… I saw the gregarious, so happy, surrounded by her group of friends, going out for the night, having a really good time, beaming from ear to ear, carefree, lost in the moment. I also saw the lonely with a forlorn look, really sad with no friend or family. His loneliness was like a gulf swallowing him whole. The pain was intense and he questioned the meaning and purpose of life.

I saw the wise, perceptive and intuitive, with deep insight into life and its way. Having an understanding of man and his biding, his direction. I also saw the fool, totally clueless, oblivious to his folly, parading his stupidity for the whole world to see. Not knowing and not seeking to know. Puffed up in his ignorance and leaving a trail everywhere he has been, louder than anyone else.

I see wealth, I see opulence, I see abundance, I see super abundance, I see wastage, I see more than enough, I see way too much. I see superfluity. Yet I also see lack, intense lack, I see scarcity, I see sparseness, I see poverty, I see hunger, I see famine, I see malnourished, in the same space.

I see new life, I see rejoicing at the new birth, I see hope, I see dreams, I see prophecy, I see the future, I see the exhilaration, I see the plans and then I see death, I see the end, I see shattered dreams, I see pain, grief, I feel the questions unanswered, I feel the weight of the sorrow. I see the finality of death.

I see the healthy, oozing with life and wellness, strong and alive. Youthful and thriving. Bouncing from one stage to another, from one project to another, from quest to another. Yet I see the sick, unhealthy and frail, dependent and depressed, demotivated and afraid, despising of life in the same space.

I see the very popular and the not so popular, the well loved and the not so loved, the composed and the clumsy, the motivated and the unmotivated, the godly and the ungodly, the kind and the mean, the gentle and the brash, the civilised and the uncivilized, the learned and the unlearned, the loving and the unloving, the well travelled and the unexposed, the happy and the sad, the young and the old, the fat and the thin, tall and the short, the keen and indifferent, the awaken and the asleep, the religious and the irreverent, the calming and the troublesome etc.

In the same space, I see it all, from one extreme to the other and everything inbetween. We all occupy this same space called earth. How do we navigate this space? It is not one against the world. It is one amongst all in the world. The earth belongs to no man, it is no mans land, it is a space we all occupy for a period and then move on, let the earth bear us witness (even if no man does) that while we were here we made good use of the space.

In the same manner that a top interior designer arranges and rearranges the furniture in a room until he gets it in the right position. He maximises the space, steps back, observe and changes the position again for newness and variety. Let us all continue to position and reposition ourself in this space. It is not the piece of furniture being in the room that creates the effect, it is the manner and where it is position in the room.

Maximise this space, called earth!

… and where does our help come from? We are human with human eyes and we look to the usual suspects, the likely ones, we look to the saints, to the ones closest to us, to the ones with the right credentials, the shinest shoes, the loudest voice, the biggest promise. And then we are dissapointed, they can’t deliver, they they don’t know how and when they do, they don’t want to. We are stuck as both the priest and the levite will walk away as we bleed and are bruised. And when we think, it is all over, the most unlikely character walk along, the Samaritan and he sees our wounds, feels our pain and without a word ministers to our need, pours oil of the wound, nurses us to health and prevents us from dying.

The question that feels my heart is, why didn’t the priest or the levite minister to this man that was beaten by robbers? Why leave him to bleed to death? Do they hate him so much? Has he wronged them? Do they not count his life worthy? Or were they just in a hurry? I guess we will never know why the usual suspect sometimes do not help, even they don’t always know. There is just no rousing, no fire, no empathy, no nothing. they are just as flat as a deflated balloon. But the Samaritan, who is unknown, a stranger with a heart, wih empathy. This man must do something, he must say something, he must urge things on and steer.

At the end of the day, it is all down to the Samaritans

… I appreciate that last Christmas is a distant memory for a number of us and we are happy to just about get back to civilian living after all that festivity. However there is this issue about Santa and his gifts that I feel the time is right for us to talk about and hopefully iron out once and for all. I am not even going to get into the argument of whether Santa exists or not, or whether he gives gift or not, not today, maybe another day, another write up.

Now I must admit, I sometimes feel Santa is a bit of a queer guy. Why? You ask. The guy only turns up at night when everyone is sleeping, leaves whatever gift he feels like, disappears before anyone can question him on the approriateness of the gifts. It is a matter of take it or leave it. Sometimes we make list that is totally ignored. we get what we get, there is no return policy, no exchange’ policy, no ‘no quibble’ policy. He has no Complaint Department, no customer service office, no Corporate Solution. Love it or hate it, he is not coming back till next Christmas! So that is just how it goes.

Anyway Santa came, left me all these beautiful gifts and I was please, appreciative person I am, so I took my gifts rejoicing, my friends turned up and I couldn’t wait to tell them all about what I got, they seem quite excited, so I brought some out and we all shared, we ate what we needed to eat, sprayed what needed to be sprayed, played with the toys etc. After, they seemed dissatisfied, I figured I didn’ share enough, so I brought some more out and we did the same things all over again. Again they seem displeased when it was all over, so I decided to bring every thing out, I mean everything and I shared all with them, there was nothing left. When it was all over, all done, they rose up and insulted me, they wanted to know why I didn’t have any more gifts. I tried to explain that was all I got, I was happy with my gifts and equally happy to share with them, but they wouldn’t have any of that. They were livid and stormed out of my house.

Once they left, I sat puzzled, all Santa gave me I shared with you, moreover I was happy with what I got, why were you angry with me? Those are my gifts after all. Where are your gifts? Did Santa not come to your place? Why begrudge my giftings? Why project your dissatisfaction unto me?

My experience with human beings are similar. They come into your life and you share all you have with them, your giftings, calling and your essence, but it is never enough, not good enough for them and they insult and throw stones, they mudsling. Why? There own needs have not been met. We all have needs, there is no doubt, but we all can do only what we can do. We are not called to everyone, we are called to who we are called to, we are gifted with what we are gifted with, we can help those we can help, we can only do what we can do and after that there is no more we can do. Once we have exhausted Santa’s gift we are done. Santa is life, Santa is our maker. Life, our maker gives us what it gives us and that is what we have to share with people. Peter said, ” … gold and silver I have none, but such as I have I give thee …”. It is pointless begrudging Peter for the gold and silver he does not have. But most importantly, let charity start at home. Let us look in our house and that begs the question, did Santa visit us? Didn’t life give us anything? Yes Santa ‘seem’ more generous to some than others. Though this is usually an issue of perception. Does this give us the right to slaughter our brother that has more? especially when sometimes there is no more.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to take issue with Santa, maybe our umbrage is directed to the wrong person and we are barking at the wrong tree. Or maybe we have no right whatsoever to take issue with Santa or anyone, maybe we must just find a way to make the best of what we are given. Let each man find solace in what he has been given. Godliness with contentment is great gain. At some level, we are all, each and every one of us is Santa, to give to others as we have been given to, not to arm wrestle out of people what they don’t have or aren’t willing to give.

… they told me she is the odd one, different, no one understood her. Her ways were different, manners did not align, her thinking was different, actually it was and it wasn’t, she was superior in her mind, but who could accept and understand that? I was born into this perception about her, what a horrible perception! And joined them in relating to her as such. She carried the burden on her head, all around her, that she was not right, something was wrong with her. If she was wrong, then every single one of us is wrong, if she is not right, then none is right. She came as she was made and she dealt as she knew. What a wicked and horrible people, we sometimes are? Even though I appreciate it comes from a place of ignorance. We killed her, we did it, even though we did it very very slowly. We told her she was not, she did not belong, we used our mouth to tear her down, we used our energy to isolate her. It was only a matter of time before she believed our lies and dealt as one that was wrong, when all along she was right!

Life swept me into her camp, I was astonished at her beauty, her love, her childlikeness, her kindness. She was truly one in a million. But she no longer believed it, she lived as an outcast, she self destoyed, she sabotaged herself, for life had told her too often and for too long that she was not good, not loving, not caring when nothing else emanates from her being but love. She seek to find herself when she was not lost, little wonder, her whole life and aboard was topsy turvy. She was good to go, but she did not know, so she did not go. Because she didn’t look like others, she was told she did not fit (but fit where?) so she stayed back. She stayed home and died there and the world was deprived of her magnificence. I thank God, I had the opportunity to catch a glimpse and to rub mind with a beautiful mind.

What a being? What a giant that visited? What a genius? Clueless as we are, we allowed them to leave without infecting us. Other giants are coming and some are already with us, I pray we don’t treat them the same way, but sadly we already are! May the giants find the strength not to cave in.

May the giant live! May the misunderstood stand! May the good stay good. May we not look for what is not missing. May we not seek to change when no change is required. May we find the strength and fortitude to just be.

May the giant live!

… he was going home, to his house, he knows where he lives, he lived there, so really there is no question about that, he is an adult and has lived there all his life, but yet he drove past it and did not know, so exactly where is he going? What happened to him? Did he forget where he lived? Did his break failed? Was he daybreaming, absented minded or did he loose his senses? What exactly is the story? Oblivous he kept going, house behind and the issuse begs the question, so where is he going? At some point he has to stop, we all have to stop at some point, has the breaks totally gone? Are we watching an imminent car crash happen right before our eyes? What do we do with the guy in the car that seems to have no break, crusing on? How do we stop him, to let him know he passed home?

Do we jump in front of the car? No! I don’t think so, that is the sure recipe for disaster for us, but yet disaster is looming for him. Do we jump in a car and drive beside him? Do we? There has to be an intervention, we have to force stop some how? We need to get his attention? We have to let him know home is behind? There is nothing in front?

The story of this man is a story we find replayed over and over again in life of different people around us. People lose cognizance of who they are, where the controls are, they can’t see home, their house , and once you can’t see home, you can’t see anything else, you can’t see the red lights, the stop sign, the give way, the single yellow , double yellow, double red, anything, you can’t even see the traffic warden! How do we slow people down in the fast lane to talk to them, to let them know they have drove past the house? That there is nothing, absolutely nothing in front!

“Get off your high horse” screamed the ….. Except ‘he’ didn’t have a horse neither was he on anything high for that matter. He was just created tall, standing straight on his scared ground, neither shrinking nor elongating, just standing! He tried to look down, he stretched down his hand , his back hurt, trying to go as low as possible but yet the liluput can not reach neither could ‘he’ go down any further. Then came the accusations, ‘you are too proud’ ‘you are a snob, arrogant, big headed, high minded, pretentious, uncaring, unloving, self obsessed, self centred etc.

With pain in his heart, he withdrew his hand and continued his journey, he must be, he must live his truth and he must never apologies for his height and so the gulf remained!

… the gulf is that gap that can not be bridged, that breach that can not be filled, that experiential difference, that psychological incongruence, that tribal disimilarity, that class disparity, that knowledge gap, that wisdom inequality, that unconsciousness, that unawareness, that obtuseness, that communication gap that grates and leads to nothing but pain on all sides and for all parties. It’s all lost in translation, broken to pieces in transportation, never reaches its destination, a journey in futility, just pointless yet we insist we must eat and play together! The legs do not fit under the table!

So the gulf remains.

• 

… my will is the most important thing about me, it is me through and through. It is what makes me beautiful, real and authentic. It is what gives life to everything I do, everything I say, all of my actions. Take my will and you have nothing, you have a zombie without soul. You have a carcass of a being, purely obeying instructions, doing as told without any affection, love or interest.

Leave my will alone, call me strong willed if you like, but let me be with my will. Take not my will from me. The strength of my will is the beauty of my being. Crush not my will and expect me to dance for I can no longer hear the music, the rhythm has left me. If I love with my will, don’t ask me to love by your demands, let me love from my depth not from your expectations. You will get your expectations but with no love, for my will is not with it.

Let me work with my will, let me deliver the project with my will engaged. Don’t crush my will and ask me to do a good job. A job I will do, but it will be no good. Without my will there is no good.

Let me be with my will, He that made me gave it to me, that I might shine and be like Him. Let me and my will be!

To be strong willed is to proceed from the depth of being.

… before I go in to face my destiny, in the waiting room that is where I am, the tension room as I call it, the before room, the cell before the execution chamber. How difficult that room can be? I have read and listen to stories of people on death row, we wouldn’t bother ourselves with the crime that lead to the situation, but this where they have found themselves. Slowly they are moved closer and closer to the execution chamber until they are just feets away, they can hear the cries and smell of those being executed! What a death before the death! In my opinion this is worse than the actual execution. We might as well get it done and over with. The waiting must be excruciating. Being so close and seeing it almost happening, not being able to run to it or run away from it. That tight rope stage!

I once watched a movie, with Tom Hanks and Megan Ryan, ‘You’ve got mail’ this was adapted from an older movie titled ‘The Shop around the corner’. I quite like the older version. 2 employees that couldn’t stand each other did not immediately know they were falling in love with each other. It is that ‘falling’ – you see it coming and you want to hold it back, you want to abate it. In the scene of disclosure, there were exchange of lines that I love very much, the guy Alfred Kralik couldn’t take it any longer in the waiting room, when he blurted the famous line ” …“My dearest sweetheart, Klara, I can’t stand it any longer. Take your key and open post office box 237 and take me out of my envelope… and kiss me.” Just to say, I have been waiting so long, I can’t wait any longer, I must see the Doctor now, I must kiss my love now, or just simply, I must express my love now, you can take it or leave it, but I must express my heart.

I never can understand why women need the rest room as much as they do, but they do. when you are out at shopping mall, cinema or wherever, the ladies toilet always have the longest queue and the look on some of the women’s faces says it all. ‘I can only wait so long before things get undiginified around here!’ Phil Collins captures the mood so aptly in his song, ‘I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord‘. In the waiting room, we ‘feel it coming’ and we are doing all we can to stay sane, not to loose it, not to blurt out our unfeigned affection, not to defecate ourselves, not to run into the execution chamber, not to dip our hands in the priest’s meal, not to tip over into the ditch …. we can feel the suction of the ditch strongly pulling us in but we must wait! How hard it is in the waiting room? How difficult? Sometimes our restraint is non ending, we must hold back, wait forever, there are things we so badly need and want to say but decency and civility requires we must keep our mouths shut.

The waiting room is for the strong and as Phil Colins rightly sang, we sure need ‘Oh Lord’ as we can feel it coming and yes it comes ‘in the night’ the darkest period for us, when our resolve is low.

… we sat in darkness for so long, it hurt our eyes, hurt our bodies, psychologically maimed us, it stunted our growth. We did all we knew to switch on the light, we tapped, pressed, pulled, pushed, slided, waved, courted, shouted, sang, smiled, laughed but the light just will not come on. We prayed, interceeded, fasted, confessed, professed, claimed, meditated, asserted but nothing happened. We cried, moaned, wrote, complained, became sad, progressed to depression, the light did not bulge. We had anxiety, we suffered insomnia, we gained weight, lost weight, we were lonely, alone, unloved, untouched, uncontacted, alienated, ignored, avoided, but yet the light did not shine. We regressed, lost our glow, our sheen, we became dull, dim, lacklustre, yet no light. We tried and tried, no stone was left unturned, every advice in the book was implemented but light did not show up. We went for counselling, got advisers, read all the ‘how to’ manuals, got all the top books on getting the light to shine, but nothing happened.

We decided that this was a dark place, it has no light, no hope, no kindness, no softness, no life, no humanity. It had no heart, no soul, just pain and harshness. Cold as a frozen Turkey, hard as hell, impenetrable and unyielding, more hostile than the Sahara desert, never seen rain of joy and never will. Thriving in it’s meanness with no intention of relenting on its grip of suffocation, a dead place with the illusion of life, no true life can survive the hostility of this place, belonging to the dead and dying.

We packed our bags, our spirits crushed without redemption. We must breath, we must live, we must be in a place where the water flows, where it is fluid, where the light shines and there is life. We must recuperate, we must recover, we must flourish again, we need nourishment, we need joy, we need life, we need light! As we turn to leave, we saw a glimpse, it was so slight we paid no attention. In the dark place, there has never been light, our eyes must be deceiving us! It must have gotten accustomed to the darkness and started seeing things, drawing patterns. It must be a fluke, a mirage! We moved one more step and saw another tiny spark, a minute flame, a flicker, we stopped and behold, in the dark and frozen place, a thawing has began, the sun was rising, the light has began to shine! We stopped in our track, how would we have known that the light could reach into the depth of hell? They that sat in darkness have seen a great light. Our hearts leaped and rejoiced. We held hands and danced, tears of joy flowing down our faces. We were as them that dream. We are grateful for the steadfast hand that kept us still during the darkest of nights, the unquenchable light that shines in the very core of our being that no work of darkness can reach.

We are the light, irrespective of the depth and blackness of the darkness and night, the light shines and the darkness can not prevail, never!

We are the light in an evil and perverse generation. We do not seek to leave the darknesss to persist, we steadfastly shine our light until the fire catches, we are the hope of our generation.

The light shone! It caught! Peace and joy reigned!

… the wait can be difficult and we grow weary, we wonder, will he ever come? At another level we wonder if there ever is a lover for us, not to talk about him coming or not. This is when the strangeness commences, when we start dancing to strange music and to show our privacy to the whole world. This is when we take on the ways of the foreigner for we no longer believe we have a lover or that he would come. We discard our uniqueness and put on the affairs and manners that will appeal to a strange lover, for we must be loved! But how can a strange lover love us when he does not know us? No one can truly love us as long as we continue to masquerade in our disguise, for we are not known. We all continue in the deceitful love affair for lack of patience, there is no transparency, no vulnerability, we lose heart waiting, believing that our’s will never come to us and we must now live with the unappealing unequal yoking we have created.

There is only one way to stand solidly on our own sacred ground, our own uniqueness without compromising the integrity of who we truly are, of our very being. That is when we believe that our lover will come. The one that loves us as we are will come, the one that accepts our being as we are made, that sees pass our flaws, focusing on our beauty, our uniqueness will come. But it takes courage, a whole lot of courage to wait the wait. It takes faith to believe that he that will come, will come and not tarry. It takes resolute and a stubborn steadfastness to stand solid when lovers after lovers arrives, picks up their bride and we are about the only one left on the shelf. It takes determination, purposefulness, awareness, consciousness and awakeness not to compromise our stand, not to shift a bit to the right or to the left. Not to take or attach a little bit of this or that to enhance our appeal.

It is hard to be rejected, it is hard to be passed over, it is difficult to accept being overlooked and ignored. It is not easy when we are not acknowledged or considered. It is just easier in those circumstances to compromise who we are and when our lover arrives he can’t find us or recognise us because we are busy masquerading in clothes that do not belong to us. We have put on the scent of another animal and nobody knows who we are.

We must find the strength to resit the temptation to be anything other than who we are created to be, we must find the strength to take our stand, we must believe to the saving of our souls knowing that it is a matter of time and he that will come will come and not tarry, our lover will come. Fear is the reason why we stay or go with a wrong lover, fear of being left alone, of never making it to our true lover, of him never turning up. We all know when we are hooked up with the wrong lover but we stay for we fear that none else will come.

Someone ask, who or what do you mean by ‘lover’? Are you talking about Jesus Christ, a romantic partner, husband etc? No, our lover do not necessarily come with any of those labels, they are the people that get us, that accept us, that see us through and through, that do not pre judge us, that do not pretend to love us, are not with us to score some points or for signalling effect. These are our soul mates, our tribe people, our very own, our heart is at rest and at peace with them, we don’t have to act up or down, we can just be and we are accepted in the beauty of our being. These people can come in any form or guise, our paths can cross anywhere or at any time, they are not perfect either, but a discerning soul knows when he is with his lover, there is a peace and connection that can not be explained or traded.

Stay true, stay you! Keep doing life the best you know to do, and there he comes!