And I Think to Myself …

… what a wonderful world.

With love,

A Patch of Poppies

I was in a bit of a quandary about Remembrance Day this year. Too many newscasts fraught with gun violence and acts of terrorism, and civil wars in places we don’t hear about because there’s no business interest for the West – I’ve been pretty cynical of late, so the timing wasn’t great for November 11. It seemed to me that the sacrifices made, the lives lost and families destroyed during, well, every darned war we’ve seen since The Great One and The One to Stop All Others, have all been for naught. Pointless. A truly senseless waste because, looking at where we are now, it solved nothing. The world is still in conflicted turmoil with no apparent end in sight.

Toss my deity, Sting, into the mix. For months, I’ve been looping Children’s Crusade, one of my favourite songs from his first solo album. I don’t think he’s that wild about it, but I love it despite – or perhaps because of –  its tragic theme. Poppies are prominent throughout, starting with the boys who perished in the first World War, through to 1980s London, where the next generation have become what he poetically called “opium slaves”. It’s hardly his fault that I happened on a rogue patch of poppies and the phrase “poppies for young men” immediately came to mind. I thought, Brilliant – a theme for my Remembrance Day blog post! Only in the months between then and now, I lost my perspective.

Duelling dictators, ongoing problems in the Middle East, the Russians (another subject on Sting’s first album that remains annoyingly relevant), religious wars, civil wars, nuclear wars ... the list goes on and on, ad nauseum. By this time last week, I was nothing more than resigned to go through the motions. I mean, you have to wear a poppy, right? Otherwise, you’re being disrespectful. But inside, I viewed the poppy as a symbol of a failed exercise.

When Ter and I talked about Remembrance Day, I ’fessed up with my mixed feelings. She did not disagree. She even sympathized, as I had a point about how messed up the world remains despite the staggering loss of life in those two wars. A few hours later, after she’d pondered the predicament, she was able to adjust my perspective by reminding me of context.

“Don’t look at the world right now,” she said. “You have to remember that the threat back then was present moment. If those sacrifices had not been made, our parents’ lives would have been vastly different and so would ours. In that respect, what they gave was supremely profound and made a definite difference at the time. And at the time is what matters.”

She was right, of course. Then, as if to prove her point, I saw news interviews with a couple of the few surviving veterans who fought in WWII. They each told a story of imminent threat, of an enemy so powerful that neither thought anything of signing up to stop it. They were not fighting against future dictators or nuclear nutballs or religious extremists. They were fighting to save their Now.

The same might be said of every war that’s ever been fought; after all, the beast was not invented in 1914. It seems there’s always a threat. So long as we believe that war is the way to peace, my little patch of poppies is a blood-coloured point on a long and grisly timeline. However, I want to end this post on a positive note, so here goes:

Remembrance Day will outlast the soldiers who survived those battles. Veterans of more recent conflicts will take their places rather than stand beside them at the ceremonies in successive years. So they should. No one who goes to war should be forgotten or ignored; they deserve our respect and our gratitude. The world has become a more perilous place, yet there are still men and women brave enough to stand in defence of human rights and freedom. If one day a year is all they ask of me in return, I can give this much.

I can wear a poppy and I can mean it.

Give Peace a Chance

“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding” – Albert Einstein

“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace” – Gandhi

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others—and if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them” – the Dalai Lama

Something horrifying happened as a result of Charlottesville, last weekend. I agreed—to a point—with Donald Trump. Violence only escalates with participants on both sides.

Now that you’ve regained consciousness, my thought is actually more expansive than the single incident of protesters getting into it with white supremacists at that rally. People who bring weapons to a gathering for any reason may try to plead self defence, but that’s an extremely loose interpretation of America’s Second Amendment, “arms” being anything that will do more damage in a confrontation than bare hands. Neither is a street brawl inevitable, since violence—like peace—is a choice. The math is simple enough: weapons = intent to harm.

Were the protesters in Virginia there to perpetrate violence? Only the individuals know for sure. Did they expect to encounter resistance from the other side? Considering the collective nature of that side, you’d have to be a moron to expect otherwise.

The white supremacists, on the other hand ... I can’t begin to guess their group intention, but protesting the removal of a statue seems like an excuse to act out their fear-based self-loathing on anybody and everybody else. “We’re taking back our country,” one of them declared. Um, excuse me, sir, but the country was never yours to begin with. White men took it from the original inhabitants by trickery and force, so even the excuse that you’re reclaiming what you’ve lost is a piss-poor one.

I read a quote the other day: “We are all human. Why can’t we live together?”

Because we’re human, that’s why. We are biologically linked to the earth and all the elements; we are ruled by intellect and bullied by ego, subject to fear and driven by the emotion resulting from all of the above. Our spirit selves are a little lost amid the tumult. Rising above it takes more internal fortitude than many of us believe we have, so we resort to violence when we feel threatened. Those white supremacists in Charlottesville arrived feeling brave in their numbers, but every one of them is a fragile, fearful, wounded soul more pathetic than powerful.

And on the flipside, those standing against them  were similarly equipped, though they surely felt their cause more noble. It’s easy to hate those who behave hatefully. It’s equally easy to ape (and justify) that behaviour when we believe we’re in the right. Remember: the villain is the hero in his own story.

The events of the past week have left me somewhat discouraged and a little bit afraid of a future that seems to be unravelling like a roll of toilet paper in the mouth of a speeding squirrel. Terrorists continue to drive vehicles into crowds at festivals and public markets. Nazis, like overconfident cockroaches, are creeping out of the shadows in our own back yard. Mother Earth continues to rend her garments through weather events of Biblical proportion. We can’t live peacefully with our families, our neighbours, our co-workers, our environment, other drivers—or with ourselves.

Maybe this is the real problem. We are all victims of conditioning, of broken parents and bad relationships and the myth of a god who plays favourites. We justify our misery by blaming others and rely on outside agencies to solve our problems when in truth, we can only be responsible for ourselves. We choose our thoughts, therefore we choose our actions, and ultimately, we choose who we become.

Most of us are good people. Most of us do not appear in video clips of violence and mass hysteria. Most of us are simply doing the best we can, but the time may be coming when each of us must make a choice and stand by it. I’m not saying we each have to go it alone. Of course we don’t. There is strength in numbers, but the strength required to gain peace must not manifest in violence. It must come with kindness, with caring and generosity and understanding. It must also come from within. So start with yourself. Look inward, angel, and see where peace begins. Find it there, or find a way to bring it there. Nurture it. Practice it, and when you’re comfortable with it, let it spread outward, beyond yourself to the realm of others, and once the world alights, watch those cockroaches run for cover.

With love,

Hygge Days Are Here Again

It’s a Danish word that has no precise comparative in English. Like umami, it’s a sense rather than a solid; one of those mysterious intangibles that everybody understands not by intellect, but by spirit.

Hygge (clumsily pronounced “hue-gah”) is defined as “a complete absence of anything annoying or emotionally overwhelming, and/or the act of taking pleasure from the presence of simple, soothing things.”

It’s the feeling you get in front of a fire, when the cold dark winter closes in and folks gather together for warmth and comfort. It’s the light of a single candle after everyone else goes to bed. The pleasure in a cup of hot chocolate spiked with Bailey’s. The joy in sharing a blanket on a snowy sleigh ride. The sound of jingle bells. The smell of cinnamon and cloves. Little kids laughing. Your favourite sweater. A hug from a friend. Exchanging smiles with a stranger. Coming in from the cold and scenting shortbread fresh from the oven. Listening to carols while looking at the Christmas tree.

It’s not exclusive to the winter, though it probably lends itself best to the time between fall and spring, and it’s not really about the components of circumstance, either. If I understand it correctly, it’s about how you feel. I suspect I feel it more when I am myself, not necessarily alone, but with my trusted posse, those who know me best and love me as I truly am. A feeling of belonging, of acceptance and connection; of oneness with something greater than the individual.

It feels good. It feels warm. It feels comforting and safe. It feels ... wonderful.

They say the Danes are the happiest people in the world. Hygge knew?

Another Perspective

At Rockland, Ter and I would stay up to see the Canada Day fireworks from our living room window. Since we moved to sea level, we only get the acoustics. Pop pop, pa-poppopop, popopopopoBANG! And so forth. It’s scheduled, so there’s no surprise when the explosions start.

One random Saturday night, we heard the same thing: Pop pop, pa-poppopop, popopopopoBANG! We wondered aloud what the occasion might be, since we knew of no celebration associated with July 9, then shrugged and went about our nightly routine of getting the bears ready for bed.

They weren’t bothered, either. One of them reminded me, huffing a little with displeasure, that there had been fireworks before Canada Day as well, at the home opener for the local baseball team. And I seem to remember a similarly unexpected display last year, something to do with Oak Bay perhaps, that I dismissed as simply more fireworks.

How fortunate I am to live in a place where Pop pop, pa-poppopop, popopopopoBANG! heralds nothing more sinister than an unscheduled fireworks display. It’s not a sniper picking off police officers or a religious nutbar massacring innocent people at a nightclub. It’s not civil war. It’s not an insurrection. It’s just a light show against the night sky.

A similar thought occurred ahead of a Snowbirds performance a couple of years ago (and I might have mentioned it in a previous post). The rush I feel on hearing the fighter jets’ approach is nothing remotely like what another woman in a war-torn country must feel on hearing the same sound. I was at work one day when the roar of low-flying military planes rattled the building and a co-worker asked me what the heck was going on. “The Snowbirds are in town this weekend,” I replied. “They must be practicing for the show.”

“I thought we were being bombed by Lebanon!”

She was joking, of course, but the sentiment has stayed with me. I can’t stress it enough. I can’t be grateful enough to live in a place where the sounds associated with war and craziness are a signal not to duck and cover, but to take the kids outside and watch the show.

War (What Is It Good For?)

This post was inappropriate for Remembrance Day, though it was prompted by the occasion. Every year, I see the poppies come out. I pin one on my own coat from respect from the fallen, but I don’t believe in war.

I wonder how many of the soldiers who fight them do believe in it.

I tried to write an appropriately respectful piece about conflict on a global scale, the horrors of two World Wars, the trauma of Afghanistan and the massive damage of ongoing unrest in the Middle East, but it’s too easy to pontificate from my comfy chair in western Canada. I can’t speak from experience (for which I am eternally grateful). None of my loved ones have been sacrificed in service to their country.

So I watch the faces of the veterans during Remembrance Day ceremonies and wonder how they must feel, knowing that the world they fought to improve is spiralling deeper into despair in spite of their heroic efforts. And now that those who survived WWII are dwindling in number, we are reminded of the men and women who fought in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and those on assignment as peacekeepers in hotbeds of civil conflict everywhere else but here. I’m glad I’m not a soldier, or that none of my sibs or nieces or nephews chose a military career. Of course I believe in reverence for those who perish in battle … but on a day when thousands of refugees are flooding out of Syria because of yet another war (or is it part of a big, long, never ending one?), I’m starting to think more about the victims of war than of the heroes who fight them.

It isn’t working, people. Can’t we just stop?

Lest We Forget

You can only remember if you survived it. In the comfort and safety of your untroubled life, you can merely imagine.

Imagine, then, those who went before, who went bravely and naïvely into battle, face to face with the enemy (boys like themselves), armed with bayonets and met by machine guns. Imagine those who were wreathed in poisoned gas, blinded by smoke and mustard fumes, their throats too choked to scream, heroes robbed of wits and possessed by a terror unseen in your wildest nightmares.

Imagine those who perished in open fields, in wooded copses and muddy trenches. Imagine those who died far from home, who left their mothers and sisters and sweethearts on a mission to retrieve the Kaiser’s helmet and were never seen again.

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep …

In Flanders Field was written by a man, a witness to the slaughter of a generation sent forth to preserve the liberty of others. In the poem, the dead pass us the torch and warn us against breaking their faith—but can ceasing to fight be considered a break of their faith? They know now, knew as soon as they shed their broken and bloody flesh, that war is not the way to peace. We remember them today because they offered their innocence, their futures, and their very lives to ensure that the world was a safe place for everyone to live.

That it is worse now than it was then, is an insult to their sacrifice.

So remember why they went forth so courageously, in pursuit of an ideal that lies within reach of every living soul yet remains untouched. Remember that war is the worst horror we can visit upon ourselves and do everything in your power to Stop It.

Perhaps then, the dead will sleep.

Bullies

A lot of people are angry after what happened in Ottawa last week. Angry, afraid, and awakened to a horrible global truth, that we as a nation are no longer safe on our own turf. It’s taken me a few days to figure out how I feel about it.

I’m sad.

Sad that Canada is no longer exempt from the venom of radical terrorist groups. Sad that Corporal Nathan Carillo’s destiny was to be the death that woke us up. Sad that I sat in a sunny open courtyard the day after he was killed and wondered what would happen if one of the passersby suddenly pulled a gun and opened fire. Sad that guns, despite the laws that control them, are showing up in these formerly unheard of situations north of the US border. Sad that it’s finally come to this, that the least offensive country in the First World has lost her status as a safe place to be.

Sad, sad, sad.

Anger is a uniquely human response, always born of another action, deliberate or not, that threatens or offends. In no way will I plead the case of the individual who did this—he’s already moved on and discovered how horrendously misguided he was to buy into the propaganda of hate. What I will say is that I believe terrorists are, at their singular core, little more than jumped-up schoolyard bullies, so wrought with their own misery and self-loathing that they seek to empower themselves by victimizing others—usually those who are weaker than themselves, but in the case of ISIS or whatever they’re called, those whom they perceive as would-be oppressors. Canada got onto the hit list because we’re allied with the big boys. Guilt by association.

Seriously? Attacking us is like kicking a puppy. We don’t play the aggressor except on a sheet of ice, but we do heed the call for help in righting wrongs committed against innocents, and what terrorist groups do is wrong on so many levels I can’t begin to list them all. Yes, the Middle East is a hotbed of conflict and yes, if they weren’t sitting on the world’s oil supply, few governments would likely bother about them, but still. Be honest about it. Show your face and state your name. Openly recant your citizenship. Be proud to scorn your family, your nationality, and the religion you claim to revere. Man up to the consequence of your decision. If you believe what you’re doing is right and true, then have the courage to own your actions.

America does. Britain does. So do the Palestinians and the Israelis. Heck, so does North Korea. And, if you push us, so will Canada.

The world is run by ego, ambition, fear and hatred. Peace is a concept, and misunderstood at that. Peace is perceived as “not at war” and is therefore unsustainable.

Warring to stop war is insanity at its finest, but we’re in it now and there’s no going back. We’ll be forced into battle against this gang of miserable outcasts whether or not we believe it’s the only way. Millennia of history tells how this will end.

Badly.

But I won’t live in fear of the bullies. I won’t accept that people are inherently evil and unworthy of my trust. I will get angry, but I will release the anger without acting on it. Every one of us was born to love and be loved. We are what the world makes of us.

And that may be the saddest thing of all.

Poppies

I wear my poppy on my purse. I don’t think it’s disrespectful; no one has said to me, “Hey, lady, it goes on your lapel!” I change up my coats at this time of year, and while I could have bought a poppy for each one, I’ve only just thought of it so will change my practice in 2014. In the meantime, I’ve had the one with me everywhere I go. 

This far into the 21^st century, when there can’t be more than a handful of veterans left who fought in World War I and the number of those who survived the Second is dwindling daily, it’s hard to imagine how horrible war really is. I mean, was. If it was still as horrible as it was during the World Wars, maybe it wouldn’t be happening anymore. Problem is, war has become so sanitized, so easy and impersonal, that we don’t even think about it except to shake our heads and say how awful it is. 

How do we know? We’re safe and secure (relatively) in our padded little corner of the world. War has been happening pretty much through the length of my life. I’m just not affected by it because the battles are fought elsewhere. Sure, Canadian troops are deployed to those places, but I’m not from a military family and the country itself is only under siege from foreign investors. In no way do I mean to belittle the sacrifice of service to one’s nation. I believe in peace. I’m just unsure that war is the way to achieve it. 

So when Remembrance Day comes along, I am reminded of those who serve and have served. We think primarily of the World War vets because the historic value in those conflicts is immense – even though we’ve learned nothing from them except how to make it more comfortable for those indirectly involved. Conflict continues in other parts of the world and young men (and women) continue to endanger themselves for the combined cause of peace and freedom. We have veterans from the Gulf and Afghanistan wars, which got press but were buried amongst other news items so it was hard to pay real attention unless you knew or were related to someone who was actually there. Or worse, who was killed in action. I don’t know why people sign up. I wish there was no such thing as a call to arms. If we could solve our own problems without conflict and bloodshed – and interfering in others – maybe November 11 would become a celebration of peace rather than a requiem for those who died fighting for it. 

I accidentally stabbed my finger on the pin of my poppy the other day. I was about to make a big drama of it until I remembered why I have a poppy in the first place. 

Lest we forget.