"Tranquillity is here."

I haven't written anything meaningful in a long time. Most of my posts have had inconsequential bits of everything chucked together into a sloppy concoction of mostly verbiage. It's not a reassuring thought, because it makes me feel as if my brain is melting into a rubbery mass. I hope it isn't.

In my panic at that initial thought, I hauled the anthology's I possessed off of my shelf and spread them across my desk - pushing aside all of the other mundane artefacts (which included my current study material) - and ate them up hungrily with my eyes at first. It's a different feeling, to run your hands over a page of script you know so well. To feel the words jumping up to greet you, like an old friend, one that will never change, immortalised by print. It is wondrous to read a few lines, and conjure up a whole kaleidoscope of understanding - like interpreting words into colours, and shapes, and splendid and devastating images.

"Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives."

So, I closed my ears and opened my mind...and heard the world around me: crickets playing their own orchestra and the ocean crashing onto the shore; the sound of gushing water through the pipes in the walls; the hum of the a/c keeping the oppressive humidity at bay; the muted dialogue on the television through the glass of my closed bedroom door; my own breathing, barely perceptible; Milo, our resident owl, outside and hopefully, on the hunt; I could hear my own heartbeat if I really concentrated; silence. Silence weaving itself through it all. If you listen hard enough, you can always find the silence, even amid a cacophony.

It is a soothing exercise I find. It calms the mind, yet at the same time awakens it: Listening. In the beginning, it's like listening to various musicians tune their instruments (with varying levels of success), and then...as you let your senses take over, it blooms into a full out symphony. And even all those sounds that once irritated you, now seem beautiful.

We should try listening to our World more often. I think it deserves at least that much, and we might just find something marvellous while we're at it...

It is difficult to sympathise with the spiteful

And, it's that time of the year again - where riotous students go on a rampage: burning tables, bullying fellow students, ransacking venues, littering the campuses with garbage, and singing struggle songs to the stamping of their feet...oh joy.

This is probably the only aspect of campus that I do NOT miss. Not even in the least (if you recall my blog-post of August last year, "Never let a pot-plant fall into the wrong hands"). I'm not there this year to join in the hoards of students who, grabbing only the bare essentials, flee from the advancing army of hooligans (or in my case, allow themselves to be pulled along by worried contemporaries), but I hear it's all just as frustratingly imbecilic and mutinous as the years past. And so, I am indignant and disgusted on behalf of all the students who still have to deal with these ruffians.

Their plight may, in some cases, be an important one and I actually might have sympathised with them too, if they didn't go about creating such chaos in their wake with no regard for others. Do they not realise that the funds they seek, will now have to go into restoring the property that they themselves have damaged? Do they not realise that they are the ones sabotaging their own efforts?

It's pathetic; it's idiotic; it's immature; it's selfish - to describe it in just a few choice words. It proves not only to the world, but to us as South Africans, how fragile, and young and so precarious is our little democracy...how immature it is. In the great scheme of things, these campus riots don't appear to be even remotely equal to matters of state...but think about this: these hooligans may very well be our leaders of tomorrow. I mean, everyone laughed at Zuma...and look where he is now.

Which is, in truth, a rather scary notion. A sad one too, considering all the effort that their predecessors, and our much respected leaders of past, put into gaining freedom for our country. I find it insulting to all the great men and women who once sang the very same songs that these rioters bandy about in their ignorant disorder. How dare they take implements of the Freedom Struggle and abuse them in such an indecorous manner! How dare they now abuse the freedom that they have been handed on a silver platter! How dare they prove all the dictators and past, ignoble, leaders who said that we did not deserve this said freedom right!

We, as the next generation South Africans, should be aiding in the growth of our democracy. Not hindering or maligning it, to meet our own selfish ends. There is no need to be violent. There is no need to be abusive. There is no need to be spiteful and hostile. There is no need, to cause destruction.

You Owe Me

You owe me more than stinted glimpses of a battered heart.
You owe me for all the times I made you smile. All the times you made my heart beat a minute a mile. All the times I held your hand and guided you back past the edge of self-pity and denigration - even when you'd clearly leaped over the precipice...you owe me, because I never cut loose your bungee cord. 
You owe me more than the feeling of the shadow of a friendship only falling on me when the sunshine of your love has dwindled.
You owe me more than vague explanations and heartfelt lamentations over someone else. 
You owe me for all the times I gave you what you needed and refused you what you wanted. For all the times I heard your pain and gave up what I needed to be your balm.
You owe me more than the warmth of a friendless friend: the empty room into which you lament your woes when the world outside turns its back on you.
You owe me for the trust I placed in you; for your trust I never broke; for the trust that you destroyed.
You owe me more than a pitiful coupon to a friendship that should never have been allowed to wilt the way it did: like a sick rose you walk past every day, and don't ever wonder about whether you should take it to the sunlight...till it's too late, and winters already arrived.
You owe me, because I tried to salvage our sinking ship.
You owe me for the nights I lay awake worrying about you; for the days I walked through thinking about how to help you; for the times I took your life and your woes and placed them before my own.
You owe me for understanding why you broke my heart.

And I owe you. For showing me all that I really could be.
I owe you for painting my world with a kaleidoscope of colours, for luring me into a cranny of time, where even  surreal happiness was possible.
I owe you for the acceptance - for the way you never pitied me.
I owe you for loving me for that short while, for nurturing false promises, for watering dreams that grew.
I owe you for giving me sunshine, for pulling it out from under my feet.
I owe you because in playing your game, you showed me that I am worth my name.
I owe you for the heartache because it taught me to smile through the storms; that even through hail, you can always spy a rainbow.
I owe you because you contributed to who I am.
Even though, "I am not what I am."

But never forget, all that you owe me. If you do...it will prove to me that the person I once knew was never really true. I can bear my debt...but not a lie - every wound heals with the passing of time, mine has already barely a scar, but a lie...is degenerate.

You owe me.
Just like I owe you.

I am the World

I am the endless expanse of blue that yawns out above and the sparkling, seamless carpet of aquamarine that threads out below. I am the golden grains of the Sahara and the snowballed peaks of the Alps. I am the degenerate slums of India and the mystique grandeur that pervades its Taj Mahal. I am the oppressively dark, ominously silent jungles of the Amazon and the clay baked earth of Africa. I am the stage of the greatest plays ever to be enacted: embittered world wars; blood curdling genocides; God’s wrath, unrestrained and terrible in Nature; the incalculable collapse of international economies. I am the chasm of the Grand canyon and the ostentatious catwalks of Milan. I am the parched footprints of Australia and the labyrinthine waterways of Venice. I belong to no one, yet my skin is soiled with the blood of a hundred nations. I am, the World.

I am the World, and it isn’t Time that has ravaged me, but Greed. Greed of a People who talk all the time, yet don’t actually say anything; People who have forgotten their thirst for innocent dreams of selfless lives and noble loves that encompass the gift of breath; a People who continue subtracting, but never add; of big words, but small character; of an era in my antique history where there are thieves and then THIEVES – who importune Human Rights, yet continue to consciously rape the very source of their sustenance in insatiable avarice; of a People whose lack of principle would have made Iago tremble and Machiavelli shudder.

I am the World, and in my aeons I have retrogressed two fold with each progression; Men have walked the Moon, yet there are parts of me still un-chartered; the air has been cleaned up, yet my soul has become polluted; the atom has been conquered, yet prejudice still weighs me down; there are more degrees, but less common sense; a wealth of experts, yet more problems.

I am the World – the World of throwaway diapers, disposable morality, one-night stands and overweight children, and drugs that do everything from induce euphoria to soothe to destroy. The World where the colossal ego of Men serve as the fuel to wage wars that raze whole civilisations to near extinction – and like bushfire in the African Savannah, the force of Man’s inexhaustible Greed has scorched my being, leaving me but a derelict fragment of what I’d been in Youth.

I am the World, and in my ancient years I have learnt an important truth: a bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer…it sings because it has a song. Man seeks answers where there are none, and in his quest to interpret a song with no purport he has looted everything from me, leaving me in desolate obscurity – a mere shadow of immutable glory. He has multiplied his possessions, but reduced his values. He spends too much, drinks too much, gets too angry, wants too much, and prays too seldom – and as a consequence he forgets that things are only as valuable as people make them. The debauched politics of Man is so engrossed in proving who’s right and who’s wrong, that they have forgotten what’s right and what’s wrong.

I am the World, I have been viewed from the outer limits and Men have proclaimed me as a most momentous sight, a vista the likes of which they have never witnessed – yet it is ironic that everyday a little bit of me is murdered. It is said, that irony is insult with a smiling face. I have for millennia provided for all and demanded nothing in return – what have I done to deserve this malignant sneer? My only purpose is to BE, and my lonely fate is to turn Time on my axis, setting myself, as those who are unhappy often do, a kind of pastoral litany. My pillaged soul has become another slovenly vessel stranded in the Bermuda Triangle of the Universe

Ever since the conception of Man’s cognition, my origins have been contested and argued invariably, however, the most popular scientific theory is the hypothesis of the primeval atom. My birth may still be debatable and though the future is as murky as the swamps of Venezuela…I am the World and as a result of Man’s ignoble rapacity, this is the way I will end: not in an explosion of splendorous effulgence, not with a bang – but with a whimper.