Do You Remember?

In the space between the quarks; in the time between the heartbeats.
There find the basic eternal nature of our being.


But we tell ourselves repeatedly that we have no time. That the next action must be performed at once, or at least thought about.


For what would happen if we should die with these actions unperformed?


Probably, the nature of our sexual reproduction infuses all our vision with urgency – we need to hurry up and find a mate so that we can throw away half our genetic investment in creating new people. Even before then, we need to hurry up and prep our minds for their task of making a nest for these new humans. We need to be able to perform some actions so much better than others that we will be rewarded and thus have the materials necessary to build a superior nest so that we may give our offspring the best possible start in order that they, too, may outperform others of our species in order to build better nests for their genetic investments….

Last night I had the television on as I was eating supper.
A small pack of wild dogs were prancing around a lone rhinoceros in order to divert its attention from the nearby nest of wild dog pups.


Our neighbours, by the way, appear to be keeping a genuine wild dog as a pet. But I have some loony neighbours including African Christians who can’t sing to save their lives but nevertheless do so once a month in their home-held church service and a piece of white trash from Zimbabwe who lost his sobriety so long ago and so thoroughly that he’s never going to find it again

The dogs were succeeding- the rhino was looking slightly bewildered as the pack yapped and feinted at his heels.
Suddenly, reinforcements arrived in the shape of two more rhino. Instead of driving off the annoying dogs, the three rhino began to run around in a circle, one after the other; the lead rhino was apparently chasing a wild dog, and the third rhino was apparently being chased by a wild dog.

Dogs and rhino continued this ring-o’-rosies for some time, until they broke up the game and each animal wandered off to do whatever it had been doing before the diversion.

Look at us- look at us, we who are God; look upon ourselves at play.

See the rushing, careening traffic on the morning Joburg highway.
Watch us jostle ourselves to get there first- because, if we should fall behind, we might fail to make as much money as we need to build that nest for ourselves and our genetic investment in the future.

It would be enchanting indeed if a handful of cars would start circling on the N1, their drivers playing ring-o’-rosies in the rush hour chaos. How many of ourselves do we kill daily in our play, anyway?

God at play in the fields of matter.

I think-I think-yes I think that could be what we’re doing.

How did we set this all up? I know I was there, but my memory is by no means clear.
I’m working on recalling the rules we formulated when the foundations of this World were laid.

You, too, were there – do you remember?

Were we insane at the time or have we just become insane?
Or - and this for me is the million rand question – is insanity engrained into the fabric of this particular universe and I’m just failing to appreciate its beauty and complexity?