Musings, Philosophy, Abundance, Human Design

Pennies in the Woods

I grew up in the middle of the Pine Barrens, on the sacred, pristine land of the Lenni-Lenape people in southern New Jersey. We had a little over two acres of woods, connected to several other large-acred but unfenced properties. We also had a game trail that ran a half mile from the main intersection entering town to the back end of the first “development,” built in the late 1980s — a natural barrier between the properties on my street and the next street over, and a huge woodland realm where any kid could reign free.

I spent entire summers running through those woods: barefoot, climbing trees, picking huckleberries, playing alone with my imagination and ferns. We had a small copse of bamboo that lived along our driveway, and I would try making arrows out of it (they were not very good, as I discovered that bamboo was hollow, of course). I had several forts built out of old, fallen branches that I would hang out in when the day got warm. If I wasn’t in those woods, then I was sweating out the long, hot days watching movies on HBO, reading The Lord of the Rings novels over and over again, or simply lying flat on the concrete of our back porch, praying for a breeze to come by and put my sisters and me out of our misery. We had air conditioning, but my parents couldn’t afford to turn it on; instead, we merely suffered the 95° days as true late-’80s/early-’90s kids did. With the hose, or playing in the rain when the summer thunderstorms rolled in, filling the gutters until they overflowed in a sheet of cool water we could run through.

One summer, as I was wandering the woods, I found pennies.

Now, this was an extremely odd find, as I had traversed the same strip of foliage just the day prior. But lo and behold! PENNIES. And I don’t mean onesy-twosy — an actual treasure trove of pennies! Piles of them! What were pennies of that volume even DOING there?? There were so many sparkling copper disks that it was the twinkling of them in the sun that caught my eye in the first place.

And what, you ask, does any oxygen-breathing eight-year-old do with that many pennies? COLLECT THEM, duh. I put them in my pockets. I made a basket out of my shirt. I ran back to the house for unused mason jars and filled them. I even found a canvas bag, torn, labeled “pennies” with “$30” under the label. I was RICH!! And it was so hot that the pennies were hard to even pick up; they burned my fingers and heated my shirt as I piled them into my makeshift pouch. That didn’t deter me, though, as I scoured the sugar sand for every glittering copper I could find.

In my overly imaginative kid-brain, these pennies came from heaven. In reality, there had been a robbery at the one bank in town, and the thieves escaped undetected on dirt bikes through the woods behind my house, while one of their bags of stolen pennies fell off the back, only to be found by little ole me on a random 96° Tuesday. But I, a kid so poor that I previously did NOT have two pennies to rub together, had just discovered what it felt like to have abundance for the first time.

Unfortunately, my parents did not know what it meant to thrive. My parents only knew how to survive. They were your quintessential 1980s Boomer hippie parents who survived on the generosity of others, Tupperware sales, gardening for fruits and vegetables, deer hunting and/or fishing for protein, and whatever jobs they could find with their high school diplomas to keep us kids fed. Our two acres of gorgeous, untouched land sat on what was previously the Brotherton Reservation, and before that was stolen from the Algonquian Lenape Native people. My parents were only able to buy it by leveraging the grace of my grandfather, who helped them afford a roof over his grandchildren’s heads — at an 18% interest rate.

That evening, when I brandished my findings to my family, proudly and newly wealthy, I was QUESTIONED. Where did these all come from? No, really — what happened? Are you lying, or did you steal them from somewhere? What do you mean, you just “found” them all? It wasn’t until three days later that the newspaper confirmed my alibi. But the fact that there was now a true story behind my recent find did not improve the situation; in fact, it worsened it, as now a deeper fear set in — their daughter had found stolen bank loot! Whatever would they do if this were ever found out??

Truth was, nobody ultimately noticed or cared about $30 worth of missing pennies. And, years later, in a moment of desperation for funds, my parents cashed in all of the remaining pennies. But the emotional damage was done: feeling truly abundant, having a high sense of value, now came with the threat that it could always stay just out of reach. Abundance was hard to conceptualize when not having two pennies to rub together meant you went to school with your toes sticking out of too-small, too-worn shoes. An apropos symbol of being of “poor worth” to the wealthier families moving into our little town.

In spiritual circles, we often speak of the concept of abundance. However, before one can discuss abundance, one must also understand the word VALUE. As a species, we humans often struggle with the value of things, but especially with the value of ourselves. Our self-worth. Our feeling fulfilled, the proverbial cup that runneth over. Therefore, abundance, or feeling abundant with life, may not be limited to money or “things”; it may also represent felt experiences, the fullness of our hearts when discussing love, and how “rich” we feel inside of ourselves. And when you consider the size of your internal cup, this is not necessarily something that can be measured in a traditional sense — which is why, emotionally and spiritually speaking, the concepts of love, of abundance, of fulfillment are often spoken of in terms of thriving on an infinite scale.

Consciousness, in Jungian terms, is also considered infinite, as is the consciousness field in quantum physics: infinite in its potential, in the future possibilities available for us to choose from based upon our knowledge, lived experiences, personal journeys, and how valuable we believe ourselves to be. The idea is that we are not merely surviving, but always have the ability to THRIVE — provided we give ourselves permission to feel valued, fulfilled, abundant. For if we truly value ourselves, then we have the capacity to value all humans, giving compassion, gratitude, and grace from the overflowing cup we have within. And if we value ourselves in this way, then our joy, our love, and our kindness are karmically paid back in multitudes. We can give AND we can receive — all of which is only measurable by how “richly” we feel through the experience.

Therefore, abundance is in our faith, our service to others, our surrender to not knowing the outcome while fully trusting in our ability to believe we are worthy of being fulfilled, both within ourselves and on the physical plane. When you are aligned with your value in this way, you can then define what it means to be value-able. What it means to have abundance and what it means to thrive.

Decades later, I found something else glittering in the woods. But this time, I found it in the dark, both literally and metaphorically. I was out camping and transporting the trash to the larger dumpster when something shiny caught my eye in the ambient glow of flashlights: a tiger’s eye. A coppery, shining crystal, polished into a pendulum shape; clearly something someone had dropped.

This time, I did not question the value of what I found — I knew. My spiritual intuition, also known as my “woo-woo spidey senses,” just KNEW this was meant for me to find. I was seeking clarity about my current life circumstances and the courage to allow myself to heal. I had guarded the life I built for myself for long enough, but in doing so, I had cut off the flow of what was possible. It was time to let go of the belief that I was somehow “less than,” unworthy of having more than mere pennies in the woods.

A discerning tiger hunts for food in the dark. Its sharp eye locates sustenance for the family, and a successful hunt yields abundance. The tiger’s eye is a stone of good fortune and prosperity, while also symbolizing courage: moving past fears, and empowering discernment and luck in achieving one’s goals.

It is not easy to heal from deep-seated feelings of unworthiness, to shift your mindset to one of clear intentions and the courage to achieve them, against all odds. But I have always believed in our collective ability to thrive through karmic abundance, simply because we are all worthy. Because we are all entitled to finding treasures as we walk the journeys of our souls: moving slowly through the dark, finding what glitters brightly, and letting it help us find our way back to ourselves. Transmuting the cracks in our psyches, filling those cracks with gold, Kintsugi-style, as we approach our own healing.

Abundance comes in so many forms. What have YOU found glittering in the dark?