The pleasures of the less than rich are visible only to those in that number. This is not because these pleasures are illusory but because there is a certain capacity that the poor develop that the wealthy had no need to.

Instead of the health spa, I can walk. Instead of restaurants, I cook well. I don’t buy expensive processed food, and the unexpected by-product has been the extinction of a taste for it, and the evolution of a love of fresh fruit. I remember hitchhiking through Ireland 35 years ago with nothing but an apple for the day. How I nursed it, fondled it, anticipated it, and, when the time came, savored it.

When my son was in prison, he wrote me a letter relating this incident: They were all playing volley ball in the exercise yard. Suddenly a hawk was spotted gliding overhead. Everyone stopped in his tracks and just looked at that hawk. Finally someone broke the silence and said what everyone was thinking: “I wish I was that hawk.”

Beauty is free. And it is visible in the smallest nooks and crannies. Here is the secret I learned: The less you have, the more tuned in you become to everything beautiful around you — that hawk overhead, the peculiar slant of sun during your morning and evening walk, a lovely song wafting in from somebody’s radio.

I find I don’t have to hold the mortgage on a sumptuous estate to pass by and enjoy it. These all belong to my Father anyway, and to his children who are seen “as having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:10).