I am a very wealthy man. This I attribute to forces that are quite outside of my control. In fact, it is a matter of good fortune entirely in my case. Nothing I have done, no amount of hard labor, no proud family connection, no great happenstance of fate, no dowry or inheritance offered me this gift. No, the replete splendor of my existence is an unqualified miracle.
Now, this declaration may unsettle some, as much as it leads me to feel joy. There is a bit of resentment that inevitably accompanies an expression of wealth. I know this effect reverberates for those who are blessed with abundance. It is a burden for us, to realize our status, and know that many around us do without.
The nature of my fortune complicates this for me. When one is flush with material wealth, it is easy to spread it around. When one is gifted with a less tangible sort of wealth, as I am, the urge to share is more difficult to satisfy.
As an example of this I will offer a narrative.
I begin each day with an incredible dog in my arms. She is not yet four months old. Her name is Yoshi Takara. As far as I know, or as I would have it, this means "Hurray! Treasure." She is a dog that I could never afford had she not been born to my dog Willa. Further, I doubt I would have been able to pay the breeder's fee had Maximus, another lovely dog of mine, not managed that for me at no cost beyond his keep. These three dogs comprise the core of what I consider my wealth in the world.
Not long after I rise each day, I gaze into the golden eyes of Ginger. Ginger is an incredible Nubian dairy goat of mine. Her coat is oily, slick, and black, and her musk is lovely and intoxicating. She and her half sister Jasmine, (who is equally beautiful) as well as her daughter Anna, (who is a growing beauty) provide me with the most delicious milk that anyone I have shared it with has ever had. Some of those lucky souls happen to be hogs, and they too represent an incredible portion of my wealth.
After I have completed the labors of each morning, and the milk has been filtered and cultured so that I will have fresh cheese the next day, I make my daily visit to a small bakery on the edge of Puget Sound. There I drink strong black coffee and joyfully engage some of the people I love in this world. When our conversations are complete, my dogs and I venture up into the Black Hills, where the fresh water that will mingle with the salty inland sea flows over mossy stones beneath the lichen hung branches of noble old trees. We will meet coyotes there, and bear and deer and elk and osprey. The giant old mothers will welcome us with a clatter, and the Salal berries will seduce us with their plump sweet promises. They are all an immeasurable reserve of opulent wealth.
I think this narrative offers you a taste of what makes me such a rich man, and why it can be difficult for me to share what I have. It is easy to give away the milk and cheese and meat that accumulates around me as a consequence of my labor, but it is the challenge, difficulty and resistance I face each day that assemble into my riches. Those obstacles I overcome and those that stand firm against me all conspire to fortify my trove. The beings I encounter who stir my spirit and warm my blood serve as reservoirs of my wealth. I look out at my goats in the pasture and they gaze back at me with a gratitude that simply cannot be calculated or even conveyed. There is no numerical measure of this extraordinary treasure, and so I am left unable to distribute it.
Anyone who has witnessed these things realizes that ours' is an age where this sort of wealth is being replaced with dead objects and lifeless figures. The trees I sit beneath with my splendid dogs are harvested and modified into logs, which fit neatly onto trucks and are weighed and loaded onto massive ships for export to far away lands where such things are impossible and prized. The hogs whose bellies and jowls I rub with affection, who frolic in the pasture when they see me coming, whose eyes glimmer with delight, are reduced to standing slabs of meat by an industry that mistreats them and miserably fails those it feeds. The goats who offer me their sacred milk because we share a bond of love and kindness, become animals in rotation, who have no choice in the matter, and are sold for slaughter when their lactation eventually falters under the stress of forced production.
It does not end with the animals and the trees, the people too are diminished with this modern measure of wealth. We have become consumers or producers, managers or employees, wheels or cogs in a device that will devour us in time, and leave our tattered remains on the production room floor. We are no more than meat to the machine.
There was a time when wealth meant something very different, before those who had succeeded redefined the rules to ensure their ongoing dominance. Although some still manage a living on the land or sea, rise early to motor an aging fleet out to the warm water thick with fish, they too will take a settlement when faced with their own painful demise. Their wealth reduced to a numeral and the transformation a bit more complete.
Once wealth was found in nature and her reverent domestication. She offered an incalculable abundance of undiminished promise; pure possibility untarnished. Now she is only a means to the accumulation of numerical wealth. We are converting her at an ever more rapid pace from pure possibility to object certainty, and the success of this endeavor will precede our own end by moments.