. Here we have compassion, contemplation, combining imagination with rationality. They don’t cancel each other out. They support each other. Begin to sketch wise plans in your mind or on paper. Remember the saying: “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Consider this. And if your wisdom planning is blocked, see if you are using your ideas of the perfect to hold back the good you can create.

Notice how good this feels, not to impact the Earth with your thoughts. Notice how often we humans think literally nothing of impacting the Earth with our thoughts.This in itself could be an entire blog post. Right? It is truly stunning.

What You May Not Have Noticed You Receive from Working This Way

Notice this lack of ecological consequences is in fact itself a way of working with Nature: not asking Her to produce for you before you are ready to receive, before you are sure what you want, before you have weighed the consequences (ecological and otherwise) of how you want to build wealth. There is no waste, misuse, misappropriation of resources. Your mind is your natural resource to be used in just this way.

OK, on to the next post in this series with its focus on taking action, doing!