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