AN ORIENTAL STAR!

Amazingly, Christmas is on my mind in July. Pictorial simulations of the nativity scene have been swimming in my thoughts, like a school of myriad colored fish in the depths of the Atlantic. And maybe I am not way off since some historians purport that Christmas must have been in summer considering that the shepherds were outdoors which would have not been possible in winter.


The part that has stuck to my mind like graphic superglue is where Mary in the throes of parturition was denied a space in the inn to deliver her dream child, her promise son to the world.

For me this is a truth that permeates the atmosphere of life like the smell of crushed garlic cloves.  Thing is that we are all pregnant. Everybody on the surface of mother earth has something to deliver. Like the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, sperms of creativity from God has been embedded in the womb of our souls. Each one of us is heavy with a saviour for mankind; something to save humanity from depression and sorrow like comedy, music and sports, another thing to make the world’s labour easier like machines, IT and telecoms, something to enlighten the burden of ignorance like literary materials and speeches, another to protect man from the elements and diseases like clothes and drugs.


But the truth is that sometimes the door of the inns of life is slammed in our faces and we are left in the cold. This is where the disaster usually occurs. Lots of people abort at this stage. You might have the gift of football and your dream club shuts its door on you with the excuse that you are not good enough, the manuscript of your dream bestseller might be rejected because you are still unknown and have no literary agent, the five star hotel says you don’t have what it takes to give your speech in their grand ball room.


Do I hear you say you are a virgin? Good news is that so were Mozart, Edison, Gates, Rembrandt, Einstein, and a host of others before they got pregnant with ideas and went into the labour room of possibilities.


Yeah, a lot of people have gone ahead of you and they have filled the inns. Maestros, masterpiece artists, Grammy and Oscar winners, Nobel laureates, name it. Life tells you, there isn’t any room for you; your ship came in late and you missed the boat. You turn around, head bowed, tail in between your legs like a flea-infested, homeless mongrel and head towards the slimy cold fingers of insignificance’s darkness, the blood of the life of your dreams about to run down your legs into the unfeeling arid sands. Your gift is about to become a colossal waste.


But hold it, look around you, hear the lowing of the cows around you, a stable is not far from where you stand. The smell of hay wafting from yonder stable is that of hope. Inhale and change direction, unglamorous and unsavoury it might be but it is somewhere for you to deliver your baby. The manger is a place of birthing dreams. Your dawn begins here.


Your manger might be, your living room, your garage ( like Apple computers), the boot of your car(like Sweet Sensation), your kitchen, the local football club without kits, a rundown building ( one of the most popular churches in Nigeria today started out in such a dump), self publishing your own book. Do not let all these deter you, just go on and give life to your baby.


It is after your delivery that your star will begin to glow and shine until it is seen all the way in the east, the orient, the land of the rising sun. It’s your star that will direct wise men to you. It will guide men from distant lands to your manger. You stop being inconsequential at this juncture. It is written that the wise men opened their gifts and presented gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold signifies wealth and kingship, frankincense typifies priesthood and myrrh is associated with death. This means in the arena of your gift you would become a king Midas of that kingdom. A priest is a mediator, a spiritual leader who shows others the way to a higher reality of life. Birthing your dream will make people see you as a priest (Henry Ford is the priest of the religion of cars; Walt Disney is the priest of cartoons).  Myrrh shows that your old self dies for a BRAND new you to resurrect.  Lionel Messi is an ordinary guy until he starts playing. The gold people give to him for promotions is not because of his person, it’s for his starry achievements’ with the round leather. YOUR STAR ATTRACTS YOUR GOLD!!!


You see, there are some Herod’s that are prancing around our locale because your star has not shown up yet. The Herod’s of politics, industry, fashion designing, architecture, shipping, banking and so on. When you birth your promise to the world, they will become yesterday’s news. The throne will be yours to mount. That is why sometimes they refuse to let you put a foot in the door; the present monarchs try to put your potential to death before it is birthed. Refuse to die, run from the Israel of your comfort zone and grow your dreams, even if you are in Egypt. The Israel might be a big multinational that would stagnate your gift to the world; Egypt might be a small shop where you grow your entrepreneurship skills. These skills will later help you to go back to Israel to change things.


When the wise men told Herod about the new king, the old ruler inquired of his scribes if they were privy to the information regarding the boy leader and they said a Prophet had made predictions about him in the past.  This shows that this thing has been written into your destiny. Like the infant in swaddling clothes, your fledgling enterprise will soon be recognized and feared. It is on its way to becoming a super power.


The sun rises in the east and never sets there, from the time it rises in the orient; it only gets brighter and brighter. That is your destiny my friend. You are on your way to becoming an oriental star, if you can just deliver the song, the invention, the clothes, the designs, the ideas, the corporations, the books and all that is in you. The tragedy will be if you never bring it forth. Then you will only remain an oriental star that would have been. DELIVER IT!!!

GENESIS, MAGIC AND THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.

After watching “Megamind” recently, I concluded that I prefer the old Disney cartoon classics to Pixar generated ones, especially those spiced with romance. Even though they are two dimensional, there is something about the timeless quality of their plots and music that appeal to my soul. The enduring character of the love of Capt John Smith and Pocahontas, Ariel-the little mermaid and her Prince, Belle-the beauty and her Beasty beau, heats up my being like burning logs on a wintry morning in the Arctic and make my heart as snug as a princess sleeping on an eiderdown filled mattress.


On the other hand apart from probably “Seven” or the odd exception, I really don’t like movies, books or anything that has to do with serial killers. The gruesomeness of the murdering spree usually puts me off no end.


I am sure you are beginning to wonder why I seem to be mentioning Jack the Ripper and Cinderella in the same breath. Yeah, I know the horror attached to the first name makes the comeliness of the “they lived happily ever after” of the other shatter like crystal.


But as distasteful as the combination might be, that has been the reality buzzing around Lagos like the drone of angry hornets in the last few weeks. The city has been agog with the news of the guy that sliced and diced his wife after two years of marriage. Our airspace has been filled with outrage and vats of boiling anger have been poured on the guilty party. Thing is the lady might eventually be canonized because her death has opened a can of worms concerning the marriage institution. The incident revealed that a lot of ladies go through physical and emotional torment almost every day of their lives and men are not exempted too.

I saw the wedding pictures of the couple in question and could not understand the short and sudden leap from the genre of romance to that of murder. It was a mystery that would have Sherlock Holmes stumped and the luridness of it would send the hounds of Baskerville to flight in fright.


Certainly, along the line an evil mutation had taken place that ought to be brought to the light of recognition. Unlike this society where problems are tackled by hacking away at the leaves and branches with vehemence instead of attacking the roots, I decided to get to the bottom of this thing by digging out some answers.


My quest egged me on like an Arthurian Knight looking for the Holy Grail. I finally had to borrow the Tardis from Dr. Who and travel down the corridors of the past to the pages of Genesis where it all began.

I got to lush Eden, so verdant in its beauty that I gasped for breath and saw Adam, fine looking hunk that he is, all alone. He had the companionship of an assortment of animals but none of them made his heart tick. After frolicking with the animals all day, he went back to a cold bed of leaves under a tree shade with no one to talk to after each day’s hard work. Finally heaving a sign of aching heaviness, he turned his gaze to the trunk of the woody perennial and slept off. Same story, day after day, night after night until God intervened and put him into a deep sleep. Mind you, it was not stupor derived from restless romantic lethargy, neither was it a sexual fantasy filled slumber or a dreamy haze of infatuation. It was a deep sleep of connection with God, a somnolence of relaxation while God worked out things for his destiny.

What struck me here is the fact that this bro was patient and not in a frenzied state of hitching up with any animal that had breath because he was alone. His canniness in waiting for the opportune time and right woman was amazing. It hit me that this is the point at which most of the problems of the ring begin.  Life has it that many people (especially ladies) in the frenzy and haste of getting out of the alone state end up marrying beasts. They hitch their lives to soulless animals- feral cats that tear their hearts to shreds, poisonous snakes that poison their self esteem, electric eels that shock the light out of their destiny and the list goes on.  Adam did not make this mistake because there was a peaceful calm about him, a serenity that made him partner with God unto the unveiling of a lifetime companion. The man had enough will to have made his pick before his creator got on the scene but he waited patiently like a cat expecting the choice cream instead of feasting on soured milk.

By the time the operation was over, God did not need to introduce Eve. Adam instinctively knew and was cock sure she was his helpmeet. There was no second guessing, no attempt to just make do with what was presented to him. She was it, a part of him, an extension of his person, a soul companion, not just a bearing mate, bed mate or cooking mate. This was his life mate, the one for whom his heart stopped beating, the first lady rocked his world! Something exploded in his brain and ran all the way down to his toes. Where had she been all his life? He said she was the bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. This heavenly, yet earthly being was made from the hardiest part of him; she was his flesh, the sensitive part of him. This was nothing to be trifled about. She wowed him and he called her Woman (Wow-man). The man exhaled, finally, at last, the search was over, the wait had ended. The studious hunt had come to a screeching stop. There was a right feeling to it like a coin dropping into a till. The inference is if your wow-person doesn’t make you exhale, you might need to have a rethink before the vows, because the expedition might still be on.

There was a fierce certainty to Adam’s decision, he did not go into the tie, wondering whether she was the right one or not, the question on his mind was not whether it was going to work or not. He did not gamble because he knew the stakes were much higher than losing millions in a Vegas casino, instead it would be akin to a Russian roulette with a shot gun.

They were connected, naked and not ashamed and could share everything and anything. This opened my eyes to where we miss it big time, when we hide secrets, thinking the truth would make our partner drop us like a maggot- infested fruit. The truth eventually surfaces like a submerged dolphin coming up for air causing the relationSHIP to capsize and drown. Your true love will accept you as you are, irrespective of your past, looks, class, size, height, bank account, tribe name it.

(Adam also did not believe in-laws interference either, it was made known that after Eve showed on the scene, that a man would leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. In-laws interfere with the cleaving process).

It was all magical and romantic thereafter until disaster struck; Eve messed up and made her husband lose it all. She brought him down from the top of the food chain to the bottom where he was now terrorized by microbes and bugged by mosquitoes. His career went down hill, everything collapsed like a card house in the path of a raging typhoon but the guy held on to his wife. He did not divorce her, he could not divorce her, he had named her (what do you call your lady Bro?) the bond was too strong, the tie was too tight and together they weathered the storm. Out of the sustained union came the seed that turned everything around positively. The marriage survived because Adam made the right choice. Choice is the foundation of any marriage. It is the similarity between the laws of evolution and marriage. In the case of the first, it is by natural selection, whereas for the second, SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON SPIRITUAL SELECTION!!!

When I say spiritual selection, I am talking about a making the choice of a life partner based on a deep compatibility connection, a connection that is above good looks, star status, vital statistics, bulging bank accounts, ethnicity, good sex and so on. Adam did not even sleep with this being that made him doe-eyed with wonder before his decision, yet he knew she was exceptionally wondrous. Most factors for our selection are as flimsy as an arachnid’s spun fabric. A deep soul connection based on God, personality, values, purpose, belief and faith is as strong and as lasting as the Everest. This is the secret to survival. (I noticed the unison in their lives, elucidating that the two had become one flesh. Their partnership was evident; Eve did not own all the baobabs in Eden, while her husband claimed all the Cedars. They were a connubial consortium).

My next stop was Galilee, a large rocky region in Northern Israel with vast fields of greenery and colorful wild flowers. I alighted in a place called Cana where there was a jubilant atmosphere, Jewish musical instruments filled the air with pure golden tunes. A rollicking party was going on, it was a wedding.

I joined in the festivity and blended with the cavorting crowd. With time, I noticed trouble was brewing, the wine had run out. (One of the reasons the wine ran out was because there were too many folks relative to the amount of wine; the fellowship of the ring runs into trouble when too many people are allowed into its hallowed circle).

Even when the ring selection was right on the mark like Robin Hood’s arrow, this happens to the best of us. The wine runs out without notification, creeps up on us like a cat burglar.

Wine signifies joy, heady euphoria, extravagant love, hot affection, intoxication and inebriation. That is why it is written, ‘kiss me with the kisses of thy mouth for thy love is better than wine. A kiss expressed from the heart of a kisser whose love is better than wine, will be rapturous for the ‘kissee”. She will be transported beyond the Milky Way without a space shuttle. But thing is with the passage of time, the roaring flames of love in the hearth of our heart burns down to glowing embers. Our heart becomes cold with having kids, loss of the battle of the bulge, work in bucketfuls and the quest for more money snapping at our heels like rabid dogs. The bedroom loses it steam, the kiss acquires the taste of vinegar and we begin to just go through the motions.


It was evident there was a lot of water at the event but no wine. Water is essential to live but does not rejoice the heart like wine. This is the phase where things become perfunctory, the marriage becomes routine without any excitement. We land from the magic carpet ride of Aladdin to the hard earth with a hard bump. The world is not shinning, shimmering and splendid anymore, all becomes dry and dull! The lady suddenly stops feeling like Jasmine and goes back to the chimney sweep status of Cinderella before her transformation.

Then Jesus came on the scene and turned the water into wine. This could be said to be “magical”. The routine became tinged with excitement, enthusiasm, delight, elation. After the fall, Adam still had this “magical” moment with his bride. The Holy Writ said that he knew his wife. That knowing was more than a wham, bam, thank you ma’am thing. There was deep connection to it coupled with an explosion of pleasure. A good portion of the time, it is the search of this magic, which causes the straying outside our nuptial confines.

(Jesus was at the wedding because of his mom. The kind of people we bring into the ring’s circle can determine the success of the marital koinonia. People never come alone; they usually bring something or someone with them).


The wedding ceremony was salvaged from the doldrums and the latter wine was better than the first. The norm was that the wine diminishes in quality as the ceremony progresses but Jesus turned that around by furnishing better wine. I believe he was passing across a message that the fellowship of the ring should be vintage. It ought to get better with time.


A marriage that has become boring but essential like water needs some zing because it is at this point sthat the shadow of the Balrog threatens to drown us in the blanketing thickness of heavy darkness. Here the union desperately needs some “magic”. Whip out your wand and like Gandalf, cast a love spell, telling the bugger to go back to the shadows, that it will not pass.


Are you still single? If you are, the GENESIS of your journey should be based on a spiritual selection. Are you married? After a spiritual selection, “MAGIC” sustains the FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING! Convert the ordinary into extraordinary. Do some new things. Get out your wand and zap some colors into your matrimonial climate.

A SUNFLOWER IN THE WILDERNESS

A name that used to strike fear even in the heart of the stoutest heart in Lagos is Oshodi. It used to be a terrible part of Lagos filled with hoodlums and delinquents coupled with unsavoury and filthy surroundings. But, this was way before Governor Fashola’s reign. He arrived on the scene like a fairy godmother and waved a wand of transformation over the location.

But despite the change, the place is still the last place I would expect any rational business owner to establish an outfit. This reason was why my mind was boggled when I took my dad to a diagnostic center he was referred to in the locale. I felt like a flower enthusiast who had discovered a sunflower in the desert.

Stepping into this cool totally air-conditioned white atmosphere from a dirty, noisy environ, made me feel I had passed through a dimensional time warp. Wonderment coursed through my veins as if I were a hillbilly seeing a mega metropolis for the first time. This site had more efficiency than a computerized bee hive, and there were enough LCD screens to make a clodhopper think he was in Times Square. With the teeming crowd of clients, the activity was reminiscent of an ant colony and also as orderly.

Seeing this laboratory right in the heart of Oshodi was like discovering a coruscating jewel in pig swill. It was almost unimaginable, the only unsurprising thing being that the outfit is owned and managed by Indians and not Nigerians. To cap it all, this business has been a real blessing to Lagosians because their rates are about the cheapest in the whole country. It costs an arm and a leg to carry out the same investigations in Nigerian owned diagnostic centers.

The questions that assailed my mind like a band of Visigoths attacking a legionary base are why, despite  the huge number of radiologists and radiographers we have in this country, it had to take immigrants to establish about the hottest lab in this city.What magic did they employ that our own people do not have?

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that some of the distinguishing factors are VISION AND FAITH. As different as these two indispensable factors might be sometimes there is actually a thin line between both of them, hence it is stated in the Holy Writ, that we walk by faith and not by sight. Faith sees what the ordinary eyes cannot see; vision sees what normal sight cannot visualize. To stand out beyond the frontiers of a life that is middling at best, we need vision. Someone said that the eyes that look are many but that the eyes that see are few. VISION MAKES YOU SEE WHAT OTHERS DONT SEE!

This is why Helen Keller said it is a terrible thing to see and not have vision. She went ahead to say that the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched but they must be felt with the heart. The question might arise that the Aston Martin 177 (since it’s connected with James Bond, I will give it the most beautiful car in the world) or the impressive Burj Al Arab Hotel can be seen and felt, thereby debunking her statement. But the truth is before they existed in the natural, they had been seen and felt by someone and that is why they materialized in the physical. Innovators had created them in their minds. They had lived in some believer’s heart. FAITH AND VISION ARE OF THE HEART! They make the tangible from the intangible. By the time the invisible things become visible, they become ephemeral and temporal and very soon will be taken over by more beautiful things in another person’s heart when converted from the spiritual to the physical. Before anything can exist on earth, the creator would have already seen it in his inner eyes, there would have been crystallization in his inner man where the physical eyes cannot probe. It takes a spiritual telescope to see the stars of possibility in this immaterial Milky Way. This telescope is vision. Those Indians had seen that center before they built it. Creativity thrives on vision. It is what makes the incorporeal real.

It is vision and faith that built that center in Oshodi, converted the Las Vegas wilderness into a neon city, turned the semi-arid untillable land of the Jews into bountiful yielding soil, and made Governor Fashola transform Lagos from a filthy state into a green land.

For us to move ahead as individuals and a Nation, the twin towers of vision and faith must become an integral part of our lives.

Do you know that lower animals like moles and bats cannot see but get along pretty well in their world? Moles build great tunnel systems and earthy skyscrapers (molehills might not be considered to be a big deal but for a small animal it’s noteworthy) yet we can’t build roads. even though bats can't see, they navigate their air space but our air travel is still nothing to write home about. These animals can achieve these feats even though they lack sight because they have vision.

The truth is that our eyes cannot penetrate the stygian darkness of ignorance, the dense gloom of bad leadership and the murky depths of blackouts that permeate this nation/continent. Sight is useless in Africa because all we mostly behold are heart breaking and incapacitating things. We need vision. Our sight can only penetrate as far as a struck match in a bottomless pit. VISION GIVES A LIFT ABOVE LIMITATIONS WHILE SIGHT BOGS POTENTIAL IN IT!

In martial arts training, blind folds are used so that the trainees can depend less on sight and have other senses heightened. That is quite a lesson for us to place less premium on what we see around us and to increase the depths of our vision. For this nation and continent to move forward, we need more visionaries and more “Imagineers”.

Did I ever mention that Helen Keller was an American author, political activist and lecturer? She achieved all these even though she was deaf and blind. The distinguished lady was the first blind person that earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. SHE DID NOT HAVE SIGHT BUT SHE HAD VISION. So if we should ever listen to any expert on vision it would be her.

What about you? Do you merely see or you have vision? Do you have what it takes to see a sunflower in the wilderness?

ICE CREAM AND FLAVOURS

              

                                                    

If someone calls me a sweet tooth, the person might not entirely be wrong. Amongst the toothsome things that are agreeable to my palate, ice cream about tops the list. There is something about walking into an ice cream parlor and seeing all those different flavors beckoning at you from behind their glassy sanctuary. Chocolate, butter pecan, vanilla, coffee, strawberry, chocolate, name it. They make my gastric juices pop like a profusion of lilies in June.

Sometimes I wonder how life would have been if it were a huge tub of one flavored ice cream. Very boring I would bet, even for ice cream lovers.

Just like with frozen dessert there is something about variety that adds to life and beauty. This also applies to human beings. The sweetness of life is in our diversity. The assortment of gifts, complexion, complexities, race, taste, style, etcetera that we all possess in varying degrees make our world fun and exciting.

You would agree that what enlivens any circus show or carnival is its multiplicity of acts. Each new act injects verve into the show like gas into a racing Ferrari. Each show is unique but together like enmeshing gears they combine to produce a phenomenal display. In war video games, you would see that to defeat an enemy, the soldiers usually have different personalities, one might be a marksman, another, an explosives expert, one might be a machine gun carrier, the other a sapper. Their victory lies heavily on their different specialties.

But the tragedy is that the distinction of our diverseness is lost on us a whole lot of the time. In the cartoon little mermaid, Sebastian the lobster said the seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake; alas this applies to quite a number of people. Like Ariel, the underwater princess, we have a treasure filled trove within us, we possess whozits and whatzits galore but we think its no big deal. We want what someone else has got, we desire to be a part of someone else’s world and be their kind of vanilla because vanilla is supposed to be the rave. The beauty of people who are releasing their flavor to bless the world and the rewards that accrue to them make us want to be them. We would rather squeeze ourselves into someone else’s mould than be us. It would appear that being a clone has more appeal than being an original.

But the truth of the matter is that we all have something to offer in the act of life and no one else can do what we were born to do better than us. We are the only one of our kind just like fingerprints and voiceprints. Without you and me, life would be incomplete. The world would be like a rainbow missing some of its colors. You are the blue, I am the violet. And no color supersedes another. Without our unique individual colors, the rainbow of life will be dark and grey.

We are much more special than we usually think, so there’s no reason to envy any other person.  You are so essential to our world but the problem might be that you have locked up your essence for too long. This might just explain why you feel pretty ordinary. Can you imagine buying your favorite ice cream flavor on a very sunny day and scooping it into your mouth with feverish anticipation but instead of it exploding like a confectionery bomb on your buds, it is all tasteless and insipid. Disappointment and anger will make you spit it out in a hurry. The whole exercise becomes a waste of time and resources.

The verbal illustration above is a depiction of how we are when we don’t release our natural endowments. Our world does not feel us; we are dull and uninteresting, bowed and dejected. Releasing our talents gives us a lift and makes us soar like a Peregrine falcon ruling its skies.

There’s so much locked inside you like an invaluable pearl in an oyster shell. It could be your singing, dancing, football skills, writing, baking, administrative skills, leadership ability, drawing, the list is inexhaustible. Sometimes we can be likened to nameless designer perfumes amongst numerous others on the shelves of the mall of life with our fragrance locked in our containers. Unless our stuff is released, no one will perceive our aroma. Become a self triggered atomizer, fill the olfactory cells of the earth with your essence and take the world to dizzying heights. Saturate your atmosphere because YOUR NAME IS IN YOUR FLAVOUR!!! The name of the butter pecan ice cream is what it is because it tastes like butter pecan and not strawberry, and likewise every other flavor. Michael Jackson is called the “king of pop”, Pele is called the “black pearl”, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is known as the” great one”, Hippocrates is the father of medicine, Mohammed Ali is called “the greatest”, Henry Ford is the father of the automobile, Picasso name is associated with masterpieces and so on.

So the question is, what can you do? WHAT IS YOUR FLAVOUR BRO/SIS?