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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.