Mid winter musings on principles above profit

With winter evident in the dark cloud and rain outside, it’s easy to forget how blissful summer was just a few days ago. June brings with it the shortest day of the year and the depths of our darker months. It’s mild compared to the winters of the northern hemisphere and the majority of people on the planet. Therefore, easy living continues to keep us lulled by comfort and complacency here on the southernmost shores of Africa.

The banana flower has opened to reveal new little fingers of the banana’s hand outside my window. In a few months it will be ripe for the picking. Red roses begin to reveal their new buds, opening wider by the day. Nature’s treasures continue to flow without effort or need for any encouragement. It’s all going on by itself. Such is the paradise of existence on even a day such as this, devoid of the life-giving sunshine or blissful blue sky visible on any other day of the year.

Being born and raised to live a lifetime on these sunny shores of Africa’s deep south, has been a blessing that kept on giving. Regardless of my awareness of the relative natural opulence, nature has nurtured and fed me all my life. Only in later years does one have any realization of just how opulent life down south actually is.

While living in our natural born homes and societies, we have no comparison to the rest of the planet, so we fail to see our circumstances for what they are, even though they surround us constantly. Once life, education and travel experience accumulate, it becomes easier to gain the perspective of our reality that brings to the fore its shine, or lack thereof.

Here in the sunny southern shores of Africa there is an abundance of shine, and with it an ease of living and abundance of good health and mindset that allows me to feel like a rare fortunate soul to have had these opulences around me for this lifetime. I’m sure you can relate, if you’ve had a similar sunny upbringing. Not everyone has.

Many suffer through painful winters for six months out of twelve. Half their lives are lived in austerity and suffering. What a mixed bag life on earth appears to be. The northern hemisphere of the planet contains the vast majority of the global population yet also has the harshest winters. A temperate climate is a rare natural opulence only glimpsed by a few on short holidays to sunnier destinations. Or felt for a few fleeting days in August as the clouds part to reveal a hesitant sun above a northern sky.

All of this makes it clear that you can choose to change your circumstances for the better with ease by simply physically relocating or by shifting your perspective of reality. Yet many can’t dig themselves out of the hole they were born into. The effort may be overwhelming. Most need help from above to be pulled out of their pit of dark despair. A drowning soul can generally only be rescued by someone outside the water.

Those that do have the strength of will to leave their place of birth and struggle for sunnier pastures, do reap the rewards. Simply relocating to a nurturing environment will uplift even a penniless soul from suffering to shelter. Migrants and refugees flock by the million to new lands in this century, as we have seen in the EU and USA. And millions more are yet to flee their torment in a forsaken land as they search desperately for shelter anywhere else.

We are all refugees or the descendants of refugees who fled destruction at one time or the other to find shelter in sunnier conditions. That’s how I ended up with my European genes at the southern tip of black Africa, a stranger in a strange land. As more refugees continue to flock to safety in the coming months, whether up north or way down south, let’s keep an open heart and clear perspective of the conditions here on our shrinking planet, our global village.

There is always a win-win solution to any situation. With a principle-centered set of ethics regarding the sanctity of life, and a personal feeling of abundance, we can remain open to sharing and caring for all earth’s people. Once visionary leadership is in place with such ethics, and once caring souls are in positions of management to implement the vision, proper distribution of wealth and resources can be achieved.

Any sense of lack or any insecurity based on a poor upbringing, will undermine efforts to nurture the world’s population and result in a win-lose or lose-lose scenario. There is no lack of resources, there is no over-population, there is only poor vision and weak management based on bad conditioning of fear and greed. The facts of history speak volumes in evidence in this regard.

So while the mild winter rain feeds the blossoming rose and bananas here on the southernmost shores of Africa, I wish all earth’s people the blessing of shelter and survival during the coming storm of the century. Times are being changed by the self-appointed one world government in a way that may redirect our life on earth to more prosperous conditions for those that survive. However, if we lose our principles or our moral compass in doing so, or if we sacrifice even one human in the process, those that remain will be less humane and less of a humanity for it.

(photos my own)