Old Blind Dog

It's raining on deck. I'm here in the cozy warm with the diesel stove flames dancing light.  The heat is distributed by the helicopter fan twirling atop the stove. I'm listening to Old Blind Dog's New Tricks Album and the Collection.  The instrumentals of whistle, drum and violin are haunting celtic.  Now the Bedlam Boys song of ancient highland is playing.
I've been reading the wonderful writing of my friend Anne Lindsay.  In northern cabins she had us all playing a background of strings so she could weave her flute tapestry in the sound. Now she's painting pictures of Moroccan bazaars with her Kirkcubright pen. I've just been reading too in Peter Newman's, The Company of Adventurers of the northern Scots lads who came out to Canada with the Hudson Bay Company.
It's been a long couple of days with 50 patients a clinic.
I'm wondering why I've been so long not playing my guitar. It's not something I do well but I have enjoyed it so.  Hearing the Old Blind Dog I remember first seeing them that July weekend so many years ago in Port Coquitlam at the annual Scottish Cultural Festival where extraordinarily strong boys where tossing the timber, flinging telephone posts about like they were toothpicks.  I dream one day of seeing and hearing Old Blind Dog in Scotland.
I've thought it would be grand to sail to the shores  grandparents left to come to Canada.  I'd not be the first to go back that way.  I read of a Danish man and his wife  doing this from Victoria there for no other reason than that his life was enriched by the effort.  I love a tale and an adventure to go with it.  The years run down and the costs of such endeavours always seem too high but when one sets a mind to such a thing it carries through.  God works in mysterious ways.  I did love meeting the elderly gent who sailed solo from Britain to the Maritimes in his 80's.  There's time enough and more.
Old Blind Dog is fiddling the Ferret Set from the New Tricks album. It's got me missing dancing now. So much of my life has been devoted to work and more work and more learning to do more work.  I've no regrets about the work. It's a gift to heal and the education I've had to that end has been unsurpassed.  It's second nature now. There's so much I've learned.  It's a tapestry and a fiddling tune for sure.  I've done a mighty fine jig at times to keep death distracted. I've been privilege to miracles.  Watched the dead rise.  So much sacred in the mundane. All the reductionism of the fearful can't contain the glory of a single moment of those times.
I remember delivering that Inuit baby in Churchill.  The same place where the polar bears chased me.  A night in an igloo with a wild Irish man singing songs of the old country while a blizzard blew outside.  Then there was the home visits in the Mariana Islands where the mad carried machetes they'd used insanely.  I climbed a coconut tree. We drank the delicious juice.
And today I thought of the camel I rode in Israel seeing the camel Anne had jockeyed on her face book page.  Those bazaars with the boys carrying fresh baked flat breads on their heads days before Moroccan Ramadan descended in the old city go unforgotten.
Who'd have guessed I'd be in harbour aboard a steel ocean crossing sailboat with a diesel stove keeping out the cold.  This is a rich and blessed life. I'm so grateful for all the permutations and combinations. Thank you for the music, poetry, dance and song.  It  lifts my heart to hear Old Blind Dog.