by Eva van Loon

Two very different books about coming down to Earth, about what life is really like for us humans. One locally authored; the other recommended by omnivorous local reader Martin Rossander.

Right Relationship is massively important. Even if a degree in economics is the last thing you’d ever want, or you glaze over in two-point-five seconds hearing yet another explanation of why your money is worth so much less today than yesterday, you’ll want to master the premises of this book.

I’ve long held a suspicion that economics is just a subset of human behavior, that all talk of how money behaves belongs either in an insane asylum or in departments of psychology. Martin Rossander claims money does not exist. Watching capitalism crumble while “free” trade squanders Earth’s treasures, some think he’s right. What economics has ignored too long is the real cost of our “productivity” and “innovation” to habitat, health, and our souls—not to mention the other beings with whom we must share this planet. Economists have failed to acknowledge that “the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere.”

Climate change, overpopulation, soil and water loss, species extinction, invasive species, pollution, deforestation, dead oceans, poverty, hunger, and the collapsing economy are all signs of pursuing wrong relationships.

“Economics is about access to the means of life” and we humans are totally dependent on the well-being of the living planet. Brown and Garver argue for a life-centered economy: “A thing is right when is tends to preserve the integrity, resilience and beauty of the commonwealth of life. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” By means of dialogue and truth-seeking, a long-held Quaker tradition, we can achieve right relationship with the commonwealth of life.

This “blessing” of a book is prefaced by several pages of praise of its “road map to virtuous action”, as one scholar puts it. Get yours; read it to pieces. A path will open up to a life where relationship to life trumps relationship to profit.

For a complete change of pace, try reading local author Tanis Helliwell’s Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns, a refreshing tale of a disastrous tour to sacred places in Ireland. For many years, Ms. Helliwell had led such pilgrimages to the world’s sacred sites to assist people with transformations. Her trips involved plenty of nature spirits, called elementals, such as leprechauns, faeries, menehune, and little people, but never had any trip been so tripped up by what the Irish call “the Craic”. Virtually nothing went as planned, as, more or less shepherded by a set of uniquely Irish characters, the group “journeyed through the Craic, and with the Craic, and we were having the Craic.”

Whether or not you believe in the existence of elementals, Helliwell’s forthright style will have you engaging with leprechauns just as she herself does. Throughout the troupe’s trials and tribulations, their leader never lost her cool, but did lose her health for a while. Even this setback proved an opportunity for transformation. As she points out, pilgrimages are not meant to be easy. If they were, no transformations would occur. It’s when you leave your mundane workaday world behind and forget about the past and the future that you get  up close and personal with what life is really about.