Nelson Mandela – The Long Walk Home at Last
I love how life brings me information, I have no tv. I was at a friend’s place last night talking about house sitting she was showing me how the television worked (numerous remotes) and suddenly she flicked to Nelson Mandela I could feel an internal desire to watch the show. However, now was not the time. I then received some information from the Gandhi Institute on Nelson Mandela this morning and then something else made me think of him, perhaps a picture fleeting. I call this synchronicity and I pay attention. My instinct was he may have passed over. I googled Mandela death and yes indeed he has. I felt happy.
He lived a long life and he both suffered and loved greatly. I feel great peace when people die who have lived full lives living their beliefs. He was inspired by Gandhi and later embraced nonviolence to discover the true power of it.
Here is a quote from Gandhi commented on the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan:
“…The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter bombs even as violence cannot be by counter-violence. Mankind has to get out of violence only through non-violence. Hatred can be overcome only by love. Counter-hatred only increases the surface as well as the depth of hatred. I am aware that I am repeating what I have many times stated before and practised to the best of my ability and capacity. What I first stated was itself nothing new. It was as old as the hills. Only 1 recited no copy-book maxim but definitely announced what I believed in every fibre of my being. Sixty years of practice in various walks of life has only enriched the belief which experience of friends has fortified. It is however the central truth by which one can stand alone without flinching. I believe in what Max Muller said years ago, namely that truth needed to be repeated as long as there were men who disbelieved it…”
Source: http://www.gandhitopia.org/profiles/blogs/mahatma-gandhi-india-and-nuclear-tests
Truth is one of the central tenants of nonviolence. Nelson Mandela was a symbol for all indigenous people’s repressed and showed them another way out of madness…
“Aboriginal Canadians have shared in the struggles Nelson Mandela faced in his fight for racial equality, says the head of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Manitoba Justice Murray Sinclair, whose commission is compiling a national record of the Indian residential school era, says the anti-apartheid leader understood what aboriginal people suffered in that chapter of Canada’s history.
“He was certainly an elder … a wise and kind man who brought with his presence to this country an understanding of what it was that aboriginal people in this country were experiencing and had experienced in the past,” Sinclair told CBC News on Friday.”
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canada-s-truth-commission-learned-from-mandela-says-head-1.2454851?cmp=rss
There is nothing more powerful than the wise words from Nelson, himself. His life leaves a legacy that nonviolence works and that it always was the long march home to wisdom. It is the future, in my view. I am glad he lived.