“Travel broadens the mind and loosens the bowels.” A street vendor’s lamb kebob in Port Said drops Digby to his knees, confining him to his cabin for two days, enough time to appreciate Professor Alan Elders parting words in Glasgow. By the time he recovers, they’re out of the Suez Canal and passing through the Bab-el-Mandela, the Gate of Tears. This narrow straight, barely eighteen miles across, connects the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Digby has spent the first twenty-five years (of his life) on earth in Glasgow. If he had spent the rest of his life there, “never seen the confluence of waters, never discovered for him-self that the English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, despite their individual personalities, are one. All water is connected and only land are people discontinuous. And his land is a place he can no longer stay.
The preceding excerpt is from The Covenant of Water, chapter eleven entitled Caste, 1933, Madras. Abraham Verghese’s setting of his novel moves to Glasgow in 1919. At this point of the novel we meet Digby and his mother. It is easy to surmise from the first paragraph of Chapter 11 Digby is on a boat sailing from Great Britain towards India. The Covenant of Water lifts the curtains of this epoch drama in1900. At the moment this story has progressed to 1933. The Covenant is destined to unfold characters as they intertwine life stories growing more branches and leaves of drama of their family tree through the year 1977. This story has a way to go!
This month we had the pleasure to travel south and meet our newest grand child. Our family tree has been adding new branches over the last forty eight years. We are both blessed with our newest grand daughter. Ten other grandchildren and six children complete our immediate family, (so far). (Note : I have to take a moment to update my webpages; Bookmark7.) I look forward to watching and being part of our youngest grand daughter’s life story. A story she has begun to create over the first three months of her new life!
Now, as I publish this, I am reading three stories at (somewhat) the same time! Added to The Covenant of Water is a novel, The Fishermen and the Dragon written by Kirk Wallace Johnson and a memoir, BlacKkKlansman penned by Ron Stallworth. All three stories deal with prejudice, fear, hatred and the courage it takes to stand up to it.
I am compelled to say that The Fishermen and the Dragon, as stated in its dust jacket flap, draws on a trove of never before-published material, case files, and interviews with Klansmen, shrimpers, law enforcement, environmental activists, lawyers, perpetrators, and victims, Johnson uncovers secrets and secures confessions to crimes that went unsolved for some forty years…… a battle over shrinking natural resources, at a turning point in the modern White supremacist movement, and that highlights one woman’s relentless battle for environmental justice.
So there you have it. These past years, if you have been reading my blog, you know that my metaphorical lighthouse is a cleansing moment where I meditate on positive energy! The last two months I highlighted my need of truth and love. This month I mirror love with the third aspect of the Great Principal, mind. It is written that the two greatest powers in the World are Love and Mind. They are the first dual emanations of the great Principle of Divinity. Love expresses Christ; mind expresses Lucifer. Dramatic? Not at all. The preceding books highlight evil expressed by the actions of people controlling the poor through a caste system. And White supremacy, attempting to control Afro-Americans, Asians, Latinos, Jews, and gays through fear.
On my reading list is a newer book written by Seamus Bruner titled Controligarchs. He focuses on societal control on a global scale. Who are the global elites? Why did they look at a plague as an opportunity? Do they also look at wars as opportunities? Are they excited that billions of us believe we need I-Phones? What is universal basic income? Why are some saying we will own nothing and be happy? What do digital IDs tell them about me? Is this the 4th Industrial revolution? I am told that Bruner’s book, Controligarchs, will answer my questions and more. Stay tuned.
Today, as I meditate and listen to the music of the waves and feel the salty spray of the ocean, I realize that the blessings I pay respect to can be better understood by reading about blackness our blessings may emerge from. The stars always shine the brightest against the blackness of their cosmos!
Thank you for reading.
Be in peace and joy!
Mark