The Truth About Abundance
A Vignette from Chapter 2 of Sacred + Circular: The Convergence of Sustainability and Spirituality
Chapter 2: The Builder, The Bull and The Rose
Sacred + Circular is a book unfolding one season at a time. A draft of each chapter is published on Substack, with the opening vignette free for all and the full arc available to paid subscribers. Between chapters, I am sharing an additional vignette — a small pearl from the larger string.
Vignette | The Truth About Abundance
Taurus rules the Second House: resources, possessions, personal values, and most essentially, what we believe we deserve. The shadow and the gift sit right next to each other in this house.
The gift is a profound capacity to appreciate beauty, to build security, to create lasting foundations.
The shadow is the belief that security can only come from accumulation, that more is always safer than enough.
I used to take vacations the way I did everything else in my burnout years: at full throttle. The point was escape, and I pursued it with the same intensity I brought to the office. Late nights, rich food, overpacked itineraries, the works. I would arrive home more depleted than I had left, vaguely resentful and already dreading Monday, wondering why the reset had not reset anything. The irony was not lost on me: I was applying extractive logic to rest itself.
The shift happened on a yoga retreat off the coast of Mexico, miles from reliable wifi and every obligation I had constructed to feel important. I moved my body slowly and with intention each morning. I ate food grown in the soil nearby. I slept deeply, without an alarm. I sat and watched the light change over the water and did not photograph it. For the first time in years, I felt what genuine replenishment actually is: not the absence of work, but the presence of nourishment. True rest is not a commodity you purchase on an itinerary. It is relational, and like all relationships, it requires showing up with genuine attention rather than a credit card and a to-do list.
Robin Wall Kimmerer names this in “Braiding Sweetgrass” with a precision I will never be able to improve upon: Indigenous traditions have centered reciprocity, the continuous exchange of giving and receiving, as the animating principle of a healthy relationship with the earth. Gratitude is not a spiritual accessory in these traditions. It is the foundation of a functional economy. You take what you need. You give back what you can. You trust the cycle to continue.
This is the Taurus lesson translated into ecological terms. Our current consumer culture is built on the precise opposite model: extract without replenishment, accumulate without regard for what is being depleted, treat security as something that can be purchased. The results are visible in our warming atmosphere, our microplastic-filled oceans, and the epidemic of people who own more than any previous generation and report feeling profoundly unsatisfied.
The invitation of Taurus is not asceticism. It is a shift in consciousness: from scarcity to abundance, and more specifically, from the scarcity mindset that keeps us grasping toward what one of my teachers, Isis Indriya, calls “prosperity consciousness”.
Prosperity consciousness is not about the quantity of what you have. It is a quality of attention, a way of moving through the world that is rooted in gratitude, genuine appreciation, and the deep recognition that enough is not a ceiling but a homecoming. It is the difference between eating a meal and tasting it. Between owning a garden and actually being in it. Between accumulating a life and inhabiting one.
I grew up in a household that, by most measures, was comfortable. There was always enough. And yet there was a persistent “keep up with the Joneses” undercurrent that shaped my early relationship to money and possessions in ways I am still untangling. What I received was provision. What I was also absorbing, unconsciously, was the equation that worth equals what you have. Choosing to interrupt that pattern, to replace scarcity thinking with genuine prosperity consciousness, has been one of the more quietly radical acts of my adult life.
Before a purchase, a genuine pause: is this a need or a want? Is this nourishing me, or am I using it to avoid something I would rather not feel? Is this adding to my life, or adding to the pile? True abundance, as Taurus teaches it, is not an amount. It is a relationship with what is already here.
You are invited to read Chapter 2: The Builder, The Bull and The Rose.
So true! Abundance is an inside game