The People with the Money are the People with the Power - Uncle Ho’s Homemade Currency Post Din Bin Phu 1954.
I’ve emerged from my beloved Teacher Shinzen Young’s brilliant annual New Year’s retreat. Chuc Mung Nam Moi! Happy New Year 2024! As always, there’s the usual mix of aftershock and afterglow, acclimatizations to states that are less fixated and progressively more attenuated. We’ve talked about it all before, visited in Shinny’s final dharma talk from the last residential retreat in 2019 as well as from the first online Zoom retreat during the pandemic. “You either become the ocean,” said Shin’s buddy the great Leonard Cohen, cited in his talk The Source of The Longest River from the same retreat, “Or you’re seasick everyday. “ Watch for a few killer upcoming posts on talks from this most recent retreat.
On the subject of a mix of both positive and negative, I’ve had the realization that the busyness of our business has devolved this blog into people’s testimonials, which are cool, and hurriedly written stories, which are not cool. As previously promised, let’s recreate this space to be a place of engaging stories and notes from the road, beginning with this former tale on our first dollar earned as a bonafide business. We’re offering our Signature Meditation + Mindfulness 101 class on Saturday, January 20th, to kick off the new year, and will be back soon with new and more engaging stories. As always, we appreciate your interest and look forward to seeing you.
You’re familiar with the notion of a business framing their first earned dollar bill, right? In dry cleaners, pizzerias, restaurants, bars, and countless other enterprises, wide recognition is given to the idea of an establishment enshrining their first greenback. Putting that pioneering note on the wall says the medium of exchange is on the move, a visible token of a venture’s intended success. That first dollar of profit also commemorates the prep work, the hard times, of getting up and running. And for anyone whose built up an entrepreneurial endeavor, you know it’s a 24-7 commitment, not quitting until you’ve moved Heaven and Earth.
Traveling through Vietnam a few years back, I noticed almost every business had a version of the framed first dollar, or dòng, Vietnam’s currency (currently equaling .000044 US dollars). There, the custom took the form of small, ornate altars. Coins, bills, food offerings, incense and family photos as well as burning paper effigies and plaques honoring holy spirits crowded the daises. Vietnamese culture celebrates the Kitchen God or Stove God from Chinese folk religion, the most important of a colorful team of domestic gods that protect hearth and family. On the twenty third day of the twelfth lunar month, just before Chinese New Year and Tet Holiday, the Kitchen God returns skyward to deliver an annual report on each households’ doings. The Jade Emperor of the heavens then doles out punishment or reward. Back in the day, families were often classified accordingly to the stove they possessed, indicating the “soul” and signifying a family’s fate. An old story says, “When a Shaman informed one family that ants were in their stove, they destroyed the stove and threw the bricks in the river.” A neighbor explained, “There was nothing else they could do. A family will never have peace if they don’t have a good stove.” The association is thus one of God and family, the relationship being essentially bureaucratic; the family is the smallest societal corporate unit, and the Stove God the lowest ranking member of a supernatural bureaucracy.
We have a good wood-burning stove here, sans ants and other things. And I like to think of the Ceremonial fireplace as The Higher Haven’s hearth. As to an official rigidly devoted to the details of God’s administrative procedures, I’m not so sure our guys are all that letter of the law. We uphold and practice certain ancient traditions and rituals here, unconventional conventions and customs is how I think of them. And we get low and when we do we pray hard, strong believers in the power of prayer. Still, the primal nature of what we do offers an authenticity, an unbounded healing energy that many of the more corporate, institutional, and organized approaches - with group-think at times stifling individual growth - can’t. The self-expression of one’s individuality (namely my own hi hi) is what drove me to this road, the one that eventually left the pavement with a gravel crunch, taillights disappearing into the Michigan woods circa 2014.
The Higher Haven didn’t really commence until May 2016, after a year and a half of what felt like administrative and management tasks tedium ad infinitum. Given these tasks weren’t anything more than standard procedures required to establish any solid business foundation. But dealing with government agencies, subdivisions of county departments, permits, payments, codes and other knotty procedures often took me to the edge. At one point Allegan county wanted to change my address and couldn’t quite keep the 494 or 496 straight, leading to unspooled reels of red tape, confusing emails, frustrating phone tag and conversations that demanded severe tests of spiritual strength.
Now it may be business as usual, starting a limited liability company and depositing checks made out to The Higher Haven. At the same time, it’s all feeling so much more… certified? Sanctioned? Maybe Sanctified works better for us. But definitely Legit. And all authorized and approved of by none other than yours truly, our organization’s Chief Creative Officer (CCO), who, on a good day, couldn’t be prouder of what's being creating here. That’s the same poor bastard, me, who, a mere year ago, was forced to take on and transcend the once utterly frustrating worlds of Pay Pal, Stripe, and The Square. It’s no coincidence Square is slang for being rigidly conventional and out of touch with current trends (more me, not the electronic device). And although these were all necessary business connections needed to drive the deal, I couldn’t help to think: I just wanted to be a teacher and a writer. Not an accountant.
Back to that framed piece of dough on the wall, the upshot here is that there was an awful, awful lot (the pivotal word being awful) required in the form of mind-numbing tasks to get this place rolling, chores I didn’t exactly enjoy doing. And while I’ve earned a few dollars over the last few years at this endeavor, it’s certainly nothing to break the bank. But now, if I step back and take a good look around, after endless baby steps and sticking with it, things are appearing better than OK around here, if I do say so myself, as I just did. This place then being an expression and manifestation of one man’s dream, but a dream that includes the success of others, of all people, of all nations, of all time, we couldn’t just mount up the common US dollar bill. With all due respect to General Washington and the founding fathers, whose spirits pervade this land, The Higher Haven’s hope too include all people of all belief systems, in a bid to heal our species age-old rift of separation, called for an official, more exotic open-for-business emblem that would include all peeps.
The 100-dong note, a cool little piece acquired in a Ha noi art gallery, was created by the State of Vietnam in 1949 at the start of the first Indo China war. Bearing Ho Chi Minh’s likeness and crude but official watermarks, the currency displaced the French Union's Indochinese piastre, Vietnam's nod to The Benjamins. the people on the money being the people with the power. Five years later the Viets beat the Frenchies and booted them out at Dien Bien Phu, which has me wondering where we'll be in five years. To this day Uncle Ho is on the dong, the biggest player in Vietnam’s liberation and a hero country-wide. His gaze from my office wall reminds me of the spirit of this place, the spirit of the underdog, the spirit of upholding the warrior’s promise, even in the face of death. And the power and wisdom that only deservedly come to those who refuse to quit until they've overcome all obstacles. One heart, one mind, one voice, one Chanupa. Aho Matakuye O’yasin.