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There is heaven in these times of dark pestilence.
All the red buttons are flashing. Rockets, drones, explosions, guns in metal boxes on tracks rolling, buildings with their guts hanging out, telling a dreadful tale of human suffering.
And the lies! The coiffured jabbering of charlatans, not a hair out of place, defending king Donald Trump to the point where the masses are laughing in a slightly hysterical manner.
Everywhere you look, just war and empty hubris, rubbish language, barely disguised nihilism. Greed, power, decline.
The US, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Trump, Putin, phew! I am so glad I do not own a TV.
And back home, death by climate fury. When smoke started belching from Nahoon Beach on Monday — the Turdy bridge was on fire, suspected to be caused by vagrants living inside — it felt like a sign of the times.
Last week’s flooding in parts of the Eastern Cape was apparently a winter’s storm, but of course it was not.
It was yet another extreme hammer blow from a climate driven mad by the “drill baby drill” insanity of money and power mongers who hate regulations aimed at curbing their authoritarianism.
I almost felt a choking gratitude when our president raced to the province to stand at the bridge where our children were washed away.
This was leadership, this was care, this was a sign that elected leaders do to uphold democracies and the fine bills and amendments built into constitutions by the people for the people.
Then I thought, but hey, he was presiding over the very thing so many scientists have been warning of.
This was the tail of the scorpion doing the devastation, the jet sting at the end of the cut-off low cyclone, a human-polluted climate coming back to lash the most innocent, the rural poor.
And as I write this on June 16, a day when Soweto schoolchildren rose up against tyrants, men with evil and stupidity in their hearts, the most disconnected, brainwashed, shuttered minds, who still clump around among us, shot and killed 176 children.
The kids were singing, they were angry, they were defying, and for this they were murdered.
For those of us who survive, the high-pressure cell rose up over the land and sunshine reigned, the rays piercing the cleanest blue air.
While down on the flats around Mthatha people were mourning the 89 or more who perished in the calamity, up on the eastern highlands, there was a wonderland.
Crisp, white snow, as much as a foot deep, as far as the eye could see, the southern Drakensberg pulsating under the rare phenomenon of South African snow.
To test my theory of darkness and light, I called for another goef, because once again the oceans would be placid and gleaming.
The sea looked settled, until we got in. The temperature was all over the show, warm, then cold, and you felt with every stroke, that the water was muscular, moving, brown.
Oh yah, this was a full moon, an outgoing tide and Gonubie bay which is a tight space in terms of the ocean and river, was a moving morass. This was not your friendly sea.
Below that shining surface, there was dark energy.
What was I thinking because, actually, I was now the leader. Jay Bells, our coach was on the beach with her board and family, and now this was my swim.
Leadership, not my thing. But we do what we must do in the breach, and so I girded my frozen loins and herded my friends across to the river mouth, having to go back for a new swimmer who said she was actually fine, but her eyes said something else.
As the strong ones hit the river mouth there were squeals of protest — that river was still in tidal and climate flood and the temperature was down to 14ºC. They turned, we all turned and back we went to the slipway on the point.
By the time we got there, we were down to two. Me and Barbs. Gailo, remembering how cut up she got previously trying to exit here, did a U-turn and headed for the beach — even then, having to take a few deep breaths as the current kept holding her back.
Now it was Barbs and I trying to find a foothold on these sharp, slippery rocks, and what had seemed to be a benevolent ocean was suddenly filling and washing strongly.
She was down on her haunches, I was wobbling and windmilling while calling for her to take my hand, probably more for my own good as well as hers.
And so Barbs and I staggered out, no falls, no cuts. Now that was the ocean and fate moering us. Did I regret it? Hell no! How do you know how to live if you have not adventured to the border, to your limits?
Did I feel grateful for having helped my friend in this little way? Very, because how many times has she not helped me?
In these dark, terrible times, friends do come and go, but the ones you choose to hold onto, the ones who choose to hold onto you, well, without them, we are nothing.
They are the most precious, heavenly thing.
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