MNN Column for December 2009 THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

What it my imagination or did the Christmas season start earlier this year? I saw Christmas lights going up two weeks before Thanksgiving in Miami, Florida, and in the local Albuquerque stores Christmas came right after Halloween. I read this as fearful economics.
Basically economics is an exchange system. It describes the ebb and flow of what is materially valuable within individuals, families, clans and nations. Before the world cash markets we bartered. The money system grew from silver and gold mines, the lands and the labor of indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is a system that has sustained few yet required the labor of many. In our indigenous cultures it is morally unlawful to acquire wealth beyond need, and reprehensible to ignore the care of the needy.
A system created from trickery, sustained from the need of a few to control and own world markets is motivated by fear of not having or being enough. There will never be enough for the greedy. That kind of hunger is never satisfied. That hunger destroyed and dispossessed us from our original lands.
There is no separation between economics, social, political, or spiritual systems. Each is interconnected. The high rate of diabetes we are experiencing is directly related to crash and rally of the economic system. Each system within the whole either supports life, or it degenerates. For life to be sustained, whether it is a bio system like Earth, or a cultural system (each culture is an energetic system), there must be balanced flow in and out. To heal means addressing the source of the problem, to bring what is broken back into balance. It means changing the story.
We must return to the original teachings, which stress respect, dignity, creativity and forgiveness. In these teachings the power of the individual is a crucial denominator to the power of the whole. We must start at the root of meaning. What makes meaning that will sustain us? Does the acquisition and control of material goods by a few individuals serve all of us? How do we take care of what we have? And most of all, at the heart of the question is how we value who we are and who we are becoming.
We have to go back to the beginning of the story and remember why we are here and what we are truly about, as spirit beings that inhabit the earthly body. What do we need for true growth and fulfillment? How do we meet challenges? Do we take care of our resources? Are we generous? Do we take care of those who cannot care for themselves? Are we thinking and acting, with our descendents in mind?
We have to want the shift. We must acknowledge water and all of our resources as sentient beings and treat them as such. We must consider that our reason to be here is to serve each other, to be there in joy and sorrow. There is no room for laws that compel us to throw away our grandchildren, so there is more money for others. And perhaps most of all, we must take care of our collective imagination, to re-vision a system that will sustain and take care of all of us. We must create fresh stories and images that promote regenerative metaphor and meaning and give value to what matters. Artists, visionaries and those coming up feed the people with fresh images.
When you see the earth from the perspective of the guiding stars you know without question that we are one being, that what anyone thinks, speaks or acts grows the potential of the next generations. We then understand that no one can own the earth or what grows upon or within the earth, that there is enough for everyone. This is the true Christmas spirit. Imagine.