Finish

Finished. I started blogging over 4 years ago. That site closed then I started here. But I guess in the end I am talking to myself. Not good so I will stop.

Changes

Many things change, some more quickly than others. Four years ago the banks were filling everyone’s' letterboxes with application forms for loans. All one had to do was sign a form and you could get 10,000 Euros or more with no more questions asked. Now you have to apply, not to the local branch, but to the head office, and they require details of your employment from your boss, how long you have lived at your current address, all you 'outgoings' and everything filled out in duplicate, even for a very small loan. Very much a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
These days I am reminded of things past. I remember my Dad telling me stories about missionaries coming to our local church. I even remember a few myself. It was always a big event. For the week or so of the visit there would be lots of religious services and people would come from neighbouring parishes also. The church would be packed with many people having to stay outside. The missionaries would be seen as mini celebrities, and people would view them with the same awe as the local bishop.
At one of these events a missionary priest went to chat with some local young men who were standing at the church. He went to one and said "Well young man, are you married?". Not sure how to reply to the question, he answered "No Father, but the dinger is! ". The dinger was the nickname of a local man.
On another occasion during a very wet day, people coming to Mass had clay on their boots and the back of the church was very dirty after Mass. At the next Mass the missionary priest declared that all the locals were animals due to the state of the floor after the previous Mass. The next day as this priest was making his way to the church, a local man went down on his hands and knees and pretended to be eating the grass. I don't know if the priest got the message but it provided some light relief for the locals who observed it.
I am not sure if this sort of humour travels well but being able to laugh instead of getting angry or upset has seen many an Irish person through some very difficult times.

Spring smell

Spring is here. It has a certain smell. I got it Saturday evening as I was opening a gate. It is a smell similar to rotting vegetation but more sharp, even crisp. It happens every spring and when the days start getting warmer and the nights less cold, it results in this signature smell. It is a sign that life goes on and no matter what happens in our personal lives or even the world economy, nature moves on anew each year. I knew someone who understood nature more than anyone. At times it seemed to me that he could read the minds of animals. He understood it's rawness and it's gentleness. It is a shame that so many people have lost that link with nature. So many will not see the growth of Spring that brings food to the shops. People who have never seen a real cow or sheep and will sink their teeth into a burger unaware of what it actually is. Nature is not just a nice weekend in the countryside. We are all part of nature and it is un-natural if we cut ourselves off from it. Anyway, good night and maybe you might try smelling nature sometime :)

The meaning of life

On the first day, God created the dog and said, "Sit all day by the door of your
house and bark at anyone who comes in or walks past. For this, I will give you a
life span of twenty years.." The dog said, "That's a long time to be barking.
How about only ten years and I'll give you back the other ten?" So God
agreed......

On the second day, God created the monkey and said, "Entertain people, do
tricks, and make them laugh. For this, I'll give you a twenty-year life span."
The monkey said, "Monkey tricks for twenty years? That's a pretty long time to
perform. How about I give you back ten like the dog did?" And God agreed......

On the third day, God created the cow and said, "You must go into the field with
the farmer all day long and suffer under the sun, have calves and give milk to
support the farmer's family. For this, I will give you a life span of sixty
years." The cow said, "That's kind of a tough life you want me to live for sixty
years. How about twenty and I'll give back the other forty?" And God agreed
again......

On the fourth day, God created humans and said, "Eat, sleep, play, marry and
enjoy your life. For this, I'll give you twenty years." But the human said,
"Only twenty years? Could you possibly give me my twenty, the forty the cow gave
back, the ten the monkey gave back, and the ten the dog gave back; that makes
eighty, okay?" "Okay," said God. "You asked for it."

So that is why for our first twenty years, we eat, sleep, play and enjoy
ourselves. For the next forty years, we slave in the sun to support our family.
For the next ten years, we do monkey tricks to entertain the grandchildren. And
for the last ten years, we sit on the front porch and bark at everyone. Life has
now been explained to you..

Amour

When I started putting my thoughts and feelings online I was slow and reluctant to say very much. Then I went through a phase of putting every emotion and thought down. Now it looks like I have gone back to making rare entries. One subject I pondered a lot about is love. There are so many different kinds of love but each boils down to one fact; we all need to have a bond with another human being. We need to know that we are not alone in the world. The easiest thing about love is giving someone else advice about it, the hardest thing is taking that advice. I sometimes think “ is love really worth it?”. Is all the pain and heartbreak worth the all too brief moments of joy? When your mind fills up with questions, doubts and worries, is it all really worth it?
The purest form of love in my opinion is the unconditional love that mostly exists between a mother and her child. Unconditional love is more rare than Hollywood would have us believe. For the majority love is conditional on the response of the other person. We feel “let-down” or even “betrayed” if we see our emotional investment being ignored or not properly acknowledged. Love can spark off many negative emotions and can even eventually lead to feelings of hate. We can feel guilty if we are unable to return the love that another person gives us.
With all the “love” dates happening on the calendar now I guess my mind has focused more on this.
Anyway, time to give my brain a rest again :)

Remember

Happy Birthday Daddy.

Full Moon

Tonight there is a full moon and for once it is visible from Dublin.It is a long tome since it was used as a calender :)
Life is not fair. You only have to see how the France vs Ireland match was dealt woth by FIFA to see that.The small guy always gets the short end of the stick. Recently someone remarked to me about how much was wasted in effort, time and money on useless exercises. He was referring to politicians who wasted the resources of a country for their own egotistical reasons. It is only as we grow older that we recognise such futility.
Anyway back to the moon. The full moon was, and still is, used as an excuse for having a ceremony. In Asia it is seen as a chance to party, in the west it tends to have more forbiding nouances.
Right now for me it is a marker. The next full moon is on New Years Eve. It will mark the end of a six month wait. At the end of it I hope to have some answers. I don't know if I want to hear the answers but I don't think I can handle the long waits.
Oiche mhaith a chairde.

Smelling the roses

I took the all too rare chance of going for a long walk this evening. It was a beautiful end to the day. The recent dry weather resulted in the cut grass and the light dusting of leaves on the footpaths having a light , dry, almost roasted aroma. The crisp leaves crinkled as they were getting crushed underfoot. The sky was almost clear of clouds. A red hue glowed from underneath the clouds as they reflected the setting sun. It is a sight that never ceases to impress me in it’s majesty. In the east the day old full moon rose silently. It’s bland white contrasting with the intensity of the dying star in the west. Most people walked with their heads bent, looking at the ground, listening to headphones or concentrating on getting the most out of their exercise. There is sadness to this autumn beauty. It will end with the dark cold days of winter. A poem comes to mind. It was written by a prisoner on the night before his execution. Full, and perhaps too full, of melancholy. but then how will we react when faced with our mortality? LOL? I don’t think so.
The poet spent a lot of his time on the west coast of Ireland. Connacht is the name of a province in the west of Ireland.
Anyway here is the poem;

The Wayfarer

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

Totus tuus

On this day 30 years ago I got on a minibus along with about 12 other “young” people and travelled through the night to Ballybrit just outside Galway. We did not sleep on the journey as we were too excited about the event. On arrival we made our way through the 300,000 or so other people to the racecourse. It is impossible to paint a word picture to fully describe the scene. It was still dark and the lighting along the way was very dim. Some groups had guitars and were singing as they walked. We arrived at a area that was fenced off into a seeming endless number of corrals. On finding ours we sat down on the wet grass and tried to get a little rest. I woke up to a gray misty dawn. A well known bishop and a priest were on the stage trying to get people awake. Looking around I finally realized the size of the crowd. I will never see as many people in one place again. From horizon to horizon it was just people. It seemed that every teenager in Ireland was here, along with all the twenty somethings. As we waited being entertained by a bishop, who had fathered a child with an American divorcee and a priest who had a son with his housekeeper (unknown to us then), the fog slowly lifted. The drone of a helicopter became slowly audible and then it appeared through the mist. A white figure could be seen waving from the cockpit. The roar from the crowd drowned out all other noise, it later turned into singing.
The red helicopter circled before landing. The Pope had arrived.
Over the 2 and a half day period of his visit, Pope John-Pau II was seen by about 2.5 million people out of a population of about 3.5 million.
It was a turning point both for Ireland and the Catholic Church here. After his visit there was an upsurge in religious devotion. However 10 years later the revelations which would shake the foundations of the Catholic Church began to appear. Child sexual abuse, financial irregularities and political deals became the normal news for the Church. If there is such a thing as “peak oil” then perhaps this was peak faith.
Anyway, for me, these 3 days were an amazing adventure. I had witnessed something that never happened before and would never happen again. Everyone seemed to know what they had to do and did it.

De profundus

It is never easy to listen. To hear, to understand and to empathise all take time and effort. We are so busy with our own personal worlds that to reach out and touch someone else’s’ take a huge leap of love that for many it is a leap too far. We may know people who can do it but even if we are surrounded by friends, there is no certainty there will be one among them who can make this connection. I knew a man who could do just that. He was strong but understood weakness, he was determined but understood uncertainty and he was practical but knew love. I saw first hand how he saved people from themselves. People who had given up on their lives were given another chance through his ability to listen.
He is no longer here.
The Summer has given way to the chill evening wind of Autumn. The trees have chosen a warm red brown coat before the final Winter sleep. Branches are heavy with fruit, some good and some bad. The heavy musty smell of decaying leaves is on its way. All goes back to the good earth. Dust to dust.

A man for all seasons

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.


Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dilís.

Perseid shower

I got my hopes up today that the forecast for "clear spells" would mean a view of the Perseid shower tonight. The forecast was wrong and it is just another cloudy evening here. On the positive side it is not raining!! It is a very long time ago since my cousins decided to camp out one night in August to see this event. Even at a young age I was interested in seeing the meteors, but not crazy enough to camp out,lol. My best sighting was by accident one night. I was, along with my father and brother, looking for some lost cattle. We found them and brought them back to their field. I was closing a gate when I saw a large fireball streak across the star lit sky. What amazed me most was the silence. It vanished like a quenced candle. A few years ago one actually landed a few miles from home. A lot of people searched for any remains and some were found. Such is the interest that a small rock of this material can be quite valuable.If I ever win the lottery one of my dreams is to have a good telescope and maybe even a small observatory. Anytime I have been abroad I try to identify the consellations in a "new" sky. I think everyone should take time to see the night sky. It was a familar sight to our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years and we too should enjoy it's beauty.

A rare bird

Occasionally in life we get to experience something we previously only dreamed about. In the past few years providence has smiled on me in this regard. The latest event was last night at 23:30.
At 23:00 the space shuttle Endeavour took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA. A few minutes later it jettisoned the two solid rocket boosters which landed by parachute in the Atlantic to be picked up by the US navy. About 20 minutes later it dropped off the huge external fuel tank. At this stage it was in orbit and the fuel tank burned up in the atmosphere. I went outside around 23:15. I was not expecting to see anything as the weather is very bad with lots of clouds. However, as if by magic or some other power, the skies cleared just enough to see some of the brighter stars. I waited. Then like a bright diamond in the sky, it appeared. The shuttle was like a very bright star as it reflected the rays of the sun on the dark Earth below. It is a sight I have seen before a number of times. What I saw next though was truly fantastic. The external tank now separated from the shuttle was moving just behind it in the sky. The tank had a rusty brown hue. Not as bright as its companion but still very visible. It was as if the shuttle had a lantern hanging from it as it made its celestial voyage. It is a sight I thought I would never see but, thanks to the many postponements of the launch due to weather issues, now I have realised a dream. At a time when I don’t feel so great , it was like a light shining in my darkness

Rememberence

Anyone looking at news from Ireland over the past few weeks will have seen the release of a major report into the abuse of children in various institutions and schools in Ireland from about the 1930’s to the 1980’s. During that time children were put into “care” as they were deemed to be in danger. The danger varied from the parents’ poverty, having an unmarried /widowed parent or living in an “immoral” home. Some children were sent to industrial schools for stealing or missing school. Violence and brutality were common tools used to control the inmates. Shocking in itself this was not the worse aspect of the treatment dished out in these, for all practical purposes, prisons. Sexual abuse and rape also became part of daily life for many children. Boys who were removed from society for fear of their moral lives were instead forced to suffer the worse evil that men in long black gowns had the capacity to imagine. Instead of being made to face this evil most of these people were moved on and the events hushed up. It was easier for those in authority to ignore it than admit to the atrocities that were being committed.
Some of these men were members of the Christian Brothers. One in particular became more infamous than most. He was asked to leave the Brothers when he first started abusing young boys. He moved from one school to another across Ireland. Each time he would start abusing a child, he would be moved on and given an excellent reference. As soon as a parent complained about his inappropriate behaviour, he moved on. When I started secondary school, he was teaching there. He had been there for a few years. I was lucky because he was only there for my first year. I remember him as a violent man who lost his temper and hit out with his fist for little or no reason. At a time when few parents had cars, he was always available to give lifts for after school activities like GAA, drama, debates etc. He was well dressed, well groomed and “smelled” clean. A lot of kids going to school would not have a very high standard of hygiene and so his clean smell was noticeable. He left after my first year. We did not know why but were more than happy that this tyrant was gone. I recently discovered that he left due to a parent complaining about his behaviour towards a child. I also discovered that he got a glowing reference from the school head. His violent and bullying behaviour was not lost on some of the older boys in the school. They copied his example and practiced it on the younger boys. Over the years it got less endemic but it left scars that for some would never heal.
All nations have something in their history that is shameful. Perhaps this is ours. What can be learned? Maybe it is that when something is wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the duty to do so. Everyone, teachers, religious, police, judiciary, politicians and even organisations whose role was to protect children, played a part in this. Healing can only begin when all accept their role and ask forgiveness.

Wish

We'll do it all, everything, on our own
We don't need anything or anyone

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world

I don't quite know how to say how I feel
Those three words are said too much
They're not enough

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world
Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads
I need your grace
to remind me
to find my own

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world
Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes
They're all I can see
I don't know where
Confused about how as well
I just know that these things
Will never change for us at all

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world

Sometimes i hear lyrics that match my feelings. This is one of those moments.

Initial report on Barcelona

I recently returned from a 10 day vacation in Barcelona. It was my first time in Spain. Like all Irish people the first thing I noticed was the heat. The temperature was in the low twenties and very pleasant for me. Barcelona is a city of open spaces, unusual architecture, beautiful fountains and Irish pubs! It seems nowhere escapes the march of the Irish pub :)
One negative aspect of my visit was a certain Kilimanjaro restaurant in Placa de Catalunya. It is in a major transport and tourist hub of the city. In it I found the rudest waiter I ever met, some of the worst food I ever tasted and a hefty bill at the end of it.
My favourite excursion was to Montjuic via the cable-car from Torre Jaume 1. The view was fantastic and Montjuic is also near the Olympic stadium.
Barcelona must the capital of Museums because there is one for almost everything. From chocolate to wax and from ethnology to ceramics, it would be almost impossible not to find one that would be of interest. The Zoo in Barcelona is one of the best I’ve seen and the dolphin show is amazing. Speaking of which, the aquarium is excellent also. It was the first time I saw the most unusual angel fish which looks more like a swimming head than a complete fish. The public transport system is excellent and simple, even I could figure it out :D
In many ways Barcelona could be described as Gaudi’s city. His style is stamped on the city through such buildings as the Sagrada Familia Church, Casa Batllo and Parc Guell.
Not all the architecture in Barcelona appealed to me. The Arc de Triomf for example just looks bad. The one in Bucharest is much nicer, even with the scaffolding!
A word of warning. If you are a shopaholic do not visit El Corte Ingles at the top of Placa de Catalunya. It is a multi-story temple to shopping. There is a saying that if you can’t find something in El Corte Ingles then it does not exist. I won’t name names here but I know some people who could spend a lifetime in this shop ;)
More later...

Deanta na firinne

It has been a while since I posted. It is a bit late for me and I will start working in a new place tomorrow. I will say more about recent events in a later post. For the moment I will just say that I was in Barcelona for 10 days. It is a nice city, though not as nice as some of the advertising claims. It was not as I expected, but then life never has been. Anyway time for some shut-eye. Nite.

P45

I got my P45 today. It is similar to the “pink slip” in the USA. It is the document that an Irish employer gives to an employee who leaves the company. Recently it has become a familiar document for tens of thousands of Irish workers. Luckily, for me, I am leaving for another job. After 10 years and 7 months, today’s silence was a surprise to me. I was amazed by the way people I worked for, effectively ignored this major event in my work career. In spite of the many times I burned the midnight oil to ensure targets and goals were met, today it seems to have not mattered. My work colleagues talked about it of course. I am lucky to have worked with such nice people. At the end of the day it is the people we work with than those we work for are the most important. Tomorrow I start in my new job. No rest for the wicked!!!!!

Mother's day

Last Sunday was Mother's day. During the afternoon I was in the local hospital visiting a relative. She was in a ward with three other patients. One was a girl in her late teens. She was paralysed, unable to speak and unable to feed herself. Her mother was there with her. She was feeding her with a plastic spoon. Mother's Day is not about cards or gifts or being guilty about not treating the person who gave us life with the respect she deserves. It is about acknowledging our mothers and appreciating them, not just for one day but always.

Surprise

I guess I will never learn! I know I should not post without thinking about what I am trying to say but sometimes the thoughts just want to jump out on the page. I will begin by saying what I know about love could be written on the back of a postage stamp and still leave room for the combined works of Shakespeare. A great and wonderful aspect of love is the feeling it brings when one is with a loved one. I won't wate time trying to describe it. If you have felt it you know what I mean. The flip side is the emptyness of separation . The empty void is filled with concern, worry and even doubt. The days of being apart feel like weeks or months. As each day passes time seems to move in a slow almost still manner. Dreams turn to nightmares and the yearning for contact becomes overpowering.
Anyway time I went to bed. Good night.