Near Life Experience.

Growing up mostly on a caravan park, buried in a valley of the Scottish borders, I knew what 'nothing' looked like well. The nothingness of empty cupboards. The nothingness of dead air in the night-time. The nothingness of your own company in a place without television, without telephones, barely a radio signal. The nothingness of being nowhere.

But in all that nothingness out there hid something. In another valley, north of the site, stood a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. Kagyu Samye Ling. My parents drove me to it one afternoon, for most of the journey I refrained from believing that it even existed. I had only ever heard of Buddhist monks in books.

But there it was. Ethereal red and gold against the decaying greens of the landscape. Set back off a forestry road, it was truly alien to my young eyes. I rarely saw a working washing machine, much less a towering gold statue of an ancient deity perched upon a cobra snake larger than any man-made car. Monks wandered the grounds, composed of shaved heads and blood-orange robes. Deep in conversation that transcended the wants of my growling stomach, or the pain of my bruised feet, produced by my disregard for shoes out in the wild.

We entered the temple and people sat in silence on the floor, talking to someone I have never been able to hear. The alters were composed of foreign treasures that glittered fearsome in the light, made in lands that seemed trapped in time in my head. We were shown a tree in the grounds that was wrapped entirely in ribbons, all colours, all textures. Some worn, some immaculate. People made prayers and wishes upon these ribbons and then tied them to the tree. I wanted so much at that age, but right then I would have traded my next meal for a few inches of cloth.

My parents had the difficult job of explaining to me that even though the monastery was decadent, the monks actually owned nothing, they held no earthly possessions. Their religion was their life. This gave them an existential purity, a divine nature. I thought of the vacancy of our empty cupboards and tried to compare it to the materialistic vacancy of the monks. Other children had taught me that not having was something bad, that it made me less than those that had. I had never considered that there were different kinds of nothingness.

Elsewhere I was a child trapped in a static caravan, with a lot of nothing to buy nothing. Out there I was closer to an immortal god, with a lot of something you cannot buy with anything.