Episode 17: The River Through
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be this week. This week’s poem and episode explore the relationship between mental health and money. Perhaps especially right now, many of us are feeling pinched by rising costs among much else. In particular, this episode unpacks the complicated common phrase and belief that “money isn’t everything.” Though it might not be, we need livable wages of it to survive. Within this dynamic (and for the sake of our mental health and well-being), we can still challenge how we think about money, how society worships it, and how not to let it consume our spirit; intentionally disconnecting it from all that truly makes us feel most alive.
I’ll share it with you now:
A violent cycle : not having enough money,
needing to work to have enough money,
but being too depressed, anxious, etc. to work.
Money isn’t everything. But it is.
Living costs dollars: meals, movies,
trains, cars, boats, taxes, taxis, tea, hot air
cold air, coffee, date night, tech, internet
and time and water and rent and tents.
But money stacks itself against
itself in sly, slick slices and slips, stock-still.
It’s not the river running, rushing, rolling the rocks.
A line is not always of credit here.
A line is not always a (life) sentence here.
And sentences survive—semi-colon snakes
past the end of lines, couplets, stanzas.
But even so, when we don’t have enough
money, s i l e n c e is opaque and drunk. Overcast
at night seems to have the biceps for
vacuuming up all moonlight but loses its
muscle at sunrise. And although
the moon is most definitely not a flat, 2D
coin, we have sculpted change to look
and feel the same—waning and waxing,
sometimes invisible though never disappeared
and never flipping between heads and tails;
the person in the moon doesn’t play games
without us that we don’t have an equal chance of winning.
We look up and see the big and little dipper
scooping up stars like measuring cups, as
if they were sparkling zinc stones from which
to strain cash. This is insulting to the stars.
So much of what we are paid to do is only
worth molded moldy metal, not stardust. Not life.
Because that which has survival value doesn’t
always make life worth surviving. Because the
root cellar of time—furnished with copper
zinc, nickel etc.—is as much within our souls as
as in thin layers of cotton beneath the soles of feet.
Why do we swim, glide, and slide across the Earth? Because
we real rich first
and still are and that is where our fight is
when we don’t have responses or answers
like right now as you and I see that this poem
didn’t and can’t fix any of the empties. But,
it can dream, forcing us to ask where
we will break even, crooked, or fully? But you see,
the greatest power we have is the soul and
heart of each other—where the words of
a poem break; cracking the dam to let a river run
right through it.
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
