Farewell to 2013...

11.30pm, feeling too well fed, after a lamb stew supper at friends – and too many xmas days of eating more than usual – it’s been a tumultuous time, more of the same – Madiba’s funeral at Qunu, then xmas, then an interview with the apparently top party organiser in the world, here in East London over xmas to visit with his family – and how gracious and eloquent and pleasant he was – he said that he thinks it is his upbringing in an East London family that gave him that special blend of warmth & charm & rapport with fellow beings, and that has brought him to the stage he is on, a friend to Oprah Winfrey and a party organiser & confidante to some world Stars – good old East London, birthplace of some interesting people & artists

East London certainly revving up, or getting revved up, by some outside & inside persons, for a mega music festival event from 29 to 31 December, at the farm OppiePlaas on the Haga Haga road – I have very recently discovered Haga Haga, for me the jewel on this beautiful coastline – something very quaint & old fashioned about Haga Haga – maybe it’s the geography there, that has allowed only a strip of development & houses along its bay – and in centre spot is the hotel, caught in a nice time warp of elegance and unpretentious beach cottage style – a place that has been expanded over the years, and has managed to not become ostentatious, or hard-edged – just simple rustic elegance, in tune with its simple surroundings

Closer to home – I haven’t ventured much into the city, of East London, over the past days – I did find that the scene at Nahoon Beach has changed, Gonubie not so much, but in many ways its festive season, with the seasonal businesses getting their annual cash injections from the big xmas holiday spend of both locals & visitors – and by sometime in January, these businesses will have a fair idea of what kind of year they will have in 2014 – either a year of ease and/or expansion, buoyed up & along by a good xmas innings, or perhaps looking at a long struggle into 2014 if things did not go very well over this season

It’s been a fair enough season for me – working at the Mandela funeral has brought in some much needed income, although I would have worked there for free, just to have been there at that historical moment – it was a gathering of some of the world’s top media people, journalists and news staff, and I was happy & felt lucky to be among them

As 2014 looms, in these last few days of this closing year – for me it has been a year of solidifying, of some friendships, and of myself as a person in the world – a year of much new information, in many areas, but especially those of diet & healthy eating, and the thinking around positive energy, ala Deepak Chopra & Oprah Winfrey et al, and a plunging into the labyrinths of Conspiracy, much of it surrounding Barak Obama & the Pope, the Annunaki and the world bankers, the People who Control Everything – the Dark Forces, under increasing pressure of the Light Forces, who are apparently winning the fight for the future of mankind, and who will possibly very soon in this coming new year, bring about the Big Event, which will usher in the much spoken of Golden Age, when men & women will be freed, unshackled, from their slavery to institutions, from their 8 to 5 life sentences, from their bond repayments and pension & medical aid payments, and all the rest – where men & women & children will again be able to live joyfully and spend time in nature – they might be forced to if all sorts of grid systems like satellite communications & electricity grids and communication systems  etc get disrupted for a while – a return to Eden – except it will not be a bountiful Eden, with fruit trees and fruits for the plucking – it is being painted more like a Mad Max movie, with some bands of people already forming up to become the Prime Marauders, plundering the survival caches of the Survivalists who are stocking up on water, food, medicines and all sorts of things that one will need when you can’t go anywhere to buy anything or to get anything fixed, or get fuel  to put into your car’s fuel tank – at the time of the Big Event, you will hopefully have your own water tanks, and garden of some edibles – sad about the people that find themselves in the winter season when it all happens – because as far as I have been led to believe, the shutters will be coming down, worldwide, and cash will mean nothing for a good while – what will count is food & water & shelter, and guns & ammo, for those who find the need to perhaps protect themselves & their families & possessions, from the mobs & marauders

I’m taking a few precautions, filing my dog’s teeth razor sharp – he enjoys the attention, and I think he finds bone chewing a lot easier – I miss having a gun – I handed mine back to the SAP in about 2004 when there was that big country-wide call to surrender our arms or to buy gun safes and get training at gunstores & certificates that you could use the things properly _ I was living a kind of itinerant life back then, and the easiest thing was to hand back my 9mil – with hindsight, I should have clung onto it as did most of the farmers throughout the country – I think they have some kind of genetic  knowing about these things – survivor genes, encoded into their DNA, from years of frontiermanship, fighting against wild beasts & men, to keep whatever they had got, and what their forefathers had reaped by their labour and with their guns – it reminds me of a friend who lived through the last years of World War 2, as a child in Italy, scavenging the lands for fruit or bulbs or any scraps he could find to take back to his mother, to feed their family – that survival experience was imprinted on his child mind, as must have been the holocaust experience on the minds of the people who survived the Nazi death camps

But with the Big Event, all the baddies will be given a chance to repent, or maybe they will be somehow punished – they are the very people who have caused most of the wars in the past hundreds of years, because those wars did enrich them, the suppliers of armaments & the big construction/rebuilders after the wars, and the Bankers who acted as the middlemen for all of it – all those millions of young & not so young men who died, from bullet wounds, blasts, gasses, radioactive damage – apparently the newest generation weapons are in the sphere of sound waves, or other damaging waves, that can obliterate & destroy anything in their path – and I’m sure that when the big guns start firing, there will be some nuclear bangs making the biggest noises & dust clouds

That brings me to Fukushima, of Japan, which is apparently totally out of control and unfixable, and the Japanese government and the owners/designers of that nuclear facility have finally held up their hands, admitting that they don’t know how to fix the damage, that is causing a massive amount of radioactive leakage into the Pacific Ocean day by day, and hour by hour – with stories of heightened levels of radioactivity across the board – in  Hawaai and along America’s western seaboard, and with large amounts of dead sea animals in the Pacific and in some vast areas, a 98% destruction of seabed & ocean life – all very scary

So it seems to me that we go into 2014, with massive amounts of Hope – and in my little corner, also much hope, and some excitement, about the HagaFest – and we also enter 2014 with the usual smorgasbord of death & destruction around the world, from disease, malnutrition, road accidents, diseases of the rich, like heart/blood pressure – diseases also caused largely by ignorance, about proper diet, but at the same time, diseases cause by widespread greed & overindulgence – the ‘greed’ thing having caused a massive move away from ‘natural foodstuffs, and wholegrains, to societies of people indoctrinated by television and globalist companies bent on packaging foods into boxes and packets, easily available at a network of supermarkets and food supply stores across the globe – where almost everybody has become so used to buying their daily foods and piling them into cupboards & fridges, and then whipping up meals from packets & tins – if one could link up all the very many dots, one could perhaps propose a Grand Conspiracy Theory – that of enslaving the world’s population to brands of food, washing powder, cooldrinks, etc, in a massive and somehow co-ordinated chess game, played by the Boris Pasternaks of Marketing and the Oligopolists – and what for?

Maybe just because of the hunger for Power in a certain few men, the hunger for Wealth, and to have their beach mansions somewhere private, where they can indulge their passions & desires – sounds a bit like a script for a Marilyn Monroe /President Kennedy film

And it seems, in the dying days of 2013, that China is finally raising its fist against America, and threatening sounds are coming from the Chinese, flexing their muscles – some kind of archaic spirit reviving there perhaps, the Spirit of the Samurai, of the yellow people, in their vast numbers – and how they suffered, landlocked and hidden from the world’s view, and from the tv cameras, way back in the early 1900’s, under Mao Tse Tung [was that his name] and the Cultural Revolution – where some kind of anachronistic/primitive spirit took hold, and neighbour turned against neighbour, and millions of people were tortured, or displaced, and spied on for years, and nobody could speak their minds, nobody could say anything that could be deemed traitorous against the Chinese State, or else you were deported  to some very faraway place in China, maybe never to see your family or loved ones again

A similar thing happened in Russia, under Stalin, so many year ago – was that also early 1900’s? The deportations to the Gulag Archipelago

So we humans, worldwide, have come through some terrible times – not to mention the massive tribal invasions that happened in Africa, the spearing & stabbing of men, women & babies, the burning of villages; and then there was the extermination of the native Red Indian peoples in America all those hundreds of years ago, the annihilation of the Incas & the Mayans even further back in history, by the Spaniards, the murdering of the indigenous Khoi & San People in Southern Africa by the early settlers & colonists from the 1600’s onward – the history of humankind, apparently, is one of killing, of slavery, of greed, and here & there a few prophets, wise men, benevolent rulers, and always the masses of people, the workers, who make it all possible by their subservience to their rulers, by their indoctrinations to be obedient to the rule of law in their lands, puppets & cannon fodder, and a small few heretics and lunatics...

With the latest thing, the information age, our world is finally exploding into a shared consciousness, via facebook, twitter etc – maybe it had to reach this point, where the revolutionaries everywhere can now expose the evils of greed wherever they see them – can expose the Catholic Church, for the global monster that it apparently is, protecting some of its priests from charges of pedophilia, and hoarding its secrets and its gold in vaults under the Vatican

And yet every new morning we are woken by birdsong, and flowers blossoming, and nature shooting up and out from the earth its millions of growing things, that are fed by the sun and the moisture in the air – and we have such beautiful places all around us, beautiful coasts, skies, sunrises & sunsets, rivers – mine is perhaps an elitist experience – I do not live in a squatter camp, here in SA, nor further north in Africa, maybe even in a refugee camp there, after most of my family were slashed to bits by the Hutus or the Tutsi’s, and where thin mothers and babies and in the burning sun, in long queues, to get their daily meal, and flies are plentiful – what radical juxtapositions there are, from Hollywood and Manhattan and Paris/London, to the Pacific and other islands, and then to Asia/China/India/everywhere – how much ongoing and simultaneous suffering, alongside opulence and depravity and greed, and then also the white light of enlightened souls, talking of Love & Forgiveness & Joy, and living each moment as if it were your last.

Our own recently buried icon, Madiba, an example to the world, of honour, thoughtfulness, generosity and kindness – maybe that’s all we can do, in our own small spheres of action & influence – be kind, patient, sharing, playful, happy – and maybe those eternal qualities can be my New Year’s resolutions for 2014, to go forward humbly yet playfully, with gratitude for what I have, and for the friends that I have, and my dog, all of whom brighten my days, and make the passing of my days most times happy, and sometimes fretful J

1.20am, time to go to sleep, and almost 2 hours of writing this, my farewell to 2013 J

The passing of Madiba on 5 Dec 2013....

5pm Friday afternoon, 6 December, sitting in my wooden shed, a soft rain coming in showers with a gentle south westerly wind – I am strangely at peace, suspended in a kind of cocoon of silence, and maybe the world too, after last night’s news of Madiba’s death at about 9pm

In East London town today, at Kim’s auction, not much mention of Madiba, although there was a Madiba print sold, a large Black & White, one of a limited print edition of apparently 500, this one sold for R500 – and there was a  relative silence at the auction about Madiba, in counterpoint to all the news stations in SA, radio & TV, broadcasting non-stop news about Madiba

So it seems the world is holding it’s collective breath, and here in East London, a gentle rain is coming by in waves

I was favourably impressed last night at President Zuma’s announcement on TV – he appeared so statesman-like – with his yellowing skin, he looks almost alien, reptilian, but he carries himself with dignity and poise, as the current Father of this nation

Madiba had ceased, for me, to be a focus of attention in SA news in the past weeks & months, after the earlier attention some months ago when he was declared very ill & admitted to a hospital in Johannesburg – and now, this final quiet news, that he has gone

The etv news reader, after Zuma’s announcement, was so irritatingly [white] psychophantic, and soul wrenching, that I changed the TV channel – please no Whiteys, or Blackeys for that matter, wringing their hands & hearts for the nation, trying to express their huge sadness at Madiba’s death – maybe that’s why I liked Zuma’s very matter-of-fact announcement – he didn’t try to gain any kind of mileage out of this event

So this silence, and wetness on the leaves from the rain, as we all wait to see the whole show unfold over the next few weeks – presumably the national road past Qunu is finally fixed, and Madiba will find his final resting place in the family graveyard there at Qunu, where once I filmed him burying another member of the Mandela clan – or maybe he will be laid to rest at Mvezo – I’m sure the powers that be know exactly where it will all happen - I hope to be at the burial, a state funeral according to Zuma – it will be a world media event, and a very historical one

And we now have Madiba up there in the sky, along with the angels, and as he said, he will be with the ANC Party in the hereafter – and we can now beam straight to him our thanks, and our admiration, and each of us now has equal access to him via our thoughts and our hearts, as he must be smiling down on us all J

and summer's here...

Waaaal, so much has happened, since August/Sept/Oct,  including very recently, a friend telling me he has seen in a dream, the start of a 5 year descent on this Earth, into an ice age, starting this December/January – and the signal for this cooling down worldwide, will be a huge comet show in our skies, starting Xmas 2013

Apocalyptic Times indeed

On my homefront, I have learned more about fishing, from an expert fishing friend, who I also interviewed, kamikaze style, in his home, for an article about Fishing that is to appear very soon in the east londoner magazine. I wrote another 3 articles for this same publication, a monthly magazine for East London - the first edition came out on 22 October, and I think it’s going to be a very nice mag

The other 3 stories I wrote for the 2^nd edition of the mag – the Xmas 2013 edition, are: a story about Drifting/motor racing, one about the Crossways Shopping Centre [and the Slow Life Movement] and lastly, a short report about the launch in EL on 30 October of the Bare-it-all-for-Cancer Birthdays Calendar, in which for each month of the coming years, East Londoners can check out the naked bods of groups of EL men, the pictures taken by 8 different  EL photographers – the whole enterprise being Linda Jacob’s contribution to the cancer treatment sector in EL – creating a cash fund that will be used to assist people in EL who need immediate money support when cancer is diagnosed & they start treatment

I have btw started my own Cancer Treatment muti supply – which is a locally available herb, ground up fine in a blender, then put into a glass jar and covered with vodka – screw the lid on, give it a good shake, then place in a dark place, and about ¾ weeks later, with hopefully daily shakings of the jar, you have a deep green liquid, which contains all the complex canabinoids that have been leached out of the plant by the vodka/alcohol – this is reputedly the top cancer treatment muti known to man?

I’m going to take some as a preventive measure – since I believe that this muti must have cellular repair/anti-oxidant/toxicity properties, and it comes with a nice enervating state of mind & being nogal

I am also cutting my teeth as a writer, and loving it – also becoming more & more adept at extracting from facebook much very useful information about health, herbs, the Universe, good & bad energy, etc – among the many lessons to be learned, about Karma etc, is one big lesson, which is to not ‘take on’ another persons heaviness/load – that is their Suffering, and also their Lesson,  from which they will grow  

I’ve had an insight too, along these lines, which says pretty much that if a person has not had a big Suffering experience in their life, they cannot/will not become properly mature – so suffering then becomes a very necessary part of growing up, and not something to be avoided at-all-costs....

I have also had the good fortune to meet a few new friends, who are very smart in various ways – one of them in the architectural sector, and also in the diet sector,  who advocates a Wholefoods diet – that seems in the end to be the great food answer – to return to eating the way that our distant forbears did – eat as wide a variety of whole grains/seeds/vegetables/roots/beans as possible – do much chewing, don’t rely only on juicing, and have variety in your diet

I continue to travel with my big tupperware of various concoctions & adaptogens & bicarbonate of soda, with which I can help friends suffering from heartburn and malaise/tiredness

And I have joined a circle of friends in what seems will become a darts throwing macho-bravado contest, where so far we have laughed much & hard, or at least I have – my darts companions tend to hold their laughter back a bit more than I do, seeing as they are more macho than I am – but the true test of macho, I suspect, is a relative/near total lack of regard for macho-ness – time will tell J

I have been the beneficiary  also of various insights, while driving [mostly] and once while recently in a supermarket queue – on these occasions I have taken up my trusty cellphone, and gone to ‘Notes’ and typed in my thoughts, becoming a New Age person against my better judgement, publicly wielding my cellphone, and running the risk of  having my phone snatched from my hands in a supermarket or at a street corner by an opportunistic cellphone collector - my recent & unpublished supermarket queue story/insight, I titled 'the black man's inspection'...

So, networking, writing, and taking photographs have increasingly become my main activities, along with some old habits like going to auctions, accosting attractive women, and avoiding my bank manager... my veggie garden is showing some promise in some small patches that I stole some time to clear of weeds + indigenous flowering shrubs, and so there are some leafy salads there again [rocket] and some other stuff springing up from seeds I scattered there about a month ago, just before our first big summer rain/s

In summary, it’s been a blessed time for me, of laughter with friends, much wisdom also from friends & from Deepak Chopra [and his side-kick Oprah Winfrey], and good energy from friends, herbs, adaptogens, etc
 I am grateful, and at rest [when I’m not up against one or other deadline] and optimistic, in the face of all odds, and even while receiving rude messages from my bank... J

almost summer...2013

BLOG 30 Oct 2013  

Forgive me dear Blog, my last Confession was about 2 months ago – so much has happened in the interim, including, off the top of my head, here in East London at almost 3am Nov 30^th 2013 : a 2 week trip to Cape Town, in Sept, a wonderful time there for a friend’s 42^nd birthday, he said it was his second 21^st... then a much more recent visit to Coffee Bay, where I discovered the 3 backpacker joints, and got acquainted with the owners of two of them, a very interesting & instructive experience – and in between all that, new encounters [with humans] and very recently, a period of extreme busyness in & around East London, selling advertising space in East London’s newest monthly magazine, named the east Londoner... and edited & published by a friend

Also in between, some starts to what I thought might be a marriage – hopefully might still be – so a very tumultuous and busy time, this latter bit of 2013, as this year that has passed so quickly, turns into a comet rushing toward xmas and year’s end and 2014

What comes to the fore, over this past 2 month’s since my last blog : about 2/3 weeks ago, I wrote up a summary article called ‘Wellness Guidelist’ – a distillation of much information that has come to me, from friends and facebook, about basic medicines & cures/treatments for cancer, etc – simple stuff like the use of Bicarbonate of soda, an alkaliniser, and how to use boric acid, in dilution, to treat a multiplicity of physical disorders [apparently this info, and the cancer treatment info, is not new info, but has been suppressed by Big Pharma over the years, in their headlong pursuit of profit, and of registration of medicines with/by the FDA [Federal Drug Agency] which presides over the multi-trillion business of the selling of drugs/medicines by the pharmaceutical giants of the world.

Also much in the Conspiracy Theory sector, with their many predictions of the collapse of Global Banking/satellite communications/etc and the nuclear apocalypse of Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan – regular reports the past few days, of typhoons ganging up on poor Fukushima, and of the Pacific Ocean becoming a toxic soup, and radiation clouds over Europe/Canada/USA, a radiation alert for the entire West Coast of America, and a very recent announcement that Hawaai is suddenly experiencing a massive spike in its sea radiation levels

So on a global level, and also at a very much more micro-personal level, much upheaval and shifts and near disasters J

Where to from here: I’m still aligned in soul to Deepak Chopra, and his ‘we-are-all-connected-energetically’ message, and more recently to Ram Dass, another Enlightenment giant/saint, with his ‘I am Loving Awareness’ mantra, and as a flood of information continues unabated on facebook, about herbal treatments for Everything – amazing stuff, and the Survivalists [mainly USA groups] continue to advise what to stock up on, as global economic collapse approaches – and the people announcing the approach of various comets/planet Nibiru/spaceships docked on the dark side of the moon, waiting to come to the rescue of Earthlings, if the Bad Guys/Aliens  really step out of line....

It’s been & become a cosmic soap opera, and I have my survival stuff packed away, I’ve sewn some seeds in my veg patch, luckily just before our first big rains here in the Eastern Cape [tomatoes, beetroot,spinach,rocket] – my dog is still in extremely good shape, and happy, I am still living the life of a primitive frontier camper, camping on my plot, my almost completed sandbag & cob cottage in much the same state as it was a year ago, when I ran out of funds to continue building/finishing work – I have however allocated a steady stream of income, toward the feeding of my most costly addiction [auctions] – and all the stuff I have bought has gradually piled up in my cottage, to a now critical point, where I am forced to build a large shed next, in order to move out piled boxes in my cottage to the new shed, and sort them out in the process, and use whatever I bought for building, and store the rest [books,pretty paraphernalia] until the cottage is completed inside [ceilinged, painted, kitchened, etc] and then set up home properly, with fireplaces, greenhouse [aluminium frame & glass] on the south-facing side of the cottage, to keep the rain off that wall, and stop the plaster from crashing down in a growing pile, loosened from the wall of sandbags, by repeated soakings of rain, driven sometimes horizontally against that facing wall by some very strong south westerly winds

My leit motif, if any – to continue to remind myself to be grateful, thankful, humble, joyous, and to live as playfully & kindly as I can, to avoid the energy thieves amongst us, and to guide people in the direction of natural medicines and emotional healing – I am a three-quarters hypocrite in this whole scenario, in many ways – being a cigarette smoker, having a very sweet tooth still, and telling myself that it’s because I don’t have a proper kitchen that I am so irregular with my diet, and I don’t practice what I preach L

Ok, this just a summary then, of my ‘state-of-things’ – I will write something hopefully more entertaining next time, more ‘anecdotal’ – certainly there have been very many ‘anecdotal’ incidents that have happened in the past 2 months & various weeks & days – a real maelstrom of events & people – maybe to accompany some very turbulent weather as we have experienced here in the Eastern Cape over the past weeks – a time of upheaval, as prophesied in Revelations – maybe The Second Coming is really nigh?