TENACITY
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…” (from If, by Rudyard Kipling)
The above quote from Kipling’s famous poem comes to mind as I watch all manner of palm fronds tossing crazily around the property like people losing their heads. Even though I sit in the protection of our main hale and have the luxury of watching these phenomenal winds from a safe distance, something of the disturbance in the atmosphere has upset my own equilibrium.
The other day the roar of the ocean was sufficient to draw us out, bowl of popcorn in hand, (wisely covered by a towel to weigh it down) and propel us to what we hoped might be a sheltered place at the beach to witness nature’s power and majesty. We found that tenuous shelter in the lee of a large ironwood tree, from which base we could view one hundred and eighty degrees of ocean fury, great white plumes erupting as wave after wave crashed into the reef and sea wall along Kuki’o Bay, and south to Kikaua and other tempestuous bays.
While, of course, I have the option to remain indoors when the natural world is deemed inhospitable, I don’t have such a ready escape from the realities that buffet mind and spirit on a regular basis. I’m always surprised that buffoons in high places can find willing henchmen to satisfy their foolish whims. Much of what I hear and read beggars belief. While it’s true that BS baffles brains, it must be equally true that stupidity begets stupidity, attracting and multiplying itself like the heads of Hydra.
What prompted this rant was a dispatch I recently received from a friend in Jerusalem, detailing the history of violence against the Jewish race, and which has revived its ugly head in the form of fresh aggression and rising anti-semitism.
I’m not suggesting that I know enough to have an opinion about world affairs. Certainly I’m not seeing much to convince me that we’re not all going to Hades in a hand basket. The furious winds that are literally raging around me seem like dramatic foreshadowing, and I wrack my brain for something positive to hang on to. Hence the reference to If. And a further reference to Willian Ernest Henley’s Invictus, the poem that carried Nelson Mandela through his darkest hours imprisoned on Robben Island:
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”
As for Robben Island, although it is most famous for being the site of Madiba’s (Mandela’s) imprisonment, the island is a microcosm of Cape Town’s [and arguably our own] social and natural history. Today, it is a profound reminder of the brutality that was apartheid, but also a reminder of the tenacity of the human spirit and the resilience of nature.
As a bulwark against cynicism and despair, I mentally transpose Mandela’s ultimate triumph onto all the struggling tribes, nations and individuals I’m hearing about today. Like Mandela, stubbornly holding out hope in the face of all this daunting information. Clearly Henley and Kipling experienced their own dark night of the soul, and shared their struggles, as do poets and even pop singers today, to inspire others with their messages of optimism and bravery. Reaching beyond their individual experiences to express what is intrinsically human — the struggle between good and evil, selfishness or self-less-ness. Obstinately clinging to the belief that small acts of kindness and compassion will ultimately prevail.
Who am I to disagree?