Beautiful Day

Just listened to U2, “It’s a beautiful day”.  Don’t let it get away.  I walked Gilbert. Cloudy skies. A touch of rain.  Would have preferred sunshine for the weekend, but it’s a weekend. Vacation time.  Work relief. Friends and dogs and children.  Cabins and lake.  A change of scenery.  Laughter.  Light heartedness.  Away from fentanyl deaths and politics.  I’m thankful and grateful for the moments of grace.  Little cracks in the vase repaired in gold like the Leonard Cohen poem.  Friends and family dying. Curtain calls.  I noticed an older person is trembling with Parkinson’s. Another is wheezing.  Another carries a cane. I think of time in a different way. Wonder if I’m doing God’s work. Is this where I am supposed to be. Today. But I think of pilgrimage most days.  Then I think of my dog. He likes this life where I go out with him and we work together. He’d not like churches and temples because so many don’t like him.  We are restricted.  Laura, Hannah, Mida take care of him when I go off alone to places which don’t like dogs. But I return.  I imagine youth bicycling across europe visiting castles and churches. But it doesn’t work with a dog.  He prefers the woods.  We’ve been sailing and canoeing. Defines my places of prayer.  I meditate more in the open than the closed man made spaces of worship.  I am like Jesus that way.  Outside, seeking God in silence in some out of the way place.  I struggle with bureaucracy and theatrics.  I do mountains of paper work.  I see people all day long. I listen and challenge and encourage and promote.  I’m life’s salesman.  I beg cajole plead that people put down the weapons of destruction.  Sometimes I’m okay.  Every day I grow more weary. I face such hatred in low and high places.  It’s what I see but all around me there’s love and kindness and caring. It’s perception. It’s so much in the perception. Choosing love or fear.  Inviting God into my life.  Be Still and Know that I am God. Holy Spirit Come.
Thank you for all the positive and uplifting and memorable.  Thank you for the joy.  Now I must get ready for work. I love showers. They are immensely under rated. Even indoor plumbing is taken for granted.  I love soap and shampoo and clean clothes. I’m so blessed and yet these little things I take for granted. Thank you for my fingers I say at this computer though Paul Simon said that in a different and better way.  I like the old songs. I like the Beatles Sgte Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I’m having flashes of past times of peace and joy.  I’m under attack daily. I live with constant threats. The man who wanted to kill me and my dog has faded into the past but now others take their place.  I work in the most hostile of environments.  I called a killer recently. It was close. He was enraged. He’s big.  I struggle with understanding his reality, once a drug lord with jets and helicopters galavanting with bikinied beach beauties and mansions, now post decades of jail, resentful, in rage.  All that time in solicitude.
She lies.  Her lies are bigger every day.  When she was young her lies were less lethal. But now she is old she kills with deceit.  People still do her bidding. They are her pawns she places like an evil queen on her chessboard.  Rallying stupid men and women to serve her nefarious schemes.  In this country she is heads about them. Her Homolka gets to volunteer at schools after killing children. In her country, a much older culture, there is no time for such deceit. There are so many good women and men around. They contain her rage. But here there are loop holes. She can scheme.  All she does is scheme.  Hurt and angry, she doesn’t like to work with others.  She doesn’t join the greater game. She is her own queen. She wants men to kill for her.  She has a sneaky grandiosity that insanity conceals. She is creepy without the mask.  She is really creepy.  Women don’t want her around children.  She is dangerous to men.
I was telling someone about working with the dangerously insane. The wards of people with life time Governor General Warrants. Mothers who killed all their children and family because the daffodils were yellow.  The men who thought their brother was a tractor.  I saw these folk with cap grass syndrome. It’s discomforting at times. When they look at you like a bird.  They lack a quality of human but have retained a bird like look in their eyes. Curous. He screams and yet is kind.
She is not kind.
I am frightened a lot, in moments when I let the reality sink in. We are all vulnerable on a spinning planet in a corner of a universe with limited time and aging reminding one of the close proximity of death.  I have trouble leaving my home. I fear another liar. I fear the psychotic psychopaths seeking money by using the system.  I tremble and stutter some days. It’s not bad. It’s only some times. I want to curl up fetal position and never see another human.  I pray on my knees beside my bed. My dog cuddles beside me.  It's fleeting moments now.
I have flashes still.  I could go down the rabbit hole. I could suck on the tit of self pity. It’s such as sour milk though.
But instead, I’m thankful. I make gratitude lists. I open my perception to see beyond the tunnel vision of fear and thank my lucky stars for all that I have been blessed with. This breath. The beating heart. The joy of senses. Hearing. The bird songs have been such a joy. Since I got my hearing aid I’m hearing them so poignantly again. They bless my morning.  I smelled a pine tree yesterday. I don’t know why that pine tree but the fragrance was beyond any chemical. A regular ice cream cone pine taste for the nose.  It was incredible.
So now to shower. Thank you for all the good times. Thank you for moments of encounter. Thank you for the peace and the refreshment. Thank you for silences. Thank you.

It’s a beautiful day.

U2 Joshua Tree Tour

My nephews, Graeme, Andrew, and Alan and my sister in law Adell gave me U2 tickets for my birthday. Laura and I have been so looking forward to this. We’d loved U2 in concert when we saw them here a few years back.
Getting to the concert was it’s own adventure. The Vancouver Taxis as usual were not available on the weekend. The city really does need Uber.  We wasted a half hour waiting and then finally opted to take the bus.  Apparently the bus services are more reliable.  I was driving my truck and it’s a tad too big for Vancouver on a friday night.    I got to take my annual bus ride adventure.  Laura rides the bus daily to an fro work so it wasn’t so exciting for her. It reminded me of my student years and youth, and bussing when I’m travelling.  I remembered we'd taken the bus to then first concerts I attended.   I didn’t have a car when I saw those great early concerts like Lead Zeappelin, Iron Butterfly, Pink Floyd, and Guess Who.  Come to think of it,  back then , I might have thought a car a psychedelic ostrich.   Half the people on the bus seemed dressed to party . When the bus stopped we all seemed to be headed for the concert. .
The line up area was chaos.  It was a scene of increasing bedlam.   Security was necessarily tight, people getting frisked and bags checked but that really was done efficiently. The confusion was way before that.  Once inside everything was fantastic.  Our seats were directly in front of the screen but I was glad I’d brought binoculars.  BC Place is huge. U2 and Fleetwood Mac that last concerts I’d attended in Vancouver had been in the smaller Roger’s Stadium.  Vancouver really is blessed with huge venues.
When Mumford and Sons began to play the place was only half full. Everyone else still outside mulling about. It was odd to be in a concert in daylight too. After the long dark winter the light is still a surprise.
Mumford and Sons were fantastic.  Laura thought the singer  was Bono. I had the binoculars told her these guys looked in their thirties.  Either they were someone else or the whole of the band had cashed in on some kind of youth elixir.
“No,” Laura said, “Bono and Edge are ageless. They never get old.”  She told me loved listening to their records in the eighties after she put her kids to bed. That’s when I first fell in love with U2 too. Danny Donahue the great Winnipeg musician and producer waxed poetic about their ‘wall of sound’ and incredible rhythms.  Danny was so far ahead of the curve on what was great music.
Mumford and Sons was a favourite of friends in Parksville,  psychologist Marion, now living in Mexico.  She also had one of these great ears for music, registering talent early.
Mumford and Sons  are incredible. A truly original sound. They’d started as more of a folky group and graduated to this big stadium sound . Here I appreciated most the maturity of their voices and the way they filled the auditorium with their music.
I had trouble believing they were Mumford and Sons when we learned that after the first song. Laura and I  couldn’t believe we’d lucked out with 2 such great bands on the same ticket.  Laura told me that a friend had told her she was going to hear Mumford and Sons and she’d replied that she was going to hear U2. Her friend was coming for Mumford and Sons not U2 as we were coming for U2.
On Facebook we learned that a half dozen of our friends were here and one of our favourite people somewhere very near us.  We exchanged locations with one group.    I could tell how close some others others were from the view of their photos they took so similar to my own.
When Mumford and Sons finished a great set dusk was setting in and the place was finally packed. Celtic Crazy.
U2 exploded onto the stage with their famous wall of music , Edge on guitar and Bono rocking lyrics, He really has a powerful soothing voice, Everyone was on their feet.  The girls in front of us like most people only sat down for the lullabies. Everyone was dancing. It’s that kind of moving music.  Alright I was up and dancing too but I wasn’t waving my arms about in the air.  I save that for church gospel.  Here it was full body boogey to U2 and everyone was doing it.
I usually try to get up close but this view gave me that sense of the whole thing as  theatre.  It’s perspective. I liked watching the hundreds people thick immediately in front of the stage. They were constantly moving, everyone with their hands in the air.  Where we were was perfect for the huge screen, the musicians like Lilliputian people were in front of this.  That huge screen took up half the width of the stadium.  I love best the movie of the road back ground to the incredible ‘town with no name.”  The joshua tree was perfect. The Salvation Army Band was brilliant.
Typically Bono did his famous activism bit.  The power of the people.  The celebration of women so wonderfully Irish.  My mother would have liked Bono.  He credited a French producer for the following  movie back ground of Syrian refugee camp. U2 is about love and freedom.  I really loved the U2 show.  It’s truly was an extravaganza event with visuals as original as the music.  Stadium  art on huge scale. Even in the intermission between Mumford and Sons and the U2 there had been large screen freedom poetry.  The tribal in the celtic tradition resonated with aboriginal. The music was everywhere. Every nook and crook and cranny was filled with U2 sound.  
Too soon it was over.  Laura was happy. I was thankful to the family for a terrific gift. It wasn’t too difficult to get out. I bought Laura a U2 hoodie and myself a black U2  t-shirt, A change from the black Harley t shirts I normally wear.  I downloaded Mumford and Sons, Wilder Mind album and  U2 Joshua Tree from iTunes as we slowly moved with the crowd to the door.  The U2 concert album will be available June 2.  I couldn’t help but notice everyone really was in good spirits after the show.  Lots of radiant smiling faces.  Probably helped along by U2, “it’s a beautiful day’ number.
And we caught the bus right away.
Pretty soon we were back at Laura’s. Gilbert, the cockapoo was so glad to see us, like we’d been away for days not hours.  While I gave him his late night walk I reflected on the experience.  Wild really.  Thousands of people gathered for this great light and sound extravaganza.  Lots of grey and white hairs like me. But a whole lot of children and lots of young people.  U2 and Mumford and Sons attraction spans three generations.  Amazing.

The Troubles, Belfast, Ireland

We’d heard of the Troubles recently at the U2 concert in Vancouver before coming to Ireland.  Here in Belfast we’d see the actual sites the concert murals came from.
There’d been conflict in Ireland between British and Irish forever.  The Norman Invasion occurred in the late 12th century. The Plantations occurred in the 15th and 16th century when English and Scottish Protestant settlers came and displaced the pre-plantation Catholic Landowners.  There was the Protestant Ascendancy and the Catholic Emancipation after that. Irish Protestants fought Irish Catholics and sometimes Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics got together to fight England.
The Home Rule Act was written 1914 then suspended by WWI. 1916 was the Easter Rising by Irish Republicans.  Then in 1922 the Irish War of Independence and Anglo Irish Treaty resulted.  Michael Collins, the great Liam Neelson movie we saw and Shadow of a Gunman, the play we saw at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin were about these times.  Ireland became the Irish Free State in 1937 with the six northern counties of Northern Ireland remaining within the United Kingdom.  Sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland has continued with Nationalists (mainly Catholic) and Unionists (mainly Proestant) at odds.  This conflict erupted into the Troubles in the 1960’s until an uneasy peace thirty years later.
In the early 70’s when I was living with my first wife, Baiba, in London, England I was repeatedly evacuated from the Associated Television offices across from Harrod’s where I worked because of bomb threats.  Baiba came home once with her beautiful face cut by flying gas when the building across from where she worked had been bombed and her building’s windows blown out.
The Provisional Independent Republican Army (IRA) felt bombs (and terror) would financially cost England so much that they’d wash their hands of Ireland. The Royal Ulster Defence League defended itself against them.  These two ‘gangs’ were the armies.  Meanwhile a  diplomatic mainstream wanted to arrive at some compromise or solution without further bloodshed. Some three thousand Irish were killed during these times. Desmond showed us an area where all the houses had been devastated .
Apparently the Unionists had had power in Northern Ireland for 50 years and the Irish Catholic working classes in the north rebelled at their poor conditions. It was something of a ‘civil rights’ conflict in the late 60’s before the violence exploded. In 1968 a peaceful civil rights march in Derry had turned violent.  This was followed by the Battle of the Bogside and the Northern Ireland Riots of 1969.  To restore order, British troops were deployed. The worst occurred 1972 with Blood Sunday when Paratroopers opened fire on civil rights protestors in Derry, killing 13 unarmed civilians.  This was the beginning of what was to be called the Troubles.
We’d taken a famous West Belfast Black Taxi Tour with Desmond as our guide  to view the famous murals of Shankill and Falls area.  We saw a wall that went on for miles.  “I was surprised when I heard from German tourists that the Berlin Wall had only lasted 23 years whereas our Belfast Wall has been up for over 40.” said Desmond.  The wall was massive too, barbwire with locking gates and curfews.  The police still rode about in armoured cars.
Direct Rule of Northern Ireland with a British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the Briish Cabinet carried on from 1972 to 1999.The IRA and Ulster Defence Regiment continued at odds. 1986 the Anglo Irish Agreement (something of a truce) was signed.  The Belfast Agreement (Good Friday Agreement 1999) gave Unionists and Nationalists power sharing in limited areas of government.  This continues till today with decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, policing reforms and removal of British Army bases. The IRA announced the end of it’s armed conflict 2005.  2011 Ireland closed it’s embassy at the Vatican.
The murals showed that the Irish Catholics interestingly tended to side with Palestine while the Protestants sided with Israel giving a global reach to these local events.
Today the walls and barbwire and armed police cars and shrines are all reminiscent of earlier conflicts, yet I confess I was thankful to be in a taxi with a local informed guide. It didn’t seem like a particularly safe place to wander about on foot.  Laura and I were thankful for the Black Taxi Tour.
The Crumlin Road Gaol  that had housed both protestants and catholic criminals has become a tourist site and the old courthouse is falling down.
Desmond let us write on the wall with felt pens.  Apparently Bill Clinton did the same when he was here. Laura and I wrote prayers for peace.  Laura is Catholic and I’m Protestant.
We learned that if Catholics and Irish couldn’t live together here.  They moved to other parts of Belfast where love clearly means more than war.

 

U2 Innoscence and Experience 2015 Tour, Vancouver , Canada

Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.   The Band U2.  “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” Roger’s Stadium full.  Crowds of all ages standing and dancing at their seats and in the aisle.  We were hit by the U2 famous ‘Wall of Sound’.  What incredible music of a lifetime. It was a spectacular show with the most amazing hanging video screen walkway half the length of the stadium. Sunday Bloody Sunday.  Songs of the Irish Troubles were accompanied by Bono’s thanks to all those who had the courage to compromise.  A tribute to the missing and a call for truth and reconciliation for everyone. A call to peace.  Bono sang Paul Simon’s Mother and Child Reunion for Red and an end to Aids.   With or Without You. The Streets with No Name.  This night in Vancouver opened their Innoscence and Experience 2015 Concert. What a privilege to be there.  What an overwhelming evening of love songs, rock and roll, spectacular rhythm, the most beautiful tenor voice, and what a circus light show extraordinaire!  Thank you U2!