Poverty, emptiness that makes us rich

Poverty sounds scary because we need money to live in society, especially big cites which I love. But being poor is a mind set. It's just realizing deep in my spirit that I was born naked and will die naked. Nothing to nothing. This is reality and no one can deny that.

Yet creative forces kick in once we leave the womb as we cry, learn and make things happen. Out of the poverty of our birth, we gain from the rich experiences of life that can urge us onward to dream and create.

It's easy to think riches are the obvious things we own. But being rich means knowing how to use our borrowed time and "possessions" to value the people we love. It's about use and not owning. If you realize nothing is really yours since we take nothing with us when we die, you are free to create, take risks and live. If you are wise, you try to find the "things" that are most valuable.

I pass by some mortuary services on the way to work. The sight of coffins is still eerie because we don't like to think that's where we end up. But the truth is that even those boxes don't die with us. When we die just like when we were born, we are naked and have nothing.

Emptiness sounds scary but we are surrounded by nothing. High energy Physics tells us we are made up of more space than matter. It is also more space and emptiness that make up the Universe than matter. Yet somehow, out of the emptiness that is space, out of the poverty of nothingness, we have life worth living. This sound religious but it is not.

Just look at how society sees death. Much of the world wants to make the dying of those we love as somber affairs because we fear it and want to publicly (perhaps pretentiously) express our grief.

Some cultures celebrate it. I once saw a dead body decorated with flowers being carried by a bunch of jogging men through the busy streets on the way to cremation. You guess where it was. But this way of treating death is much closer to the facts: that poverty and emptiness is the beginning and end, yet we live!

Real riches is the life we live in the midst of nothing and space. And that's the truth.