Sometimes Life on Earth feels so foreign to you. It's not Earth that is so strange really. It is the world. Earth is rewarding. The world you have trepidation about.
The world seems to run on money. Business is money. And money seems also to be one of the silliest things you can imagine. There must be another way.
Advertising has taken over. Marketing has become like a God. It is as if love has been forgotten, and only gain is remembered, and gain at any cost.
How could this happen? What did happen? And, yet, you too are dependent upon money. Can money really be the basis of Life in the World?
Maybe it isn't really about money. Maybe it's really about the thrill of the chase. Maybe it's about competition with a capital C.
Why couldn't something else besides money be the medium of exchange? Yet you can't think what it could be. Smiles can't replace paper or coin. Flowers? Not likely, but what you don’t know even as money seems too callous and callow. Hmm, there seems to be something about the idea of the deal. The transaction seems to be the thing.
All you can really say is you want to live in a different kind of world where money isn't so overly-impersonal. Hand to hand, hand from hand, to and fro pockets and purses. What kind of florid energy is the stock exchange?
So real are exchanges, paid for with money, and so unreal to you. You don't have the answers. You can't figure it out. All you know is that it seems too cut and dried.
The way it is now, it is just so impersonal, even inhuman. It's like a hold-up in a bank. Money is stolen. Someone is left holding the bag.
There simply has to be a solution, only you don't know what it could be.
Not that you wouldn't mind being independently wealthy, as if that independence would mean you would have no worries. It's just you wouldn't have worries of a certain kind.
Yet the concept of money can’t be natural. Money can't be what it is made out to be.
Nor do you like the concept: "By the sweat of your brow…"
What do you really want, you ask yourself. Freedom, you suppose yet not lawlessness.
What can dislodge this discomfort you have when it comes to money and business affairs? Money is seeming to you as an indignity.
You don't at all like the idea of such borders.
Money may have become an empire of its own. You wouldn't mind an empire of your own. Sometimes the idea of living on a deserted island sounds wonderful. That would be getting away from it all, all the traffic and back and forth and catching a subway, and yet it would be lonely.
Well, it may be lonely for you now anyway.
Meanwhile, you follow along in step with a world that you frown at.
It’s time now for you to break out in a big smile, do some cartwheels. Commerce may not be your thing, yet it is something. Of course, money is what the world says it is, yet money may not be more fictitious than anything else in the world.
Right now, you don't want to hear the word economy again – THE economy. Or the word budget. Or the word spent or the word paid or rising prices or afford.
You would want Love to take over the world yet that seems improbable to you.
Nor do you want any more questions today. You don't. Except you ask:
"Where, God, where is peace? When is it mine?"