Letting Go

Last time I wrote a blog post, I was reasonably fresh back to the UK from India. I’d been there for just under 6 months as a volunteer teacher. You can read all about that adventure on my parallel blog page; Maggamouse. I knew even before I came home that I wanted to return to India. There’s so much still to do there, so much help still needed, but this is expensive. To pay for my flights, my visa, my vaccinations, my travel insurance and to cover my costs while I’m there to avoid draining the already humble resources of the organisations I want to work with will probably cost me about £3000 (25000 Rupees at current exchange rate) I knew I had some work to do with getting that cash together and began to plan all sorts of things from epic walks to Buddhist centre talks, from sponsored poetry readings to free henna art (for donations). As it was, however; when I landed, a new responsibility closer to home needed my attention and I went to live as a carer to my elderly great uncle in Essex. This took pretty much all my time and energy so my fund raising went on the back burner. This story came to an end on May 23rd when my family and I said goodbye to him at Southend Crematory. Sad as this was, I remain grateful that I was able to do what I could to make his last weeks as easy and enjoyable as possible, as well as for the merciful fact that he was spared suffering a long drawn out illness.

One consequence of his death, on a very practical level, is that his house will not stay in our family and so I am no longer able to make use of his kind offer of loft space to store my possessions (Coincidentally, you can find out all about that home on my last update to this blog, shortly before I flew to India; Number 49). As I am soon to be studying for five months on a residential course at the Triratna retreat centre Adhisthana in Herefordshire, I’m not settling down to a new home yet either and have nowhere else to store it all.
I recently re-read the last Maggamouse Blog I wrote in April, to conclude my story. It was titled ‘The Beginning’ and in it I stated:

Number 49; Blog Post and Poem

“I have so much potential. So much to do. So much I can achieve. These things won’t come, either, in the format of all the other things I’ve ever used to judge myself or assess my worth. These things won’t be expressed by graded certificates, resigned to battered folders. They won’t be tallied by marathon medals in a dusty box. They won’t be checked by piled sketchbooks or exhibited paintings or published writings. They can’t be described at all by collected things, finally doing no more than keeping each other company in my uncle’s loft.”

I read that and I realised how appropriate those words were and how true they remain. I remembered that there are so many people in the world living with far, far less than I, in my privileged status as a Caucasian British national, will ever have. I remembered that you have to give up the mundane to approach the transcendental.

And so on Sunday the 11th of July, with the very generous help of an extremely lovely friend, I gave all except two (quite large!) bags of my stuff away at a car boot sale. That which hadn’t already been given to friends (lots of paintings!), charity shops (11 bags of clothes), consigned to the landfill (old home movie VHS tapes from the nineties), or the recycling (2 decades worth of arts education and various other tangential studies), was strewn across a field in the very early hours of an English summer morning by an eager hoard of hungry bargain hunters. The visitors to the Dunton car boot sale in Essex were freely invited to take whatever the liked as a gift, with the simple request for a donation of whatever they’d like to give to help me fund my return to India. Funnily enough, I found this stumped many people. In a scene comically reminiscent of the Life of Brian ‘Won’t ‘aggle!?’ sketch, confused browsers who were hoping for a low price, merely walked away empty handed when told the item in question was a gift, but that I was welcoming charitable donations. For every person who gave very little and took quite a lot, there was another person who made a donation without taking a single thing. It was a very strange experience but I’m very glad I did it.

Hopefully a few people benefited from receiving some nice things they might not otherwise have been able to afford...

I never before realised that it’s as if the more ‘things’ I get rid of, the more of the entire world becomes mine. The less I focus on ‘owning’ a few square feet, filled with objects that define me, the more I seem to inherit the entire universe as my home, the more I approach a state where I can be free from being defined by the language of mundane, worldly things.

The more I give, the more I have.

I now have 2 bags (that’s still too much quite frankly, when you’re trying to carry it all at the end of a long car boot sale!), a bike and a total of £469.45 raised of my £3000 target (I took a little over £300 but already had some donations). I’ve also started training for a half marathon in October.

This doesn't feel very minimalist when you're carrying it...

My crowdfunding page expires on the 14th of June 2017.
If you’re reading this before that date, are you able to consider giving?
Thank you.