The broken human being and hope

By Lumepa Apelu 24 November 2016, 12:00AM

Are you a believer like Shakespeare is a poet?

Love chooses us, not the other way around. 

But if we are love to begin with, then we are always chosen and as flowers in a poem, we would all be in love and would be picking ourselves in a keen city with a balloon as the moon. Yet here we are, the mighty human being, questioning our morality and the essence of our cultures to make sense of our brokenness. 

Dear reader, it is not a prayer that leaves the flowers which lifts them towards the sun. It is the touch of the loving sun on their bended backs which gives them color and beauty.  

But given our problems here on our shores and there on other people’s continents, we must accept that to be sane in a world where sacred things such as marriage, friendship, religion, nations, forests, coral reefs and most of the educated individuals are falling apart is to be like fish going against the tide. But dead fish as your islander eyes would know, go with the flow.

So, my friend, struggle is a good thing in the context of finding our peace. The more struggle you feel, the most alive you would be. 

Let’s now be merry and think of the faculty of thinking. If you consider the brain and all its worries, it is a jungle. The more you fill it up, the more entangled it becomes. 

I am thus inspired to dig deeper into poetry, art and our dances with wild flowers to make a starry night of our dark times. Where else does a human being reign high but within his own heart? It is what we need to nurture. The human heart today is like a dried up waterfall. Yet, it is only through drought that a river appreciates the rain that fills her. 

These days, the moral degradation of societies, not just ours, marks the hunger of the human soul for something deeper, something ethereal, something eternal.  But to find it on the pulpits of our churches is a mistake. If you ponder the mismanagement of the money the vendor child on the street is giving to the church, you would with your faculty of thinking own the jungle and join the monkeys in it.

The things our yearning hearts need are also not found in the books of academia because the magic of kindness and the humility of wisdom are missing from there. And if you think that we can find our peace in politics then accept as a fool would naturally do, that there are ripe bananas growing in the sea. 

To weigh out our common sense with our logic and our lack of empathy with our deep understanding, we have to answer to simple questions. Towards the riddle of our identity, and our future we may ask; if the human soul cannot be bought, then what may I ask, are we selling?

To end this hungry for peacefulness rag, I will state as  a woman filled with emotion the things the human fragile heart needs. It needs, as a woman in love, flowers and something funny. For what is this life but the sound of an appalling love says a poet. We cannot measure our problems and fix them with a frowning disposition. 

Feelings come from deep within, and emanate the highest or the lowest form of who we are, depending. I hope for our country that most of us are like flowers in a poem. I hope also, that the jungle in our heads is connected to the heart more than it isn’t. We need balance. We need to carry ourselves like circus animals on a string. 

We can do it, because we are broken human beings. Flexibility is impossible, if we were not broken to begin with. So yes, the many problems we have, brings the notion of hope, as much as the circus brings us laughter too. 

By Lumepa Apelu 24 November 2016, 12:00AM
Samoa Observer

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