Juxtaposition

Cape Breton and Lanarkshire
I have a strange sense of mirroring as I think about the very small experience that I have had of a very small part of Cape Breton

The first coal mine established in 1715

During the 2nd world war Sydney Harbour was bustling with convoy ships and 50% of Canadian Steel was produced in Sydney – the steel mill is (like Ravenscraig) now a “green” site

The orange dust and acrid smell is gone but so has much of the local employment

I remember being told during my 1st week in Monklands that ‘we are very rich here, rich in the diseases of poverty and deprivation’ and last night I heard similar reflections about Sydney life

Yet within only a few minutes drive of Sydney there is some of the most beautiful landscape in the world -ocean, hills and the largest salt water lake in the world – a lake that takes 40years to flush

Like North and South Lanarkshire, shadow and light it is the juxtaposition that adds definition to the picture

Evangeline

Song based on Longfellow’s poem re the Arcadian Expulsion (clearances) in the mid 18th century

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbxvf20flWk&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Spot the giant fiddle across the harbour

If you wake during the the wee sma’ hours on Saturday you can imagine CASC in party mode here

The circular room is part of the city hall and the main conference is being held in two tone brick hotel two buildings further along the boardwalk

Sydney Harbour from my window

The Drumkeeper’s welcome

The scent of the healing herbs -sage, tobacco and sweetgrass – smoked through the room, front to back, left to right, floor to ceiling.

The Drumkeeper carried the welcome and welcoming dish to us all and the drum spoke – beating across the room and setting the floor adance.

He pauses to allow me to cense  myself, head and heart, and the beat pulses through the soles of my feet, up through my gut, round the chambers of my heart and out through the tiny drums I carry in my ears.

I feel the brush, the healing touch of the eagle’s wing on my back and head and know that I am standing on holy ground simultaneously part of a community far wider than those gathered in the room and alone.

I understand with my head and my heart for the first time that alone means al’one (all-one)

I see the eagle soar and glide, the eaglet fall like a stone only to land on the eagle’s outstretched wing, her heart pounding like the drumbeat which has become all encompassing.

And in the last days they shall come from north and south, east and west like the billowing sweet grass to join in g-d’s great heartbeat of welcome.

Today I learned that the heart that is lent to another can never thereafter be the same – can I lend my heart to another that might have need of it? Could I accept the gift of someone’s heart if I had need of it?

Tonight my heart beats in community with the Drum and the Drumkeeper – will it stop with the closing beat of the drum?  No matter for the Creator’s drumbeat is an eternal one.                                               HMM 18th April 2012

                                                                                                      Cape Breton

A heart that is lent to another can never again be the same

That is something I learned as we weretalking about the impact of listening to the 1st Nation story ‘the skeleton woman’ during a workshop at the CASC conference being held in Sydney, Cape Breton. I passed through Halifax on Tuesday and decided to go outside in order to be able to say that I at least breathed the air before going back through security and flying on to Sydney and the conference.

 

Halifaxis reflecting on the loss of the Titanic as this is where she was sailing to when she was lost and is also the town to which the recovered bodies were brought. It has also marked Holocaust Memorial Day this week (a different day to the one which we mark each January) and to bring its pain up to date the news is full store ports re the murder of a much loved activist who died when leaving Menz bar on Tuesday evening. He was beaten to death by a man who had been on an hours pass from a local forensic unit and who had not returned.  He has said that it was just a silly drunken fight.  The only voice I have heard which mirrors my first thought has been the voice of the dead mad which was given life by one of his friends saying that one of the tragedies within this tragedy is that an ill man now has to live with the fact that he is also now a murderer

 

The loudest prophet’s voice does seem to me to often be the one that is or has been silenced

Looking back on Monday 16th from the vantage point of Halifax Airport

 

By the waters of Babylon…..

 

Flying into Toronto, the high wind whipping up the sand from the Lake Ontario shoreline into a dust storm I looked in vain for the hills. I am not sure if I have ever seen such an expanse of perfectly flat land and  I wondered if that sense of ‘being in a strange land’ in any way echoed the experiences of those Israelites on their first sight of the Babylonian irrigation system of canals and basins

 

And hey the squirrels are black and I saw a cardinal and his wife in the garden!

 

This may be too hard

old dogs and new tricks come to mind not sure Simon Cowell will be voting for Mee