There Is A Better Way...

I am a 21 year-old student from Finland.
 

It makes me sad to hear how Americans are suffering.

Here, our taxes are high but we all benefit from them.

I grew up in the countryside and always had access to the same services that people in the city did.

My university is known around the world in my field and my education is not only free, but my government pays ME to go to university. Everyone has a right to this.
 

Everyone has a right to the best healthcare, there is no such thing as health insurance.
 

I am young now and able to take risks and pursue my passion because I will never have to worry about starving if I loose my job or my business fails.
 

I know that when I am old my state pension will be there for me so that I can enjoy my retirement.
 

We call this the Nordic Model, and under it we live well and our businesses are among the most competitive in the world.

 

I am grateful to have been born a citizen of a country that cares for its people, and I hope that one day the USA will take example from us.

I am the 99%

 
We are the 99%

 

Just Say No!...

My grown kids worry about my homeless/moneyless situation;

They want to know why I just can't/won't play THE GAME...

Because THE GAME is toxic and kills...

My soul demands that I refuse to collaborate and enable THE GAME, and to do what I can to interrupt, if not end, it;

I bear witness to, and call out, its sociopathic cruelty - NOT IN MY NAME - and I pay a material price for that...

And the price we all pay for playing THE GAME is much higher than the loss of physical comfort and "security"...

In this case, just saying "NO", abstaining, is really the only strategy we have that will work in ending the madness...

 

Post Script:

I've had a lot of response to this post, particularly from older women who are in the same situation, walking the same revolutionary path;

We've turned our backs on security to push for change;

Our souls want/need to help heal the world, for all the other beings on the planet, and for our children and grandchildren... 

“The world will be saved by the Western woman.”

~Dalai Lama

Vancouver Peace Summit, 2009

Divesting Myself Of My Investments...

OK... living in this huge, lavish house for a week has finally cemented the realisation that our "stuff" really is a millstone around our necks in our current circumstances... 

It's costing us our mobility and flexibility, it's costing us money, sitting in storage, and it's costing our friends' energy, taking up space in their homes...

All "stuff" is energy, and while we're holding onto all this stuff, that's energy not available to us to live fully...

And it's creating an energetic block via the conflict between my mixed emotional needs - the need to live very simply and the need to have an outward manifestation of who I am, a reassurance that I exist, and an (illusory) sense of security...

So - I'm selling all the furniture now, except the boy's bed (he isn't ready for that, even though he hasn't slept in it for more than a year now!)... 

If you're in or near Seattle and you want to exchange cash for beautiful things for your space - furniture, rugs, lamps - then let me know; I've posted photos below, of what we have as it was set up in our last home...

I have to do this if we are going to go back to Australia anyway... might as well start now...

And some of you might have thought this was an obvious solution to my lack of cashflow, BUT, it's not so easy to give up what had meant "home" in one sense... besides, I'm a crab, astrologically - I hold on and I go at things sideways!...

I remember my parents coming with me and my sister from Holland to New Zealand, with all of their lives contained in four wooden tea-chests... and how they worked hard and played by the rules to make a home for us all - and what a toll that took on an already dysfunctional relationship (as it's doing in this family we are staying with)... and how each of them died "owning" a modest amount of "stuff", still paying mortgages, sick and lonely and unhappy...

And I remember 20 years' as a military wife, moving every 9-24 months, just when I had gotten our houses - both rental and owned - looking/feeling like a home...

And I remember coming to the US with the boy, with 46 years' of my life, and 8 months' of his, all contained in 24 boxes...

And I remember creating the home you see here in these photos for me and the boy - the only home we have had in the past 10 years...

And some might think that this is the last of the slide into the gutter, and marks us out as failures in life...

But why shouldn't this be happening to us?   What makes us so special?

People all over this planet have been having to make this choice over the past several millenia.. 

More and more people are facing this reality daily in the "west", and even in these circumstances, we have much more than billions of others on the planet...

And I look at how people in this house are doing life - despite the fact that both adults are working and making good money, they're only holding onto all their beautiful stuff by the skin of their teeth, and I know that we're all going to have to go there, in one form or another, because this way of living on this planet cannot go on... 

And a Facebook friend commented that nomadic life may be the way of the future as we try to avoid flood and storms and drought.   If we work on it now, we may be able to do it well.

As I tell the boy, just as always in my life, we're living ahead of the curve, riding the front edge of the wave...