Nobody owns the water, and the water nourishes all of us. It soaks into the land and nourishes the soil, the plants, and the animals, producing food for all life forms.
Water moves slowly downhill through aquifers, streams, rivers, and lakes, eventually into the ocean. It rises up again into the sky, blown by the winds, carried in the clouds, to fall again onto the land. A never-ending cycle of life-giving flow.
Where there’s very little water, life takes a different form. It’s dry, deserted, and desiccated. More sand, rocks, and mountains in mighty formations. Few people, plants, or animals, because we need water to thrive.
Where there’s a lot of water, life takes a different form again. It’s wet, powerful in its depth, sometimes devastating in its movement. The ocean, a flood, an inundation, the swell that makes waves that crash onto the land in endless cycles.
And something very special happens when human beings interact with water, not as takers but as managers.
A good farmer understands water. She knows its cycles, and she knows how precious it is. They know they have a responsibility to work with the water on their land so it moves through the landscape in a way that is nourishing for all.
The beauty of water is how it responds to distribution. When humans slow its movement, channel it, pool it, spread it across fields, and pipe it into troughs, and ensure it brings its power to all parts of their country, everything thrives.
Managing water is an act of love. It takes care, thoughtfulness, detailed observation, rationality, and responsiveness. Experiments may work or fail. Weather events may change the flow dramatically overnight.
Learning takes place over years, not days. There is no course or book that can make you a master of water. They can only give guidance.
It’s the daily work of the farmer to manage water on their land that creates a profound change in the health and well-being of the entire landscape.
Water responds to human care, and humans can sense the loving response of the water. It is a symbiotic relationship.
Money is like water.
It is a flow of energy through the landscape of human life that has the power to nourish all life on this planet.
It moves from one person to another, one organization to another, providing the means for families to eat, children to go to school, entrepreneurs to solve problems, artists to create, and people everywhere to live out their lives with dignity and joy.
Where there is very little flow of the energy of money, people share what they can. They work together, sing and dance together, and talk. The endless creativity of humans emerges in whatever ways are open to them: children picking through garbage to find the leftovers that still have some value; parents working long hours for tiny wages to make sure their children can eat.
Where there is a lot of money, so much power is concentrated that it can overcome almost any obstacle in its way, create whatever the mind can conceive, build empires, and fuel vast acts of destruction.
And something very special happens when human beings manage money in a way that is directed towards thriving.
It is not possible for me to truly thrive if you are not thriving too.
You and I may have very different needs and desires, just as trees have different needs than flowers or insects. We each have our own version of living a good life, and we create it together, not separately.
We can manage money the way a good farmer manages water: we can slow down its movement so it reaches all people; we can pool it in communities so it creates local wealth.; we can channel it to the places where it’s lacking and share it from the places where it’s abundant; we can distribute it across the entire landscape of human life so each part is able to thrive as it makes its way through the great cycles of the economy.
This is the responsibility of humans (that’s you and me). We don’t need to wait for someone else to show us or rescue us. We don’t need more money to get started. Like water, we start with what’s there and discover how to manage it so more of life is thriving than before.
Money moves through our lives in a constant flow of exchange. It is as powerful as we allow it to be. It enables us all to create as much as we have courage for. It holds the power to starve through scarcity and to destroy through excess. We have the capacity to manage it for mutual thriving.
Nobody owns the money.
