pressed down, shaken together, running over

nothing real can be threatened. 
nothing unreal exists. 
herein lies the peace of god.
                  ~a course in miracles

one day i decided to start picking up the cigarette butts that people had thrown down on the ground in a place near a tidal waterway that i walked every day. i am a firm believer in the philosophy one less butt in the water : one less piece of plastic in the ocean. it took a bit of time, and it felt pretty good to watch the walkway become cleaner and cleaner, but soon i grew bored with counting all those butts. at a hundred or two, i decided that this process, and indeed the butts themselves, was worth something. i admired first the clean walkway. i talked with some of the people i met who also walked there - and asked them to please keep their butts off of the walkway, which would keep them out of the water. i especially loved talking with parents walking with children, some of whom were curious about what i was doing. i found myself grateful for the opportunity to do something i could do in service to a cleaner ocean. then i began noticing there were fewer on a daily basis.

as i kept up the process, i thought picking up these discarded bits of water choking plastic may be worth even more than my good intention ... maybe $1 - each. i reasoned that each one was, after all, one less butt in the water ... a valuable service indeed! slowly, over a bit of time, they became worth 100 each, then 1000. i loved the freedom of being able to name my own quotient! i realized at some point that i wasn't necessarily thinking in terms of that many dollars each, but they were certainly worth 100,000, and then a million - each. and then i went on to pick up 400 or 500 or 600 or more.

the thought occurred to me that the amount that had accrued is a number that i have (already) deposited into my account. what i knew was that in the view of the law of mankind's money, my contribution was not worth too much. i also knew that the units i had been counting actually had nothing to do with money. the astronomical amount was, in fact, abundance. the amounts i deposited over time into my account were in the form of universal abundance, and most certainly i was rewarded according to the divine law of compensation.

i delight in this reward, as there are at least that many less butts in the water. a less polluted ocean is one idea of abundance in the world.
...and i get the delicious experience of myself actually being the energy of abundance ... prosperity is being created, and i myself am creating it ... wow! 

the larger message, of course, is that abundance is whatever we make it : and we may assign our own value to it. should we all begin to see good in the world, we may create our own scale of measure : this is how everything has the power to be full to overflowing - the way the holy bible of christianity puts it :

pressed down, shaken together, and running over. for by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return.

the understanding of the law ... never, ever fails. it can't.

abundance is law : we are all welcome : according only to our thoughts.