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Oh Beloved Enemy of Mine


I have this neighbor who is a thief and a cowardly murderer. He has clearly a mental condition reminiscent of, if not, sociopathic personality disorder. He is naturally greatly despised in the neighborhood and all this hatred he holds for himself and others, all this fear and insanity of course piles up and develops into bad character. This form of bad character is in Ifá called ibi inú. This would signify a condition of great resistance towards what is good and a great acceptance of what is bad and negative. One day this neighbor pulled a knife on my wife. His submissive son, standing on the side with a scythe, helped to enhance the threat. It all went well, no one got hurt. To cut a long story short. This situation was the culmination of a series of events that begun with stopping this man from trespassing in our land and steal from us. It was followed by a long period of sabotage of light, water and road - and of course gossips about our evil constitution, like he attempted to transpose his own bad character on us. One day I had enough and upon fixing the sabotage of electricity yet again, this time with gun in hand, I threatened in return. Upon calming down I was thinking. God, I am becoming my neighbor! My hunger for justice had made me partake of this hatefulness. I realized I was nurturing that hostility which is at the root of developing bad character and thus failing fortune and destiny. I decided to speak with my Baba. He told me that all living beings are divine doors. Since man is interconnected with all other beings, each being holds a mysterious message for us. It is a question of understanding the place this being has in our life. I started to realize that my failure in seeing the place of my neighbor in my web of being made me myself the author of this series of misfortunes. Of course his role in my web, was that of a clown, and well, I did see a clown, but a Bozo with a machinegun and a bloody grin of madness. I perceived him as something he was not. This carries many lessons, because failure in recognizing what the many divine doors leads to will ultimately end up with the same door being opened elsewhere in our life. It is like the Kreyol proverb says presenting a deep truth: "Jou neg la kitem map jwen on lot o" meaning: “On the day the ‘evil’ man leaves I will find another”...

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