Stuff

This is what I believe:

1. We are born, some time passes and then we die.
2. Death is what makes us who we are.
3. Death teaches us to tell the time.
4. Death shows us how to live and love.
5. Without death we could not tell a story or make a journey.
6. The last thing on our CV is a death certificate.
7. Death makes life a precious commodity.
8. Death is proud, mighty and dreadful.

Now I am getting old I’ve come to feel that my purpose is to come to terms with death and thus wring the most out of life. I’ve got a long way to go. I want to be a funeral celebrant, so I can help people face death and value life and make progress on my own journey.

Some people call death “god” and worship it. I don’t agree, but I can see where they are coming from and I’m happy to be on the journey with them, provided they don’t try to force their beliefs on me or insist that their sacred writings are anything more than beautiful allegories.

The older I get the more I see people as either “real” or “monstrous”. Real people are humble in the face of death, often at a sub-conscious level. Monstrous people run from death and the further they run the more monstrous and cruel they become.

I’ve run into a few monsters this week, in the flesh, in emails and and on Facebook and I feel upset and angry about it. I should be more calm, but like I said, I’ve got a long way to go.

Watching the Great Apes

Borneo is famous for being the home of the orang-utan and last Saturday I finally got round to seeing some.  Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, outside Kuching, is a shelter for injured, orphaned and kidnapped orang-utans, where they are rehabilitated to go back in the wild.

We gathered at the Centre in the morning with maybe fifty other tourists and, after a briefing, walked a couple of hundred metres through the jungle to the feeding station.  As we filed down the path, cameras in hand, the orang-utans made their way through the forest canopy.  We could hear the odd crash above us and every now and then see a wise, hairy, quizzical face looking down at us through the foliage.  Orang-utans move very slowly.  They hang from one branch then carefully test the next before swinging across and stopping to check out their next handhold.  Sometimes they will test a rope or a creeper several times before trusting their weight to it.  They eat lugubriously, like an absent-minded old man chewing on a sandwich while reading a newspaper.

At the feeding station we bald apes worshipped in silence, raising our cameras and Ipads in supplication to our new god - experience.  All of us eager to capture something of the moment to take home and show our friends.  Snap, snap, snap we went.  Most of us know we are only going to see orang-utans in the wild, or semi-wild, once in our lives, so we do our best to make the most of it and fight off the inevitable feeling of anti-climax.  After I'd had my fill of taking pictures of the orang-utans I took some more of the humans taking pictures, desperately trying to get that perfect David Attenborough shot and never quite succeeding.

I wonder what the orang-utans make of it all.  One moment their home is being smashed down and torched by crazed bald apes and the next they are being petted, looked after and photographed reverently.  No wonder they look puzzled and a bit sad.