Rag­ing fire in my soul

Burn­ing through this wicked world

Show­ing us the way out of Baby­lo­nia

Fire fire in my soul

Burn­ing through the evil world

Show­ing us the way to the high­er king­dom

-Hosan­na, An­dre Tanker

I was sit­ting on top of a hill in La Lune, Moru­ga, eat­ing a leaf of pak choi, med­i­tat­ing on what makes life beau­ti­ful and worth liv­ing. Good food, I con­clude, is high on the list of pri­or­i­ties. As is clean air and work that is ful­fill­ing. It's one of those days when I am thank­ing the god­dess­es that I can be a hip­py and still have a job that al­lows me the lux­u­ry of sit­ting in the mid­dle of spinach con­tem­plat­ing life. On this hill in La Lune, there are friends and ac­quain­tances from Trinidad and else­where and in this mo­ment noth­ing mat­ters. Not the mur­der rate. Not the fear we have of our­selves. Not the pot­holed ob­sta­cle course we had to take to get there. In this cor­ner of par­adise, where politi­cians' voic­es do not pen­e­trate the roar of the wind in your ears and the smell of sea breeze in your nos­trils, you can think a lit­tle more clear­ly.

I was rea­son­ing with Nor­ie­ga the farmer, who is one of those peo­ple who make you think that all is not lost for this coun­try. If every com­mu­ni­ty had just one Nor­ie­ga, if not one Nor­ris De­onar­ine. He ex­plains why he is back here. Af­ter tak­ing the town peo­ple ed­u­ca­tion and preach­ing in the Chris­t­ian church. Why he is plant­i­ng the sweet­est pak choi known to my mouth on this hill so steep. If every­body leaves, what is left? Aban­doned co­coa and cof­fee plan­ta­tions, the mem­o­ry of en­slave­ment and post-eman­ci­pa­tion mas­ters too fresh in their minds. Fam­i­ly es­tates aban­doned in search of town's bright lights. Young men who would rather plant some gan­ja to feed the habits of town peo­ple who have the mon­ey to af­ford a lo­cal­ly grown head. Nor­ie­ga knows what hap­pi­ness is, I think. He looks like he does. He has none of the up­tight pre­ten­sions of town peo­ple. But he knows that he de­serves a lot more.

Some­one from town says that what they want is not de­vel­op­ment. Leave them just so. So that peo­ple like me can go down there and in­dulge in my es­capist hip­py fan­tasies about sim­pler times and sim­ple peo­ple who are hap­py with what the earth and sea give them. I won­der if there is a hap­pi­er bal­ance. Where Nor­ie­ga can have his peace and I can have nicer pak choi all the time. Be­cause, Jah knows, I haven't the time to plant it my­self, what with all the time I spend on Face­book and Twit­ter. On the top of this hill, I am won­der­ing if there is a mod­el of de­vel­op­ment that makes it pos­si­ble for par­adise not to be ne­glect­ed or lost to big build­ings. If Moru­ga's un­der­de­vel­op­ment is an in­di­ca­tion of how T&T could be if some­one cared enough.

For men like Nor­ie­ga to ful­ly ben­e­fit from all his hard work. But this is the eter­nal cri­sis of coun­tries like ours. Where we ne­glect the rur­al in favour of the ur­ban. Where the voic­es of farm­ers, food givers, are not giv­en full at­ten­tion and politi­cians make pro­nounce­ments with­out con­sul­ta­tion with any­one who might have more than an io­ta of sense.But we think we're do­ing things al­right here. We think we're on the right track. We're hap­py. We're oh so hap­py here. So says some doc­tor­al stu­dent, who has been study­ing our ways. Trinidad and To­ba­go ranks at num­ber five on the scale of coun­tries in the West­ern Hemi­sphere. There is, she says, a def­i­nite link be­tween one's eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion and one's hap­pi­ness lev­els. Why shouldn't we be hap­py? We're hor­ri­bly rich. Nat­ur­al dis­as­ters don't seem to like us. A fair per­cent­age of the women look like god­dess­es. Maybe this place is blessed af­ter all. Or maybe we have been cursed by some hereto­fore un­known god of in­dif­fer­ence. Some de­ity of how it heng, it swing that makes us all su­per okay with the hand we've been dealt.

The truth is I some­times won­der if all the ma­te­r­i­al things we have are a dis­trac­tion to the hap­pi­ness that we can have if a dis­as­ter strikes or when the oil runs out. In this mo­ment we care on­ly for the im­me­di­ate plea­sures, the wine, women and song, live and di­rect and in­stant­ly mes­saged to you. The Moru­ga kind of hap­pi­ness that is a dip in the sea and chil­dren fly­ing mad bulls and sit­ting on a hill eat­ing raw pak choi. With the op­tion of up­load­ing to your Twit­ter feed too. Just you and the bush and the bugs. Con­nect­ed to the world even as you stay root­ed to a sol­id place called home.