Faith can move mountains or quite literally push you over the edge. Everyone’s brain function and cognition is tested at some point. When it comes to paranoia and schizophrenia, schizo affective disorder and delusional modes of thinking in this day and age delusions of grandeur seems to reign supreme. I needed to relearn all the basic steps of human understanding and my own instinct and capacity for the virtues of unadulterated love, tolerance, peace of mind and understanding.
My studies began the year before I entered high school through the Brahma Kumaris Centre in Malabar. I began with a positive thinking course. This was before the meta era of cyber bullying and digital technology. What is neither here nor there was that I was still a child. An old soul trapped in a child’s body longing to play. I had been a foot soldier in the world drama for aeons. I had been one of Shakespeare’s illustrious “strutting and fretting poor players” upon the glorious world stage for lifetimes. What the mystics call reincarnation.
What is mysticism? Shrouded in secrecy for millions of years the ancient Greeks knew it best and left behind a detailed history of fable and folklore. Stories in which tokenism of the gods of the heavens (Apollo) and Neptune (ruler of the leaugues of the sea) was expounded.
The scholar Homer, poet Virgil, philosophers Aristotle, Hippocrates, Socrates, Euclides, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder their truth holds both a moral compass and Olympic truth for both the Muslim and the Christian world. We are brothers. We are seekers searching for a conscious modality, a conscientiousness way of thinking. Our faith is a paramount enterprise. It is this enterprise that when centred will make the fibre of our core being whole again. It is paramount because the reconciliation between Christianity and Islam must be aligned intrinsically.
The wind blows. A seed is planted and germinates. A school of thought is envisioned by a philosopher. Adler, Jung, Freud, Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn all left their mark from Thus Spoke Zarathrustra and the The Gulag Archpelago. The leaf falls between the boundary walls of the supernatural and nature. The American poet Walt Whitman saw or rather envisioned God in a single blade of grass. Poets know we’re in a hare versus the rabbit race for equanimity. It is easy to say, to think, to equalise race relations within the scope of police brutality as being out of sight out of mind and that in modern day America there is no other outlet for the white haves and have nots and those living in trailer parks (they are not ‘white trash’ they are just down on their luck or receiving welfare cheques) and people living in tenement buildings in the projects.
The meaning of melancholia is this. Tiredness in a broken world, journaling furiously, drinking too much, nicotine stained fingers and a feeling of empathy for both a modern world and the human race.
Look! Hark! Hark all the herald angels sing! Soon it will be that time of year again. Christmas. The season of cheer and goodwill. But families have lost children, husbands, sons and both sides have lost soldiers in the Russian-Ukraine War. It is singing to me. It can be found behaving exemplary in my bones. It hovers nearby in my dreams. It is exhilarating seaward. I would have been a bad mother. I know this in my bones. Same old Gail. Same old me. I am tired of this waiting game but there are days when it feels exquisite to me. I am floating on air when the man (the ex-soldier, ex-army captain stationed in the Congo is nearby). He left me well over a year ago and I have had to get used to the feeling of abject loneliness again.
Like mother, like mother. I am tired of this disease. This all-encompassing need to please. All my life I have played the role of social outcast. In film school, in high school and at the Salvation Army. Then there was the shelter in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. Perhaps storms have sheltered me but I am growing old now and getting used to picking my brain. How I taught myself not to cry. You wouldn’t believe just how tired I am of fakeness and fake personas and I do not have the energy for that blue jazz. It inhabits the aorta of my index finger, the scarlet thread of every magical ventricle, visionary corpuscle and invented vein.
