Thursday 21 February 2013

It Can Not Be Otherwise



A 7 hour planned electricity outage this morning caught us by surprise.

When I say planned, of course, I mean planned by City Power and not communicated to the end users.

So, from 1 in the morning - as Warren was defragging his desktop - until almost precisely 8 am, we had no electric power in the quiet suburb of Bloubosrand.

We had somewhere to go this morning, too, and showers were sketchy. Apologies to anyone who chanced to encounter us out and about.

It was to Woolworths we headed - after stopping at the bank to draw an unusually large sum of money - to pay our Woolies account up in total and close the bothersome account. Woolies weren't always a pain in the arse, either. There was a time when their quality was good and their financial management above reproach. No more, alas. After completely failing to send me statements which actually arrived in my postbox for several months, and after sms-ing me incorrect information on my payment amounts, and after displaying a total lack of regard to South Africa's clothing manufacturers(opting for the glittering, cheap Chinese products which have a lifetime shorter than a disintegrating meteor)...after adding all this up, I decided I didn't care to do business with them anymore.

I've been mulling over the fact recently that good old homo sapiens is getting stupider by the year. Not just according to this entitled, privileged,university-educated middle aged woman, but also according to several sources with much less biased points of view.

It seems that one of the problems may be the environment we've created for ourselves. An environment poisoned by pesticides, replete with high fructose corn syrup, petroleum products toxic to the brain, and a culture where the possession of those afore-mentioned cheap, glittering tawdries is a major marker of worth.

Well, sigh. We surely never set up this earth-plane to be a cake walk, did we?

 My middle-aged Pit Bull, Scylla, displaying her hunting prowess earlier today by catching and then consuming a baby Lourie - something she doesn't do too often, especially the eating part - has reminded me that actually, this plane was never supposed to be a dimension of sweetness-and-light. We eat each other. And kill each other for no apparent reason - worse. And heap such pain and sorrow upon each other all the time, that I wonder why any of us think that peaceful non-harm is a natural state of being.

I have carefully avoided saying that this plane is devoid of Love. For that is not the case.
All sorrows, all he pain, all the seeming unnecessary hurt is all there as part of our plan.
And Love informs that plan, in every shade and shape of its coming-into-being.

It can not, I submit, be otherwise.

The Grey Lourie, mourning loudly even now for its massacred offspring, reminds me of this.

Pic: courtesy Wilkinson's World

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for this. The state of the union and reading level link is great. The title of your post says it all.

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