Category Archives: blogs

Wednesday 16th January 2008

Dear G

Hi.  How are you?  You’re the strange one, asking me what studies when I’ve spoken about them twice in your presence.  Perhaps you didn’t realise what exactly I was saying?  When I spoke about having read a lot about Africa these past two years, the troubles since Independence was rolled out in the sixties, the dictatorships, the madmen, the LRA and Joseph Kony and Charles Taylor and Mobutu and Idi Amin and and and, I said also that I’d taken a particular disliking to human rights abuses around the globe and had a real issue with the subject.  That led me on to reading about genocide and the inefficacy of the UN and the Security Council and the World Bank and the IMF and structural adjustment failures, the pathos of the United States Government in these situations and then on to the oil!  Arabs and the Janjaweed militia and the Taliban and its muslim fundamentalism and home-grown fanatics and then over to my inability to understand this UK society in which I have found myself immersed these past years and my determination to get some sort of a handle of societies worldwide first, and then try and get a handle on the world at large.  I am distressed at the discord.  I fail to understand the lack of goodwill – it would appear – left in our world and I want to do something about it. I am not entirely sure what, but thought that educating myself further – or ‘officially’ on the subject (s) might help.  I intend to use my writing, whatever, but also have to work on that because having had to take the long way around and teach myself, it’s a slow process.  All trial and error.
I wonder, did you think that all that travelled between my ears was perfumed air?  That I was just a silly little girl with emotions as my only friends?  Well, perhaps you wouldn’t have been wrong there.  She certainly is part of me.  But just a part.  Oh no.  Please don’t tell me you fell for the blue-eyed blonde hat-trick?  Methinks in part you did.  The conditioning would dictate it.  She is part of it.  But also, just a part.  The real heat in me is deep.  The heart of my heart rages against global injustice and abuse.  I get furiously angry at the plight of millions of children in this ravaged world.  I hiss and spit when faced with the media spotlight on one missing child in Portugal and hear of the millions of pounds raised to aid in her recovery.  What about the thirty thousand-odd mothers and fathers in the blackest of Africa whose children were taken from them and trained to become child soldiers fighting for resistance armies?  Raped, tortured, enslaved.  Corrupted and stained.  Broken.  And thousands of children in Africa are STILL being abducted in this day and age – after twenty years.  What’s going on?  Why are the feelings of the Mc Canns so much more valuable than those of some arbitrary black family that survives on about $1.00 a day or something as ridiculous?  A missing child is a missing child.  It’s obscene.  The balance is so far out that societal conscience is teetering precariously and seems just about to fall torn into its own abyss.  Is there a saving grace?  Of course there is.  It’s the constant.  It is accessible, just not that visible unless using one’s peripheral vision.  Or perhaps we can rely on the wave of a new generation of Indigo and Crystal children to smile beatifically and head over to Palestine to sort out the middle east crisis over milk and cookies?  Who knows.  Perhaps they will be the real peace-keepers.  Pity it’s going to take another twenty years for them to come of age.  In that short space of time this world will be on fire.  The Super Powers are defunct in their accountability and as nations that should know better it is devastating to watch them refusing to open their arms to those nations that know nothing.  Nevermind the calamity of climate change!  Climate change as clear and evident market failure.  Commodities we all share but do not pay for as such – natural, if you like – used and abused with scant regard for bequest.  It is bound to end in disaster.

I’m listening to Darshan: Awakening.  The sun is crisp in the clean blue sky and there is a serious chill in the air.  All in all, a perfect English winter morning.  My cats Simon and Derek were allowed out yesterday for the first time since our move.  It was raining but I decided to stand outside with them while they felt their way around.  It was a joy to see their pupils dilated, their tails flicking and their whiskers twitching as they went into sense overload after being cooped up for 6 weeks.  This morning I repeated the process and stood out in the sunshine with them, watching as they scampered from bush to bush, spraying their scent and spreading their saliva on the lower leaves of just about every shrub.  Their excitement was palpable.  Cats are my muse.  I’ve known this always.  I have to have one around at all times, two even better.  I spend hours watching their activity, or lack of activity, as it happens.  Their ability to entertain without even trying gives me endless hours of pleasure.  As far as aloofness goes, my cats tend to maintain a certain level of deliberate disdain, but it’s meaningless really – as soon as I converse with  them they drop the act and come rubbing against my legs, shouting their feelings at me with upturned faces, smiling mouths.  One black cat, I have, and one white.  I thought this interesting the other day, wondering whether my selection was subconscious.  Whether it was yin and yang, perhaps, or whether it is about wanting no grey areas.  I’m not sure.  I like to think I choose my cats in the same way I choose stones, crystals.  I wait.  I see which energy it is that draws me to it and only then do I go to it and make my choice.
Instinct in this regard has always served me well.  We always commune.
Oh that voice inside.  How quiet.  How wise.  In time, when it knows what it is saying, it will speak out loud.  Until such time, every atom of me is filling slowly, storing information and although the assimilation of said information is not yet happening consciously, I know that subconsciously my brain is working on it.  I’m taking it all in.  In due course I will deconstruct it and reconstitute it and then I will use it as a tool.  Patience.  ‘Patience shows you have a true sense on mind’.  That was the message on the scroll you brought me from Hong Kong.  All those years ago.  Seems you knew something too.  It’s already written in the stars, so like that saying says, shoot for the moon and if you miss it doesn’t matter for you will land amongst the stars..

I have got to go.  I am being fetched this afternoon by Susan, a woman I used to work with.  We are going to have chat about my circumstances and she is going to assist me with the task of making lists.  I am not usually a list person, I commit everything to memory.  But in this instance, I thought it wise to establish a written plan and follow it.  A life firmly on the ground needs planning and strategy, not the snatching of reactions from the hands of capricious winds.

I hope to have my internet working again soon and will write you of my news.
Adieu.
Cat