The Hartsock Agency

“In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
(Confucius)

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic for this year is Poverty. Probably plenty of folks will post on the current economic crisis and politics in terms of poverty and I hope they do.

I wanted to post about what I see as the poverty of the soul that is increasingly prevalent in all our lives as we grow too busy to address our creative sides and engender creativity in the souls of our children.

Being an artist or a writer or a musician one often has to make friends with poverty in order to pursue their career full-time. More and more with the advent of the reality-based television shows where stars are made by phone polls and three ego-driven talking heads at a long table, we often forget how many people are out there just struggling to keep creating and have literally taken a vow of poverty to be able to share their soul with the world.

One might say they overcome poverty by creating in spite of it, in spite of all the naysayers and corporations who own most of the music and publishing world, there are still people willing to independently create just for the sake of doing so. Thank heavens they exist.

Our country has lost its footing when it comes to feeding the creative spirit. We don’t spend enough time just “being”, instead we push our children and ourselves always to “doing more” and more never seems enough.

In the public relations business you might be surprised to find that we have a short shelf life as well because no matter what we achieve for clients, it never seems quite enough and there is always room to become even more famous.

Poverty of the soul is bred as well with poverty that keeps us hungry for enough food, or in need of a new coat. How does a child who does not even have the most basic of items begin to listen to his soul’s calling?

In our family we’ve committed to the book, “The Year of Not Buying” by Judith Levine for the year. It’s indescribable both the sense of exhiliration and the sense of panic that one finds when they commit to “not buying.” For my husband and I, it’s been a great revelation of how utterly addicted we’d become to being good consumers instead of grateful humans.

It’s telling and sad that the Pastor Rick Warren asked both candidates how they defined someone who was wealthy and none of them including Warren defined it as anything other than a dollar amount. That is truly poverty of the soul when the only way to describe wealth is through a dollar amount. What if wealthy means living your soul’s purpose, caring for one another and doing that without living only for the bottom line and the next purchase?

Perhaps this ongoing financial depression will clear the plate for all of us instead of just the few who have struggled with so much less for all these years. Perhaps we can all create a way out of both poverty of the soul and poverty that so many suffer in terms of having their basic human needs like food, water and shelter met on a daily basis.

I hope so.