I’ve had intense dreams my first two nights sleeping in my new, used, RV. I don’t remember anything except little flashes of a feeling of revelation. It seems some deep transformation of understanding is imminent and immanent.

I know many or most of you take a cast iron pan for granted, but buying one felt somehow decadent. It was cheap at Fred Meyer, though, as was the knife I’ll use for chopping vegetables. Walking around the store with a big shopping cart, picking up some of the things I need, brought a sort of comfort. It was a luxury. I felt pleasure.

Getting back home, transfering stuff from the trunk of the car into the RV, my attention was drawn by a noise across the darkened street. An apparently homeless man was struggling with one of his bags of belongings, muttering to himself as if engaged in an intense discussion.

The juxtaposition of the two of us – traveling in opposite directions on opposite sides of the same darkened street, me into my luxury appointment, he to God knows where – brought me back to conscious awareness of a very old feeling at the root of my psyche, and subsequent years of poverty: Who am I to have things? Why should I get this place to be, while he struggles to manage his cans?

I had almost forgotten about this deep, apparently unresolvable, question, though it’s been with me for decades. I remembered then that living in poverty had been something like the cornerstone of my method of dealing with the feelings of guilt I experience in response to the awareness that I have what others lack. Now that I have a place, I am confronted with the question, but without my usual way of dealing with it.

At the start of Plato’s Republic, Socrates’ first interlocutor – a rich man whose name I forget – describes justice as the payment of one’s debts. Here, he says, is the virtue of being wealthy. A wealthy man can pay his debts, and is therefore free from the sin of them. But – and here, perhaps, is THE Great Crisis that roils the waters of social harmony – where does all this money come from. Or to put it another way: can one pay a debt with blood money?

I realized last night the extent to which I had pushed these deep questions out of mind, just to – you know – fucking take care of some basic things to make my life more functional. I wonder, though, if this great unresolved question is the energy working itself out in my dreams lately. I guess I should make an effort to remember them.