Owners

Being an owner sounds so permanent.

An owner is a person who owns something: one who has the legal or rightful title to something (or someone?).

When a house is bought, the purchaser signs a pile of papers and is handed the keys to the house, but who owns it. The address and the land becomes your responsibility, including the property taxes. In reality, the bank owns the house and is letting you live there like a renter until the mortgage is paid in full. Don’t believe it? Miss a payment and see how soon you are evicted.

Is that your automobile? New or used, you are responsible for the insurance and a driver’s license but miss a payment and the repro man will be at the curb to haul it away.

Ownership gives on power over the item. It can be taken out of the store, retrieved from the box and placed on a shelf or tabletop because you have a receipt. Thousands more may have the same or similar item with proof of purchase but they do not own the design, color, shape or function.

A song or a story or a poem or a painting can be created and owned by the artist or writer or singer or poet or performer, but…

Was the creation truly original? How much was ripped off from a previous work (even unintentionally)? Was the presentation a total ownership effort or relied upon others to help assemble, record, print and published? Look at the credits at the end of a movie.

This is my land. I own it. I paid for it.

But is it really?

Like a house or an automobile or a television or an alarm clock, items can be purchased and paid off the debt and accumulated as assets or wealth, but are they really yours?

My great grandmother who owned it purchased that dish in the cupboard. That silver tray on top of the refrigerator was given to my father who owned it. At the estate sales, items will pick through what was owned by others. The rest will be thrown in landfills or rivers or oceans until all the space has run out.

This plot of land I live on was probably ‘owned’ by several people over the years. The first indigenous people (the one’s who walked upright here first) may have claimed the land as their own. They might have put up housing and lived off the land until…

The next batch came along and reclaimed the land for them.

At some point the land was surveyed and divided up into affordable blocks and papers were drawn to make the transfer legal.

Depending on the purpose of the land, some were blocked off for agriculture and some became high-rise cities and some became suburbia.

Some of the land was paved over to become highways or shopping malls and some was left alone to be natural parks so people could remember.

When life is over, the land is placed for sale to another. You never owned it anyway.

We are just renting the space along with our neighbors the squirrels, chipmunks, cardinals, blue jays, butterflies, ladybugs, wasp, bees, rats and roaches. They are the indigenous creatures who were here before we tried to scare them off or annihilate them. They will be here long after we are gone.

They own this place and allow me to share with them for a period of time.