Cleaning out the attic

We spent the week cleaning out our attic. If wealth were based on the number of things accumulated, we would be very rich indeed. But wealth comes in many forms, least of which are things. Even money is a poor measure of true wealth, if by that we mean the things in life that really matter.

Phil Dahl-Bredine and Stephen Hicken in the Maryknoll publication of their 2008 book, "The Other Game," describe the lifestyle of country-dwellers in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico in terms of a world view of scarcity instead of unlimited abundance. Wealth is not what we have, but what we share, the authors imply.

This is the way of countless generations of Mixtec campesinos, but it is a way of life threatened by a multinational, corporate economic system that extolls greed above all else. Greed, based on the erroneous concept of unlimited resources, is unsustainable. The authors write, "The principal of the Limited Good insists that on a limited planet, the distribution, not the accumulation, of wealth, will be the primary economic challenge of our future."

The authors describe one form of redistribution through annual festivals where the accumulated wealth of one village or family is willingly given to others.

The concept of redistribution of wealth is not entirely foreign to us. After all, the Highland County Fair and the Maple Festival, where various community organizations sell food and donate the profits to charitable activities in the community, are forms of financial redistribution. Taxation is another way of sharing the wealth. By taking a percentage of one's income and applying it to services provided for the common good, the community redistributes wealth.

Evidence suggests, however, a growing disparity between the very rich and the very poor, where the poorest in our society have seen actual income decrease while at the same time the rich grow even richer.

How much is enough? The answer depends on what one has. If we have clean air and water and fertile earth to grow our food on, even if we don't technically "own" these things, then we are wealthy. If we have friends and family, a social life, and support systems to get us through the hard times, we are wealthy. If we have ample opportunities to be creative and use our imaginations for the benefit of ourselves and others, we are wealthy.

This week we cleaned out our attic. Some things we threw away, some we gave away, still others we kept. These things are poor symbols of true wealth: they represent a lifetime of activity, memories of travel and fellowship, tokens of hard work and achievement. They are nothing more than the shadows of lives well-lived.

One practice seen among many indigenous societies is to periodically destroy the things accumulated over time. The idea is that it wasn't the things at all that mattered, but the human activity and interactions that made those things possible.

Maybe it's time to tear down some of the old monuments and structures gathering dust and growing ever more decrepit with time and start over.