Kamisaka Sekka
The Six Immortal Poets,
from the series “Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)”
(1909/10)

"Might this realization have been my purpose in beginning this inquiry in the first place?"

The word Prosperity immediately conjures up visions of money wealth, often, by logical extension, also images of stuff that requires money wealth to acquire. The Prosperous do, often, possess lots of stuff, more than what the struggling seem to acquire. Indeed, the lust for stuff that can only be acquired with money often proves to be the undoing of those who struggle to achieve Prosperity, as if they necessarily need money to achieve what might pass for it. Such convictions might be common to members of any acquisitive society such as ours, for aren’t we hammered with messages designed to convince us that we must acquire or suffer horrible consequences? Heaven forbid that we ever find ourselves falling ever further behind Those Damned Joneses!

But the array of stuff that might be acquired by money, and, indeed, money itself, including credit, covers perhaps the most infinitesimal part of what Prosperity might fully entail. For every bit of Mammon that might seem to associate one with Prosperity, I contend that perhaps as many as ten thousand non-money equivalents probably exist, perhaps many more. These often seem to go unseen, if only because they do tend to be conventionally invisible. Like the proverbial book and its cover, the content of such non-monetary Prosperity cannot be judged by merely scrutinizing any exterior. One must delve considerably deeper, beyond any glittery superficiality to see or even sense the presence of such Prosperity, the kind that represents by far the most common evidence of a Prosperity’s existence. These non-Mammon alternative indicators include all the many reputational ones, for doesn’t a stellar reputation represent an invaluable Prosperity in and of itself? Another might be all the self-esteem-oriented ones. These are typically comprised of stories we tell ourselves that bolster our positive self-regard. Maybe a few of these might be purchased, but the bulk of these Prosperities carry no cash-equivalent purchase price.

Yesterday, I happened upon a facility maintained by the Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management. Accessing this database allowed me to identify the specific sections of land settled by my Oregon Trail ancestors. I’d known vague stories about rough locations for years, but I’d never before been able to pinpoint precisely where, for instance, my great-great-grandparents Evan Wallace and his bride Sara Parker Wallace first settled after they came west. Now I have a picture of a portion of a section of land not far from where I live today. I intend to drive up there later and finally set foot on some land that has held my family history all these generations without my knowing. I’d known that they lost two sons to dyptheria that winter, and that they’d overwintered in a tent after arriving too late to erect a more permanent structure, and that Evan and the boys were laboring for a local farmer named Royce, a name that persists in this valley, but I’d never known that they owned, in 1880, in the state of Oregon, Willamette Meridian, Township and range 004N - 035E, the S½NE¼ of Section 24, in Umatilla County, a total of eighty acres under the authority of the May 20, 1862 Homestead Act. Now I do.

Is this a form of associative Prosperity? I’ve never owned such a plot of land, and Evan and Sara are four generations ahead of me, my grandfather’s grandparents, and that land fell out of the family shortly thereafter, sold or traded for more acreage in an even more remote location. Yes, I can track that family’s whole migration around Eastern Oregon through ownership records maintained by our Federal government. That seems miraculous to me. This knowledge leaves me feeling immeasurably richer, more prosperous than Croesus, who only ever had Mammon money-property to support his Prosperity. I contend that this basis of my newly discovered, albeit curious Prosperity, might be far superior to whatever any amount of money might buy me in comparison. I suspect without knowing, though, that the truly Prosperous never engage in such comparisons: My Prosperity’s Bigger Than Yours games. Don’t these seem awfully unseemly?

I feel as though I’ve opened up vast fresh territory on my Prosperity Scrabble® board, and that I’ve stumbled upon a word that scored more points than an entire unabridged Latin dictionary might. I warmly anticipate discovering more of the more prominent forms of non-Mammon Prosperity, and even a few of the more obscure, for these Prosperities seem to be free for the taking, and infinitely available, depending. Depending upon what, I’m as yet uncertain. I am not counting pre-existing blessings now, but discovering them. Simply acknowledging this possibility seems to suggest the existence of an overarching meta-Prosperity, one easily available to everybody, too often unrecognized. Might this realization have been my purpose in beginning this inquiry in the first place?

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz