I remember it as though it were yesterday: the movie, “The Lion King” was a worldwide sensation, clawing its way even into the remotest areas of the world. The relatively poor and unknown country of Guyana was no exception. In our little village called “Williamsburg”, we watched the movie, over and over again. We discussed it. We marveled at it.
I remember to this day Sandra’s facial expression just moments after we had finished watching the movie one time. Her eyes bright with amazement, through lips smiling with disbelief, she exclaimed “even the lion has his enemy!”.
The Lion King narrates a fable of a good and bad lion. A young lion, the heir to his father’s throne, is forced to flee the kingdom after his wicked uncle killed his father and threatened to do the same to him.
In the end, the young lion would return to fight against the evil lion. The movie reaches a climax when the hero lion rolls off a cliff during the fight, and almost falls to his death. As the evil lion approaches him in his victory gesture, he looks down on the young lion and snarls “this is just the way your father looked before he died!”
The hero lion then learned the truth that this evil lion, who was his own uncle, had murdered his father. This thought filled him with an uncontrollable rage which he converted into a final rush of energy and leapt back up to the top of the mountain. In a final fight of fury the hero defeated the evil lion.
It has been more than fifteen years since I last saw this movie, but why has the remembrance of this movie streamed to my consciousness only now? I was sitting down on the couch in the lobby of the Takutu Hotel and looking back at my life–meditating on all the troubles I had faced…at all the enemies who had raised themselves up against me, even though I was good to them.
People who truly know me will be able to attest to the fact that I am the kindest, gentlest, strongest, most intelligent, and needless to mention, most handsome specimen of human being ever to grace the planet earth.
Yet there are people evil, ugly and stupid enough to set themselves up as my enemy and seek to do me harm. It struck me that no matter how wonderful you are, in life, there will be people who will rise up against you. Or, as Sandra so aptly put it “even the lion has his enemy!”
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