A potpourri of pieces

I ran a writer’s group in Ireland many years ago and would use a blue notebook during these sessions.  Often I would suggest writing tasks/triggers and everyone would have a go.  In the silent moments of concentration I too, would scribble ideas.  This same notebook I found in my mother's garage this week and decided to use some of the half-thought-out ideas in this blog posting. They are far from complete and diverse and I’d forgotten their existence but somehow it feels right to resurrect and share them now. These are the first two pieces.  One meditative in quality and the other a science fiction fantasy tale.

1. The calm of the morning

I find if I start the day off right it all flows better. By starting right I mean I find a quiet spot on a chair near a window in my home. There, I begin by looking out and drinking in the view. My thoughts race here and there. On the birds, in the hedges, the clouds closing in, and the pain in my back. Then, the thoughts begin to settle like a flock of birds landing on the lawn. I remember all the people past and present I love and pray for their protection and happiness. Going a bit deeper and I look inward thinking about who I am and what I need to change. If I sit long enough even these thoughts disappear. Stillness comes, a tiny moment of calm. There is suddenly a sense of well-being, of being mindful in this world. I find myself grateful for another day, another chance to do things better, to be a better person.  

As Saint Jerome (342–347 AD), an early translator of the Bible,  so eloquently put it,

“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best.

2. Unity, not science saves the day (Sci-Fi)

It has been an incredible unlikely breakthrough, discovering that by placing large mirrors in space it was possible to reverse global warming. The Max Planck Institute in Hamburg Germany had come up with this amazing piece of geoengineering. The physics was simple enough, the mirrors reflected the sun's rays away from the Earth and by selectively reducing the incoming rays were able to precisely compensate for the extra trapped heat. Global temperatures were brought down to preindustrial levels in a surprisingly short period of time.  The headlines screamed ‘Scientists to the Rescue’ and the world population heaved a communal sigh of relief.  Several Pacific islands under threat from flooding of their low-level land were saved.  Glacier coverage at the poles went from a frightening reduction rate to a more stable state. 

What was really clever about the system called (Geo Electromagnetic Management System - GEMS) was that when temperatures plummeted due to a severe winter in the northern hemisphere careful adjustment of the radio-controlled mirrors were able to direct extra sunlight to an entire snowbound eastern coastal region of the US and helped clear transport lines, reduce freezing temperatures and yet prevent urban flooding. It seemed these mirrors could not only combat global warming but could also be used to moderate any severe weather fluctuations. It was felt that GEMS was a super version of the massive dams which had controlled water supply in the previous centuries. It was just that now, these enormous mirrors could enable an equally sensitive control of the sunlight hitting our earth. The Max Planck Institute made millions and won the Nobel prize in physics for their startlingly clever invention. Then, things began to go wrong.

It two decades to discover that just as the massive dams across rivers in the US had in fact damaged huge swaths of ecosystems these mirrors had been having unknown impacts on ocean temperatures.  As one eminent scientist explained it, 

“It is a bit like controlling one simple part of a complex global interrelated process for your own ends.  As a result of GEMS, other vital features of the planet’s wellbeing are thrown out of sync.  Unfortunately, the damage done is irreparable and irreversible.  The end result is that we will just have to live with the consequences of what has been done.”  

This was dismissed as nonsense by the management team at GEMS who pointed out that such naysayers always underestimated what science could achieve. Adjustments could be made and errors reduced. Popular opinion was behind the scientists and it took a decade before the GEMS mirrors were dismantled.  Arguments raged across the world as to the correct course of action with toxic polarisation of the pro-GEMS population and the anti-GEMS.  Any attempt at a reasonable discourse appeared impossible in such a rancid climate of debate. By that stage, ocean warming had passed the tipping point and runaway climate change triggered huge loss of life across the globe. Disunity bred dissension and disease and it took another century for unity to come.  When a world community eventually began to act as one, positive change was remarkable.  As one comedian said, “It was as if the whole earth’s system was waiting for us to get our act together before it would play ball!”  

“It is the light of the intellect which gives us knowledge and understanding …”

'Abdu'l‑Bahá

For the disembowelled among us

There is no room for judgemental speeches when someone commits suicide.  The loss is too great to address and it has been accurately referred to as “the scar that will not heal”.  Every person’s death diminishes us and we need to use each as a spur to all of us to do more to help not as a conversation piece.

Ten million people attempt suicide each year and one million succeed. A disproportionate number are young people.  These figures do not even come close to exposing the agony and pain that hides behind those statistics.

The loss of a young life just beginning screams its wrongness.  Too often the necessary investigations inflict more anguish on already lacerated hearts.  Those who end their own lives do so not because they choose to die but usually because living is no longer a viable option.  We cannot imagine what is going on in the mind of a tormented soul but their anguish should call out to all of us.

We need to ensure support, professional, competent and timely is available for those who are at the very end of their tether.  This lifeline should be strengthened if it is the final barrier between a person and that deadly last step.  It cannot be amateur, incompetent or ill informed.  It needs to be constantly evaluated and improved.  While suicide preventative resources are limited and often under developed there are well-established suicide prevention programmes worldwide that have shown themselves effective in reducing the number of suicides.  Prevention is always a challenge but by using resources available and learning from good practice we can get better.  

While attending a suicide prevention programme in Londonderry, N. Ireland some years ago I was impressed that the speakers spoke with passion and insight.  They seemed to know what they were talking about and conveyed compassion and guidance that made practical sense.  It was only during the coffee break I learned that all of the trainers had lost family members through suicide.  Their experiences gave their words a depth of understanding and poignancy that touched all exposed to it.  They clearly got over the principle that that “suicide is everyone’s business”.  Channels need to be opened to those in despair and each of us can play a role.

Too many live among us, mortally injured, but having to hide their weeping wounds.  In addition to their growing pain they muster up the charade that all is well.  The reasons are manifold but one is the knowledge that fellow humans thrive on gossip, backbiting and the tragedy of others.  Going over the bones of carcasses, pulling apart the sinews to see wounds more clearly.  Delighting to satisfy their morbid curiosity and share with others new titbits found.  Our newspapers and neighbourhoods are full of such judgemental spouting.  No wonder then, the disembowelled among us seek no help but hug their intestines to their chest and hope no one senses their despair and agony.

"regard backbiting as grievous error, and keep ..aloof from its dominion, inasmuch as backbiting quencheth the light of the heart, and extinguisheth the life of the soul."

(Baha'i Writings)

Across Canada and The USA by Campervan

We were in a camping van recently, my family and I, recreating a road journey of over fifty years ago. It’s rare such things happen.  You always mean to do such trips but usually never do.  Life kind of gets in the way or runs you over.  Half a century ago my father decided to immigrate to Canada from NI.  He had a teaching post offer in the plains in Saskatchewan in a tiny hamlet called Piapot. So with his young wife and two toddlers (My Mum and brothers are shown in photo above) they headed out westward, where so many have gone before.  All of them in search of something better, I expect.  Later, he moved to Maple Creek a larger town nearby with proper shops.  On his holidays his persistent restless urge got the better of him, so he set off on an epic journey across Canada and The United States in a large car with his family.

It was this journey, which took us across Canada to Vancover and down the US through loads of national parks, that we redid in 2010.  It felt epic driving a massive camper van through country you associate with movies.  Coming from a small island the vastness of a huge continent is heady stuff.  The campervan rattled and shook as we drove and handled like a small house on a trailer.  As before, there were five of us but there were changes too.  I was merely an embryo on that first journey and my Dad had died five years before the trip.  He has left a huge gap in all our lives and he was the missing passenger on our journey.  He would have loved it. The lakes, glaciers, forests, plains all unfolded before us.  Then, when delight or weariness got the better of us, it was time for a nice cup of tea in our campervan.  Elbow to elbow with my brothers for the first time in three decades felt like revisiting your childhood as an adult.  Only this time around instead of fighting we enjoyed the closest company of all, family. 

There were challenges, my eldest brother’s boots (which had smell one cannot begin to describe), my mum’s skin reaction to mosquitoes (huge swollen pus filled protrusions), a hernia and more (don’t ask!).  But it was all great!  The open road, a huge campervan and total freedom.  We saw real live wild bears in the forests, swam in glacier lakes, explored and have photographs to prove it.  I’m so grateful for all of it.  In Maple Creek the school had been preserved as a museum, so my Dad’s classroom was there exactly has he had left it down to the posters on the door and exercise books.  There was even a picture of my Dad, looking so young, with his class beside him.  Strange sadness as well, as if we were close to him, but he was gone, out of reach, despite our longing.  

Piapot was different, the whole prairie area has suffered economically and there has been a huge exodus of inhabitants to the bigger cities.  So Piapot, which had always been a tiny hamlet beside the Trans Canadian Railway line, had shrunk still further.  The school here had been disserted for years with grass growing waist high around it.  Peeping through the front door everything was still there desks neatly lined up as if it had been left just yesterday and not a few decades.  It felt strange, as if we as a family had been transported back to the same spot 50 years earlier in a time machine. Then, as my brothers stood shoulder to shoulder next to the train lines, a huge endless train trundled past and sounded its horn.  It completed the miracle and we were all awash with the past, delighted to have caught this exact moment on the wind.  There is a photograph of my Dad with my brothers next to the same railway crossing and you’ll never understand it – but we were all there, every one of us, together again at that spot.  It felt like, this is the moment that we had come so far for.