About a year ago, right around this turning of the season, I shared an apple-scented, steadying, entangled conversation with my friend and mentor Danae Yurgel of Avella Orchard, an heirloom fruit and nut orchard in La Grande, Oregon. I called that episode “Enough is the Point,” quoting Danae. We sat in her greenhouse to record, basking in the late low sun streaming through the south-facing windows, and our conversation celebrated the ebbs and flows of seasonality (fall is when the trees grow their roots); trusted reciprocity (we breathe out, the trees breathe in, and vice versa); and affirmed that enough is plenty, enough is abundance, “enough is the point.”
Today’s guest on Kinward podcast, Georgia Lee Hussey—a Zen practitioner like Danae, a bonafide “queer dandy,” a Certified Financial Planner, and the founder of Modernist Financial—works toward that same understanding; affirms that same broad view of plenty and that same deep trust in enough; approaches her work in the world, too, with an ethos of love and gifting and a compassionate beginner’s mind—and all from a very different angle, in her role supporting wealthy progressive people to tend and move their money in alignment with their values.
I wanted to talk with Georgia because she takes a maverick approach to her work with money, she’s a storyteller and an artist and a skeptic and she proudly says that she’ll “always have a job in the Resistance.”
And I wanted to talk about money with somebody because I thought a conversation about money would be hard, would stretch me. It was. It did. Preparing for this one was a bitch! Ha! This is good. Growth edges.
Raise your hand if your feelings and stories about money are simple. Ping me if you raised your hand; I’d be so curious to hear what your simple story is!
My stories and feelings about money are very tangled.
I know that money is a tool and a power, and I know that tools and powers can be wielded in many ways and for many purposes. But my own felt sense of how money power plays out in my life and lineage and in the world is sticky and contorted.
A lot of that stickiness and contortion feels like transpersonal fallout from the structures our culture has built around money and its energy. There’s something about the way that the hoarding of money (and the urge to get more of it) has been placed in the driver’s seat; something and something else again about these very visible billionaires’ very bad behavior; something about the ease with which our money-centered accounting flattens and narrows and abstracts and objectifies our human and more-than-human relationships and elides the other kinds of wealth that sustain us and upon which we utterly depend (soil fertility, pollination, clean air and water, community, etc etc etc)—there’s something about all of this, the scale and speed and machine-oil smell of it all, that makes me feel paralyzed and small.
And, engaging with Georgia’s body of work, and with the ways she frames it—as a fuller accounting, a practice of storytelling, an art of asking “beautiful questions,” a principled creation of structures that can bend us toward justice and repair—was a great reminder to zoom in, too, and unpack the more personal reasons why my feelings about money are so knotted up.
My own (immediate and extended) family’s money stories include immigrant poverty and addiction; include the blue collar work of building and maintaining and the blue collar work of extraction; include the precarious highs and lows of making and selling fine art; include the instruction to not pick up the phone because it was sure to be the creditors calling; include money instead of talking and money as emotional leverage and money for keeping score; and include, importantly, the confusion (and shame) of growing up in a household that often felt stretched thin financially, a household without much in the way of disposable income—but with the very robust safety net, and the expensive gifts and vacations, and the avoidance of debt, made possible by my grandfather’s steadily accumulated wealth from his work as an oil geologist.
And he, my grandfather, was the one who grew up with never enough. And his brothers grew up to build bridges. And all of these stories unfolded on stolen land. And back in Europe, if you keep going back, those immigrant families’ land was stolen too. (At some point, as we discussed in the episode with Antonia Malchik, all the land was stolen.)
Early in this conversation, as Georgia and I address these troubles and snarls head on, Georgia (who has her own money-story-snarl, as you’ll hear) makes an important distinction between shame, which is a signal that something’s not right, which can motivate us to get ourselves into better alignment; and guilt, which is a burden that can paralyze us.
I guess I’ve got a bit of both—both healthy shame and stultifying guilt—in the mix. The work of decolonizing is, for me, very often the work of staying with the trouble and widening the frame: inviting more sensing, saying yes to complexity, helping the sticky and stuck things to shake a little, to breathe a little, to move. To re-root and remember what they’re for, what they’re protecting, where they came from.
That’s Kinward Moves: a catalogue of experiments for coming home from the delusion of separation.
How about you? What stories do you tell yourself about money and what it’s for and what it’s meant and what you can or can’t do with it, or without it, or because of it? Where do you stall out? Where do you turn away?
And what attracts you—what’s a practice (or potentiality) in your relationship with money that affirms your values, that feels like an expression of trust or love?
Georgia and I spend much of this interview circling around the different stories we could tell, the different ways we might pay attention, the different practices we can cultivate to connect with a sense of having “enough,” of being “enough,” so that we can exercise our economic agency from a place of love instead of scarcity.
“How do we talk about [wealth] without me telling you that you have plenty?” Georgia asks. “Because that’s not helpful. YOU need to know that you have plenty, in order to take action in a way that is meaningful.”
Georgia’s approach to developing this inner knowing among her clients includes asking them to consider a broader conception of what wealth is—to cultivate a felt understanding of wealth beyond money. She talks about the “five elements” of wealth: money, yes; and also time; relationships; wellbeing; and skill or craft.
If we all took a truer accounting of all of these elements, she says, “we’d have a lot of rich people ready to make change.”
Amen.
Spoiler alert, one of my favorite parts of this conversation is Georgia’s reflection on her punk artist friends from punk Portland back in the day getting rich (some of them) and then not knowing what the heck to do. She says, in effect, if these people with these values can’t figure out what to do with their money, how are we ever going to fuel (and maintain) the kinds of change we want to see in the world?
Georgia Lee Hussey is the Founder and CEO of Modernist Financial, a B Corp wealth management firm dedicated to helping progressive people structure their wealth around their values. Her mission is to build a world where smart, creative people feel permission to enjoy today while providing a stable financial base for our common future. Before launching Modernist, Georgia worked for national and local financial firms as a CFP. Prior to working in finance, she was a sculptor and writer.
She has “work” tattooed on her wrist, too, and wears geodesic coats.
We reference many resources in this conversation. Here’s a short list.
Modernist Financial’s 2024 Impact Report and their collection of free financial planning tools, Modernist University
The Roadside Geology of [Your State]
Sisters Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown in conversation with Rebecca Solnit on their podcast How to Survive the End of the World: “The Revolution Will Be Incremental”
Richard Powers’ book The Overstory
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s podcast series Apathy Is Not An Option
Sarah Schulman’s new political history of ACT UP New York
Rachel Scherman of the New School’s work on “Class Traitors”
I’m so curious to hear what beautiful questions bubble up for you as you listen to this conversation.
Gratitudes for this episode include: to Georgia for the “love gift” of this conversation; to Oregon Humanities for introducing me to Georgia and her work via our mutual membership on their Board of Directors; to my friend and financial-planner-in-training Amy Roseberry for facilitating the “Stewarding Financial Capital” table at our recent community orchard planning party (thank you Amy!); to my baby daughter for modeling something all babies know, which is trust that our needs can be met; to upriver grandma Monica for the reminder that she knows what she needs, and that all of us know what we need, just like the babies do; to Danae for another, different yet very resonant, conversation on enough; to the river for always coming and going; and to the garden for the beans. And to all of you, for listening, reflecting, responding, and doing the work you’re doing in the world to direct your many wealths toward a life-sustaining world.
