A Moment Of Universal Reflection And Prayer.

A Moment Of Universal Reflection And  Prayer.

I am not a deeply religious man. I think God has a lot of things to answer for and if he was to suddenly turn up out of the skies, I would be a little surprised, that multitudinous thought control, can make things happen before your very eyes. But I have faith in the goodness and hopefulness of Life.

Normally, I would keep my thoughts on spirituality, religion, mindfulness and philosophy very much to myself. However in the past decade or so, I, like many others I have spoken to, have felt at an emotional and maybe even spiritual level, a hardening in the intolerance of some humans to each other. It is almost as if everyone is only out for themselves and all the collective accepted wisdom, that has defined the goodness in us humans suddenly means nothing.

• Millions of people are killed in the wars that rage in the Middle East and no one cares.
• People fleeing from those wars trying to get to Europe in safety are called cockroaches (less than human) are abandoned and thousands die, because no one cares.
• American Red Cross, collects $500,000,000 (yes Five hundred million dollars from the public to help Haiti after the earthquake and only managed to build 6 (yes 6) homes with it, no one cares.
• Charities are now Multi-National Corporations with CEO’s earning Million Dollar salaries and not much money going towards their original intent, does anyone care?
• United Kingdom decides to leave the European Union, because most of its inhabitants think that this will stop European migrants coming to the UK. Migrants are being beaten up and killed on the streets of UK and no one cares.
• The Republicans have decided to select a man full of hate to run for the Presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth and we wait to see what hate can do when it has power. And no one cares.
• The rich takes more and the poor gets left less and the media can now, only defend the super-rich that pays its wages.
• The poor now think they are only temporarily poor, so laws brought in to protect the needy, no longer applies to them. And still no one cares.
• And the planet just seems to be dying from the inside out as its heart gets slower and slower.

This prayer or reflection is sent to whatever force or energy we believe guides us on Gaia. We may need your help and guidance as hopelessness seems to be in control.

Oh Universal Force, Yahweh, Allah, Jah (whatever designed this existence)

We come to you at this time of the great need, to seek your wisdom and guidance. You know what is, what was and what will be. Your insight and advice is therefore supreme. 

Give our minds and our words clarity, so that very complex philosophical issues can be visualised, enabling us to understand what is being said and how best to implement it. Give our minds the peace required to hear the message.

Let this planet be at peace with itself today. Let it be a refuge for those who need it to be, and you know who they are. Keep all our brothers and sisters (all life) safe especially those in imminent danger.

We come to you this day in great humbleness, hoping that your grace and mercy will guide us as we take yet another step closer to you. In the Great War that rages between hope and hopelessness, let hope reign supreme. You know what is in our hearts, so please soothe any pain, any uncertainties, any anxiety any desolation as you have always done.

As we look across the world, the chaos feels like the start of the biblical battle of Armageddon as predicted in the final book of the Bible, Revelations. Nations killing each other, tribes killing each other, the world hypnotised by hate. And a lot of the haters saying that it is all in your name.

Please tell us until we understand what is going on. We know that the suffering is driven by fear and the law of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” cannot be upheld whilst fear casts its shadow across the world. It is time to let love fill the hearts of everything on this planet, enabling peace to reign. Let your mighty power of love reign over us today and give us the insight to witness you at work.

In the great turmoil that’s sometimes overwhelm us, let our minds be as fresh and alert as they can be. Give us all the strength to carry on, the will to do what is necessary, the courage to get through the day and the heart to still keep loving, when you have no reason to.

Please carry us and breathe for us, when we do not have the strength to make the next step or to breathe the next breath. Let us all have the courage to do what we know to be true. Keep us safe and at peace with ourselves and our friends and neighbours.

Let those who are imminently on their way to you have a safe journey and wipe away all fear as they journey through the valley of the shadows. Let them have the courage to do what they know to be true.

Keep guiding us as we take one more uncertain step away from wars and towards your way of peace, love, hope and wisdom.

Make each step, more certain than the one before and make the final steps a mighty gallop.

Let hope be audacious and victorious. We ask all this in your everlasting name.

These "you tube" songs might help along the way.

1          Welcome Holy Spirit:          

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPyqkFWqwTE&list=RDWPyqkFWqwTE&index=1

                       

2          How Great Thou Art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GKhDCsLrUg&list=RD3GKhDCsLrUg#t=89

3          Bless The Lord Oh My Soul:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXDGE_lRI0E

4          Indescribable – Amazing God:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM5YReFSm0I

                       

5          Offer Up My Life:                                  

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQkzHwz2eLE

                       

6          The Lord’s My Shepherd:                     

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN4tPkX0MG0

                       

See my other blogs on the "Relentless Realities" Website:

http://www.relentless-realities.com/blog

My New Poem On You Tube: My Words My Lines

This poem is about writing a poem...Yeah, I know!!

See what you think.

It will be part of the Relentless Realities Collection, I am publishing soon.

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaozS6UdNxA

http://www.relentless-realities.com/

My Words My Line

I Am Trying To Be A Poet
I Am Trying To Write What I Think
I Want My Lines To Have Meaning
To Put A Little Smile On Your Mind
To Make You Say, Well I Didn’t See That Coming
Not All The Time, But Just Now And Then

I Don’t Want My Lines To Be Transparent
I Am Not Writing A Weather Report
I Am Not Thinking Of A Formal Document
I Want Some Of My Lines To Be Devious And Mischievous
Taking You On A Journey, You’ve Never Been On Before
I Want You To Wake Up In The Middle Of The Night Saying…
I Get It; I Get It…That’s What He Meant.

I Do Not Want To Spend All My Time
Writing Fluffy Fluffy Rhymes
And All That’s Left Is The Rhyme And No Other Sense Of Purpose.
Now And Again, God Knows, I Need A Little Prose
To Let The Words Dance And Sing In Universal Harmony
To Hear The Cadence Ring Out As One Word
Interact With The Next And As If By Magic
Synergy Manifesting And Magnifying Itself.

I do not always want to write complex quatrains
Where words can mean everything and nothing
Where history can be re written again and again
And the writer can never be wrong.

I Want My Words To Take You On A Journey
I Want Them To Meander About A Bit, Take You Here, Take You There
And When You Think That’s It
You Suddenly Find That The Lines Are Taking You
Backward And Forward At The Same Time
Up And Down, Left And Right, Creating Paintings In Your Mind.
You See My Words Creates The Vehicle
That Drives You Ever So Slowly To My Heart
And Finally My Soul.


Copyright Roy Merchant Oct 2 2016 @ 16:43

Plagues To The Heart

Plagues To The Heart

Sometimes I wonder if I am trying to prevent the World from becoming what it is destined to become. 

Other times, in the depths of my certainties I am powerless to create right from wrong, light from dark or even right from left.

Why do I worry so much about what others are doing? I am not in control of anything, including myself. If the world is going left, I should only worry if I wanted to go right.

I am fed up with people hiding their actions in the brightest lights, denying it all in plain view, as if your eyes are blind, your ears deaf, and your nose incapable of smelling the truth.

What is it that’s left?

When innocence escapes its cage

And in an angry rage

Attempts to disengage

From the not so innocent sage

Sometimes my fears, my uncertainties overwhelms the very things I Love, Nothing can harm you if you worry less and care more.

It’s not your fault if it goes wrong, don’t worry be happy

Go With The Flow

Things are only a problem, when they become a problem. Until then they are just possibilities which don’t exist. 

Not all problems will cause you woe.

The Black Man's Song: Live for Slavery Remembrance Day

The Black Man's Song

An erudite and emotional reflection in the middle of a long journey.

Last Sunday, 21st August 2016, I performed one of my poems at Trafalgar Square in London in memory of my ancestors, those who came and went, so that I could be.

They would have come and gone unheralded, like most ancestors, simply mythical beings that have been handed down through the generations until they become grainy pictures in the mind or just footprints in a sandstorm. The ancestors who lived through the slavery years however fill me with a great sadness. The sadness comes from knowing that no matter what potential they had as they travelled the 9 months from conception to the birth canal, most of them would not be realised.

In the version of slavery adopted by the Europeans, the unborn child was also the property of the owner, which could have kept slavery going forever.  From all I understand about slavery, the idea that a human being still attached to the umbilical cord of its mother is a slave is one of the most unbearable things I have ever come across. Before that child is born, before it takes the first suck of its mother’s teat, even before its conception, the potential of that child is enslaved. Think about that and imagine that it was your child.

I am a descendant of slaves. I am the result of slavery. Slavery across the Atlantic was the starting point in a new and perilous journey that nature made in my name a few hundred years ago. I am in the middle of that journey and the final destination is unknown.

Whether you believe in Nature, Yahweh, the Universe or whatever you think is worth worshipping, or giving praise to you must recognise that something fundamental started in 1441, when the European slave trade in Africa started. The Portuguese captains Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão capture 12 Africans in Cabo Branco (modern Mauritania) and took them to Portugal as slaves.

In 1444: The Portuguese de Freitas lands 235 kidnapped and enslaved Africans in Lagos a city in Portugal, the first large group of African slaves brought to Europe. It is now becoming big business. This is some 50 years before Columbus stumbles across the Caribbean in his search for India.

Those realities that have made me, also denied the me, I ought to have been, from ever becoming real. That me, drifted off into a parallel universe where hopefully, I grew up in the love, security and traditions of the past thousands of years in the river beds, plains and valleys of West Africa.

The new me after all this time, will look you in the eye and proudly say, I was , I am and I will become again, what I was always intended to be.

This is part of my story and I give homage to my ancestors.

This poem is copyrighted and is a section of a much longer poem which continues the journey to the present day. It will be part of a new collection of poems to be published soon.

The Black Man Song

I Want To Tell You A Story

I Promise It Won’t Take Long

It's About A Tribe That Is Filled With Glory

It's Called The Black Man's Song

We..The People Of That Blessed Land

Were Stolen In Our Innocence

Taken..By An Unmerciful Hand

And Cut Off From Our Inheritance

We Had Our Native Culture

We Had Our Native Tongue

Suddenly There Was A Vulture

Forcing Us To Sing His Song

He Took Us In His Stinking Ship

Three Hundred At A Time

Our Incentive Was His Stinging Whip

Our Food Just Gruel And Lime

For Long Long Months..Imprisoned By The Seas

In The Bottom Of His Pit

No Recreation..Just His Histories

Us Tired..Dying..In Our Own Shit

More Than Half Passed Away On Those Rides

Too Sick..Forgetting To Be Proud

Bodies Thrown To The Ever Present Tide

While The Wailing Grew So Loud

While The Wailing…Grew…So Loud

They Must Always Be Remembered

They Will Not Die In Vain

Their Bodies..Now Dismembered

Must Illuminate Our Brain

If Willie Lynch existed, he would have said

“Slavery Is A Psychological Game

Where The Master Makes The Rules

Being Afraid To Die Is Just The Same

For Wise Men Or For Fools”

For Three Centuries We Helped The Master

All His Countries Became Great

Economically..They Could Not Grow Faster

The Blacks Just Grew Inanimate

In Jamaica "Mada Nanny and Cudjoe" Fought And Won

Very Small Victories

Tacky Took Over Where They’d Begun

Trying To Brighten, Our History

Our Women Took The Brunt

Of The Master's Attack

They Were Not Important

Even Less..Could They Fight Back

Raped..Vandalised..And Scandalised

Self Respect And Dignity Drained

Through Fear They Were Totally Hypnotised

And The Master's Will Was Maintained

Men Seeding Children For Three Hundred Years

Painfully Discharged From Responsibility

Whipped..Flogged..And Killed..The Scars They Bear

To Remind Us Of Their Sensitivity

We Say That Uncle Toms Were Nought

Paradoxically..They Saved Our Race

Outgunned..Outmanouvered..And Out Thought

They Kept Us From Our Final Resting Place

All Our Heroes Fought And Died

Too Proud To Toe The Line

Too Impatient To Wait For The Turned Tide

Survivors..? No. Heroes..Fine.

Slowly The Tide Began To Turn

Toussaint L'Overture Beat The French

Slavery Economics Was Now Being Spurned

The Europeans Couldn't Take The Stench

In 1838, We Thought We'd Come To The End Of The War

But It Was Only An Interlude

They Gave Us Our Freedom..Then Charged Us A Star

Just For Water And For Food

And Maya Angelou Cries

And Still We Rise

And My Heart, My Soul, My Spirit Replies

My Father Is The Great God Osiris

And I lived In The Delta Of The Nile

We Were Sent Here To Learn Peace And Forgiveness

And These Lessons Are Taking A While

So…We Take Our Pain And Go Forward

New Horizons Are Ahead..

They’re Not Too Far

Keep Remembering Our Past..

Remember Every Word

Let’s Never Ever Forget ..

Exactly Who We Are. 

It really would be nice

6 Days In Cascais

What a holiday!!

Must tell you about a trip we took to Cascais earlier this month. We had never been there before, normally go to Algarve. What have we been missing? Cascais is a beautiful part of the Atlantic coastal region of Portugal, about 40 minutes from Lisbon Airport and 20 minutes from the capital itself. Also near the World Heritage site at Sintra and the biggest casino in Europe at Estoril, if you like that sort of thing.

We were looking for a Spa type hotel, well my wife and daughter were anyway. I was just looking for a holiday of wondering about doing nothing. We were both satisfied. 

We arrived on the night Portugal won the European Cup and in fact just as we were booking in, Portugal scored the only goal of the match and we just joined in the celebrations with a fantastic set of staff at the Hotel Miragem, where we stayed.

What can I say about the Miragem that has not already been said? It is simply amazing. The organisation, the meticulous processes, the food, the professional staff, the facilities are such that you can see why we met the Man of the match of the final game of the Euros there. I understand that another famous footballer who shall remain nameless was also there a few days before. Miragem is undoubtably one of the great hotels in the world.

I am looking for an excuse to get back there in September or October. Don’t tell the wife though, otherwise she will want to try somewhere else. 

Loved it to bits.

A Blast from the past

Greetings

You’ve probably gathered from my last post that I am supposed to be writing a book with the rather grand title "Rhythms Of My Life".

However, I have been stuck in stasis, that place of motionlessness for such a long time, I am beginning to wonder if I will ever finish this book!

I have done 50,000 words and the creative pool from which all my words come, seem to have run out and I cannot find another pool to dive into.

I know the ideas will return, maybe I am being punished for being arrogant and living on the assumption that all I had to do was take and the pool would automatically fill up again, with even better and bigger words than before.

If that assumption is true, then a full pool is a long time coming. However, I wait, I mind-map, I walk, do all the mental exercises that forces the brain to think differently, but nothing changes.

I will continue to go fishing in the pool, and in the meantime, here is part of a true story from the pool when it was full to the brim.

It is a section from my current book "Walking In The Shadows Of Death" available on Amazon, see link below.

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Walking-Shadows-Death-Roy-Merchant

 "It was 5am on Friday, 22^nd December 2000, when I woke up with a bit of a start. I felt, from the time my eyes opened and my head cleared, that my old adversary was in the room. Since my stay in the hospital, I always seem to wake up at the same time in the morning. This time, however, it was different. I knew something was seriously wrong. I felt nauseous, faint and out of breath. I automatically checked my wrist and could not believe what was happening. The VT had returned. My heartbeat was up at 140 beats per minute as opposed to the 55 beats per minute it usually ran at.

I went to the toilet and sat down and as I was about to get up, a hand from the netherworld pushed itself up my rectum, grabbed my heart and started pulling it right out of my body. At least that is what I felt was happening. What was really happening was that the ICD had fired its first shock to bring my heart back into its normal rhythm.

 The pain was intense. It was not of this world. It was not just painful. It was without any redeeming features in its remorselessness. It just was what it says it was. Absolute pain.

I screamed and in my own head it sounded like the voice of death. I felt that I was dying again, only this time I knew all about it. My first scream woke Sue up. She looked at me, sleep still in her eyes and she must have seen in my eyes what I was feeling because she quickly changed and, even as she was changing, the second electric shock sank into my heart and literally lifted me up from the bedside table, where I was frantically taking my socks and underpants out to prepare for the ambulance I knew would have to take me back to the hospital, and threw me into the middle of the bed. I weighed fourteen stone and I was lifted like a grain of salt and thrown.

I stayed in the middle of the bed, lying foetus-like and minimising my size and dying. And death laughed at me. It said I was a coward who could not take a little pain. It said did I really think I could escape him by going home? Did I not know that he knew where I lived? I lay there foetus-like, trying to get back into my mother’s womb, where there would be no pain, where I would be safe.

I lay there and screamed as the third shock came and I heard Sue knocking on our next-door neighbour Simon’s door, and Simon, who had already heard the scream and was coming down the stairs as she rang the bell, came over and helped.

I heard Sue’s frantic call to the ambulance and their controlled information gathering, which was more than Sue could bear, when the fourth shock slammed into my heart and I screamed again. I glanced at Simon, who was sitting on the stairs, with his head in his hand, looking totally helpless.

I screamed for the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth shock and wondered whether any God would let anyone suffer so much pain. What, I wondered, was in it for him? I was now waiting for the shocks to come. I thought they would just keep coming until the battery in the ICD ran out or my heart stopped as it had done before. Only this time if it stopped, there was no cardiac crash team to leap to the rescue. There was only Sue, my by now poor hysterical partner, Simon, my next-door neighbour, and my two youngest children, lying fast asleep in their beds, downstairs.

By the ninth shock, I would have welcomed death. I would have gone over to him and said, “It is a fair cop, just take me and let me not have any more pain, and release Sue and Simon from their nightmare. This fight is between you and me, keep them out of it.” Only in that dark, stark moment of total and absolute despair, when I looked for him, actually sought him out, death was not there".

Copyright: Roy Merchant 2015