WINTER
I’ve not been doing welldressing up in winter, been looking a bit tired. It could be the heavy burden; our long winter is doing to me and maybe to everyone else. Winter is going, that is what we want to say, but it’s not happening. What I really want to do is dress up like Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie “The Revenant” and begin an arduous journey through the up north Canadian wilderness. Leonardo looks perfectly dressed and sharp for the terrain and the weather. It is my favorite film. This is where a human being learns to live in nature, hunting for food to eat, but not hunting to mount a trophy in their living room. Nature is a great teacher and a human, a perfect student. The only violent things in the movie are human beings. One would wonder, out in the winter wilderness, animals would be the most violent things, sadly not. As in life too, nature is the gentlest thing, our violence resonates and brings in more violence, where none existed. Human greed, lust and need to acquire matter and materials has increased violence in our cities and in our wild and soft nature. But I’m taking a break from all of this and looking for Fall to come by and then slide slowly to summer. Are we there yet? I keep asking….
NEW YEAR RESOLUTION
I like the feeling when a year turns over, and I like New Year resolutions. A lot of people are anti-resolutions, because resolutions mean goals, and goals mean pressure and high standards, and high standards mean disappointment. I know that year upon year most of my resolutions come to nothing, but I still like to make them. These days, I tend to make them in a smaller way: they’re often more of a feeling, less anything to be rigidly held to. I made my biggest resolution a few weeks before the year ended, which is about the way I use my time, and I’ve already been putting it into effect. My writing resolutions, meanwhile, are so firmly embedded in my psyche I know they will happen or not happen or turn into entirely something else of their own accord and I don’t feel the need to list them for myself. Here, though, are a few of my other resolutions for 2020:
- Get in the Forest even more than I already do and commune with nature.
- Eat more sparingly, and less expensively, make food about nutrition, not about fun.
- Learn to hum the sound of life, listen to the wind and listen to my Soul.
- Talk less, think more, create more, start with a thought along the love, joy peace track
- Then convert the thought into words and deeds, finally experience it.
- Read more, Write more.
LOCKDOWN
I strolled along Humber lake on a March evening. Most people were just walking and keeping social distancing. We have an unfriendly visitor in Earth, who is going around uninvited and jumping into our bodies to occupy and destroy our cells. The world calls it COVID19. I call it the alien invader. Most of the world we know is under locked down situation. I remember my favorite character Spock in STAR TREK and his most famous line “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few”. The lockdown is essentially a play taken from this line. This virus is testing human behavior at best and taking lives at the worst. We have acquired over years artificial social constructions, which has made us socially over dependent. The virus uses this social track to find and run. While governments try hard to tell people to go home and stay home, it has become impossible for all of us to do this. And so, the virus finds its way easily across countries and cities. The lockdown is not really at ground zero. Pockets of walk over and intermingling takes place, allowing the virus to spread and move. For the virus to move, humans need to move which is the opposite of lockdown. Our human race has never been tested like this, it’s a great lesson exposing the perils of tightly populated cities, poor urban planning, high density places and congested industrialization arising from greed, real estate pricing and city comforts. Cities need to de-populate, people need to spread out, and companies need to thin out from major cities. It’s time to de-build cities and re-build rural areas. Why do companies have to get a lot of people under one roof? This makes people buy homes nearby and in turn creates living congestion, which brings about a host of urban planning issues. This scenario makes it a perfect pathway for viruses to flow through. Now, it’s time to stop eating too many animals. Ingesting different animals allows an easy bridge for any virus to jump from an animal to a human and having jumped, the human corridor provides an easy travel path to reach all corners of our world. So much for borderless concepts, liberal ways and congested living. We need to find another way to live and find another way to be Human….
WRITING
I could live with almost anything. But I need to keep writing. That is my passion to spread the word that we need to make friends with our Soul, our long-lost forgotten friend. So, I will keep writing till the message becomes loud and clear. Our world is moving in the wrong direction, with misguided actions. Hating another to get your agenda across is such a primitive thing to do. Loving another and inviting them to follow a good path is so much a wiser thing to do. We need to become collective to change our world, not become violent to do it. This is why I need to write and write better to help get the message across- We may be different, but we are all the same in our core, in our essence and in our soul. We are one, from the many.
My FRIEND
Jan is one of my oldest and best friends, although for the last twelve years we have lived more than a few miles apart, and at times a hundred miles. We first met in 2008, on the first day of a slightly ill-defined course for people who weren’t quite sure what they wanted to do with their life but had a vague notion it had something to do with Finances. Jan was wearing that seemed cooler than pretty much anybody I’d previously met, and, within a short time or so, we had formed a group together. We are very different in many ways, but also very similar in other ways that require more intricate description. Like me, Jan is married, and a father. Unlike me, Jan has done the same job for many many years and lived in the same house for many many years. Like me, Jan eats meat. Unlike me, Jan likes hardcore punk music. I don’t see him anywhere near as often as I’d like to, but every time I do, everything is much the same, and I remember what a warm, lovely person he is. So when, to my surprise, over this most recent calamity period, I received a message from Jan to say how much he had enjoyed my latest manuscript of my second book.
COFFEE SHOP
Its not the same going to a coffee shop these days, you need a mask to enter, you need to form a que outside and you need to stay like a mile away from the ordering counter and then yell over your mask to let your order be heard. All for a cup of coffee, that which you enjoyed when you strolled in, and got your steaming cup and walked out without any of the fuss and routine we have to do now. Getting a coffee has become like going to a war zone. There are colored ribbons everywhere like barbed wire. The staff wear a helmet like a plastic face cover. Their faces are covered with colored face masks, like camouflage. There is a burly looking security guard, resembles the yelling Sargent in the battlefield. Is this a coffee shop? Where has fun having a coffee gone? Blame it on the Virus. I am not going there, its no fun buying a coffee anymore.
SWIMMING POOLS
All pools remain closed, both private and public, part of the lockdown rules. People drive far away into the country and jump into a lake to swim. The lake is outside the lockdown rule. Its serenely quiet and peaceful, the water is blue and tempting. Jumping off a rock cliff into this pristine water below is a feeling out of this world. And then lying on your back, looking at the sky above or the stars at night is such a beautiful feeling. Nature doesn’t blare music like how human environments do, swim in the lake or the ocean, you hear music allright but a different kind. Nature sings to us in many forms and in many ways, soothing and peaceful. Now that’s one way I can swim in water, enjoy the sounds of nature and keep my sanity during this lockdown. I tell myself, they can lockdown my body, not my soul, its free and wild and joyful, it will find a way to take you away from the lockdown, keep you safe and give you joy. Better call Soul….
