Missive from Andalusia IV

Photo of Conil countryside in sumer by Bryan Hemming

By the evening of the fourteenth day of home confinement I became mindful of an unfamiliar feeling of peace. It was strange. Heightened by a renewed sense of being, my awareness of the world around me had increased. I felt reawakened.

Beyond the living room window small birds had been happily pecking the day away, all the more chirpy at no walkers to disturb them. And I was happy for them. At the fall of night stars shone brighter from pitch black skies and I felt all the brighter for it. A childlike sense of joy enveloped me in its warmth. Angelica and I were smiling and laughing more. Despite being made starkly aware of the ephemeral fragility of life itself, or maybe because of it, the underlining sense of anxiety that had haunted us over the first ten days had melted away completely. I was more alive than I’d been in ages and felt immense gratitude for life itself. Though confined to a cage looking out, a new sense of freedom had washed over me.

These are strange times indeed. Squeezed between posts of impending disaster and doomsday scenarios, through the magic of the internet, there exist vignettes of home life that can make us aware of the inherent creativity inside all of us. They teach us about the indomitable spirit of the human race in any situation, however bad. In the most simple of forms, and lasting just minutes, these vignettes demonstrate how so many of us are rediscovering our ingenuity and undying optimism. And they are vital in all senses of the word.

Slotted between too many pointless Facebook postulations, about who did what and why, the short snippets reveal bursts of intense creativity, showing a side of our humanity that has been repressed over countless centuries by the desperation to survive in a system designed to prevent us from expressing ourselves as nature intended. We are all naturally inventive in many different ways, each with its own particular value, yet we’ve become weighed down by a system where our movements and freedom are dictated by the clock, rendering us too busy to stop and ruminate.

In these days of uncertainty, if we pause from scrolling down to the next post on conronavirus, we can see housebound mothers, dressed to the nines, singing their hearts out on Facebook, just like they’ve always wanted to do, but felt too shy. We can watch dads and mums getting to know and love children they never had time for before. We can see grandpas and grandmas fashioning the most ingenious devices from things they found lying about the garage. We can peek at couples dancing round their living rooms as though nobody was looking. We can learn how to prepare exotic dishes from home cooks. And we can roar with laughter at the antics of dogs and cats. Above all, we can see people sharing. We can observe ourselves unleashing a deep desire to share our lives, knowledge, joy and experiences with others.

For far too long through history, we have been made to feel as though we will drown in an ocean of our own inadequacy if we don’t keep floundering hopelessly to keep our heads above a waterline that continually rises on an eternally incoming tide of debt. Yet, like money itself, debt is an illusion, an emperor without clothes, revealed in his nakedness, if only we allow the scales to fall from our eyes. If we want to know how money is conjured out of nothing, by those who control its supply, we only have look at the way our masters have suddenly discovered an entire orchard of money trees for themselves to plunder. Remember the countless times they told us there was no such thing as a money tree?

We have been imprisoned in an ongoing nightmare by those who would have us their slaves. This is the moment we can wake ourselves out of it. Living under a seemingly ever-present shadow of illness and death has the ability to make us appreciate the fact we are alive. To wake each morning in the knowledge that any one of us or our families could be struck down at any moment, should make each moment we live, infinitely more valuable. We must learn to treat each day as though it is our last. Every moment we share with the ones we love must be treated as though it will be our last. We must seize the chance to free ourselves from the shackles of the blind consumerism that is destroying our planet and enslaving us to the workplace. Good can come out of any situation. But only if we make it.

So far, only our doctors, nurses and their support teams are fighting for our futures. Many have already sacrificed their lives for our lives. We must show them we are deserving of the sacrifices they have already made, and will be making for some time to come. Things must change and, in light of our governments’ signal failure, it is up to us to change them.

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