All they have is money
We should be cultivating little gardens (both literally and in our minds)
A good friend sends me some photos of flowers blooming in his newly planted garden. I admire them ardently along with the privilege he has of owning a home with a yard for gardening. I had always imagined myself living on a small piece of land, tiny house next to a lush garden filled with a bit of everything. But life happened and I now live a few hundred feet in the sky, overlooking landed plots where owners have paved their entire driveways with concrete. A home for cars in a city built for them.
I try to imagine the lives of those in these sizeable landed houses. Perhaps they’re bosses of big companies and spend most of the day out doing “big businesses”. Perhaps most days they come home just in time for sleep. Maybe. I don’t know them nor their lives. But owning a your own private house on a large piece of land in the capital city means that my estimation may not be far off.
It reminds me of the saying, how “some people are so poor all they have is money.” Which, thinking about it, ties in with so many things in our capitalistic society. All they have is money, but they roll up onto dead concrete lawns, devoid of any signs to sustain life. Something I thought was common knowledge but soon learnt that many were unaware of, was the importance of our own little gardens. The patches of flowers, cultivated vegetation, scattered leaves, all help to provide nourishment and shelter for insects. Insects that have been deemed too “annoying” for urban life. Yet, without which, our entire food system would collapse in a brief amount of time.
Everywhere you turn these days there’s some sort of land grab going on. From developers with stomachs of black holes to “property investors”, they swipe up pieces of land, mow down all semblance of biodiversity, and create horizontal plaques of death. “The insects and animals should just go somewhere else.” The question is where? When everywhere I look, there’s the clearing of trees, of new construction work, everyone trying to stake claim on another bag of gold. When even the people who can afford to own a small piece of land are cementing it all up in the name of “cleanliness” and ease. Where should the animals go? This earth is their home too.
But these are all symptoms of a system that values death. Of extracting till the well runs dry, be it land or labour. I can no longer speak about the issues that concern me without seeing how they all tie in together. Isn’t it funny how the richest man on earth takes drugs to cope? When money no longer functions as a practical tool to trade for necessities and has instead become a perverse game of who can hoard more. All they have is money. Truly. No ecosystem, no fresh air, no clean water, no meaningful relationships, no quiet satisfaction in the little things in nature that bring you joy. When the world has been plundered and every semblance of life as we know it extracted, all they really have will be money.