This is about helping you make prosperity for yourself and others by sharing cheer and inspiration, plus ideas, tools, resources and lessons learned to create a great-feeling life and world, doing work you love.
Hello.
I’m Mary-Elizabeth, Founding Mother of Chard & Stripes.
So, Thomas Paine was telling the truth:
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
But here’s the deal:
OUR POWER LIES IN OUR IMAGINATION,
and mental pictures we form clearly—and feel deeply—wind up staring us in the face.
The world is not at peace because too many minds on the planet are filled with images and ideas that cause disturbed emotions, which infect susceptible people, go viral and spread unrest.
To spread peace and prosperity, we must use the things we can’t accept not as cause to fight but to create: to imagine the lives and world we want as step one toward making them.
Or, we must be in the world but not of it, like the Bible says.
I talk a lot about God, Jesus and the Bible, but not like your grandma did.
I spread prosperity by spreading heresy.
I believe that…
Jesus came to show us, not save us.
He modeled love in action so we could follow his lead. Or, you could say, he showed us true power so we could find ours and prosper. Jesus isn’t coming back in the flesh except through us, or so I think.
And here are some other things I preach that break from the norm:
I preach going slooow, not only with food and fashion but marketing. Indeed, most everything.
This means living and working at a pace and in a way that supports quality of life.
I preach going deeper, not bigger.
I’m not saying you should reduce what’s stirring in your soul, but Chard & Stripes is the place for you if you’d rather deeply impact the lives of 100 people than influence tens of thousands at a surface level.
If I’m speaking your language, …
As for what prosperity is, here’s my logic:
Jesus was the ultimate prosperity maker. He said he came so we might have life and have it abundantly. That means he came so we could have a lot of life. So, I say…
PROSPERITY IS ALIVENESS.
Or feeling great.
It goes without saying that we need some level of aliveness to make change. Aliveness grows, I believe, by tending to what I call The Five Pillars of Prosperity:
WORK :: COMMUNITY :: WISDOM :: HEALTH :: WEALTH
Without some positive activity in all these areas, it’s less likely we’ll feel great or fully alive. I’ll write about all of it, but with an emphasis on work and wisdom:
Encouraging you to be wiser by listening to your body and heeding your heart smarts—your intuition—and using your head smarts as back up. And encouraging you to start work you love now—think fun project—as part of a group that gets you jazzed. And/or you could start one.
The important thing is finding a cheerleader or two and getting started, because getting started—before you feel like you know what you’re doing—is how you’ll gain clarity to make and spread prosperity.
I make and spread prosperity at the intersection of storytelling, spirituality and play.
WHY STORYTELLING?
Our stories are like seeds: they bear matching crops. Just as orange trees don’t grow from apple seeds, prosperity doesn’t grow from seeds of discontentment. My hope is to inspire you to release wanting to be right and telling it like it is, and embrace being prosperous by telling it like you want it.
WHY SPIRITUALITY?
Previously, I threw out God with the bath water. Then crisis hit, and I became open to new ways of thinking. I studied Kabbalah and later found New Thought. I became more alive the more I put what I learned into practice. Prosperity is aliveness. To spread prosperity, I teach spirituality.
Plus, Chard & Stripes wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for my spiritual beliefs, so how could I not share them?
WHY PLAY?
I know firsthand that play opens us up to God Force, which equals Creativity or Higher Intelligence. I get great ideas with ease when I play, and feel depressed when I act all serious-like when working 🙂 . Plus, I believe this quotation I found on nifplay.org, the website for the National Institute for Play:
“THE TRULY GREAT ADVANCES OF THIS GENERATION WILL BE MADE BY THOSE WHO CAN MAKE OUTRAGEOUS CONNECTIONS, AND ONLY A MIND WHICH KNOWS HOW TO PLAY CAN DO THAT.”
NAGLE JACKSON
Plato said, “You can discover more about a person from an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
Through Chard & Stripes, my desire is to build a hometown community with people of all ages, wealth levels and colors—including red, blue, and purple—to play together and prosper.
Outrageously.
I’ll report back when that happens.
Finally, the Bible says, “And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
I reject the popular trends of polarizing and finger pointing. I hope you’ll do the same and join me on a journey to renew our minds in a post-2020 world.
Oh, and don’t be fashioned according to this world if it means wearing sad clothes deemed appropriate for work. Or for your age. A love for quirky outfits is partly why this exists. Click here to learn more.