What of your possession have so much worth that you would trade a life for them? Would you trade a life for your house? Having shelter is pretty important, but is it worth a life?

I can name something I would trade my life for. I would trade it for my wife’s life or my child’s. So what about these other things? How are we to value them in the face of life itself?

Fortune is the balance of life itself, luck is not. Fortunes shift because people’s relationships and activities shift. Luck can remain as it is despite your activity or lack thereof. Fortune, like the seed, grows when it is shared. The more merit is offered the more will be available when it is needed, and you can choose how you involve yourself in this sharing of merit, this sharing of fortune.

Merit is seed of our giving? Merit is seed of our virtue, but becomes merit with the giving or expression.

Life is just like a field. You reap what you sow in it. If you sow abandonment, you will reap abandonment. It’s really simple and self-evident everywhere.

I sometimes get silly around the house. It’s mildly embarrassing, but I will make up a silly little limerick say, or try to make some poor attempt at humor, and though there might not seem to be objective value to it, it still manages to make my wife smile. Is anything really lost when I let my so called dignity go?

The most important thing in a relationship is that you can make each other laugh. Simple joy is indeed the essence of life.

You might still do it when you are home alone just to make yourself smile or tell it to the cat. Yes. That would be just as worthy. And yes, I sometimes make a weird face at the cat. He gives me a look of mild interest, maybe even amusement.

But what comes about from these “rules”? We make rules that say our musicians have to get special permission to perform in public places. That and many others don’t even accomplish the control they are supposedly designed to do, but what are we trying to do? What if people just offered their “goods”, whatever good they had, just shared it with the community. How would fortune go then?

Fortune happens whether it’s going well or poorly, and many goods are lost or fail to come to fruition because support is withheld. Since we cannot help everyone as individuals, what if instead we just chose to be mindful of the web of fortune in our immediate surroundings? Find one good that we can foster for a time.

Animals have loyalty. They have connections. The wolf pack prospers because they each offer their strength of whatever measure to the pack. No member of the pack evaluates the strength of the others with the intention to exclude. The weaker wolf might make noise to flush out the prey. It still contributed to the hunt.

Some packs do drive out the old and infirm. It depends on the animal species. It actually depends on more than the species. In fact, the wolf pack is aware of their home, the territory they hunt in, and their behavior will change with the fortunes of their territory. Does human behavior respond like that? The green movement, as they call it, is an awkward attempt to acknowledge this connection, but it is still working against other factions in the humans species.

I mean only to speak of the web of fortune and not individual members of the human species. It exists as an interspecies dynamic, even inter-material. Those forms of matter we covet, and the acts we have undertaken to get them, have had an impact on the web of fortune, perhaps even more so than unethical money management policy.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~