The Moneyless Man (19 page)

I wasn’t sure if Buddhafield would be my type of festival. Much as I wanted to help get Freelender off the ground, I was concerned there might be too much Chai Tea and Tai Chi for my taste. But Paul and Edmund offered to get me in and make sure I didn’t run out of food for the five days, so I decided to go. During the day I worked in a tent handing out flyers and questioning people about their attitudes towards borrowing and lending. We ran a Freeshop from which people could take things they needed for free and leave things they didn’t want any more, set up a borrowing and lending service for things like blankets, galoshes and so on, and organized liftsharing so that people could get home from the festival for free.

I had lots of fun in the evenings, despite the absence of cash. I hung out with friends I hadn’t seen properly in years, spent time with people I’d met in Bristol but had been too busy to get to know, went for saunas and listened to amazing musicians, favorite bands like Seize the Day. This did me a world of good. Until the end of June, I’d worked seven days a week and although I was working at the festival, the change was definitely as good as a break. But while I greatly appreciated and needed the fun and relaxation, the festival conspired to have a much greater purpose in my life.

It started just before four o’clock on the next-to-last day, when I bumped into a friend, who told me about a great workshop being run that afternoon by a poet, Paradox, who’d given a fantastically inspiring performance the night before. In the
workshop, we asked ourselves that common question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ and how this meaning changed throughout life, with the intention of writing a tragicomedy of our existence so far. It is easy to write off such exercises as ‘hippyish’, but I feel that we in the modern world spend too little time contemplating our place in the world and where we are going. We began by agreeing that life has no one meaning in itself, but that through time, ‘I’ or ‘you’ attach changing meanings to our lives to give us focus and a reason for being. I realized that between five and twelve, being the best-behaved boy in school gave me meaning, from twelve to sixteen it was being good at sport, and at sixteen to twenty-one it was beer, girls, designer clothes, and money. But between twenty-one and twenty-six I obtained my meaning through unconditioning my mind and deconstructing the lies I’d been fed about the world. Now, my meaning is derived from striving to use everything I’ve learned to be as gentle and respectful as I can towards the planet and all that dwells on it, to make up for the fairly consumerist way I lived the first twenty years of my life.

Paradox read us an extraordinary, true poem. He’d had the most insane life, including quite a few times when he’d been homeless. One day, two women, unknown to each other, had told him they were pregnant by him. Another day, an accident in Mexico that tore his leg off left him on his deathbed, due to a lack of blood in his blood group. One of the reasons he called himself Paradox was because this event was both the best and worst moment of his life. He did lose his leg, but he would have lost his life if a group of Mexicans, strangers to him, hadn’t tirelessly sought a blood donor by putting out an appeal on all the local radio stations. Lying on his bed, he realized his life until then had been about himself and his ego and he was not the person he wanted to be any more. He decided he wanted to inspire others and to be of service to the world by sharing what he did best: his poetry. One of the last things he said was that, on your deathbed,
you’ll recognize the things that are truly meaningful in your life and what is important. And it won’t be what brand of sneakers or shirt you wore or how much you earned last year. It will be your family, your friends, and even nature herself.

At the end of the workshop we read the poems we had written. I felt nothing but complete admiration and empathy for the people around me, many of whom I may previously have thought were strange, weird or idiotic. When we heard each other’s life stories we realized just how amazing it was that we were even alive! I left feeling completely inspired and I looked back at the last few months with some doubts about the person I was becoming. Finding it hard to watch the destruction and suffering that we humans cause, my way of dealing with it was to become judgmental when I had absolutely no right to be. If I could blame someone else for it all, I didn’t have to change my own ways.

Inspired by Paradox, I resolved I would live every day like it was my last. However, I had no idea that the universe was going to make sure I got the message loud and clear the next morning. I had cycled the fifty-five miles to the festival; a six-hour journey during which I’d seen no other cyclists but lots of dead badgers, rabbits, foxes and birds. I was about two miles into the journey home when I heard a car scream over the peak of a small hill behind me and, seconds later, its horn frantically blaring. I scowled over my shoulder:‘I’m in as far as I can go!’, only to see the car in mid-air coming straight for me. The momentum of the bike kept me going and the car landed dead, bent in two in the ditch, with a sound like a bomb going off. It came to rest about six feet from my back wheel, so close I could see it out of the corner of my left eye. If I had cycled one second later or if the car had bounced back out of the ditch, I wouldn’t have been living without money. I’d still have been without money, just not living.

I made sure the driver was OK. Miraculously, she stumbled out of her car, albeit in complete shock. I had to hold back the
tears as I raced up the road on my journey home, so shocked and pumped full of adrenaline that I got home in just four hours. Going through my head was what Paradox had spoken about the day before: how would I live if today were my last? Would I be happy with the last thing I had said to someone? What had I spent my last hours/days/weeks doing? Had I told the people I treasure how I felt about them? Had I wrongly judged a person about whose story I had no idea? Was I the person I aspired to be? The answer, in June, was ‘no’. I was living without money and my actions were closely aligned to my beliefs. But for me, that is only one part of the entire solution.

Most people claim to want ‘peace’, without really knowing what that means. Peace isn’t going to fall down on us from above; it is a mosaic whose pieces are our daily interactions with each other and the planet. My personal interactions were, all too often, far removed from the true meaning of peace. I moaned about being too busy, complained about people buying stuff I didn’t agree with and generally acted less positively than I could wish. Moneyless living had begun as a means to a more peaceful way of living, but had become an end in itself, just like money started as a means to easier transactions but became an end in itself. Paradox’s workshop helped me check myself and get back to my original intentions.

The second festival I managed to get to was Sunrise Off-grid, the little sister of a much bigger festival, Sunrise Celebration. This was the off-grid festival’s first year. It grew out of Dan Hurring’s desire, the founder of Sunrise, to take issues such as climate change and peak oil seriously and to show other festival organizers how to put on a really fantastic festival, have a lot of fun, yet cause very little impact to the environment. Dan had gotten in touch in May to ask if I would do a couple of talks on living without money and I gladly agreed. A couple of two-hour talks was much easier than the five days’ work I did at
Buddhafield, although I helped in the alternative economics section in my spare time.

Sunrise Off-grid was four days of workshops on every aspect of society, from economy to ecology, education to energy, food to friendship, and politics to pottery. In the evenings, it was all about music and dance.

That is a point in itself. We’ve never had more money or cheaper energy. If environmental destruction made us happier, that would be something. Frying the planet would have some justification if it made us joyful. But why haven’t we become happier as we’ve become financially wealthier? Richard Easterlin, an economist at the University of Southern California, believes that a large part of the problem is the consumerist treadmill we are on; never satisfied and always wanting more. He says:

People are wedded to the idea that more money will bring them more happiness. When they think of the effects of more money, they are failing to factor in the fact that when they get more money they are going to want even more money. When they get more money, they are going to want a bigger house. They never have enough money but what they do is sacrifice their family life and health to get more money.

The Austrian millionaire businessman, Karl Rabeder, realized this simple fact and gave away everything he owned, including his $4.5 million fortune. Asked why, he said:

Money is counter-productive – it prevents happiness to come. For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness. I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things and I applied this for many years. But more and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’. I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.

I had the privilege of meeting a few of the people who’ve really inspired and influenced me. One, Patrick Whitefield, Permaculture guru and author of
The Earth Care Manual
, came to one of my talks. Knowing someone in the crowd knows significantly more than you about almost everything you are talking about can be a little unnerving, to say the least, but thankfully he was entirely supportive.

I also went to an interesting talk by the founder of the ‘Transition’ movement, Rob Hopkins. Rob’s talks are always intriguing, but this one was particularly fascinating. He had to limit his presentation (for which he used a data projector) to just an hour. If he hadn’t, the band due to play a little later on the same stage wouldn’t have had enough power for amplification. This highlighted the implications of taking responsibility for your own energy needs. When his talk ended and questions began, Rob turned off his wind-powered laptop, whereas ordinarily, plugged into mains electricity, he’d have left it on. Whenever you produce your own of anything, you don’t waste a drop.

I went to a workshop led by Theo Simon, lead singer and lyricist of Seize the Day, one of the bands I’d been delighted to see at Buddhafield. Theo has spent twenty years writing and performing songs that have inspired activists in the UK and beyond to keep campaigning for social justice. Constantly on the frontline himself, Theo had spent much of the summer of 2009 campaigning with the workers of the Vestas Wind Turbine factory, on the Isle of Wight, who had lost their jobs because their bosses, who’d made a profit of $114 million in the previous three months, realized they could make more if they moved their operations to the US. Workers who’d joined just months earlier, advised that their jobs were safe, had taken out mortgages, only to be given barely any notice and just $300 as compensation for their job losses. Others had lost jobs they’d spent their working
lives committed to. That’s green capitalism for you: a symptom of a system based on competition instead of co-operation.

Theo’s workshop was called
Conscious Activism
. Over the years, he has seen a lot of brutality, mostly from police ordered to defend the interests of those who bring millions of pounds into the UK economy. As anyone who has been on a protest, direct action or non-violent demonstration to stop an incredible injustice knows, some police officers can be very heavy handed. During the workshop, Theo described many of the incidents he’s witnessed and it wasn’t easy listening. Every single person in that workshop was touched to their core by how he talked about the police, despite his harrowing experiences of them. Activists often talk like they ‘want to save the earth’. The earth will be fine, in time; it’s humanity that may need saving. But who do they want to ‘save’ it for? Only other activists? Only for activists and the working classes? Or for everyone: executive bankers, environmentalists, police officers, human rights activists, and politicians alike?

If we are genuinely interested in preventing the worst repercussions of climate change and depletion of resources, we need to engage with and have compassion for everyone, not just those who have similar views to our own. Turning things around environmentally will have to involve everyone, including the police officers ordered, by their bosses, to prevent such change happening, but who, for the most part, do a fantastic job of cleaning up the mess that society creates.