Red Listed Species
The man beams as he opens his palm and sees the banknote. There’s thanks aplenty and we exchange rich blessings. I do okay digging in bins but this kindness is appreciated, he ends. I step away quickly and return to the insulated cabin of the warm car. There’s a reason this bit of the holy land was named the Cape of Storms and it has lived up to its previous moniker for the better part of the day. I say a silent prayer for this unbelievably privileged life I’ve been gifted and then remind myself I’m also acutely aware of being merely a paycheck away from the homeless man’s pariah status. I pull off slowly and return to my warm, safe shelter for the night. The sheer number and visibility of homeless people in this city on the southern tip of the holy land is mind boggling and I wrestle with this for the next few days. To be fair, almost every part of the holy land I’ve seen over the past two years also reflects this starkness between multi-million rand supercars zooming past lines of homeless people.
Days later, I find myself looking into the screen to catch any changes in the Dervish’s background but it’s the same pleasant seascape I’ve come to know as intimately as any morning walk I’ve been on. Her face is fuller though and I’m tempted to ask for a look at the bump but hold back. I don’t know we’re that close beyond our shared journey towards learning more of our self and how we infect the world with our being and ways of being.
A few more weeks and it will be over, she says. I’ll admit I’ve been blessed with the easiest of times while nurturing this being within my body. It’s a wild ride to think I’m growing a life form within me that will exist far beyond my eyes. Still, I’m glad that this part will be over soon. I had no idea it would tire me out so very much, despite being in arguably the best shape of my life. Anyway, enough of this tandem process; tell me more about the old man’s eyes?
We speak for the next hour, going over the experience of being an instrument of the universe when offering a gift to another being. We go over the stony ground of being worthy of gifting, of being self-aware to know we give nothing of ourselves but only channel what is already abundant in the universe. How our little acts of kindness, generosity or even that abominable word, charity amount to no more than moving around what already exists. That the receiver is the blessed and not the giver. That in a world gone insane with acquiring, the act of giving has become more of a public relations exercise. Personal, corporate, charitable; at whatever level it is carried out in our off-default society, more is given to the givers than to the receivers. And that’s before we even start to ask ourselves why is it that this social order we have created relegates our entire existence to gathering more unto ourselves and disdaining those who opt out of this mad and unholy scramble?
The strange part of having such a conversation with the Dervish was that it was an actual conversation, not a series of watch this insta reel, did you see this TikTok and have you read anything by (insert any typecast Jostein Gaarder or Gary Zukav here) or other such bumpf. An actual enlivening conversation on the state of our beings and how they interface with the world and its beings. I reflect on this post-call and ask myself if this is the effect of being in the presence and grace of a Dervish or is it more than that? Days later, I’m no wiser to any answer and I start to carry this experience within my waking state.
At first I seek to unravel it or find some sort of explanation, some method, something technical so as to better understand and maybe even to emulate. I fail miserably and soon start to merely hold onto the experience, the feeling itself. I can feel myself eventually let go of seeking meaning from the experience and conversation with the Dervish. It is enough that I had the experience and that I have held onto the feeling of being enlivened by a conversation that usually has me trudging towards despair. Towards the notion that we, collectively as a species have failed at making a type of society that includes rather than excludes. Values that embrace and not marginalise anything and everyone that veers even just a little from the typecast. That we as a species have not done as well as we could have, should have, ought to have over the last two thousand years.
But none of this is news.
Ben Okri already took us down this road and over this mountain when he first spoke out loud ‘A Moment in Timelessness’ at the Edinburgh Book Festival way back in 1997. Two years later, this voice had been transformed into the poem we know today as ‘Mental Fight.’
If you don’t have a Dervish on call; go read Mental Fight. Maybe you too will be enlivened.
And that can only be good for the species.
Red Listed Species refers not to some tiger or panda but to humans.
© Jesh Baker for Oppi Stoep 2023
