Lines

MASKS

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I saw suddenly one day that there on our face is a mask. Strange, but it moved. It spoke. It smiled. It frowned. It scolded. And it watched the world obliquely.
And the last thing it will tell you is that it is a mask.
And only love can break into this mask and comprehend its bearer. And only love can break into this mask and be comprehended by its wearer.
And then to my horror I saw that every continent has its masks. Every race, every group and every face. But whoever is unmasked by love is masked by love.
And love can speak, can comprehend every tongue. And on the day we have all learned to speak the language of true love – respectful, selfless love – we shall have no more the need to mask our hearts anymore.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

STRANGE MYTHS

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After love was killed, it rose again. After day was banished, it returned again. After joy was smothered, it shone again. After ours was buried,… there – it resurrects.

But I wonder: when the universe sings in unison, do we hear music or do we hear again the first silence? But I know: when eternity smiles or laughs, no heart can help but smile and laugh along. Now the question is: who will point out to us the Way back into the fabled land of tomorrow? Only Today can do it, out of whom Tomorrow is ever and again born.

And like strange mists are all those myths which reassure us of the Immortality of spirit and love. You may not quite see through them with your understanding; but if you are patient, they finally turn out to yield the truth. Because when the mists break and un-form, you see again the very same road they once had shrouded.

But is this poetry? Or is this love? Or did Word and Spirit ever meet, or ever part?

Soon the Mists will break open and we shall see what lies inside this heart…

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

THE DANCING TOUCH

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But require of me not that I dissect and demystify and recloak in petty words every poem, every rhyme, every song I write… and too many words obscure the subtle effect of the dancing touch of inspirational truth resting within the breast of true poetry…

Do you feel the stirring? Do you taste the salt? Do you hear the unbroken chant of spirit and light? Do you feel something…? If you do not, then you have no question. But if you do, then how come you do not understand the question in your own heart, when the language is yours and yours alone?

The dancing touch of poetry is more elocutive the less it is worded and worded too quickly…

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

THE WATER DANCER

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As I was travelling from one place to another, once upon another time, I saw a young man with a friendly smile that occupied his lips and eyes, and – what do you know? – each time he spoke, he danced…

As he spoke, he danced to his own words. And as I spoke to him, how strange, he danced to my words too.

We had a deep and searching conversation, exchanging hearts. And by the time we parted, he was the traveller – although he still danced – and I was the dancer – although I still travelled – for we had changed, and exchanged, hearts.

I taught him how to travel, he taught me how to dance. If you will travel, then you must become like water. And this dance which he taught me, so strange, but it seems to me also to be…

The water dance.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

THE SHY IN EVERYONE

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I can show you the earth, I can show you the sky, I can show you the sea, the sun and the moon; there is nothing I cannot show you, but my heart. Yet: what is in my heart, you may wonder? And truly there are only simple things therein, little things forgotten and unforgotten – yet I shall not show it to you.

You can touch the sky if you really try; you can swim every ocean, river, sea and Lake. You can stand on the moon, you can stroke a candle-flame; but, try as you might, you still cannot touch my heart, unless I let you. Not my heart… not this little heart of mine.

Is my heart fragile? Sometimes. Is my hard adamantine? Sometimes. What is a little human heart? A mountain? A sea? A cave? A mirror? A forest of flames? What?

I can show you everything but my heart, because locked within it is a painful shyness that simply cannot bear to be seen, or touched, the wrong way, by the wrong hand, or eye, too soon, too late. It is gone. Innocence. What happened?

If I could take away the Shyness from my heart, then I could show you my heart… but then all the fun would be gone. For a heart without shyness is only a memory of a heart – and my shyness is very precious to me and my heart.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

DYING STARS

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In our hearts we feel it sometimes, we know it fullwell, even when we deny the feeling to everybody, including ourselves and our best friends, yet we know: the star is dying…

There you see it, in the spiritual firmaments of the decaying soul. It used to be a bright star, friendly and confident, and pure as miraculous crystal. Once, it shone and sparkled, twinkled and flared and brightly laughed like a flaming eye in the skyscapes of who you truly are… in the skylines of your sensitivity and consciousness.

What is that song which just faded out? It was not any ordinary song, nay. It was the star that lived, and died…

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

NOSTALGIA’S DONE

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Just now I saw a morning star, luminous in the sky high up above me. And then suddenly I see it no more. Blue-grey clouds are journeying past in silent, ominous solemnity. Morning has dawned. The birds, they are a-singing. Early people are writing their feet into the road… and I am sitting outside, writing poetry and pretending it is prose.

Perhaps by the time I am through, and raise my head anew, the clouds would have gone completely by, and my star will be visible to me again. But if not, yet still I carry within me the picture of my morning star, as luminous in my heart as it was luminous in the sky.

I suppose this is what they call Nostalgia.

Now, see: the sun is rising, and the light is come again. Star, sun and light. And there is spirit inside of me – spirit and love.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

HISTORY AND DESTINY

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Plenty of questions but no gaps, only seeming gaps – but how would you know unless you first tried to fill the gaps in answer to your questions? Then you fathom that you are the gap, you are the question, and the answer rests in you.

Plenty of questions, but not all are gaps. Plenty of gaps, but only some are visible, while the rest, the sleeping questions, are still waiting for you tomorrow. You don’t even know your deeper questions yet, the ones that will really tear you out of yourself and make you a part of something bigger than you could ever conceive of today.

Because you are the gap and the question, you are the answer, the future and the fate. And the more you find yourself, the more you find your questions. And the more you find yourself, the more you find your answers. Until there are no gaps left, and everything becomes simply the story.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

GLOBAL UNITY IN THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

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The Elite and Power-holders, traditionally few in number, always find a way to prevent the masses from uniting against them. The most popular and effective, trusted and time-tested, methods are the instigation and strengthening of racism, tribalism, sexism, religious intolerance, etc, within and amongst and between the masses. Man, being a living being, soaks up these sentiments and they grow within him, upon which he begins to also defend and propagate them; thus they become self-perpetuating from generation to generation, across centuries, and people even forget where and when and why these things started.

But these things were never the actual problem of the masses in the first place. It’s all an illusion. True, when different sides happen upon each other there is initial distrust and competition; but there is also curiousity, such that left on their own – if there is no conscious malicious and insidious effort to awaken fear of each other amongst them – they will always merge with time as they unite in the common struggle to master the battle of life. Especially when they face a common threat, e.g. nature and the elements.

But man has a fragile nature sometimes. In his struggle to master his own personal little life he can lose sight of the bigger picture, thus making him gullible and susceptible to the intrigue and manipulation of those who seek their own personal and selfish goals. And those who have money and power, or who strive after money and power, know well to prevent the masses from ever uniting against them or developing a WE-consciousness as a united group. Thus they keep them occupied with the individual struggle for existence, or distracted by a media barrage of empty things of no importance and, as the master stroke of genius, they keep them divided amongst themselves by pulling the strings and feeding the sentiments of religion, ethnicity, race, sexism, etc.

Any leader or leadership system which really loves its people will seek to unite them. This however is rare. Instead what we see are power-centers which perpetually ensure that the flames of division (religion, racism, ethnicity) never die. All the rest of the people perpetuating these things are just blind tools. But if you follow the trail of the true power-centers it will always lead to where the money is. Follow the trail of the money’s smell. Those who have the money – who OWN the global wealth – are the ones who make sure that those who need the money always stay divided amongst themselves. Divided and distracted, so that they will never see the effort being deliberately made to keep them from recognising the path that will lead to freedom. The path of unity.

People, unite.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

CHINUA ACHEBE: THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE CONTEXT OF THE CONVERSATION

~ Che ~ 4 Comments

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“If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.”
– Chinua Achebe.

When you see a well-cleared road through the jungle, it is sometimes hard to imagine that once upon a time there was no road there, only trees and bush. To put it differently, when you see a jungle in front of you, it is sometimes hard to see a road whose past was a jungle. So stoic and self-justifying in its impenetrability that it would never have occurred to anybody that this jungle has no right to block our path; that anywhere we say “Let there be road”, there will be road; that it is not for the jungle to blind us to our possibilities, but for us to open the jungle up to our needs; that we have the right and the ability to choose and determine the range of our options by ourselves; that it is not the task of roadlessness to indoctrinate us from birth into the stupor of its own inevitability, but for us to be immune to the concept of “roadlessness”, and learn to see the obvious: it is man that defines himself.

But once in a while, a person comes alone, a special mind of deep intuition struck by an unaccountable thought. What if I am not who they say I am? What if I am something else? What if this jungle is not what we assume it is? What if it is a road dressed up with trees? What if that “mirror” they’ve placed in front of me is not a mirror, but a painting of what they want me to think I am? What if I now make my own mirror, with which my kind and I can see ourselves as we really are – what would I then see? What if the freedom they’ve given me is in truth a mental prison? What if the education they’ve brought to me is in truth a software of mind-control? What if?…

Once in a while, a person wakes up because the “What if?” moment has taken root in his consciousness. And, like a mustard seed, the “What if?” question will mature into a “Yes, indeed” answer in this person’s mind. And this person will become a leader. This person will part the red sea of somnambulism. This person will turn the mirror around. This person will change the context of the conversation. This man will open a road where others saw an impenetrable jungle. This person will rid the obvious of its garb of concealment, allowing it to arise in all its naturalness and normalcy, so intoxicatingly immediate, this simple truth: we are not who they say we are, we are who we know we are.

Pioneers and groundbreakers like this are very rare and far-between. But every once in a while, they step on the stage, to nudge the development of a people’s consciousness one step forward, creating new inner living spaces for the growth and flourishing of generations of consciousness.

Such a person is Chinua Achebe.

Many things fell apart when his first novel appeared; above all, the tight bind of redefinition wrapped around the thinking and perceiving faculty of the average colonised and educated African. It began to unravel, spearheading in its wake a generational surge for self-re-redefinition that did not stop with the generations that midwifed its birth, but has transplanted itself from generation to generation. Like every unravelling, it has been untidy. We know what we were. And we know what we aren’t. Armed with these pieces of the puzzle, we struggle to attain the living definition of the question: Who are we? A journey buffeted by the twin helpers of self-pride and self-criticism as we travel on along that road cleared through the jungle by vanguards such as the late and forever unforgotten Chinua Achebe.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.