Gems

I complain repeatedly about teaching, about how I am in no way designed to teach kids.  Now that I am no longer teaching at college I wanted to remember all those wonderful young people that I had the privilege to meet along the way.  In particular, I wanted to thank the parents of such youngsters.  Believe me we all owe them a debt of gratitude, because of their actions the world is a brighter place.  So this poem is dedicated to all of you parents and the gems you have helped brighten the world with.  I wish they weren't so rare!

Gems

Some kids are like that

Sure eyed, full of love and life

Eyes register

Hearts absorb all

Minds weigh things carefully

Discard the dross and pack the good

I want to meet their parents

Thank them for this miracle

A sound head on a good heart

Well done, well done indeed

No one may ever tell you

But I see a job well done

Yearly, hourly every second reinforced

Never sure of the right path

But finding the best inside

Cultivating a soul worth meeting

Protecting a seed in difficult days

What a delight to discover that knowing eye

Who loves Attiticus and justice

Feels on all wavelength and yet

Laughs and helps with ease

They make life sweet for the rest of us

With their good humour and balance

Always ready to laugh, to live, to light the way

In class, I despair of hurtfulness

Twisted anger, bullying, mindless sameness

Fashion fatigue, surface preoccupation

Following sheep like, juice and drug escape

Then there they are, a delight to mind and heart

This sweet spring of goodness and hope

Among the weeds, unexpected, glowing

They light my day

Much thanks for these gems

You have mined well and fashioned facets to catch the light

Mrs Fazi

Mrs Fazi

She lived in Tehran and was from a wealthy family.  She was ever elegantly dressed, well read and meticulous in her housekeeping.  She lived in an affluent area of the town in her large spacious house.    One day a couple came to her door and told her to pack one suitcase and leave immediately as they had been given her house and its contents, since she was a Baha’i.  She was literally thrown out of her own home within a matter of hours with her single suitcase in hand.  She had lost everything she owned in a matter of hours.  Everything that was familiar, loved and cherished was now owned by strangers. 

But, she had her children and they were more important than possessions, she consoled herself.  We take for granted all that we have until it is taken or lost, she told her friends. Then, her son, a medical doctor, was arrested and put into Evin prison.  Arresting Baha’is was becoming a common occurrence, whether it was to extract large fines from the family or as a method of intimidating the Baha’i community.  She visited the prison daily on foot taking food and clean clothes to her son.  The guards, as a joke, told her one-day that she needn’t come anymore as her son had been executed the night before.  Mrs Fazi went missing and was found two days later wandering the streets in a confused state.  Her son was eventually released but her mental state never recovered. 

She came to live in Ballymena and was lovingly nursed by her daughter here in Northern Ireland and is buried in the graveyard here.  I visited her grave recently and thought about her life and her suffering.   I also remembered her kindness to all who came across her path and her devotion to her family.  The callous cruelty that cuts through decent lives and wreaks havoc and pain quite takes one’s breath away and shouldn’t be forgotten.

“O OPPRESSORS ON EARTH!
Withdraw your hands from tyranny, for I have pledged Myself not to forgive any man's injustice.”

The Hidden Words of Bahá'u'lláh

Jimmy and Eleni

We had some wonderful friends on Rhodes, Greece.  Jimmy and Eleni were just like angels.  We met Eleni, when we went to Greek classes at a nearby centre.  My depressing attempts to learn Greek were disheartening.  Despite my best attempts to memorise words for homework, my brain was incapable of keeping this information for any degree of time.  As a result, after months of classes my Greek was worse than awful and even the newcomers from Albania or Russia were outstripping me within weeks of starting.  But the best part of that class was Eleni.  She was Greek and a lovely radiant 60 year old.  She attended the classes to help with our pronunciation and her kindness was a salve.  Gradually, we got to meet her husband Jimmy another wonderful soul.  They lived in Koskinou and had a lovely house in a huge garden of fruit trees.  Sitting having coffee in their garden with the apricots hanging over us was heavenly.  Eleni did a good turn everyday in her father’s name.  Such a sweet thing to do in memory of someone you love.  We would arrive home to our flat to find a huge bag of fresh delicious fruit hanging on our door handle.  Or the day my youngest son learnt his first Greek word (it happened to be the Greek word for watch) and she bought him a small watch to encourage him to learn more!  Jimmy and Eleni are wonderful people inside and out.  Such a privilege to know them and I hug myself in glee to know they are on Rhodes cultivating a fertile garden out back and radiating love and kindness to all they encounter.

Nightmare quality of some experiences

A piece from an old e mail, found on my hard drive.

Hope all goes well with you guys.  I am recovering from yesterday and it all seems quite dream like.  Things in Greece have a disorganized feel to them that adds to the nightmare quality of some experiences.  

I had heard Harry had gone into hospital but I had celebrated his 69^th birthday in his home only a few days earlier and he had looked fine with a good appetite and a was a good colour and back on his feet able to get down the stairs.  He still had the urine drainage bag attached and I could tell he hated it but otherwise he seemed his normal cheerful self.  The bag had been empty in the morning and that had caused them to go to hospital the day before last.  The hospital did not seem to do much – how chaotic and appalling their disorder appears when some one is in real need.   

He was ordering in a Greek sweet that morning and then by the afternoon he was dead.  In typical fashion they don’t have cold storage here on the island and so burial is within 24 hours!  So yesterday afternoon we had the service in the German graveyard and several of his friends and family were there.  It was Daniel’s first funeral and not an easy one.   

The coffin was open and they had shoved two huge pieces of cotton wool up his nose.  The bearers were four really rough characters in tee shirts and underpants hanging out with ropes and surly countenances.  They work for the graveyard.  They lowered the coffin in opened as the Greeks have an unusual practice of throwing earth into the open coffin (just a few handfuls)!  Then the lid is put on.  It all seemed so horrific and rough and when the lid is on they immediately start shovelling earth in while everyone looks on.   

At one point, as the four shady characters raced off with the coffin to the graveside my friend Shirley urged me to run with her after them, saying we could not let him be alone with strangers.  I could see the four were very perplexed that no one was throwing themselves into the hole and fainting – a norm for Greek funerals.  But the ceremony, was dignified with the Lord’s prayer, Harry’s favourite prayer in German, beautiful music and lots of flowers.  At one point the someone started singing a song and everyone joined in and the atmosphere melted.  I could not wish a speedier end for Harry and despite the horrors of the funeral both Daniel and I were happy that he was in a better place.  As we drove home Daniel and I kept holding hands and reassuring each other.  Life seemed very tenuous all of a sudden.  Harry’s smiling face will be missed and his good nature.  It was the first time I felt my son’s strength, his stoic nature and his robustness.  How quickly they grow up and become bigger than us in every way.

      An American Indian elder described his own inner struggles this way:

      "Inside of me there two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time." When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed the most." 

Mean Faced Figure - George

He was tall and thin almost cadaver like

Face craggy, half shaven with coldness in his eyes

Prone to fits of temper and violence

His bad humour fitted him tightly squeezing

An ever-present sneer onto his lean face

Not all bad, he was kind to his big black dog

But he was cursed with mood swings

That changed like the weather

Afflicted with mental period pains

One minute joking and laughing

The next lashing out at whoever was in range

Couldn’t understand where all this rage came from

What fuelled these toxic dark moods?

Until I met his father sitting by the fire

A sullen, scowling, mean faced figure

With hardly a word muttered

He radiated his misery

His unhappiness filled the room

And I saw the truth

The apple never falls far from the tree.

Plodding away hamster like

I have been going to the gym and joining all these peculiar people on moving platforms and bicycles plodding away hamster like.  Reminds me of those pictures of poor pigs unable to move in the their pens and reduced to swinging their heads to and fro in a repetitive fashion.  I am doing my abdominal lifts (sit ups) all wrong and these slim trainers come over and point this out and I point out that when you have no abdominal muscles this is how you do sit ups!!  Since they all have flat tight muscles with no bulges they have no idea what it feels like for me.  By far the worst thing however is seeing my reflection in the full-length mirrors that are everywhere.  As I plod along I examine this plump middle-aged lady with frizzy hair facing me and wonder in amazement just exactly who she is as in all honesty she bears no relationship to the me as I see myself.  I begin to regard it as a kind of mental torment designed to bring true self-awareness.  What is it about this age that you start to loss all feeling of being even vaguely feminine?  You grow out in all directions so that there is no hourglass figure (well ok there never was) just a barrel from the chest all the way down.  Your face develops all these lines as if your armpit creases have spread to your forehead and eyes and neck and mouth.  Black hairs begin to sprout from your chin and neck, long thick ones perhaps nature produces them in kindness as an attempt to hide the worry lines?  I have resorted to using that device you gave me Mum that pulls them out by the roots (for your legs) on my chin as now tackling them with a pair of tweezers would frankly be like painting the house with an ear bud.  So in order to regain some lost femininity I went and did a thing I swore I never would.  I got my ears pierced!  Don’t ask me why, I just wanted to look more like a woman.  Does that make sense to anyone there.  The clip earrings are too painful and I end up frowning in pain after two minutes when I wear them.  So I went down town and I had them done by a lady with a gun.  It is a bit like a staple gun and the earrings are fitted inside.  So I now have two small earrings and believe it or not I feel a sense of accomplishment – how easily the foolish are amused! 

Packing, moving, cracking up

Things that go into boxes are not so bad.  There is a kind of ordering of all the chaos of one's life that is strangely productive.  The bit I hate is when you have packed the hundredth box and you walk into an almost empty room and know there is at least another twenty boxfuls there.   Worse still are all the things that don't belong to any box, can't be dumped, sold or given away.  You end up grabbing such oddments and throwing them into a pile muttering, where the hell do you go? I am rapidly resembling a headless chicken racing round in circles with only 5 days to get out of this house.  If you were me you would not be wasting time writing a blog.  On that note I better stop.  This moving country thing is certainly up there with the divorce, bereavement and job change in terms of stress!  I promise myself not to accumulate so much junk in future.  There will be silence from me for a while, for obvious reasons.  The silence of despair!

Old Territory - a caricature of me

A day begins but I am in reverse going over old territory getting nowhere.

Making the same old promises of what I will do in the future

While revisiting exactly what I did before

Like the caged lion in the zoo

Walking up and down

Not only the same side of the cage

But placing each paw

In exactly the hollow

Moulded by years of habit

Something must be broken

To break free

Some caricature of me that I have unwittingly become

To really, like this day begin!

Choose the Opposite - be wise

This is me aged 5.  As you can see I have the doll and pram but look carefully and you can see a gun and holster.  What an odd mixture, hand on gun and pram.  Perhaps it comes from having only brothers and to this day I wonder how different things would have been had I had a sister.  However, no complaints the brothers will do fine.  Only, they don’t visit me, ever!   

I used to think it was the fact I lived in Greece for a decade and that, admittedly made visits tricky and expensive.  But actually living in the same town has the same result, no calls.  But, to be fair Northern Ireland folk are pretty strange.  Perhaps it is the same where you are?  Here, people polish and clean their houses, fuss over tiles and curtains, sofas and bedding.  They match carpets to lamp shades and a whole lot of other stuff I have no time for.  Then, they establish a routine that is stuck to.  It may be watching soaps, football, endless work or hobbies but when that routine is established not even the end of days will shift them.  You sense it, when you visit, that an inner sanctum has been breached.  The place of security that homes have become and in which others should not come.   

All of us become foreigners outside our homes and feel strangely adrift until ensconced once more on our coordinated turf, remote in hand.  The only outing tolerated is to the shops and that is too is part of the routine.  Don’t vary from the norm, don’t risk changing anything, after all so much crap happens even when you have constructed this spider’s web of activity – heaven knows what might happen if routines were abandoned. 

 Well, I reckon we need to challenge the norm.  A friend once said, if you want to do the wise thing look around and watch what just about everyone else around you is doing and choose to do the exact opposite.  There is something in that.