JESUS, BUDDHA AND GANDHI
I have no excuse. The greatest teachers, them all of them, told us that the richer you are and the more you possess the less fully alive you will be. The more you possess when others around you have very little, without a home of decent clothing or enough to eat, and you have more than enough, means you are putting your soul at risk. Jesus never owned anything. Buddha was extremely rich but it was only when he gave up everything that he was able to find enlightenment under the Bo tree. Gandhi was a rich lawyer but in order to lead India to a peaceful independence he knew that he had to give up everything else except his meager dhoti, and even then he spun his own handmade thread for his clothes. On a level much closer to my own, Thoreau built his own cabin in the woods and lived simply (for a couple of years) in order to be fully alive.
I have read about all them, I have no excuse, but I haven‘t listened. Instead I haunted flea markets and yard sales, brought beautiful textiles back from my overseas trips and had an addiction to books, particularly photography books, so intense that I collected so many that I had no room in the house to put them and stored them in Ingles milk boxes in the carport and laundry room and even a rented storage unit. And of course I was then unable to look at them.
Now in my old age, as I have to find a home for all my treasures, I feel the crushing weight of all those milk boxes bearing down on me day after day. Now I am in the process of trying to clear out my Augean stable of boxes of books and memorabilia and outmoded electronics. I am going to spend my final days trying to extricate myself from this overwhelming presence.
And these were all things that I one time loved, that gave me brief moments of delight. And the question is how I got myself into this. Of course, when I look around, I see that I am not alone. I live in a consumer society in which production and therefore consumption has to go up 2% a year or we will drop into a recession. Elections depend upon everyone amassing more and more and more. Seductive advertising lures me along.
Jesus watches me with an amused smile. I didn‘t listen, no one is listening, we are all rushing into the same morass. Even prosperity Christianity beckons us in deeper in deeper. It is almost my patriotic duty to keep the economy going by buying, buying, buying. Living simply, saving my soul, is almost impossible to do.
So yesterday I took ten milk cartons of photography books, beautiful photography books, the work of great photographers, to Marshall to join the six I have already taken. It was very painful because I loved those books. And then I am going to flea on Wednesday to Bogata with only a carry on bag and will live there simply for a month, having everything I need, proving that I could have done this all my life long. And then I will come back in a month and drown myself in my stuff again.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 