1. What if…
What if, being quantum beings, we are married to randomness?
What if our knowledge and skills cannot outrun the monsters we create?
What if the monsters hidden in chance events outrun our knowledge and skills?
What if, in our stupidity and cupidity, we believe in our own invincibility?
What if the known and unknown universe is indifferent to our conscious conceit?
What if, in our arrogance and carelessness, we trigger our own extinction?
What if this Corona portents many such, but hotter than the Sun’s Corona?
2. It is true …but what if?
Formed from the clash of stars …
Born in a furnace hotter than the hottest…
Forged in and out of a crucible of intense violence …
Human-to-human violence seems disproportionate to love
But …
What if we grab this impulse to violence
at its stem and, using STEM, breach its inner defenses…
What if we tease out the disparate strands of this violence…
What if we then tame it from its source, and render it less senseless
But…
What then if this internal command to violence…
This urge, to dominate, to destroy, to crush…
What if it is an essential survival imperative …
Will the killing of violence lead to the death of life?
3. 2023: New Hopes, New Fears
A fiery ball of burning helium and hydrogen
has been burning continuously for 4.5 billion years
and will continue to burn for another 4.5 billion years,
so says our brain-mind quantum dance.
Our little ball – the Earth – 109 times smaller than the bigger ball (Sun),
has been rotating on its axis as it revolves around for the last 4.5 billion years
Within our ‘neighbourhood’ (galaxy), 200 billion stars burn
In distant, seemingly infinite space, 200 billion galaxies,
each with billions of burning stars, the human mind-brain quantum dance slows;
Slows down and pauses long enough to consider its own worries and hopes
Worries about mortality here, and hopes of immortality thereafter
Worries about heartbreaks and hopes of heart rapture
Worries about the blessings of the digital revolution.
4. Prediction
Listening to Nouriel Roubini (“Dr Doom”)
He is talking about his book Mega Threats…
It is sobering; much food for thought
Massive calamities that threaten our survival; they have happened before.
But humans will survive – even as small, isolated populations
This will largely be the result of human resilience,
enabled partly by technology, and luck.
5. Conversation with an 82-year-old German-Kenyan scientist: A recollection
We are too young – as a human species
We are the surprised face
of the morning dew on a green leaf
Not sure if the sunrise ray is friend or foe
So we drink, dance, dazzle and celebrate heat
We are too young and innocent
We are hunger in a child’s mouth
crying for food but not knowing why
Not aware of the instinct to survive
So we fight, compete and violate at will
6. Hunger cured the Doctor
Many hungers born of trauma
Troubles born in foreign climes
Children born and un-born
A keenness to bond
An urge to plunge into a sweet pond
Oh, to embrace momentary madness
To savour the intensity of the storm cloud
To ride the tiger into the forbidding jungle
where the senses witness a life-death tango
whose beat and rhythm spells double trouble
7. Married to the Jog
A creamish sweater
sways back and forth
back and forth
in rhythm with the swinging hands
Swish swoosh, swish swoosh
She is chasing time
And feuding thoughts
Been doing this for 17 years
The years have stolen her gait
But the spirit endures, defying time and age
8. The Journey
Deep or shallow,
it is your choice.
Deep, shallow, deep, shallow,
it matters to none but you.
Consider your Mind and go fishing for Time:
How deep can you go, or wish to go?
Deeper waters for Angler and Lantern?
Or,
Shallow water for triple fins and seahorses?
Our minds – in shallow or deep Time – it matters not.
Knowledge & ignorance – collective & individual – likewise
As water tides dance to the tug of the Moon & the Sun,
So are Time & Mind buoyed & buffeted by knowledge & ignorance.
Ceaselessly. Relentlessly. Ad infinitum
9. Looking at the sky with eyes closed!
A walk – on the golf’s fairway…
A chat – ever tentative and tender …
Tendons – tense on tenterhooks …
The sun’s wink – a memory away…
Ah, the emotions – on tiptoes …
And the judo roll – to distract feelings!
And yet, it persists…
And insists…
This ancient feeling
of proximate recognition…
of a truth older than the rocks
yet younger than the wind on my cheek…
Oh, heaven, what a blend of bliss and beauty!
The mind races madly…
and tries to escape from its orbit…
Tries to resist the pull of emotional gravity…
Sees the stars in the night sky wink, knowingly.
as the trees – silent in their strength – bear witness
to the struggles of two heartbeats against two mindbeats …
Who, between the heart and the mind, wins this battle?
Will they accept that defeat and victory are both life’s gifts?
10. I stopped going to church, regularly …
Because…
We may have been conscious and sentient before
Always existed as different reincarnations
of past extinctions and rebirths of sapience
the degree of which ours is but an example
Because…
Men, mostly men, at least in the current reincarnation,
emerge and claim special spiritual insights
and, by dint of a sweet tongue and unique charm
persuade millions to follow what in fact is hollow
Because…
The miracle of creation and recreation may be infinite.
And, if the probability of emergence of sentient creations
Is infinite in an infinite multiverse, it follows that heaven is infinite
Why then seek and yearn for a heaven that is already here – in our minds?
11. Mastering Asymmetry for a new Resilience
It is only ‘yesterday’
that we ‘sleep-waked’
from the ‘mære’ of a dark Night
into the grey of Day
Only yesterday
Today, we drift in and out of Daylight
Many amongst us turn and toss
but remain still flat on their backs
Whilst a few crawl, fewer barely walk
And now there is this Memory, a force
Forcing us back into the night sack
Shall we fall in line without a squawk?
Hell no! We must not, now, or ever
We must summon ancestral Mystery.
And learn an Asymmetry that is Cleverer
Amidst the noise of hate, we must learn a new Silence
We must retreat into Deep History
And from within its depth, fetch a modern Resilience
12. A Return to the River
Bits and pieces of memory
Cohere tenuously as I attempt to recall
Back then, in a past Century,
The road’s incline was a leisurely stroll
Today the knees protest yet I’ve no injury
I have to be careful I don’t trip and fall
The road is eroded, so, deeper and steeper
And the land, while familiar, is more naked
Stripped of its clothing by many a poor stripper
The land bears scars of galloping rains wasted
Oh, my land of Sosio, I recall you much greener,
I recall how cows, having grazed on your back, rested.
This is Sosio, a river whose cold water taught me endurance
The river within which I washed away my fears of drowning
The river whose smooth pebbles radiated a mysterious essence
The river whose gift of a stray sheep, I never saw coming!
The gift from Mt Elgon’s mammary glands of life and blessings
Sosio, my home river, waters of my ancestors, keep flowing.
13. A Fable
There is a time to tell tall tales
During such times, any yarn, nicely spun, sells
But not one witnessed by old trees with new scales!
This is a tale of emotion in motion in the morning.
On that day, Mind and Heart were strolling
Then they began a contest without warning
The Heart said, “look at that Pink Sensation Lily
as it drifts on the pond; its beauty makes me dizzy.
The wind’s silent whisper across the water is pretty”
The Mind, seeing approaching dismay from miles away,
smiles, and says to the Heart, “today was yesterday;
get a grib and see the invisible danger lest you stray.”
The Heart responds, “what’s there to fear,
…if the cost of heaven is a private tear?
…if the price of pain is a sincere cheer?”
The trees, majestic in silence, wait for the reply.
The Mind has none; it knows it must comply,
and let destiny write its script with no regard to why.
The forest, except for its hidden vibrations, stood still.
The defiant eucalyptus offered its trunk as an aide-to-thrill.
Oh, the feel of the twirl and weave says there’s more yet to fill.
14. I see, saw you coming …
I see that the bonds that brought you together
the fury of the fire that forced you together
the compulsion that caused you to cohere
I see in all these a departing of silence
a farewell to a friendly fireworks
I see a rising roar of riots
I see a parting of ways
A scattering of sacred secrets
A desire to dissolve and disappear
and appear as paired entities elsewhere
I see you wanting to join the ceaseless dance
of the tango, entangle and disentangle of the Cosmos
15. Growing Together
Sunday 28 January 2024. It is 12.39 pm.
I am seated at the dining table on my favourite chair
The only chair in the entire house that seems to inspire me to write.
I look out at the grounds through the window.
I have parted the curtains so I can have an uninterrupted view.
I see the Grevillea robusta I planted 22 years ago.
There are twenty times higher than me: they seem to have doubled or tripled my stand-still height every year.
They have slowed in the last 5, clearly.
They stand silent except for the gentlest sway.
For now, until a fierce wind attempts to rush by, prompting fierce, screaming revisiting resistance.
They grew up in the rain.
As I did.
Growing up in the rain.
I grew up in the wet armpit of Tulwop Kony
16. Sasa… Abe…
Her, a Srilankese,
Forged from the crucible of Buddhist thought
Supremely self-assured of the certainty of her flaming spirit
Me, a Kenyan,
Flung out from the rich soils of an ancient continent
A lion cub surprised at why this butterfly stirs an intense intent
Her and me,
We soared high like twin eagles above our mental savannah
We the rode on its undulations, its peaks and valleys, every corner
On June 18th, 2020,
As a rampaging virus ushered in the Covid Era
She broke the bonds if coherence and freed her energy.
Traverse the universe, dear Sasanda, as a potent force – Kap
