Death divine, and the light of day

My grandfathers memorial was today. That statement is met with a head tilt and a reassuringly general apology. Without question it is met with compassionate understanding and acceptance. This was certainly the case for my legendary granddad who died peacefully in his bed in his home with loved ones around him as he ducked a week before his 98^th birthday party. However that might not have been the case, but he was old and death is expected with old people. If you die younger than old it is not only unexpected, then by god it is unacceptable.

I do not believe in the pearly gates or the priests and heaven for me is on earth not in the hereafter and I have come to accept that death, be it that of a baby or a grandbaby is equal. Time is after all our own concept. Can we conceive that there is no time, or that time is endless, or even, timeless? I also don’t believe in gods will, or that some holy jew has my life signed sealed and delivered, and yet I accept that all death is a part of life. For the first time I saw an acceptance of death with the passing of my beloved grandfather, and an almost condemnation for any sadness. For as long as I can remember I’ve been adoringly in love with him, and while he pushed one hundred I still wanted him to be there for those occasions you want the people you love to be there for.

When my brother-in-law died it was met with shock and disbelief, questions and tears and disapproval. Despite the adage that only the good die young, dying young is unacceptable. Similar to a tragedy when someone dies by the hand of someone, or god forbid by some animal, that indignation is so far removed from acceptance that it is condemned with deplorable intolerance.

We will all die, it is the only certainty in our entire lives, so is it really that surprising? Surely irrelevant of your beliefs you can accept that when you are meant to die you will die and there are only so many ways in which that can happen. Surely we can accept young-age-death as sincerely and compassionately as we accept old-age-death? Our options are limited like night and day, we can die from either a natural or unnatural cause, and we can die either young or old. Both those concepts, natural and unnatural, young and old, are as finite and insubstantial as night and day.

 

Why did the précis put the proof in the pudding and not in the eating?

Proof / evidence / fact, are as subjective as faith / belief / hope. In fact where does belief lie, because what is a fact without first believing it to be true? Truth is just as subjective. Where does fact begin and faith end, or are they as entwined as night and day?

I have never hidden the fact that I am not religious and while I more often get to argue against indoctrination, I rarely get to argue for faith. Strictly (grammatically) speaking I am atheist but I do not define myself, and I enjoy arguing against negative connotations theists have for atheists. Theists bang on about trust and atheists about theory, but both began with the word. One difference being that atheists evolve, and theists are set in stone.

Fellow atheists are often scientists for the love of proof. Latter-day sages they specialize in one field disproving it to prove it to validate that everything can and must be proved. So once proven must all else then be improved upon? Or is all else left in that intimate pile of belief? Men are not killed in the name of science but there has been a certain amount of destruction for scientific theory. Take biologist Carl Linnaeus the man who named every little thing, but to find every little thing to name, he had to flog it. Collecting plant or insect samples (aka flogging a tree and picking up everything that died and fell out of that tree) is harmless because how else can you define and name every little thing, right? He also happened to name certain little critters after certain people in his life who displeased him (Hilarious, right). Or does this just highlight how much of what we know is based on someone making it so? Including our very own name. Equipped with nothing more than that name you never chose, how many of us can prove anything for ourselves, let alone disprove? If you vehemently accept your church and deny evolution, or if you fully accept evolution and deny creation, both is your belief. It takes an equal amount of faith, even to believe that your belief is a lie.

The saying “the proof of the pudding, is in the eating” has been abridged to “the proof is in the pudding” not “the proof is in the eating.” As if the proof is in the pie in the sky and we need no longer taste it for ourselves.

Life before we had all the answers… Or is that now, while we actually know nothing for sure.

Imagine seeing the lights of an aircraft at night and not knowing what it is. It would give you minutes of wonder, today, but if you had no idea what it even could be, can you imagine what that would stir inside you?

Imagine having no idea what the sun was, or where you were in the world let alone the universe. Can you? My earliest memories are of the sun. First whenever I was scared, or woke up from a nightmare I would stare at the curtain and wait for the sun, for everything to be alright. Then came driving in the car. The sun never left my side, the sun was always there, right beside me, no matter how far we drove. Be it across country, or across continents, there the sun would be. Now I know why, but at that early age the awe I had for the sun meant the world to me. I felt loved, chosen almost, because the sun had my back.

However we now have all the answers. Is there anything left to wonder? Of course there is, don’t you think? First of all as knowledgeable as we are we simply turned our obsession with the sun into an obsession with an imaginary son of an imaginary father. It appears that as we discovered the sun we got very confused. It is as random for someone to believe in god as it is for someone to believe the sun frolics in the sky by day and then goes to sleep in the sea. So what happens when we find the answers, do we simply just accept another’s understanding? When did we stop wondering, and decide we know it all?

I don’t think we can yet fathom what the smallest thing could be, and we certainly have no idea about the largest? Is it not self limiting to believe we do? Have we not learned through history and science that asking why is vital for growth? Is evolution not example enough that things change, they are constantly changing, evolving, growing? Can we not see that death is needed for birth? So why do we think we know enough or know it all and teach as if we do, teach as if we have the answers even though we don’t have all the questions.

While we put together the pieces of what we find into a puzzle can we not look beyond what has been left behind?

I think everything should be challenged and questioned, it deserves to be. We must never stop asking questions, and never accept that there isn’t more to learn. Even when I know, I know that I too, do not know. Like someone wise once said to me, “belief, in itself, is a lie.”

#OMG words wonderful words

They are as much a nation as are the creeds. Speaking of creeds, the king of them all also happens to be the most prevalent exclamation. I have never been a fan of the exclamation mark, in fact I will not use it, not even to exclaim that god dammit god is a good word. How did the word god, being the omnipresent father, become the universal echo of exclamation?

How do words get their power, and how do they lose it? Like the word black, how come it gets to describe all things negative? What about those foreign words that actually mean nothing more than black, how did they come to define the derogatory?
Nigger is the most infamous of those words but African-American citizens, some who have never stepped foot in Africa, have at least claimed back the word nigger. They own it, they made it theirs and rightfully so. It need not be derogatory, nor need any word be, right? This one in particular is only derogatory depending on who uses it, or is this the case with them all?

While we are on black words, in SA there are a lot of words (With 11 official languages including English which has a synonym for synonym) but nigger is not really one of them, it is not an African word. Kaffir is our N-word, but no one owns it, it is frowned upon to use. So frowned upon in fact that if I just so much as say I heard someone say it and therefore indirectly say it, I would have lost my previous job as a newspaper journo. Well it’s too late, I don’t have an employer any longer so I can discuss all words… and like any creed they have a story on which they are based, they have an origin that was created by man.

The offensive K-word originally meant infidel. Nothing wrong with that, right? Because by definition I’m a kaffir. Or is it a simple case of it’s not what you said it’s the way you said it? So why do we give away the power of the word, letting misuse of it control us and cause us so much angst? How could we let the prejudice, the bigotry, the benighted abuse a word so much that its pure meaning should be lost and forgotten?

Or is that not the evolution of language? Unlike the evolution of a species, it is not the most adaptable to change that survives. So who decides which words remain alive, which words trasnform and which words die? Who gets to recreate the word?
For instance gay, who let that one slip? Will gay ever be gay again? Will gays ever reclaim gay and return it to its former glory?

For the myriad offensive, and vulgar slang words that exist in all languages around the world, only one is universally versatile. The F-word. I firmly believe that fuck will be bumped up the colloquial ladder and find its place next to ubiquitous, (yes it will jump the alphabetical ladder too) and then it will be cherished as expressive not slandered as lazy. So let us not dilly-dally with the euphemism, when fuck says it all. As words evolve who shapes them? OMF need I say more than OMG?

Words cannot harm you, but they can define you. Those words, wonderful words, paving the road to hell. Be kind to everyone, even those who hashtag speak and acronym all else.

To have and to hold

I volunteered to serve as a volunteer at the Chimpanzee Sanctuary in the Congo while I was there. This topic came up recently when an Australian I was talking to said: “I love chimps,” he told me. “I want one.”

I referred him to the website jacksanctuary.org where he could adopt one. This wasn’t what he had in mind. He wanted to own one. He also loved kangaroos. He also wanted to have a kangaroo.
This is not an uncommon expression of love amongst the sapient species.
Where I love you means little less than I must have you.
Chimpanzees are very susceptible to human diseases, and despite that to hold one inevitably means that you will kill one.

This desire to express love through possession is not limited to the mammal kingdom. I love flowers so I want them in my house cut off from their life source. I love birds so I trap one and I cut its wings so it can’t fly. I love men so I want one (or two) to be mine and only mine.

How could to love mean to have? No chimpanzee wants to be a house pet (nothing wild wants to be tamed), no bird wants to be prevented from flying (even the ones that can’t).
Where did we lose sight of love? Since when does to have mean to hold?
When will we let love be love without possession?
You are not mine to own. I am not yours to tame.

Those were the days, my friend

Back in the day we ate food without a concoction of chemicals. Back in the day we were clean without torturing bunnies. Back in the day our clothes were cleaned without killing a few fish. Back in the day we medicated from the garden without antibiotics.

I’m talking old-wives-tales day here. Granted we did some pretty stupid things back in the day, but the things we used to clean with were harmless and effective. The things we ate were nourishing. The things we did to medicate (not including those tentative times when a headache could have your brain drilled into) were spot on.

This is a strange time to live in. Called the information age, we think we know everything, and yet we can be so fundamentally stupid. Rejecting modern advances because they weren’t mentioned in an archaic novel. Accepting decades-old medicine over thousands of years of effective treatment. We medicate symptoms without ever healing the real problem. We poison ourselves with what we eat and wash with. How did we get here?

It has never been easier to find immediate solutions and answers. Just yesterday I ran out of window cleaner and one quick question to my smartphone and I had a homemade recipe using 3 kitchen ingredients that I already had. All you ever need is a lemon. Life hands you lemons because they fix everything. In no time at all we can do things a little smarter and a little simpler, like they did back in the day. Let’s move forward with what worked and toss (reduce/reuse/recycle) what doesn’t.

 

There is nothing wrong #nothingwrongwiththat

It is quite challenging living with the philosophy that no matter what, there is nothing wrong. Especially in the DRC. I felt like I had moved to hell, until I said that out loud to a religious chick who gave me her in-the-bible interpretation of why I must eat meat after I had told her that I could be vegetarian.

In the Congo they eat cat, and monkey, and flying ants and anything that can be considered food will be food. The religious chick was offended that they eat cat, telling me this while gorging on foie gras. I have already bitched about the miners and missionaries, and in my struggle to see the good here in this devastated poor land I saw a man snap a puppy’s neck to secure future roadside sales.

Verbalising how this is hell for me, made me realize that it is only because here I can see it. I don’t see the pig killed for my bacon. I don’t see the cow suffering for my milk. I see neatly packed shelves of beauty products I don’t see bunnies in cages being tortured, I just read on the bottle that it will burn if put it in my eyes.

How do you tell someone who collects flying ants for food to feed a cat as a pet?

As for the rest of the world outside of the Congo, (the middle of the world). We have ISIS, xenophobia, black-lives-not-mattering, planes crashing and ships sinking, which we think is wrong, right? Labelled as wrong we find someone to blame and we punish the perpetrator to life in prison. Then we have blizzards, landslides, floods, volcanoes erupting and earth quakes of equal if not greater destruction, which we think is wrong, right? Are either really wrong though? Is one really worse than the other?

Is eating cat wrong, is it any more wrong than smacking a kitten when it annoys you? Eating beef, chicken, fish, milk or any of those foods purports a much larger, much crueller and far worse system that we not only accept but actively promote every single day. So why is it hell to see people deep fry cat, it isn’t, just like it is not hell to see a lion eat a kudu.

Our mass produced mass producing systems of systematic mass torture, how wrong is that, and how acceptable is that system?

So here on this perfect planet everything exists in equal proportion. Day and night. Clouds and stars. Heaven and hell. As we fuck with the balance and create imbalance, somewhere somehow the world will balance itself. Natural disaster: human disaster. Disaster is nature’s culling process. The same process we implement when we create a system with no natural predators.

Will there ever come a time where we implement a system based on Mother Nature? Will we ever see how well the natural system works? Or is our fucked up system just simply part of the perfect natural system? The grand original design.

How does one change the existing erring system when it has the biggest task force?

Living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I have been shown clearly the core of all the worlds’ problems. Here in one of the poorest countries in the world, torn apart by war, ravaged by inequality, lies immense potential. The Congolese, however, are honestly being dominated by two dominant forces. The mining forces and the missionary forces. Working hand in hand they have taken over. Here, and all over the world, this system is so successful, and this system will end the world.

The miners: Expats who live in luxury, their every need gratified, they arrive, take what others want, and they leave wealthier than they could have imagined before. They go home with enough to retire in a beautiful position, leaving barren desolate earth that is neither livable nor worth appeal.

The missionaries: Expats who build colonies to sustain their new colonies of converted worshippers. They appear to be giving back while diverting attention off the destruction of the land by convincing locals that the land being destroyed in front of them is inconsequential, stating they should care not for the land that sustains them, but care only for who they believe created it.

This is where I have found myself. An expat in the Congo surrounded by either miners or missionaries or Congolese who don’t speak my language. Unable to see what I can do, knowing that this is exactly what needs to be stopped, I find myself deeply despondent by the forces that make this happen.

Missionaries spread throughout the world like a weed, the dandelion kind, offering a dream come true for a breath of air. They have the money, they have the time, and they have the forces. Miners do the same only with a little more opposition but not enough to actually stop any unnecessary destruction of that which all life needs to survive, on the only place that it can.

Those who care about the planet, and those who think for themselves without being indoctrinated by a make-believe dictator, have very limited support and resources. The ruling forces, the ones that are infiltrating the uneducated, the devastated and the war torn lands, working together as one steals the riches, while the other promises those riches are waiting in a heaven in the somewhere hereafter.

What can I do? Here where the people eat flying ants because they are starving, and bordering their scrap of sand is a 15 foot wall guarding a miner and a missionary who pay a pittance to a local to cook, clean and open the gate so they do not have to lift a finger while they live in the deepest darkest part of Africa. Taking everything of value, leaving nothing behind, except a false hope that a god will save them if only they care about nothing else.

When did #coffee become uncultured and life threatening?

Mmmmmm coffee… First coffee of the day… Need I say more?
Everyone has a unique relationship with coffee, akin to their relationship with love. Coffee is the viable reasoning in the climate change conundrum, convincing people to protect the planet to protect their coffee is unarguable. Why we love coffee is simple and undefined, needing no clarification. Coffee is our primary antioxidant, filled with nutrients, it helps burn fat, boosts metabolism, makes you live longer, helps fight depression, protects the liver, lowers the risk of diabetes, can help prevent dementia, and amongst many more advantages, is clearly one of the healthiest beverages on the planet (Ok I clarified a little).

Coffee on the go, just like water and food on the go, is essential but has led to a catastrophic challenge for our environment. Single use plastics are disturbingly destroying every inch of this planet we are quite fond of living on. Any and all single serving non-recyclable products should be banned… but while the fight to ban single-use limps to the left these housebound k-cups are a sneaky double uppercut to the jaw of ecology, knocking its teeth out.

When these single serving coffee pods hit the market it was a no brainer they would soon be escorted off the market. Single use, non-recyclable, wasteful, inefficient, redundant… but billions sold, billions are selling and they are becoming progressively more popular by the day.
It is outrageous. First world countries making their coffee at home with a single serving container that is either made out of plastic or aluminium. Plastic, be it recyclable or non-recyclable is a big toxic problem, and as for aluminium pods, it is no new science that aluminium is bad for you. It is considered to be a poison universally. So no matter the coffee pod, it is bad for you and bad for the planet (The one planet that produces coffee).

So why are these coffee pods so accepted? Is it because esteemed celebrities market these expedient insta-coffee machines that people overlook its containers that are 95% unrecyclable. A couple years ago used coffee pods could circle the globe 10 times, and at present k-cup discards can reach the moon. While those behind this fad make billions upon billions of dollars to the billions upon billions of coffee pods sold, it makes you wonder how they get away with these intolerable levels of waste, and how can billions buy into this profligacy? Coffee pods now represent a quarter of the coffee market. How did this happen? Where did all the cultured coffee drinkers go? It is hard enough to eliminate single use take-away cups that at the very least serve a very small purpose, but now we are dependent on die-hard pod-cups per coffee that is drunk in our own mug, and this happens in 1 in 3 homes.

Coffee… the beautiful berry, the most sought after fruit that grows along the coffee belt, those sunny regions that have the conditions needed for growing coffee, but coffee’s belt cannot sustain this pod overproduction. Without the conditions needed for growing coffee, coffee won’t grow. So as this warm belt (That often goes by the name some degree equator or no I think it is vacay hotspots) gets hotter, and as the cold belts get colder, the need for coffee grows and grows. So why would we corrupt such a beautiful industry with poisonous pods that contaminate not only the very coffee we need, but the planet too. Why ruin it for everyone?
The endless list of redundant single use plastics that we desperately need to stop producing now pales in comparison to this coffee pod problem. For coffees sake stop with the coffee pod fad. Coffee is best from the bean, the healthy pit of the berry. Use one coffee cup, use coffee from nontoxic cups so you can reap all the benefits that I clarified briefly, and leave the circumnavigation of the globe to the bees.

UPTAKE

There are numerous (slightly silly) ways in which you can reuse these pods. First however reduce the need for them, and the 5% that are recyclable should be recycled, but mostly AVOID them altogether. However if you have one of these coffee pod contraptions the easiest option is to refill them with responsibly sourced and packaged ground coffee and reuse them.

The @MotherNatureNetwork has some ideas: http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/recycling/stories/20-crafty-uses-for-k-cups. As for takeaway coffee, check out my products page for the smash-cup and other nifty ways to be one less person promoting the production of single use plastics and polystyrenes.

#Warning #Robots have invaded Earth, life as we know it, is hopefully over

The startling reality is that life, as we know it, is quite unknown, or should I say, unquestioned. Think about it, how much of what you know is completely determined by what you were told. Day to day, what you do, what you worry about, what you think about, what you care about, who you are, how much is based on what you are told to know.

We live day to day in a to-do list, our minds on anything but the moment. Either checking our mail, updating our status, planning, remembering. How could someone leave their child in the car to die, was it simply because they didn’t register the child was in the car in the first place? Too busy thinking about work, getting to work, getting work done?

Working for what? Each day all those hours are given to live pay check to pay check for a system that was designed before my time (Without my consent).

Would anyone consciously choose to get overweight or unwell? Would anyone choose to have no time and no food and no joy? Would anyone shun another with a true understanding of himself?

According to biologists we are ruled by our subconscious, our autopilot, which was formed by the time we were seven. We have a seven year old directing our lives, why do we let it take the reigns. We can drive, eat, walk, work and live all without thinking about what we are doing, in fact while planning a party or worrying about issues.

Could we lose control if we were in control? Is regaining control as simple as thinking about it? Being present.

Is it that simple to not be a robot? Think about it. Be present!

Would our choices be better, our lives easier, if we just registered what we were doing while we were doing it? Like Chopra poetically explains, and I un-poetically reiterate, if you ate each meal embracing what you were about to put in your mouth with love, acknowledging that it will now become a part of you, would you really eat junk?

If you were completely conscious could you buy food knowing that it will destroy the cells in your body? Would you sponsor the thirteen million tons of plastic that are polluting our ocean each year?

How much of your day, or your life, are you on autopilot? How much are you contributing by not thinking about your choices? How much of what angers you is triggered by something someone told you that you never bothered to question?

How much do you know, and how much were you told to know?

Are you a robot?

Life as we know it will hopefully end, because there is so much more to life. There is so much more to what we know.