Another day has passed.

Some things, like memories, are not easy to write about. I know that memory is a wonderful thing yet it can be quite frightening in its scope. My memories seem to be activated at random, as I presume happens to others. All of a sudden a memory is there without seemingly being called. While others have to be dragged from wherever they reside. 

While the time spent without Magucha has not been easy, time can be kind. It dulls the pain. Sort of. But the ache remains, as do the memories. They always will. 

But the curious in me wants to know so many things. One thing has bothered me, even though I think I have worked it out – why we/I grieve. Grief hurts in many ways but it’s all about me! It’s about my hurt; my loss; my feelings. 

I should be glad that Magucha no longer suffers; I should be glad that she is no longer burdened by the trappings and necessities of life, as we live it. I am - but it is not easy!

That her love; that her emotional strength; that her mischievous sense of humour; that her deep and sensitive knowledge of the needs of others; that all this has just disappeared into "nothing" is beyond my understanding. 

Of course it is a given that I have absolutely no idea what has "happened" to her. I have the strong conviction though, that when we die we still “exist”, obviously without the bodily form we used when “alive”. The essence that was/is us continues. That essence, that “Life”, has returned to wherever it came from.

All I know is that (in the words of the song) “Loving her was easier than anything I’ll ever do again”.

Am I faithless?

Now important questions for me are, “Where is God? Is God “up there”? Only in a House of God – Church, Temple or Mosque? Or is God (as I strongly suspect) everywhere?”

If God is everywhere why do I need a priest (in my case – I was baptized into the Anglican church), or Rabbi or Imam, to tell me what to do and how to behave? Most of these people would have received “instruction” about the dogma and the form of their belief system from their specific scriptures or Holy Books. This is religion.

But religion, in my understanding, is not the same as knowledge of God. Certainly not the same as spirituality, which, I have always presumed is the aim of worshipping God.

It may be taken as a given that I have a belief in a Higher Power, or source of Life. Call this God, or by whatever name you may choose. It doesn’t really matter. I really don’t think that God would care.

But have I “Faith”? According to Hebrews 11.1 (King James English Bible):-

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”.  

I may hope for things, or events to happen or not happen, but does God “look” at me or “listen” to me and agree or disagree? Really?

As the poet William Ernest Henley wrote:

            “I am the master of my fate;

             I am captain of my soul”.

The bit I just fail to understand is this.  Why do we humans, why do we need to reduce God the level of being human? Why call God a “Him”? Why a male? Then, of course being a male and “human” we imbue “Him” with human traits and the need to propitiate “Him”; try to cajole “Him”; ask “Him” for favours; bribe “Him” with sacrifices, often burnt so that the smoke will rise to “His” nostrils (and presumably please “Him”). If God is everywhere why would he need this - how would this please him? Anyway, how would anyone know?

God, in my understanding is Love. Pure love. Now this does not fit with the public image of greed and lust for power and control prevalent in various, most probably all  religious orders, uncovered by various investigations in many countries. Lust – in its most virulent form – sexual lust for minor children; control, through physical and emotional abuse – is now known to be perpetrated by some preachers of “faith” in all religions.

And this is done in the name of God?

It has been truly said that, “no soul was ever saved by hate. No truth was ever proved by violence. No redemption was ever brought by a holy war. No religion ever won the administration of the world by its capacity to inflict suffering on it enemies (re: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks).”

If Jews, Muslims and Christians worship the same God; if these “believers” read from Holy Books that espouse the same principles of Love, Justice and Tolerance; if these “believers” each invoke God’s aid against the other; if these “believers” cannot resolve their differences without the most extreme violence, then religion (any religion) cannot form the basis for a sustainable social order.

To be truly humanitarian it is essential for any person or group to involve themselves in that most difficult of imaginative exercises – role reversal. Put yourself  (or your group) in the place of the person (or group) that you despise, denigrate or simply do not understand.

It is a human failing, I believe, when people (particularly politicians and religious orders) are threatened with internal discord, to focus on, even invent, some external threat. This is the history of the “scapegoat”. Projecting all your failings onto someone else – and then blame them for your troubles. Killing the scapegoat is then seen, in the eyes of those involved, as justified. It is a form of “sacrifice” and deflects attention away from any internal violence that may destroy the group or people concerned. For centuries the Jews have suffered under this “scapegoat” label. Blame the Jews for everything – the most horrendous example occurred in the 1930s in Nazi Germany. But Jews are not the only scapegoats. Currently, in the eyes of some, anyone who is not a “true believer” is “not worthy in the eyes of God”. Apparently. 

According to the history of the three religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – all people are children of Abraham. By whose understanding then does God want his followers to kill for His sake; to engage in “Holy” war for His sake; to engage in human “sacrifice” for His sake; to hate and terrorise “unbelievers” for His sake? Such activity is an obscene distortion of everything that I, for one, was ever taught. 

It is the requirement of all, or so I believe, to overcome any “evil” tendencies within us and learn that love is the greatest power of all. This, in my understanding, is the only “message” that is worth listening to. That and the Golden Rule – “only do to others what you would like done to you”. There are no viable alternatives.

But if I know this – that I am not perfect and that I have a negative (or bad) side to my character as well as a good side, why do I need a priest, or imam or rabbi reading from a “Holy” book to tell me? Anyway how would this person know what troubles I’ve experienced or what my shortcomings are, or how to redress them? 

It seems to me that the priests, rabbis or imams should confront their own shortcomings. To quote from the Bible (it has its uses!):  “First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye”(Matthew 7:5). 

So am I faithless?

I am me – I need to live by my own authority

I am me. I am not you. I am comfortable (I think) with my beliefs,  with my likes and dislikes, with my judgements and opinions; I try to be as honest as I can; I try to be truthful; I try to be kind and compassionate and generally try to behave towards other people as I would like them to behave towards me. In other words I like to think of myself as an ordinary kind of bloke trying to live by my understanding and interpretation of events and circumstances. This means I am trying to live by my own authority.

And yet how many of us do things, have beliefs or have interpretations of events which we never worked out for ourselves – ones accepted by us because a politician, a priest, a rabbi or imam tells us, or we heard them on talk back radio, or saw them on TV or social media, or read about them somewhere - ones spoken or written about by someone we consider an ‘authority figure’? This means accepting, even if subconsciously, the decisions of someone else, who, we must think, also subconsciously, knows more, knows better. Otherwise why should we accept their opinion, their view of the world and how we should interpret it?

Why live according to someone else’s expectations? Why the necessity to conform? And conform to what? {There are of course laws in any country that have to be obeyed – criminal and civil laws. This is understandable and necessary for the orderly functioning of any society. This is not what I am talking about.}

To accept someone else’s decision is to accept their view of what they think our lives should be and how we should live it. In other words (whether we actually like it or not) we conform to someone else’s set of values, someone else’s views of life, not our own. We are not living by our own authority. 

Very few of the judgements we make on a daily basis, about what is “right” or “wrong” for us, are made by us, based on our true understanding of the situation as presented. It often seems that the more important the decision, the less likely we are to rely on our own thoughts and ideas, based on our own experiences. Advertisers tell us what we should buy – what we ‘deserve’; we are told what books to read, or music to listen to; we are told what fashion dictates we should wear and such like. Statisticians tell us that it is a statistical probability that, being a male in a certain age group and with certain racial physical characteristics and with certain religious beliefs, we will have certain likes and dislikes, be of a certain height, be overweight, even obese and have this or that medical problem and that when presented with an ethical dilemma we will answer in this or that way. But we are not a ‘probability’ – we are human beings.

One does not do something to be happy – one IS happy and does something to express it. One does not do something to be ethical – one IS ethical and does something to express those ethical ideals. We don’t need someone else to tell us – we act on our own authority.

Life is about choices and no one can make a choice for you, that suites you – be it as a voter, an employee or customer. It is your life and you need to live it your way, as you see fit to bring you peace of mind – your mind, not someone else’s. You need to live by your own authority – yours, not someone else’s.

So it should be with all activities. We are not pieces on an Economic Game Board to be moved at the whim of Big Business (Big Banks?). 

Commerce and industry must again revert to the position as the servant of humanity and never try to subvert this wherein humanity is considered the servant of commerce and industry. 

There is no need to change, just BE yourself. How can you reach fulfilment in your life if you live by someone else’s ideas; to someone else’s expectation? You must live by your own authority.  

But always remember that your freedom (to do what you want) stops when my freedom (to do what I want) begins!!

Left or Right?

Years ago my father posed the question, “If one day something happened to make me turn left to go to work instead of my usual turning right – what would happen? Who would I meet? What new course would my life take?”

I’ve always remembered him saying this and have always wondered what events would unfold on the “Road less travelled”.

This is of course the ultimate hypothetical question. There can never be a definitive answer – anything could happen and there is no way of knowing if the same event would have taken place, regardless; that Fate has determined that whatever happens had to happen. 

Quatrain 51 (From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

This notion of Fate or the Fates, the Moirai in Greek mythology, the three sister Goddesses, incarnations of destiny and life has always fascinated me. There is Clotho, the one who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, the one who draws lots to determine how long one lives, by measuring the thread of life; and Atropos, the inevitable, is the one who chooses the moment and method of death by cutting the thread of life with her shears. 

Now this, death, happens and will happen to us all however we might try and avoid the subject. So I ask the question – would it not be better to prepare ourselves for this inevitable end by living as best we can, by our lights? But it is so hard to accept death, particularly when it affects someone close, someone one loves. I know it is pointless to ask the question -Why? There is no answer. It just is – the Fates have made their determination.

But it is very hard.There is a poem, a tragic poem, which expresses this in words that I totally understand but with feelings almost beyond my comprehension. But, Oh the pathos!

Were You But Here!

Were you but here!

No more with tears the dreadful Night

Would in my soul her sorrows pour;

And through the curtained door

The groaning of the Earth

I’d hear no more;

Were you but here.

Were you but here!

O, high in Heaven the pulsing stars,

Your gracious way to greet,

Would scatter all their jewelled dust

In joyance at your feet,

And through the shadows, soft and low,

The happy laughter of the Wind would go;

Were you but here!

                                    Eugene Marais (9 January 1871 – 29 March 1936)

Probably written after the death (in South Africa) of his wife in 1895. She died from puerperal fever (eight days after the birth of their son) and after just one year of marriage.

Marais, trained in Law, was a well-known naturalist, poet and writer who was best known for his seminal works published as “The Soul of the white ant” and “The Soul of Ape”. Because he wrote initially in Afrikaans his works were not widely read outside South Africa and also because of this, unfortunately, were heavily plagiarised - stolen - by American and European naturalists in their own published research.

He never fully recovered from these hammer blows dealt him and finally committed suicide.

The Fates indeed – Left or Right – who knows!

I know that I nearly wept when I first read this poem, shortly after the death of my wife, Magucha.

Intimations of Immortality

Ever since I first read William Wordsworth's poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" I have felt especially drawn to the deep understanding of "Life" expressed in this extract from what is quite a long poem. The words seem to "fit" with some hidden wish (or hope) that this is true. I sometimes think that we (I?) need to "reconnect" with our true selves, rather than being sidetracked by the Siren song of the easy pleasures that abound around us.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;	75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

                                                                                               William Wordsworth.

All in all, to me, this is a splendid poem.

How human are we - actually?

What does this mean? Take bacteria for instance. They “work” in a symbiotic relationship with all life forms. To understand the significance of this we’ll need to go back in time – just a tad. Like three billion years (3 billion years) to when there were no recognizable life forms on earth, only a primordial ocean “soup”. Simply put, this soup contained a huge variety of bacteria (never mind where they came from – no one really knows).

Now, return to present times and follow me – it was from out of that primordial “soup” that life (as we understand it) developed. Furthermore – just to put things in perspective – the human body consists of somewhere between 30 and 80 trillion cells (no one is quite sure – it depends on the method of measurement used – volume or weight). But the number of bacteria in the human gut exceeds this by a ratio variously estimated at about 3:1. That’s right, there are estimated to be about 3 times more gut bacteria than cells in our body. Similarly, while the human genome has about 20 000 genes the gut biome has many, many times this – variously estimated at about 150 times this number.

Never forget, too, that we rely on out gut bacteria for our nutrition. Furthermore many different chemicals such as the brain chemical serotonin and many enzymes are produced in our gut. In fact without our gut bacteria we wouldn’t survive. They help digest everything we eat by reducing it to an easily absorbed form, which is then transferred to our blood affecting not only our metabolism but also our moods. 

But the bacteria need us too – to feed them!

So now, because of the symbiotic relationship between us and them (and don't forget we are inextricably linked to all the Earth’s life forms through our bacterial ancestry) consider this scenario:-

Bacteria were here first – we (and all life forms) developed from the original primordial bacterial soup. Therefore, are we just a useful host for bacteria to live in – in our case, our gut biome (recall, there are more of them than cells in our body)? Remember also they get fed at regular intervals, interact with us via the vagus nerve – which connects the gut with the brain (in fact our gut may be considered our “second” brain as there are about 150 million neurons lining the intestines). This “communication”, travelling both ways along the vagus nerve, tells the brain “I’m hungry” or “I’m full” or “I don’t feel well” and then there is that mysterious “gut feeling” that “tells” us to do or not do something. Increasingly researchers are discovering links between our gut bacteria and our general health - physical, emotional and mental.

The food we eat affects our gut bacteria (negatively or positively) and in doing so, they affect our health and our moods (also negatively or positively).

So, how human are we - actually? 

  

Love - the greatest gift of all

I know that I have written on this subject before but it is still something that, as I get older, is of interest – grief, mourning and the cause. There is after all only one end to life. But this subject, for some reason, is studiously avoided. So while I’m not sure how to introduce this I find that grief has many facets and is very puzzling. We are, after all, mortal beings. Trying to make sense of death, however, is very hard. We will all, at some stage of our life, have cause to grieve and mourn. 

There was, in my case, the death of my wife Magucha whom I dearly loved.

Then there is, now, the harsh reality, still not fully absorbed, that my life will never be the same. Her love, her intelligence, her insight, her emotional support, her wonderfully infectious laugh, her mischievous quirky humour – is now all gone.

Then, now for me, there is the settling into a new way of life that is part acknowledgement of her memory and the way we used to do things together and part acknowledgement that from now on I’m on my own without her at my side. This is still a work in progress.

Then there is most difficult part of my day, not so strange really I suppose, difficulty in actually going to bed. I defer this necessary function until the last possible moment – 12 mid-night, even 1am. Then I might read for a few minutes before I “crash”. Once asleep I sleep well. It’s just getting the “courage” to actually go to bed. Bed is not the same now, you understand.

Then there are my own questions. But I do believe in something that is above and beyond us all to which we are “attached” by the essence that common to all living things - Life itself. Call this God if you like.  And then where did my Life come from – the same place it will return to? It makes sense to me, that death is a “transition” from this life to the next – just as a birth transitioned me from “that place” to this. This is a subject we, all of us, usually avoid, ignore or change the subject when it is introduced. Why?

Then there is the problem that we humans are unable to imagine “God”, or conceptualise “God”, so we bring “Him” down to our level and imbue “Him” with human attributes that we can understand – passion, hate, vengeance, anger, jealousy and such like. Reduced to this level we now need to propitiate “God” and get “Him” to agree to our point of view – hence the requirement for sacrifices (hopefully symbolic). Is this because humans are all supposed to be born sinful (because of Adam and Eve)? With a sacrifice, it is posited, we can attach our “sins” to whatever, or whoever is sacrificed, and so be absolved of “sin” and be “cleansed”.  

Surely, surely, any God who can be “altered” by anything men do or say, or by the sacrifice of an animal or human (even if symbolic) cannot be a perfect God? God, surely, doesn’t need a reward? God, surely, cannot be bribed? Why load, even symbolically, some poor animal or human (that God created in the first place) with the wrongs that we commit?

But personal sacrifice is a different matter. Is this what grief is – a form of personal sacrifice? That the more we love the more we grieve?

I believe there is a Spanish proverb that goes something like this: “Take what you want from Life, says God. Take it, and pay.”

And so it should be – we reap what we sow! The Law of Cause and Effect applies to all. This is justice and by my book, this is Love – maybe tough love – but Love none the less.

I like to think that this place, this planet Earth, is but a school for what comes next. We all need this school, to learn to Love – and to forgive.

All this, of course, gets me no closer to understanding what Life is; that “essence” that is present when something is “alive” and is absent when something that was “alive” is now “dead”.  

To me “God” is pure Love and understanding - this is “His” greatest gift of all, even if it is the most difficult to accept.

This is all rather circular and brings me back to the point where I started. I still grieve.

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

    Always a little further; it may be

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,

    Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave

    There lives a prophet who can understand

Why men were born; but surely we are brave,

    Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

                                                            James Elroy Flecker