What does Wealth mean to you?
The roots of the word “wealth” can be found in the Old English wela and the Middle English weal meaning well-being.
This was also intimately connected with wholeness in terms of health and well-being. In fact, to heal essentially means to make whole.
A symbol of wholeness is the spiral- common to Indigenous traditions from around the world. The DNA molecule is also unmistakably spiral-shaped: we literally have wholeness coded into us.
This understanding of wealth as wholeness + well-being brings us towards a closer understanding of Beauty - which is to say an experience of pleasure and expansiveness emanating out from a healthy/whole nervous system.
Of course in our modern lexicon, the meaning of the word ‘wealth’ is almost exclusively connected to finance and money.
Here too, there has been a loss of meaning.
Money is a route towards Wealth - or well-being, wholeness.
Undermining our individual and collective well-being for the sake of money degrades money’s true potential, while keeping it caged up within a very limiting set of definitions and qualities.
In our culture, time + money are also linked.
We live in an age where the less time we have, the more money or financial wealth we seem to be rewarded with. However, this scarcity of time does not create an experience of Beauty or well-being in our lives and our nervous systems.
Here again, the mercurial current of money is abused and exiled from evolving into its full expression as a route towards Wealth - in its fullest meaning of wholeness. Instead money, through patriarchal-colonial meaning-making, remains bound to the dull turpitude of being the end in itself, and all the attendant dehumanizing, exploitative, greed-driven patterns of behavior this propagates.
If we are to embody the true meaning of Wealth in our individual lives, and ripple that out into our wider worlds, including developing a non-exploitative, wise and healthy relationship with money, that allows it to be a path towards individual + collective wholeness and well-being, we have to unhook from certain harmful matrices of force-fed meaning.
This is what’s known as the Hermeneutic Responsibility: the art, study and practice of interpretation, or meaning-making. It involves excavating into and making new interpretations of accepted and unquestioned beliefs.
I like to take this one step further by insisting that these new interpretations are coherent with our individual soul’s signature. No more rigid one-size-fits-all meanings.
The word Hermeneutics has its archetypal origin point in the Greek deity, Hermes (Mercury to the Romans), who presides over language + meaning, and also money + commerce, who in turn arose from the ancient Egyptian ibis-headed Thoth.
Thoth/Hermes was also the god of travel, most notably moving between the heavens and the underworld, pointing towards his role as being a bridge or a path between two places, much like money.
The meanings + attributes we assign carry the weight of belief, which structure our reality.
If you’re interested in restoring the true meaning of Wealth as wholeness into your life, and organically rippling that out into your family and your community, you might enjoy exploring Root + Rise: The Membership Space for Mythic Inner Alchemy.
If you suspect that there’s more to you/your life than what you’ve been led to believe, this adventure’s for you…