Here we know better: wealth ain't what they say it is or what they try to represent it as. But for the moment I want to illustrate a really simple form of wealth in the hopes of better teasing out what it really is. And we'll soon discover that even the simpler form is not all that simple.
Let's take dirt, soil, from which living things spring up from. Soil is best free and clear, where it can breathe, and accept new decaying matter so that its multitudes can break it down, freeing up its constitutive elements for other living things. Constant movement and circulation is good, but living things themselves, just as they need the free elements of nutrients to take up to produce themselves with, they also need to slow the movement and passage of these things within themselves.
A living thing benefits both from circulation and change and the temporary suspension and freezing of that change to momentarily be. In even the most rudimentary of circumstances, human beings themselves require clothing and shelter to arrest the movement of energy out of themselves, or to prevent too much from getting in for that matter.
For the moment, I'm getting after shelter, so let's keep moving in that direction. A lot of shelters are built from materials that are valued for being able to hold fast and keep shape against the many changing conditions of the outside world: wood and rock and even earth itself, though earth which is typically hardened and treated and shaped so as to stay put.
These things take lots of energy to produce and then to arrange. A tree has to rise high above the soil to get above the decomposing elements and to capture falling light, and so the wood that is a result of this must have the strength to persist in this state of fighting gravity, and is valued as such, and removed from its context with energy and tool to be repurposed for shelter.
In building, the cut wood shouldn't necessarily be set right back in the soil, which with moisture and microorganisms and insects would get to decomposing the wood again and changing that desired set-fast form into something else, going back into the dirt in the process.
The wood would instead be set onto stone, another material in which much energy goes into creating it, in this case, negatively as the pressures of gravity and surrounding material and energy condense it, and then the energy of tectonic forces and moving water set if free from its entombment, where more energy must be put in to moving it and shaping it to be laid as foundation and as barrier against the dirt.
Once you're up on stone, you can move about without getting dirty, and without having your resources set upon it get dirty as well, and potentially degrade and decompose. This ends up a tremendous asset: the initial stores of energy are invested and now you're up on stone, permanently away from the dirt - at least in a given lifetime - freeing up labor for ever higher pursuits. Needless to say, class arises partially out of this state of being and this privilege.
This is a form of wealth: this permanent suspension above the decomposing elements and the perpetual structures of permanence that allow various forms of energy to accumulate in usable stores. But like all forms of wealth, this still requires a proximity to and an access to those regions of decomposition and renewal. Indeed, this is an essential condition for wealth to exist.
