A dynamic state of peace

It is pouring loudly with rain. The clouds are united in a pure, white sky that has neither definition nor limits. Trees, bushes and pot plants are swaying, shaking and drooping, though the arum lily stands undaunted. The strings of rain are close together, there is unity, harmony in this hard, persistent dance. 

My mind's inner eye is occupied (literally). It is claimed by an image observed yesterday, outside my head, just like the rain today. It is an image of a family of Egyptian geese, led by the male, with Mom as the rearguard. 

Eight or nine goslings paddled for what they were worth through the windblown ripples of their home lake, keeping in perfect single file and so imprinting their live bodies into the 'duck(ling)s in a row', which now inhabit my head.

Once the parents had got them all safely to shore and, famished from their strenuous outing, they immediately began foraging in the grass, Dad raised himself to his full height, stretched and shook his splendid wings, pushing out his chest with its dark brown medal in a momentary posture of proud glory.

Mom had meanwhile flown to perch upon a railing to groom herself in private, as it were, taking some time out from the family.

* * *

In the aftermath of a sorrowful division between dear friends and fellows of mine (a situation which remains painfully raw and as yet unresolved), the undemarcated sky and rain, the disciplined little goslings and their steady parents offer an objective correlative to my inner state: I have taken a stance that is aligned with my heart, mind, body and soul. My friends know where I stand and, most importantly, I know where I stand.

Balance is a dynamic state of peace. I wish this for each individual member of my great and varied human family.

Photo: thanks to Ken Barris

Equally human

‘The poor’ and ‘the rich’. Two terms, which, apparently, denote human beings according to their material property.

I recall teaching youths as well as adults in Soweto during the 1980s and early 90s. They were a relatively small élite, in that they were given the chance of receiving high quality education every Saturday, while their peers were watching tv, doing chores, laughing, squabbling or, worse, fighting in the streets.

A couple of years later I taught at a private college, which had sprung into existence to support young people who had not achieved university exemption, but whose parents wanted them to get some form of tertiary qualification. Many of them managed to register through UNISA, and not a few lacked the discipline and motivation to knuckle down and obtain their degrees. We, the teachers, were employed to serve this ‘clientèle’ by wrestling them, somehow, into passing.

What disturbed me at that time was the strong sense of the disadvantagedness of these ‘rich kids’. In hindsight, I guess it was the cadaverous fragrance of decadence that hung about them. Against all political correctness, I felt, strongly, the privilege of those select township children, who were loved and pampered by the education support programmes and really given the best in the allocated hours. By contrast, I felt sorry for and disturbed by the ‘rich kids’, who were paid for, but whose hearts and minds were all too often nigh impermeable. As human beings I judged more than a few of them to be quite stunted in their development.

It remains a horribly unquestioned perception that material wealth equals advantage. It is a skewed perception, however, because it is grossly superficial. The most advantaged kids I have seen in the last ten years were a group of grade 7s at a tiny school called Crabbush, in Hogsback in the Eastern Cape. They came to the local library once a week for supplementary tuition in English. They were considered disadvantaged because they could barely speak that language. However, they struck me as basically happy, healthy children, who recited new vocabulary in sing-song, and then strolled between free-roaming cattle from the library back to their school each Thursday. It disturbed me that such children should be saddled with so negative a label; just as it continues to disturb me that youngsters, who are fluent in English and who have private rooms in city dwellings, should be seen as ‘advantaged’ when too many of them are, in fact, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually dangerously neglected, in some cases even abused.

I cannot not mention the rich élite in the present government, who also demonstrate the potential 'disadvantage' of excessive material wealth when it comes to being a decent human being. The rich are helplessly entangled just like the poor in an outdated system and mindset, which is a system and mindset that prioritises the material identity of an individual at the cost of all that makes us truly human. The 'poor' who steal and lie and commit murder are not a jot better than the 'rich' who steal and lie and commit murder. BOTH classes are dehumanised.

I am trying to question, indeed, I would like completely to get rid of the mindset that says it's ok to steal and lie and even murder just because you are materially poor. THAT is one of the most HARMFUL attitudes, which robs the poor of their humanity and encourages material greed. That limiting mindset has rotted our civilisation through and through and stoked frightening hatred towards the rich, many of whom are, likewise, not in control of themselves – indeed, there are individuals in the South African government who are perfectly happy to demonstrate that it’s ok to steal and lie and cause the misery and death of others, just because they themselves are rich.

It is time that real human needs – for love, care, intellectual stimulation, manual as well as mental skills, as well as spiritual sustenance – are ranked equally alongside the need for food, drink, clothes and shelter. Nobody can enjoy the satisfaction of one need at the cost of excluding the other needs. The rich are just as human as the poor, and both are just as human as the middle classes (where, arguably, the greatest chance for a balanced lifestyle exists). Neither group benefits from being labelled, as these labels merely serve as blindfolds for the living hearts and minds inside the individuals branded so. The choice to honour your humanity exists for EACH ONE OF US – no matter whether you wear diamond-studded stilettoes or go barefoot.

Image by freepic.diller on Freepik

Image by Leroy Skalstad from Pixabay 

Free to be bitter

The season's grapefruits have brought much rapture. Whilst cutting them, they spray me, I am obliged to slurp the overflow before I can dare to prise segments of the flesh out with my fingers or a spoon. They have given the phrase 'to hold water' a whole new meaning!

My mother used to entice little me to eat grapefruit by disguising their bitter taste under a hilly topography of sugar, which immediately became wet and translucent as the crystals sank into the embrace of the juice.

My adult tongue, however, scorns such deceptions. Neither sugar nor milk in my coffee, please. I ward off colds and flu (including covid, by the way) with infusions of African wormwood, known also under the Afrikaans names Wilde els, or Bitterels. And oh, it is bitter - you just know it's good for you, equally as that legendary cleanser and healer, the bitter aloe.

Of course, the buds dispersed over your tongue, which hold your ability to taste bitterness, have an emotional and mental equivalent.

Bitter is the absence of God, of hope, of love and faith. This absence was felt even by Christ on the cross momentarily and is thus, surely, an emblem for the vital part it plays in human experience. 

Bitter it is to turn your eyes away from Christ on His cross, because you then immediately become aware of your own. Bitter purges me of sweetness as a disguise, it forces me to face the fact that, suddenly and inexplicably, my prayers ring hollow and my heart feels like a scar. Neither milk nor sugar please: my husband died, my mother is paralysed, my father has dementia, I've no stable income nor home, etc.etc.

Such a moment of darkness, if it extends, easily deteriorates into depression or resentment and so loses its medicine. (An excess of Bitterels will also make you sick and too much citrus gives you the runs.)

But if I treat the absence of God, the loss of connection with Beneficence (however you conceptualise it), as a living season of juicy grapefruit, the bitterness on my tongue reveals itself as a pearl and my heart-scar starts shimmering again! I can share the dawn with my beloved, and even with you, my reader!

Bitterness is a fast, a purge from safety and security, from harmony and confidence and trust. It frees you up, vaults you on. Just don't turn it into home, but see it as a spa. And let that metaphor hold water.

Re-balancing seriously squif habits

I'm not officially back on this blog. Not at all. I am still on a self-granted Sabbatical, shielding me from feeling that I have to share or speak out in public about anything.

However, after inspecting the latest edition of  The Marginalian to sail into my inbox, there are a few thoughts that this outrageously named blogsite is whispering I tattoo upon it immediately, so here goes.

In the above newsletter, the conversation between Bill Moyers and Martha Nussbaum about human goodness leads her to tell him that being a good human being means caring, staying true to and, in fact, sticking up for, your values - to live life, as she says, "with a deep seriousness of commitment" and "to wrest from the world the good life" you desire. And this naturally sometimes leads, undeservedly, to tragedy in the good person's life.

She is firm that a detached person who no longer expects fulfilment or gratification from the world cannot be considered properly human, because of the decisive disconnect between themselves and others and the consequent immunity to tragedy, or profound hurt.

Now, during two years of pandemic and lockdown, I have witnessed a significant portion of my fellow humans forced to detach themselves socially and psychologically more than they have ever done before. This includes myself. It has led me to experience my living self, indeed, as not-quite-human; with the exception of my family and friends, as utterly irrelevant to humanity and the human world. As bewildering and unwelcome as this perception has been, it did bring with it simultaneously a certain sense of not caring - in the best sense of that word: the sense of being carefree.

Yet there's a totally illogical fundament to this. Globally, the pandemic and lockdown, the medical, economic, political and social stresses, have been hurtful, traumatic, tragic. Simultaneously, there have been unforeseen griefs in my own, as well as the personal lives of others I know. How can all this lead to more lightness?

Hmm. Tough one.

I am a person who has cared, i.e. carried, perhaps, too much for too long, and so, 'not caring', in my case, could effectively be a sensible re-balancing of a seriously squif set of habits; divesting myself from a lifetime's overload, as it were, and thus facilitating a redistribution of my dubious wealth (aka load of responsibilities).

Caring, or carrying, less (those words are actually synonymous for me) has been a shift that has caused me, paradoxically, to care enough - about being a good human being, I guess - to be here at this moment. 

So, that's the 'tattoo' my blog wanted, to start two thousand and twenty-two. A kind of decorative whirl of gentle hmms.

Now where was that Sabbatical? I'm still happily riding into both sunrises and sunsets upon it. Let's keep going, Sweetheart.

Photo by TS Sergey@ttsergey

 

No why ever

Blue cranes -
snow-threaded mountains -
kites hunting, and
a sky - haired and studded with cloud -

blurred, but finding
water's shapelinesses combing through
my human thoughts
to hold

the crystal of a landscape never broken,
and no why? ever spoken.