2012 : Movie Review

Saw the blockbuster 2012 yesterday. My immediate impressions: New Age Kitch. I had hoped for so much more. OK, so the special effects were superb, but personally I would have liked a bit more about the Mayans - more thought provoking stuff rather than last-minute-scraping action.

Having said that, there were a few moments in the movie which had a strong personal resonance for me. Anybody who has seen the movie will recall how in the very ending scenes, when the fleet of giant Ark-type (archetype?) ships moves into calmer waters, a map is pulled up by a scientist and he notes how the planet has shifted and changed so that the Himalayas are no longer the highest range in the world. They have been replaced instead by the Drakensburg Mountians in KwaZulu Natal South Africa. KwaZulu Natal is where I was born, and in my Hiking Club days we used to go sleep in caves in those very same Drak Mountains. Every year in my youth we'd go camping in the Drakensburg, and I've often said that is the place I miss most since moving to Cape Town...

But Cape Town also featured in the scene as the fleet steered a course directly to the Southern Tip of Africa - the Cape of Good Hope, the "Hope" part being emphasised in the new age cliche.

On page 162 of my book A Branch of Wisdom I mentioned the Hope part of the Cape of Good Hope, because thats where I was moving to from my home province of KwaZulu Natal.

But there was also another section of my book that kind of resonated a jolt within:

That being a verbatim (as in scanned from my book) copy of Page 144 of A Branch of Wisdom.

You will only appreciate the synchronicity in this piece if you've seen the movie. To tell you the truth I'm not sure if I had heard this parable prior to my writing it in 2001, or if I had come up with it myself. I suspect the former, but it's fuzzy...

For the record: No, I don't think the world is going to end in December 2012. Yes, there are lots of major shifts going on right now on a level that cannot be empirically tested, but no matter what happens we gonna carry on.

SHIFT HAPPENS