The Green Goddess Ponders the Energy of Money

Ah, the Green Goddess has decided to take on a Big Topic! She has been visited at night recently by a wide-mouth frog owl (not that there seem to be frogs in the grounds of Castle Green--unfortunately, but the owl is probably enjoying the fat rats which still manage to dig underground to the compost heap)! As an aside, before the Big Topic, the Green Goddess was at first unaware that it was an owl visiting in the garden--she sounded more like the water pump from the tank down the bottom of the garden; so the Man of Action, the Green Goddess' beloved, lept out of bed to fix the offending item--it was then that the owl was discovered!

Now the Green Goddess understands fully the sybolism of the owl: she represents wisdom. (A message from the Kingdom of Nature for the Green
Goddess to use some of her own).

The Greek Goddess, Athena, is one of the Green Goddess' great inspirations--she carries the spear, and has the owl on her shoulder. Athena was the child of one of the wives of Zeus. Interestingly, Zeus was afraid of having a son who would overthrow him. As fate would have it, Zeus had a daughter called Athena who was born fully armed with a spear in her hand! Now we all could have the spear in our hand and an owl on our shoulder if we decided to harness our "personal power".

The Green Goddess feels that too many people now equate personal power with money, instead of money just being energy. What money does buy is the access to opportunity and quality in goods and services--it does not buy "powerfulness". None-the-less we chase this elusive money energy frantically as if it were some new kind of god.

It seems in life that everything is either time or money. We in the west do the money thing well--although we do not seemed to have learnt much from that journey. It would be a most insightful and worthwhile journey if we now tried the "time thing". Let us discover its value.

There are many reasons why the Green Goddess, a servant of the nature sprites that she is, would like to try the "time thing". First of all, it would involve less consumption, less "bigfoot" which would be great for the planet. Secondly, all the people who rush from place to place in grey suits and endlessly catching aeroplanes might get to know themselves a little better. The Green Goddess knows that this can be a worrying prospect; but in the long-term it sorts out the real issues like what is really important in life. Finally, there are the joys of the simple pleasures and leading a life of integrity--the Green Goddess' favourite catch phrase.

Simple pleasures--our overburdened senses seem to have forgotten what these are eg reading a good book, smelling a rose, spending time with the family (and not just "quality" time--the junk time as well where lots of stuff happens), picking vegetables from the garden, and having a bath (a high-ranking pleasure in our drought-affected land).

Now, don't get me wrong, the Green Goddess knows that time has a price--it is just a matter of what price you are prepared to put on it. We have consumption choices every day, it is just that we don't normally pit them against time choices. Or we feel that we do not have the choices at all. If we let go the power hold that money has over us, and think a little about our personal power instead, we may find we do have the choice where before we thought we had none.

Footnote: this has been the Green Goddess' personal time choice for the last hour or so--and what a luxurious and delightful one it has been! Time now to give the owl a brief nap and to go out into the world, spear in hand to fight on, with the nose to the grindstone to earn more time to have a "personal power moment"!