African Renaissance

Orpheus

Published

4 years ago

October 23, 2019

It is the worst feeling in the world when you are rejected by a man, any man, but when it is the love of your life. Well, the only one you would have chosen anyway, above any of them, and there were some, some of the most powerful, highly persuasive, well, it doesn’t matter anyway. Because in the end, he didn’t want me. He was very polite about it though. About telling me to leave him alone. All he had to say was this, that I looked like his daughter. Which meant I was too young, too unsuitable, too crazy, or too mad, whatever word you want to use in place of mental patient. I wanted them to leave me alone, and now they do. I only have myself to blame at the end of the day, or night, or in the early hours of the day.

Men want sex. They want to know it is available to them when you are in a relationship with them. Men want the sex-act. They don’t want to ask you questions. I don’t eat anyway. Restaurant dinners would be wasted on me. I don’t like to eat in public. I don’t like restaurants.

Don’t like to go to them. I don’t believe in all of that. The stuff of relationship-imagination that girlfriends want, and wives want even more. The date night. That’s foreplay for the girl, for the wife. She talks, and talks, and talks, and the man says nothing, what does he really do, what does he really want. He wants the evening to end, so he can make love to his wife, or his girlfriend. I on the other hand because of the medication cannot climax. I cannot reach orgasm.

I am a complete waste of time. What does a wife do best? Nag. Whine.

But she’s fertile. She gives him the sons, and the daughters that he wants. He worships his children, gives them everything, everything because he can. The men, besides being beautiful, and intellectual, and driven in their careers and all of that, the Orpheus Effect, oh, I said that. I said what I wanted to say. They are beautiful. All I want is the man. But I can’t. I can’t fall pregnant, do you understand.

What would I do with a child, a baby who will need me for the best part of eighteen years? I have no money. A woman alone, living in poverty, oh, I write. I write books for a living, but I don’t make much. It’s enough for me. But not for a family. Do you understand?

There’s no man, you see. Do you understand? There is no man. But there were. Oh, they’re all off now in the world. Leading everything.

Building empires. Leading filmmaker, leading researcher, leading companies, teaching, consulting. I was young. I’m not young anymore.

Maybe one day I’ll get lucky. I’ll get someone to marry me. But I’m a strange and bewildering woman. My books are full of it. If you read them, you will find that out about me. I’m not a woman. I’m an intellectual. Blame my father for that. He was lonely. He wanted someone to talk too. I was his companion. His best friend. His confidante. I don’t know how to be this woman, anyway. Lack of mother.

Lack of her intensity. So, I lack that kind of intensity within me.

You’re the therapist, here. Yes, I understand. I understand that you understand. Yes, it is a lonely life. I don’t have a father to shelter, or protect me anymore. The sky is a blue ribbon, so, so is my heart. What colour is yours? I’m a detective. If I investigate everything, write about everything, hold nothing back, what then the wife in the relationship with her husband. These books I write, oh, they sell. People read them. Men and women read them. My life, I, little me, make people curious. My life makes people curious. Not men.

Men know exactly what I am. The Jack Nicholson of women. Always left, always loved though, but men can’t stand to be around me say, for years. Maybe hours. Everybody wants me. It’s tiresome. Tiring.

The conversations are mentally exhausting. The love, I have enough love for the world of men. Creative men, highly intelligent men. For them, I am everything. I’m progressive thinker, I’m independent, I’m object of affection, and in return they love me. They can’t be with me; they can’t marry me. Marriage is out of the question. They made their choice years before, all these men. All my loves. Everyone can see this. So, I try to stay out of the man’s way. His space. Goodness knows how important a man’s personal space is to him. The wife ensconced in mansion, large house, with child, or, with children. They make it clear to me from the beginning that no mention must be made of the other women in their lives, their wives, their daughters.

Their other children, if the other children are sons. In the men I have chosen to live my days with, long afternoons. The men that I think of, that are there even when I close my eyes, and am utterly, utterly alone, they chose me, so that should be enough happiness for me, isn’t it? The sex act makes me sometimes, just sometimes uncomfortable. But I do, do I do it gladly, that is enough, isn’t it?

It makes the man in my life happy. That is enough for me. I get no pleasure. None whatsoever. Blame I guess the lack of the presence of a mother in my life. I was always gravitating to women, not to fall in love with them, no, no. I always, always preferred men. Blame my father. Blame me for being his confidante for his entire life.

Even near the end, I had to do everything for him. He was in a wheelchair at the end, in the autumn of his years, and I was still doing everything. A grown woman behaving like a child. Never able to settle down and run my own household affairs. I was a grown woman, bored, uneducated running my father’s household. Fixing breakfast for him, giving him his pills, reading to him from the Book of Psalms, after that we’d discuss what was read, he’d pray, I’d pray, then we’d talk and talk and talk. He was educated, an intellectual. Perhaps that is why I’m only attracted to heavily educated, intellectual men.

Childhood is strange. My childhood was strange. No mother, although there she was in the house. Elegant, always elegant.

Hair always done. She never spoke to me. She talked at me. She screamed at me. She shouted at me when she wanted something done. I could not, even when I the insomnia started, the nightmares as a child sleep in her bed. By then, my parents were sleeping in separate beds.

My childhood. You want me now to talk about my childhood. Not now.

Please not now. I don’t have that kind of time. Already I am mentally exhausted thinking about my father, thinking about all the men. They leave me alone now. Maybe it’s because I’m old now. Older. Isn’t it sad? All that time, all that love, all that potential wasted. Or, perhaps not wasted after all. I have written books. Some people even call me an artist. Note to self. Not novelist.

Not writer. They call me artist. Read it. Read them, if you want to. I know you won’t. You’re female. Not male. You have a female sensibility. You’re married. You have a husband, a daughter. I have none. These books you will either find amusing, or absurd. Perhaps you won’t be able to take my freedom. I’m free. You’re not. You’re tethered to community. I have no community on the other hand. If you read just a chapter, even open any of my books randomly, you will discover this for yourself. I don’t want you to hate me. It’s not your job to hate me. It was my mother’s job to hate me. My sister, she despised me all the way to Czechoslovakia. She lives in Prague now. If you read my books, you will know all the secrets of my heart.

All those men, but all that time they didn’t, or, couldn’t understand that I didn’t know how they loved me at all. They didn’t want talk.

They didn’t want communication eye-to-eye. Face-to-face talk. All they wanted, desired, was the sex-act. Even in my early twenties I didn’t know anything about the sex-act. Jean Rhys had called it ‘the sexual transaction’. Sorry, she was a novelist and short story writer.

Dominican. Feminist before her time. Writer, in the vein of the Russian men, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pasternak, you know. Oh, you don’t know them either. Fine, I’ll continue. I had plenty of boyfriends.

Most of them, no, all of them, come to think of it, a good deal older than me. Do they still think of me, that is the question, with their careers and prosperity? Children at university. The only one I do care about, no, let me rather rephrase that.

The only one I love, love deeply, for who he is, and all of that. The kind of love that makes a woman in the end marry. He doesn’t love me anymore. He never loved me. All this time, I thought he did. After winter, must come spring, right? Right. Madly in love with me. Sadly, as it turns out I had believed in a dream all these years. In my youth I struggled. As a child I was hurt, wounded by my own mother. There’s the proof. I have life. I am an artist. I also have no life. To look at me I look as if I’m a married lady, with children. Not even children at university, young children. After all this time, years, and years, and years. My great love is still unmarried. He is still beautiful. He’s still older though, but even more beautiful.

We’re both a great deal older now, and of course I thought, anything can happen. Yes, yes, it was a mistake. But it was my mistake, you see. I take full ownership, and responsibility for that. I thought, well now. We can love each other now. We can fall in love now. But I am here. He is in America. He is in Los Angeles. He is also an artist.

I am an artist. All of these things we have in common. I contacted him. It was my mistake to make, you see. He did not speak to me. He spoke to me through his secretary. There was no love. Never. I could see that now, as I saw it when I was in my younger years. My early twenties. Or there was, and he was just doing what he always did, which is love, absolute love, unconditional love me, in any place.

He protected me, by not speaking to me. By not questioning me. He just said this. He told his secretary to say this to me. That I looked like his daughter. And all I thought to myself was this, asked myself, really, has so much, or, so little time passed that I still looked like his daughter. All this time I thought that change would eventually come. I thought I would marry. That the seeds would grow.

That I would marry the man I loved with my entire being, and that accepted my psychological framework. All this time it was out of the question. It was out of the question. My love was unacceptable. He had someone else in his life. A daughter, and we would never be together.

I look like her.

Remember, because I remember that cold and hard fact, bitterly sometimes. That he told his secretary these exact words. That I looked like his daughter. Which meant this, the very obvious. That he was always going to be old enough to be my father. I know, I know. Why do I hurt myself in this way? It’s all my fault. It’s always my fault.

They end it, always. They walk away. The men. All of them. When you are a gifted child, you carry that gift with you throughout your life.

Yes, it stays with you. No matter how old you become, you become wiser, also indifferent to the world. In a way, this gift arrests your youth, your development. You understand? No, you don’t. How do I explain it to you, then? You specialized in the field of psychiatry.

You should be explaining this to me. Not the other way around. You smile. So, so, we are friends. All this time I thought to myself that we weren’t. I was too forward-thinking, too artistic. You were mother.

Wife.

African Renaissance

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

Published

3 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.