(Temple of the Twelve) Yellow: An Abundant Mindset

On my last day working with Yellow, I still don't have resolution to my housing limbo. I don't know if we'll have to move or not. I've realized that's part of the lesson--that inner sunshine, that safety net of daily practice, outreach, and gratitude must operate independently from my circumstances. I can't be grateful because things are going swimmingly or because hard times have passed--I have to continue to be grateful during those storms and trials. Yellow is about where I go when things turn hard and how my mind perceives the events in my life.

Everywhere I've looked this month, I've seen yellow flowers. I've bought them for myself at my local grocer and seen a variety of cheerfully bright wildflowers winking at me all over town. They're at the beach, where I've played with my son, and they're cultivated carefully in the bank parking lot, and they're tucked into the woodlands along our daily drives and walks. The blossoms in my own life, with Yellow, are blooming gently as well. We finally joined our local Unitarian Universalist church for services and found a community that welcomes my pagan beliefs and nurtures my drive for philanthropic work, belonging, and my need to be needed. It serves my husband and my son equally well. It's a strong thread in my safety net of sunshine. The homeschooling group I've joined is a great mom-resource for me and my new swap community here on LiveJournal is off to a warm and wonderful start. I'm a lifelong loner so this is fairly new territory for me to be so social and interconnected with others.

The final sermon of my U.U.-infused Yellow Month was about abundant thinking. Do we feel the warmth of our abundance every day or the chilling darkness of scarcity? Are we content and secure or do we feel that we've slipped behind in a race for resources? Do we cheer the successes and joys of those around us or do we harbor resentment and jealousy that they got something good and we did not? Are we trusting community to hold us or are we fighting an endless battle of survival alone? Do we live with hearts open or shielded and shelled? That frantic scarcity mindset, the basic belief that there is not enough to go around and so each individual (and maybe their loved ones) must compete against everyone and everything else to get theirs, to survive, has so damaged our communal and tribal lines. It divides people and divides groups. There are "us" and "them" divisions all over the place. With perceived lack, there isn't enough water, food, jobs, money, security, happiness, rights, attention, fame, beauty, talent, nor even salvation enough to go around. We think some will have it and others will not and we scramble, we scrabble, we compete--we ration, we hoard, we grasp. And it's killing us from spirit on out to physical reality.

There is enough to go around if we start to consider the difference between "enough for me" and "enough for we". There is enough abundance in the world if I can live without locking the bomb shelter doors behind me, if I can 'relax the reflex of grab', 'to love and not to hold'. The first step, beyond gratitude and the peaceful mindset of abundance and contentment, is to reconnect with community. What I've failed in is that I'm living as an island when I could be a strong and supportive, supported part of that vast tapestry of humanity. I can trust community to hold me when I need it and I can provide support when it is needed of me. When did the idea of becoming an individual become so central to the society I live in? When was it that neighbors could no longer pop next door for a borrowed cup of sugar, a shared treehouse, a communal lawn mower? When did it become so shameful to not be able to stand on your own two feet, alone, when all along what everyone has needed is the give and take, contributions and honest needs, of a community acting together? Together, if we expect abundance and trust there is enough and give and share and see what we have instead of what we lack, couldn't we thrive instead of just survive?

I came into the month feeling no bit of Yellow in my core. I couldn't relate to it. I've realized, though, that I couldn't relate because it is inherent to me. I haven't had to struggle and work with Yellow lessons. It is one of my super-powers and perhaps the one, more than anything, that has made me who I am.

The question is--what radical, life-changing things could I do with it?

( Wendell Berry's poem, The Wisdom to Survive, was read during the service. I share it here. )