Wealth

As you know, I think in the bath. 

I like to have the window open so I can smell the sea air and feel the breeze and hear the birds singing, and be (as Thich Nhat Hanh said) "the happiest people on earth".

And I think.

This morning, knowing our plum tree and miniature ornamental  cherry are laden with blossom and the buds just breaking on the other trees, the breeze blowing, the sun shining and the sky a glorious blue, I was thinking about springtime and blossom.

This recalled to mind a time in my life when I belonged to a church home group that included a gardener in its membership. She worked for a very rich family living in a large walled estate including cottages for staff. So sometimes we went to her place for the home group meetings, and had to stop at the electronic gate and call through to the man on duty to give our names and be let in, driving up the long road through the extensive grounds to her home.

The first time we went there, she took us to see the gardens. The family also had a London house, and the garden staff had to keep both houses supplied in fresh flowers, veggies and fruit. To meet this challenge, they were provided with numerous greenhouses, including — I kid you not — a massive greenhouse in which an entire cherry orchard was enclosed!

Thinking about that in the bath, I decided this must be the absolute definition of wealth — to be able to afford a greenhouse big enough for an orchard of trees and the space so that could be just one thing among many, including your Redwood trees dotted about here and there.

But then I started thinking about my auntie and uncle, also very rich but you wouldn't have known it. Now, they were different. The cherry tree family were bankers, but my auntie and uncle were farmers. So they didn't start off very rich, the land grew their money. And as they farmed well and shrewdly, the farm prospered. They poured their money back into the farm, so it did well. When I was a child visiting them in the summer, I remember the large tribe of gypsies who used to come every year for the strawberry picking. When my uncle died, a great many gypsies came to his funeral, because he was good to them in life. And of course, all sorts of people helped him work the land on his big farm. One of the boundaries was a large, deep, fast-flowing, tidal river. Every evening my uncle used to take the men who worked the land home across the river in a rowing boat, and every morning he went and fetched them the same way. I suppose they could have used their money to build a bridge, but I think they liked the separation and the simplicity of the way they did things. They lived like a tree, that drops its leaves and fruit to feed many species and enrich the ground in which it grows — the kind of wealth that goes hand-in-hand with simplicity. 

They would never have dreamed of growing flowers for the house, or buying a separate house in town. The special things to see at their place were the feral cat with her kittens nesting high in the hay barn, not a glass house enclosing an orchard.

So that was a different kind of wealth.

And though I don't have loads of money, I have enough to buy food for the fox, the crow and the seagull, enough to buy fresh fruit and vegetables to eat every day, I have a garden with 20 trees in it, laden with the blossom that will make our summer fruit, and already planted with kale seed and sprouting healthy growth of the herbs and dandelions we put in our salads. And I have a room of my own, and a family I'm proud of and friends I love. I live with artists and musicians and have the pleasure of their work all around me. All of which is wealth in abundance.

Some people are desperately poor. And among those terribly poor people are included some who have pots of money. But you know how with diabetes, because of the insulin resistance the person both craves food and cannot benefit from it, well, that can happen with money too. You can get a sort of money diabetes, where you keep wanting more and more but none of it does you any good, like the man in the Bible. And that isn't wealth at all.