A richer nation

In a couple of weeks, New Zealand will have a general election. One of the political parties here is the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, and I have been impressed by their billboards. The slogan on the boards says "For a richer New Zealand" and the picture is of a young boy with his hands on his hips and a big bright smile, standing in a rural setting in front of trees and a small stream in which a family is fishing. The graphic is lovely and sunny and colourful. (See the graphic here. Note, it's one of three that comes up in rotation.)

Steve and I have commented to each other about how wonderfully subversive the billboard is. It plays on the concept of what it means to be rich. Nothing in the graphic suggests rich in a material sense. It is suggesting that the family, and ourselves by extension for they are in a public place, are rich for they and we have access to an established and healthy natural environment. The graphic tells us that it is this that makes us rich, not money.

This truth is backed up by my experience, especially since I moved to two hectares of land. Steve and I have a small income, but we live like royalty. We know very well that it's the land that makes us rich. We eat fruits and vegetables that come from the property, heat the house and our water with the wood from the trees, and drink the water that is captured on the roofs (rooves) of the buildings on the property. Our chickens are fed partially by the insects, berries and grasses that grow wild. Their manure is used to grow our food. And so on. Any money that can be made from these systems is made as a direct result of what nature has provided. Money is not wealth, nature is wealth.

I am pleased to see anything that challenges people's concept of wealth. Baha'u'llah certainly has challenged mine. He speaks of God as the All-possessing - by which I understand him to be saying that wealth comes from the given reality in which we are all submerged. I think he is reminding us that we do not actually own or control that reality. For that reason, we have to develop a relationship with it; that is, fit in with it, understand its processes and balances, find our part within these and trust that it will provide.

An analogous process of change in attitude can be seen in the way we see marriage now. It used to be that the man saw the woman as a possession and would have a fit if she acted independently of him. Now we see that as old-fashioned. We know a woman is not a man's possession, and that he doesn't have to control her to have a relationship with her and to benefit from what she brings to the union. He trusts that she'll stick around and enrich his life. He is better off because of his connection with her, not because he owns and controls her. In fact, he gets much more out of the relationship if she is free to act independently and realise her potential. The same is true of our relationship with nature. We don't have to own and control it and use it up. We can connect and unite with it, and develop a sensitivity to its ways and learn to benefit from them in an ongoing way.

Which brings me to mining, I shake my head in despair at the thinking that the answer to the country's debt problems is in mining the ground. Every time I hear someone going on about how we'll all be wealthy if we mine the earth, I hear Baha'u'llah's words: "Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value" (Tablet of Maqsud). That's it: we should be 'mining' our human resources instead of letting people languish in poverty, without hope of realising their potential. How many genius minds are being wasted? How many bright, novel and marketable ideas will never be found because they were lost to poverty? Perhaps we could mine our people's creativity and find out if that makes us rich.