African Renaissance

Feminist Technoscience

Published

4 years ago

September 5, 2019

‘Networked feminism is a phenomenon that can be described as the online mobilization and coordination of feminists in response to perceived sexist, misogynistic, racist, and other discriminatory acts against minority groups. This phenomenon covers all possible definitions of what feminist movements may entail, as there have been multiple waves of feminist movements and there is no central authority to control what the term “feminism” claims to be. While one may hold a different opinion from another on the definition of “feminism”, all those who believe in these movements and ideologies share the same goal of dismantling the current patriarchal social structure, where men hold primary power and higher social privileges above all others. Networked feminism is not spearheaded by one singular women’s group. Rather, it is the manifestation of feminists’ ability to leverage the internet to make traditionally unrepresented voices and viewpoints heard. Networked feminism occurs when social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are used as a catalyst in the promotion of feminist equality and in response to sexism. Users of these social media websites promote the advancement of feminism using tools such as viral Facebook groups and hashtags. These tools are used to push gender equality and call attention to those promoting anything otherwise. Online feminist work is becoming a new engine of contemporary feminism. With the possibility of connecting and communicating all around the world through the Internet, no other form of activism in history has brought together and empowered so many people to take action on a singular issue.’

Tech is taking ‘the covers off’ social issues while feminism is now becoming the perpetual adoration of the female intelligentsia. Technology has certainly opened our eyes to the plight of women and girls around the world. Consider the impact social media had on galvanizing international outrage after the horrific and deadly gang rape of a young Indian medical student, or the power of Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, an advocate for the right of girls to an education, who was targeted and shot by a gunman, and who has since become an international heroine.

“Technology has definitely taken the covers off a lot of social issues when it comes to women,” said panelist Tara Hughes, senior director of technical product management at Turner Broadcasting, CNN’s parent company. “I think it’s provided a voice for the voiceless, so we wouldn’t know some of the things that were going on in countries like India or (in) the Middle East if it wasn’t for some of those social networks.”

Is feminism the new racism, the dishwater of imagination? Is prejudice still the new education between the haves (knowledgeable boys, guys and men) and the have nots (girls and women), the soft domestic animal shamed if she is not a goddess. Technology is not gender neutral. Domesticity is not gender neutral. Feminism is not gender neutral. Art is not gender neutral. Feminism must confront the danger zones, the assumptions of the lives of women. It is technology that is influencing the intelligentsia of women for the most part today. Daughters doing what they did in a disembodied space, a personal space that is filled with images where men hate women for their emotional maturity and intelligence.

What about the future of feminism, tech, generations of girls to come? Is it always going to be masculine, primed for a man’s brain, a man’s brain cells clicking away? What is fundamental is that women are becoming just as smart as men are if not smarter.

There are women against feminism but there are more women who are in praise of it, who worship and appreciate their physical bodies, their independence. In the end feminism, humanities, the digital divide, there is and will be enough potential for it to develop alongside each other.

‘Networked feminism’s impact is somewhat limited because not everyone has access to the internet. According to Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive editor of ‘Feministing’, a popular feminist blog, “we tend to forget the women who aren’t online – there is a digital divide – and I think that part of the feminist movement should be focused on reaching out to people face-to-face doing community work, doing international work. A lot of people are online but not everybody, not by a long shot.’

Slacktivism (sometimes slacktivism or slackervism) is a portmanteau of the word’s slacker and activism. The word is usually considered a pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little physical or practical effect, other than to make the person doing it feel satisfied that they have contributed. Slacktivism can be defined as the act of showing support for a cause but only truly being beneficial to the egos of people participating in this so-called activism. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist. The underlying assumption being promoted by the term is that these low-cost efforts substitute for more substantive actions rather than supplementing them, although this assumption has not been borne out by research.

Many websites and news platforms have integrated social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter into their interface, allowing people to easily “like”, “share” or “tweet” about something interesting they saw on the Internet. People can now express concern about social or political issues with nothing more than the click of a mouse, raising the question, what is actually being accomplished by these “likes” when very little thought or effort is required?

Slacktivist activities include signing Internet petitions, joining a community organization without contributing to the organization’s efforts, copying and pasting of social network statuses or messages or altering one’s personal data or avatar on social network services. Research is beginning to explore the connection between the concept and modern activism/advocacy, as groups are increasingly using social media to facilitate civic engagement and collective action.

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS describes the term “slacktivist”, saying it “posits that people who support a cause by performing simple measures are not truly engaged or devoted to making a change”.

There are millions of feminists out there today. Hundreds of mental sketches, mental sketches about the role that technology plays in the lives of ordinary women, exceptional women, extraordinary women, brilliant women, mothers and daughters all in certain support of political activism whether they vote or not. Governments may not have found solutions of philosophical consequence, writers’ movements in Nigeria are moving towards the memoir, there might not be inspired peace in the four corners of the globe but girls have options. Girls go on pilgrimages into the guidebook, the ebony and ivory, the psychoanalysis, the psychological framework, the history of the wilderness of Europe and America. Girls have the otherworldly guidance to the kitchen table wisdom of their mothers and grandmothers on their side and that is their guide to the unveiled male brain.

When it comes to the affections of intellectualism, there is a hidden telepathy in creativity, the scarcity of a female mind being suppressed by successful, powerful men, intelligent men who minded the materialist in likeminded women who were their equals, in the synchronicity of the vanity of that savage impulse. For the man subjugates the woman’s movement, thinks his essays are far more superior, that it signals ‘humanity’. Technology is never going to bypass even the African feminist. There will always be advancements in technology, in footprint of climate change. Someday technology may even surpass humanity. The intersection and perspective, the knowledge and networking of technological advancements made in social media will affect feminism in the long run as well but not in the way that you think it will. In the eighties it was debate, in the nineties it was a perspective that no one wanted to own up to although there were feministic parameters, in the new millennia it was another wave of feminism, modern feminists who were more technological savvy than their counterparts in previous decades were.

There is what I call ‘evolutionary displacement’, a creative outlet for the modern feminist and the African feminist which goes to say that there are integral theories that are a ‘kindergarten’ work in progress of paradigms of indigenous knowledge systems. Intelligence in women is no longer an illusion, no longer abandoned memory work. The intellectual woman is no longer an argument, no longer Darwin’s argument. Her sensations are no longer trivial. Spiritual poverty no longer has an inner voice for the female intellectual. Now that all women are awakened to the fine art of the accumulation of the pessimism of social media, sexual violence is being taken to a new kind of virtual level kind of phase/playing game. There is no kind of Jane Austen society that exists today in the universe. Even less a Dorothy Parker society to a lesser extent. But the feminist is more comfortable in her skin. The Goth is more comfortable in her skin amongst.

It is necessary to look at the violence, the waves in the shallows of this hallucinatory reality, modern society demands that women become more technologically-savvy alongside their male counterparts, Do intelligent women take themselves a seriously as men take themselves? The African feminist’s life is an unexamined life. The onset of the nature of life is symbolism, the consolation prize instrumental in demonstrating the female property is the sensibility of intuition. What is feminism and what in the world does technology have to do with it? Feminism is an abandonment of the vibrations that alters the relations of the biochemistry of childhood into adolescence. Both, by establishing specificity, flatters intelligence, are learning curves, emotional and independent of each other. Both are liberating. Women are gifted since ancient times, since fighting for contraception, the vote, and the encouragement of the suffragette movement. Women are oracles, and at the end of the day a woman’s work is never done.

Self-awareness comes with pain (what does technology have to with that. It is where the introvert and the extrovert, the inhibited intellectual and the exhibitionist meets) but it also comes with futuristic technological advancements to be made. Here is a self-portrait of a machine or robot who we think has no sense of intuition but has a ‘narrative’ or ‘text’ running through it of his own volition that although it cannot think for itself it has science, it is coded, and it has an energy, a personal velocity. It is the creative hand in hand with the advancements in technology who will imagine our future, alongside feminists, female intellectuals and women who are as smart as men, who fought their way to think the way their fathers did or who are smarter than the men they know of, work with or socially interact with or engage with or relate to. It has always been men who has inspired the female intellectual since she was a child and not a woman. Not the mother figure in her life.

The mother figure is a miserable failure to the girl child who wants expression (to express herself), the girl child that wants to be part of a collective but to also be seen as an interloper in modern society. The girl child is fascinated with her older contemporaries. She is always re-enacting scenes from the introduction to her father’s acute sense and sensibility, his culture, his pride, his prejudice becomes part of her psyche, whatever arrogance or anticipatory narcissisms, neuroses that her father portrays it will become part of the girl child’s psychological framework. She writes to liberate herself. She thinks to liberate herself and the miserable failure of a mother does not write, does not think. This is strategic on the part of the girl child. To distance herself from her ‘miserable mother’ who is most probably tired (with a household to run, a husband and children underfoot), sad (because she has no energy, no time for herself), lonely (because she has simply no one to talk to about the things on her plate, she is having to think about the performance about it all when it comes down to it), and depressive (too many things on her mind).

The values of a man have been ingrained in her since childhood, that all book-knowledge is powerful. That was the case with me. What can women share with each other? Education, stories about childbirth, fertility and motherhood. I am not in any way saying that is the case with all women who decide to write as a lifelong career, go into academia, become a feminist (a feminist is ‘being’, it is a kind of humanity, you do not become a feminist, in the end to me it is a small triumph). Aesthetics on the other hand is a panorama, a cordoned off view of explorations, perspectives, small little triumphs, A feminist is a little-known landscape to the mother. There is a crossroads when it comes to the world of tech and the world of the feminist. If you are a feminist you are not only making a statement that this is your identity. You are either a feminist or an egoist or both. You have a lack of an ego, it is also a lecture, my hairstyle, my clothes, my dress, my attitude, the films that I watch and who I choose to love you are saying you are feministic and that it is not a phase. How can technology save women, save feminism, save the girl children? Education can save women, save feminism and save the girl child?

The girl child who grows up to become a writer or a feminist or an intellectual projects what her father projected, what the men around her as a child projected whether they were alcoholics or mentally ill or had beautiful, artistic hands and kind eyes even though perhaps she felt abandoned or neglected by an absent father, even though she had a mother who showed her a world of life. I write the way I write because my mother was the one who abandoned and neglected me. She was the miserable failure who was tired, sad, lonely and depressive. Harsh words but then not every one’s life is a Disney fairy tale. The girl child embroiders fantasia, but when it comes to tech another world opens itself up unto her of biblical proportions and she becomes a Moses, Jonah, a Noah, an Elijah, and a Daniel. Science and education can do that to you. Literature and existential phenomenology can do that to you. Make a radical out of you. Decorative imagery can make tech look pretty. Dealing with tech and feminism is easy, retouching critiques. It is not for the boys anymore.

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Abigail George

Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated shortlisted and longlisted poet Abigail George is a recipient of four writing grants from the National Arts Council, the Centre for Book and ECPACC. She briefly studied film, writes for The Poet, is an editor at MMAP and Contributing Writer at African Writer. She is a blogger, essayist, writer of several short stories, novellas and has ventured out to write for film with two projects in development . She was recently interviewed for Sentinel, and the BBC.

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African Renaissance

The Art Of Communication: God, Intervention And The Divine Space

Published

4 days ago

June 2, 2023

Abigail George

The more consistent we are at being kind to ourselves, kinder to the natural environment and the more loving we are to ourselves and to other people who find themselves in less fortunate circumstances than we find ourselves in, the luckier it seems we will become, the more tolerant of other people we become and the more we will gain and obtain understanding of and into our true nature, instinct, our humanity and the world around us with a modicum of circumspection.

I truly believe that a realm of understanding and infinite possibilities is opening up to humanity at this point in time in our history. Look how far we have come from the Essenes, Mayans, the Egyptians and their star maps, and the Sumarians. The Dead Sea Scrolls have taught us that erudite and gifted scholars wrote the Bible. Men who were intellectually ahead of their time, spiritually cognisant and self-aware visionary thinkers whose psychic abilities knew no bounds. What do ancient civilizations have to teach us about the universe? I think that the question that we should be asking is what does it have to teach us about vibration, energy and frequency.

We will live the best version of ourselves when we are cognisant and aware of the mind-body-spirit balance. When we live our lives with intention and purpose we fulfil God’s mandate and sacred assignment in our lives within the construct of a very highly intelligent order. My life has changed for the better. I always felt tired, exhausted, I experienced lower back pain, I wasn’t able to run simple errands like going to the bank or to the shops to buy groceries and now I can since my entire mindset and attitude has changed when it comes to understanding and acknowledging the love language of my soul and the mind-body-spirit balance.

I have seen when I operate at the level of the divine I am granted access to the ancient knowledge of the source and the known universe. I have incredible levels of energy, I am able to multitask, generate multiple income streams, I am lucky, content, fulfilled, I don’t overeat, I take care of myself. In arguments I am calm and keep a cool head. I have become kinder to myself and much more level-headed over the years. Our mental wellness, physical wellbeing, and how we handle our emotions are all about self-care and self-love. These are neither delusions of grandeur nor are they a form of poppycock or hocus pocus ideology. I am granted these superhuman instances of this in my own life and speak from experience. I feel I am more grounded and connected to the people in my family than I ever have been before.

It was always difficult for me to handle the disconnections in my familial relationships but this is something that we as humanity and the human race struggle with. We come to this planet from the source or call it the known universe to learn, to gather information, to make the world that we live in a better place that we live in for flora, fauna and the animal world and to benefit from the connectedness we feel with other individuals. Most of all we come to earth and experience reincarnation (rebirth) to learn and unlearn and assist all hurt and wounded human beings who have been displaced by war and conflict in the regions that they live in to come to consciousness and enlightenment. Lay preachers speak of spiritual warfare, living in bondage, supplication, redemption, salvation, sacrifice and generational curses in the bloodline, demonology, demonic strongholds, the power of the Holy Spirit. We are spirit. It exists in life, in everything, in abundance. Spiritualists, mystics, screenwriters have brought to screen and storytellers (for example, William Shakespeare in his play “Macbeth”) throughout the ages speak, and have written about witches and warlocks.

What does all of this mean? Spirituality is made up of particles, elements, dimensions and inside our mind’s eye we are continually formatting this information into what I like to call “atomic habits”. Conflict is a way of life but it is something that we must learn how to deal with with competency. The vibration and energy and the frequency that lightworkers and starseeds are operating at on this planet, in this dimension (which some are calling a simulation, it is fast becoming more reality than illusion and more than even a non-reality).

Light, love and blessings seeker. Go forth into the unknown, into the wilderness. I call this “the Moses blueprint”, Christ consciousness, Christ seed and Christ light. Our identity can be found in a single fingerprint. The Moses blueprint has been imprinted on our consciousness subtly each time we have entered a rebirth. Perhaps this knowledge and expertise has been passed down throughout the ages and as we reach enlightenment and operate at a different frequency, as we become more self-aware and intuitive and knowledgeable about soma (energy) we will ultimately become who we were meant to be.

Conflict leads to stress but it can also take us to greater depths of understanding the human mind, our capacity to teach, to recover memory and what it consists of, it helps us recover subliminal messaging and puts conundrums into an exponential sequencing that we find useful in our daily habits. The same conflict can either inflict mental illness upon us or stress can induce positive tension instead of just strain and wear and tear in our bodies. It (both conflict and stress) helps us to make sense of the semantics of brain health, to progress, to prepare, to process, to heal, to think and to overcome the great difficulties in our lives. What has education, science, religion and spirituality taught us? That in the long run we are energy, we are what we think and that our thoughts are communicating to the most cellular level of our physical bodies.

What is important to realise as Eckhart Tolle expounded in “The Power Of Now” and “The New Earth” is that “the dense pain-body” exists. We must never lose the importance and process of the lesson. It is possible to heal completely and recover from ACE (adverse childhood experience), incidents of trauma and emotional damage to the brain.

African Renaissance

What Happened To The Rainbow Dream?

Published

4 months ago

February 8, 2023

Abigail George

When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant, I was a beast before you. Psalm 73: 21-22

South African has a long history of the liberatory struggle. Many theories were forwarded by leaders of various political parties. What followed in the years to come was the postulation of many different political ideologies. In order to obtain the support of the majority of the people these theories were distributed far and wide and resulted in many publications. Students of social dynamics had to acquaint themselves with political theoretics of the day in order to understand the political dynamics. One of the gravest errors made by many theorists was that it lacked dynamic pragmatism, which made it difficult for the people on the ground to carry out the expounded theories. This resulted in a big gap between the political theorists and the people on the ground. In the South African context many theorists did not take into account the practical needs of the people on the ground (the working classes and military operatives of this country).

We now enter a global scenario in which corruption will be the downfall of the governments of the world. However, in our present circumstances we find that we are facing a number of problems in Africa and South Africa. Many vital functions have become obsolete. There is no longer electrical power, unemployment is rife, acts of violence is prominent, there is a grave shortage of clean running water and in the last two weeks we have seen a total collapse of law and order where armed thugs create havoc in many areas in Africa. Many innocent people have been killed, wounded or maimed. The total number of people killed this week runs into the thousands.

Where are our leaders and who will hold them accountable for their sins? The majority, the neo-liberal capitalist imperialists or the entitled, priviledged minority? No fear. No favour. Life is seed and what is the harvest that is forthcoming from following a structured approach in the falling hierachies that abound? Our leaders have adopted the discipline of silence amidst the outward decline of communities in the rural area and lack of spirituality abounds. Poverty exists in every corner and thwarts the disadvantaged and marginalised. The days ahead of us are going to be hard and we will need to find our own resources instead of looking to the West to save Africa and to the church. We must reach out to our allies in Africa, build and rebuild bridges, mend fences, build and rebuild relationships, mend the broken, the maladjusted personality within ourselves.

We must end literary apartheid (#endliteraryapartheid). The pen is truly mightier than the sword and with that been said it is knowledge and our poets, educationalists, arts and cultural practitioners that will save Africa from the quagmire, from downfall, from the aftermath from a term Don Beukes, a preeminent South African poet and educationalist termed as “literary apartheid”.

History was made in South Africa on 20-21 March 2021 when the National Writers’ Association of South Africa (NWASA) was inaugurated. The conference coincided with the Human Rights commemoration month whereby writers in South Africa stamped a historic moment in the literary calendar of the continent and the diaspora.

We must invest our time productively in the causes that we wish to adopt, our perspectives must become our strongholds, we must be principled, patient, prepared thought leaders and apply jurisprudence, circumspection and reflection when it comes to handling the collateral damage of the neo-apartheid. The personal freedom that we bought democracy with has come at a terrible price and it must be accounted for, its glorified leaders must be tabled, recognition must be given to them and the tough questions must be asked and not whispered about. Was the Rainbow Nation a dream, is it now shattered, was it just a biased psychological framework conjured up in innocence?

We see the pains, ills and birth pangs of our beloved country that was forged at CODESA playing itself out in a global landscape. It is a scenario that is teetering on the brink of financial ruin and collapse that is being mirrored in other countries in the West. We are in South Africa in a mess with education and an energy crisis looming. The haves, the priviledge few seem not to want to share. The ifs are literally being left in the dark. In my opinion this is what will save deepest, darkest Africa. In plain language it will be the continent’s leaders who lead with integrity standing in solidarity with think tanks, intellectualism, self-actualization, self-esteem, belonging and values, who will understand what is meant by the needs, wants and desires of the psysiological. We crave safety, the beacon of hope that Madiba was, and we’re looking for the kind of “point of light” that he was as a reference. The solution can be found in our history books, in the archives, in the textbook knowledge, in our libraries, in mother tongue, the literary material coming out of contemporary Africa. We can see the divisions that exist among the races in South Africa staring back at us on the page, in the “literary apartheid” that exists to a large extent in the literary establishment in South Africa, in the publishing companies in South Africa who publish stories about the majority from writers who make up the priviledged and entitled minority. Lest we forget, there is a minority whose lives were endangered during apartheid by their “white writing”. Their writing today could even be said and accounted for in so many words as being black consciousness writing, leading to the enlightenment, the coining of and the conscientisement of the African Renaissance.

These leaders will be educated men and women who have the vision to think past hate crimes, police action and police brutality, class and the struggles of discrimination, racism, ageism, sexism, fear amd gender based violence. I believe that the voices, the purpose, the agreements of these leaders will lead Africa to the world stage, the United Nations, new beginnings for every inhabitant and citizen on the face of this continent. The question is Africa where art thou or are we just feeding the beasts or waiting for our poets to write about poetry against depression? Africa is growing rapidly. We are the beacon of hope for the working class.

It isn’t going to be the breakout of civil war that we will have to contend with. It is going to be our mindset and how we view the world that we will have to contend with. It is going to be our perspective that is going to set us forward on the road and trajectory of negotiation. It is going to be an education for all citizens and netizens for that matter. We must as a continent, as a nation guard against civil war by all and any means necessary. Instead it will be the textbook knowledge of negotation that will set us free. We must look to our cultural, social and poetry practitioners, our historians, the purveyors of truth who stand up for human rights, those stalwarts in education who will mentor the young. Personal freedom was never “free” and we must acquaint ourselves with this as if it were a kind pf scientific knowledge that we have to get to grips with. Patriotic integrity should be more than a buzzword for appointed leaders and the cornerstones of office and administration in Africa and the diaspora. Yes, I believe we can adopt this ideology. Transparency equals fair governance. It can also help us to cope with the junction that we find ourselves and our modern world in today.

African Renaissance

Advice From A Mother, Missive To A Writer Father and Excerpt From A Book Forthcoming

Published

7 months ago

November 21, 2022

Abigail George

E-V-E-R-L-A-S-T-I-N-G. It could be a poem/or testimony/or the start of a new beginning. Or an extract from the introduction to “The Overcomers”. All I had was a wristwatch and a page in a diary. I remember the time when no one would speak to me. Now I speak to all the sassy particles and powerfully good dimensions of the world. Now I am flicker. Now I am spark. This I guess is my inheritance. And when I look back now to the time when I saw no beauty or imagination in the issues I was having, when all I had on my mind was body shaming’s dysmorphia and how much I was eating. When I considered a lettuce salad and yogurt a substitute for all the lack in my life. When I didn’t see one ounce of enchantment in my struggle or the battlefield of my mind. My inheritance includes a gold that is indestructible as God. So, I guess this is a full circle moment for me but for me everything starts and ends in movements ordained By God. And the lesson is that even though you don’t know what your inheritance will be, God knows. He knows exactly how cool you are.

Excerpt from the chapter “10 Things I Love About You”, a book I am writing about “Overcoming”.

1. “The fullness of your destiny awaits.”

2. “You realise everything moves in seasons.”

3. “I want you to accomplish all your dreams.”

4. “Every characteristic of your soul is built for and constantly being reinvented for success.”

5. “You have the response of competency in every situation.”

6. “You are the evidence of God’s blessing, promotion and inheritance in his life.”

7. “You know and understand what your inheritance is.”

8. “You believe in God’s unconditional trust”.

9. “You understand that the vision God has for your life He planted the seed in the past, is watering it in the present so that it can manifest itself in the future.

10. “When you know and understand the totality of failure and overcoming and winning over both adversity and adversary.”

Excerpt from the chapter “Advice From My Mother”. Give a man space. Give a man his space, daughter. Give a man room for his intuition to become like the frontiers of space, the boundaries of space, the territories of space. Give a man room for him to release and manifest this intuition and his potential. Daughter, understand that this is the fundamental reasoning behind making him happy. It will allow him to become the best version of himself. His faith in himself will increase and he will inspire the magnitude of greatness in others, and all the qualities of greatness in himself. You will then see the daydreamer in his soul, the childlike wonder he possesses when he is at work, atonement and forgiveness in his enduring love. Be the reading light in his world in daylight, and the innocent in his nightfall. Teach him to be an Elijah waiting for the abundance of rain.

Excerpt from the chapter “Positive Reports Of Abundance In Your Life”. This is something about the introduction of abundance in my own life. It is a story about transformative love, enduring love, redemptive love and a return to love and what I heard in my spirit today about setting up miracles into power, into redemption, into salvation in my life. Believing in miracles, in abundance means to stay encouraged in the face of absolute negativity, to be boldly confident like Captain Kirk, to think with unlimited power (knowledge is power, God is power, being authentic is powerful) like Zimbabwean-born Mufti Menk, and when your thinking is unlimited you begin to manifest love, see love, envision love and this is a love that is not subject to laws or principles or change as Mother Teresa portrayed in life. It is one of a kind and when you love like this you become one of a kind too. One of a kind people walk through life with grace and abundance. To love is the singular most important assignment we can have in this world.

Excerpt from the chapter “The Daydreamer Chronicles”. This is one of the pages from my diary that I journaled this morning. I was hurting this morning so this is what I wrote to counteract feeling wounded. One of a kind people walk through life with grace and abundance. They realise when failure and dismissal by others come to you it is only an abundance of rain teaching you how to be an Elijah, a force of good in the world, a force to be reckoned with, a force of bold confidence, leadership ability and greatness. To be great. Where do I begin? With the years that I have lost. I have notched up twenty odd years of lost. What you have lost can never be measured. The only person who can measure that is God in all of his supersonic dimensions. I have realised that the word “lost” means it is only a season that becomes your reckoning for a divine harvest.

How will we exist without illusion in all the dimensions of the non-reality that we are living in now. It is the space, the inter-connectedness, how we relate to each other across the widening spaces of humanity’s birthplace, earth’s almost sovereign rank in the universe, that will either count as the final frontier. There is the catastrophe of wildflowers at the back of my hand. My grandmother’s porcelain teacups are as delicate and fragile as her consciousness. Nobody loves a warrior at first. Then they’re called epic or legendary. So they gather reputation, praise and adoration to themselves like Rilke did with his Orpheus’ sonnets. Rilke danced around the sun, embraced the moonlight found in nightfall. Hemingway was a captain. Salinger a tuning point. In Updike’s features a vulnerability showed itself there in the pages of every domestic scenario that he ever wrote about. Last year, we ate ice cream and cake on my brother’s birthday and like a comet around the sun, I felt him slip away into an impatient man from my reach. I let him go. Saw in his eyes the empires he would build in flight. Away from the world he had known as a child I called them red furious beasts, my brother called them flying-monsters. He wanted a family. Truthfully, I wanted a family too. God had a family. He called it humanity at large. This was amazing to me. His complex sensibility at work. Here we go. Here we go. Into the aqua-coloured veins and texture of platelets of the virtual world where sea meets sky and azure is really blue.

Sorry about this. I keep apologising. I am writing a love language unto myself to exit out from the realisation that I am losing the singular most important person in my life, my dad. So, I am writing love letters to myself today, all day long. Dear dad, you exist for me like the sun, two suns, moonlight, the stars, all the planets in alignment that our atomic God created. I am because of you elderly statesman, articulate and expressive orator, defender and giant of all who you knew once an autumn ago. I thought when I was a child that you only lived to exist for me as I exist for you. You have survived the volcano, and deserve all the thoughtful support and positive praise that I can give you now in this autumn. I adore you dad. I always will. You teach me daily to master the pain.