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secret # 14/30 - i ain't afraid of no ghost

i thought this would be kind of appropriate, considering the time of year. fact is, i don't believe in much...ghosts, ufos, varied and assorted social/cultural/religious myths. i am a bonafide lover of logic and reason and the cause for this state of mind is simple. every time i have believed in someone or something based on nothing more than blind faith or because someone said it was so, without benefit of evidence to support my belief, i was, at the very least, hurt...at the very worst, my life was almost completely destroyed.

i don't believe anything blindly anymore.

i was as responsible for having the wool pulled over my eyes, or just being downright screwed, as the people who screwed me. all my life, until about ten years ago, i had a desperate need to see people and situations as i wanted them to be rather than what they really were. i ignored, tolerated, overlooked any concrete evidence that did not support what i *wanted* to believe. i was so afraid of losing those few people that i called 'family' or 'friend' or 'partner' that i literally put up with anything...and then pretended it never happened. it was so much easier to believe what people said than what people actually did. so i believed my fairy tales and kept up my illusions until i had completely surrounded myself with people who knew exactly what to *say* to me but their *actions* were something else altogether.
as you can imagine, the day arrived when, lo and behold, i actually hit the bottom of the barrel of life, so to speak, and not one...not a single soul out of all those people that i'd believed in, trusted, taken care of, stood up for and supported...not a single one of them held out a hand to me. couldn't overlook that. couldn't lie to myself anymore and that hurt.

after that life-changing experience, i felt like i'd been reborn (not in the religious way). i was an empty vessel with no idea what to fill myself up with but one thing i knew for sure was that i needed *truth*. i craved it like a long, cool drink of water after a journey in the desert. even the truths that hurt, the painful ones, i wanted them. bring it on. it always hurts when your illusions are shattered. but it's a pain that has a very definite end. living a lie and living with the lies of others is a pain that last forever.

i had to re-examine every facet of my entire life and the things i found weren't pretty. where once i'd had people in my life, i suddenly found myself completely alone...and after a year or so of being so lonely and desperate i thought i would die, it was suddenly glorious. i was finding out who 'carrie' really was. i was paying attention to who other people *really* were. the cover of life had been whisked away and i was amazed at how incredible things truly were. i didn't have to pretend that life was any certain way...it was magnificent just the way it was.

some might say that, in love especially, you have to have illusions. love is a fairytale, right? not in my life. roger is the love of my life, my soulmate...but the way i feel about him is based, not on what i felt within the first few minutes of talking to him, but on months and months and years and years of him doing exactly what he says, being sometimes brutally honest with me (if i push him) and never, not once, turning his back on me in a crisis. he gave me evidence to support his claim that he cared about me. we went through some very bizarre situations where he could have turned and ran at any moment yet he stayed. he had several opportunities to tell me things that weren't quite true...but he always told the truth. to this day, and we've been together for over seven years, he has not told me a single lie. our relationship is firmly rooted, not in fairytale crap, but in logic and reason and evidence. i know when he opens his mouth, he will speak the truth because seven years of vast and varied experience have proven that to me.
i've never seen/heard/felt anything that i would *ever* assume to be a ghost and there is no scientific research *at all* to support the theory so i'm not a believer. should evidence arise, i'll reconsider. i've never seen a single thing in the sky that i would ever associate with alien spacecraft...so until there is some evidence to support that claim, i'm a disbeliever. as for religion and politics, you do the math.
if you want to be a salty, cynical, jaded ole battlea-axe, spend a lifetime believing in fairytales and have your heart broken repeatedly by the people you love and you're well on your way.

footnote: if you have had experiences with ghosts or ufos or if you're religious or believe in your politicians, the last thing i meant to do with this narrative is offend you. this is my experience only and frankly, should probably have remained a secret. =]

So when we last spoke it was dinner time at Rhino Walking Safari Camp and I mentioned how I uttered the fateful words "If you have got to go, better to be eaten by a pack of wild dogs than to be run over by a London bus...."

The story continues....

.... with the pre-dawn unholy ululation of a hyena outside our hut. If you have ever heard this sound you will understand what I mean when I say Morgan and I went from asleep to WIDE awake in under a second. It was only once we saw our friendly local wake-up call walk past the window and down to the water pool, that we felt properly reassured the damn creature was not snuggled in bed with us. Anyway once our heart rates had subsided, Morgan went back to sleep - but I knew these were my last hours on safari and once awake, I wasn't going to waste another minute with my eyes shut.

So I made myself a cup of tea and walked out on to the balcony with my camera. It was at this point 4 am and the light, what little there was of it, was faint and grey. Because of the timing of our flights out of Kruger Park, it had worked out that we were not going to be able to join the morning safari ride. To say I was gutted was something of an understatement. A woman in camp had seen african wild dogs the previous day - an extraordinarily rare sighting seeing as there are only about 200 of these endangered animals in Kruger (a park the size of Israel) and they don't have a "patch" the way other animals do, so a sighting one day was no guarantee that they would stay in tea area.

I should probably explain that african wild dogs had become something of an obsession by this point - making it to the very top of my "would really really love to see..." list. So far I had had no luck and even though I was resigned to staying in camp for the morning I was not going to pass on the chance to witness a miracle, no matter how much the guides gently mocked me for my optimism. Somehow, some part of me believed that if I kept a close watch, they might just show up and say hello - what are the chances of that?

In the stillness of pre-dawn, silk pyjamas (oh yes baby) and steaming cup in hand, I stood on the balcony doing my best impression of a coffee TV advert (even if I was drinking tea). Suddenly some movement caught my eye and I looked to the far left; there on the opposing bank of the dry river that our huts were adjacent too, I saw the white flash of a tail. I looked again, this time quite literally rubbing my eyes to make sure optimism and sleep deprivation hadn't resulted in hallucinations, and there he was - the first wild dog I have ever set eyes on.

He was far and there was barely enough light to take a shot (certainly not enough to take a decent shot) but I didn't care. He was a wild dog and I was happy.