I am alive and so are you

By Lumepa Apelu 12 April 2016, 12:00AM

I wish I was the wind sometimes. I would make flowers from sand-dust. 

I would blow away all these wars and defeats to our humanity. I would bring back a generation of deep sensible people whose simplicity and humility we can hardly recognize. It is as if we are flying ducks with eagle genes in our potential. 

The rhythm of life is such that we have to know how to dance with it, or find someone with smaller feet to blow your mind away if you cannot dance. Whether you are married, divorced or single, your dancing is part of your tango. 

Best of luck to the break dancers and the tamure shakers, because they are individualistic, and need to be tied to a post to get them to be still. 

Mermaids and angels are not the same but they may be part of someone’s fantasy about heaven on earth and heaven under the sea. To be fair to fantasy, let us pat ourselves on the back for creating Sunday as a day of rest in the human calendar. I know for sure that trees in the forest never rest, nor does the humpback whale in the deep blue sea. 

It serves Moby Dick, to throw stones at us the careless and funny human being whose mindlessness, even battles with the gorgeous ways of our nativity, our ruggedness, our downright closeness to earthy things. 

But songs tell us to hold each other. Let us try, anyway. The moment we let go of the notion that we are flowers needing to bloom instead of competing against another one’s growth, we look like a donkey’s nose, twitchy in the heat of progress. 

But think of elegance and femininity. 

Where is a woman’s place these days? Is it in the kitchen, the bedroom, the bar stool, the church choir seats or is it inside the hearts of children today and those yet to be born? Will our future sons benefit from the fight to know our place here on earth? I know from having gentle daughters that we need better sons to help us in the world we live in today. 

We need more grandfathers to make us read the bible or listen to the silence of being, and love it. We need our men to be more stable and heroic. We need them to own the stage they give us as fathers, brothers, friends and husbands. I am not afraid as a strong willed woman to say gently, “We need our heroes please!”. Yes I love and adore my father and grandfather. Nobody in the world can outstand my faith for them, dead or alive. They both held my hand as a child and taught me to be kind and brave no matter what. 

I want to be everything but I also know like you, we cannot be that ever if we are stuck like leeches to our egos all day. Excuse my formal education when I sound cocky. It has somehow instilled itself in a corner of my mind, where it has convinced my somewhat ruined brain that education is by far the most golden thing. Yet, it also does a disservice to the ego, don’t you agree? If knowledge is indeed power then may I say in return and with utter finesse, that compassion is twice as much in strength. 

The uselessness of human discoveries happens because the human heart becomes a stone. It turns itself to eyes of green filled dollar notes. It looms over the cyclones and tsunamis, the flooded rivers of towns filled with poverty, and it shines so silvery from the eyes of children with bruises on their faces. We have a lot of those. Have  you driven by in your air-conditioned car and seen them? If not, the thing to do, is to put your phone down, and look deeper into the eyes of the cold. 

But here we are a progressive kind of people, the first generation of Facebook and Twitter pages. We are in charge of a mindless way of strutting alongside reality. The boys in the plantation are spending more time in the world of fantasy than in the joy to grow food. All of us are connecting world-wide, and yet still so disconnected from the most important things. The world you are sad about? Is it healing? 

But by luck and destiny I survived a tragedy that killed many of our loved ones in 2009. By note of remembering nationally, it is a forgotten history almost, like the Germans have forgotten they were Nazis and the Americans are oblivious of their cause of strife in their own politicians. The storms of corruption howl like a cyclone and whirl all night. Even the snails without ears to hear, know of the suffering we hold. 

When we choose to forget instead of forgive ourselves the most, we become completely and hopelessly blind to our lawlessness to life. So hold yourself against a door, and realize, you and I are grown and we are not innocent. We are part of this place we made, wretched as it seems.

If you were to ask me, what words I could say after watching from under the sea our tragic carelessness, I would whisper to you in your sleep, “I am alive. And so are you. This is our time to make a difference. As hard as it seems, please own it.”

By Lumepa Apelu 12 April 2016, 12:00AM
Samoa Observer

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