Yesterday I bought an old favorite of mine, Estée Lauder Beautiful Sheer. Apparently it is being discontinued. I managed to purchase one of the last three bottles in the store.
I wore this scent on a trip to Harare, Zimbabwe a few weeks before I left South Africa. It invokes memories for me. Good and bad and pain on my then soft heart.
But today! I am wearing it again. And I am back in Harare. With my perfume and my children then still babies, and a new future ahead of me.
And my heart is no longer as soft. The years and scars and experiences and feelings have toughened it up.
It was all of eleven years ago when I sat in a Johannesburg office wanting to see the last screening of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. I had project commitments that needed to be completed, and so I decided not to go.
This week, I noticed the sequel is being screened at my local cinema. I thought it would be an idea to watch the first one first. And so! Thanks to technology I was able to rent the documentary, and watch it eleven years later.
And this morning I managed to watch the sequel, An Inconvenient Sequel.
Now dear readers! I do not understand how others, as well as leaders (especially leaders) can sit back and deny and / or do nothing. Our planet is crying. Our planet is pleading. Resisting and fighting back.
The sequel included a two-second Donald Trump insert where we can hear him denouncing climate change, and asking why would we waste our time when we have isis to fight. We see him exiting the Paris agreement. We see him facilititating the production of gas, oil and coal. We see him making climate change jokes. Climate change jokes.
All while Greenland and the ice caps melt. All while Cape Town droughts, Sydney sizzles, tornadoes rampage, floods drown, our planet and life as we know it dies.
My late mother, if she were here, would say (in response to Potus) that the mind completely boggles.
The might of nature and the power of the planet is far beyond anything we can comprehend. We are rendered powerless in the event of major catastrophes. The best we can do at times is to flee. And hope and pray for the best.
And yet. And yet. We do nothing. Trump plays golf, devours his two scoops of ice cream, and utters useless threats. Threatens nuclear war.
Many thanks to Al Gore. For being the leader that the world needs. For speaking truth. For standing up for what is right and good and true. For making a change.
Trump has children, he has grandchildren. You would think, any reasonable person would think, he might well want a planet for his offspring to grow up on.
My grandmother once warned me, if I should ever take one puff of a cigarette I will be addicted forever. And so I never have. And I never will. Smoking repels me. I truly hate it.
And yet. There are other addictions she never told me about. Addictions I willingly seek, and cannot resist. Playing with fire, and getting burnt. Burning the flesh that has already been scarred.
Just like that first puff of a cigarette. It is the first line that is crossed. That has the power to draw and hook you in. Into a tangled, messy, uncomfortable, powerless web.
And at the end, all that is left, is the burnt ash of a once beautiful flesh.
