A Modest Celebration

All you need is.....

It is a dull, misty morning. As is often the case these days, my mind clicks and whirrs as if it is in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, little impulses flickering around like grains of sand in an old tin, the platelets colliding and then sticking as I worry about amyloid-ß plaque formation, and in amongst this turmoil I hear snatches of songs and echoes of poems once learned:

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

W B Yeats

EASTER 1916

I walk out in the dim day, wondering about this world and how it has seen plague and war ever since we began to civilise ourselves.  I have often thought how fortunate I have been not to have been in some other time, some other place. I kick myself for my superficial and trivial mind, and then lapse into a kind of torpor, before another thought emerges.  Did Alexei Navalny die in vain?  And why did this occur to me?  I face the wall:

And Robert Frost comes to mind:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down

 

Robert Frost

Mending Wall

And then walking on, I see the village church spire probing the mist above.  Why can't I believe in something?  Anything?  Did the saints all die in vain?

Those poppies round the gate - the messages of love - those who fought and died, or perhaps, just died - what is this life if full of care?  I must snap out of it.  The news - today's news - will soon be forgotten.  Please?

George Harrison comes to mind.  He said this about a song he wrote: Sometimes you open your mouth and you don’t know what you are going to say, and whatever comes out is the starting point. If that happens and you are lucky, it can usually be turned into a song. This song is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord, and whoever likes it.

I like it:

Give me love, give me love

Give me peace on earth

Give me light, give me life

Keep me free from birth

Give me hope, help me cope

With this heavy load

Trying to touch and reach you with

Heart and soul

 

George Harrison

Give me love (Give me peace on earth)

I walk on, the damp clinging to me, smoke from an early bonfire drifting lazily around me.  There is someone on the allotments before me.  Tim Mann stands and leans on his hoe, and we exchange greetings.  It is a moment of hope.  The only other person in the world for the moment and we share thoughts on the way the world is turning.  How strange that on this dull morning the one person I meet speaks in a language I understand, and says things that I can comprehend, things that seem to chime with things I would like to say too.

They'll try to teach you how to stop shining. 

And you, instead, must shine on. 

Tim Mann to his 10 year old self

I am lifted up.  Perhaps all is not lost?  Sanity is not entirely dead.  While there are the empty spaces - the desolation:

There are also flowers that bloom:

And, to put it coarsely, there is hope that something fresh may grow out of the shit:

Another song comes to mind. I remember seeing the Beatles perform this in July 1967 on a TV show that went simultaneously around the world. And I remember seeing a counter ticking, as the 200 millionth birth in the United States of America arrived. There are now nearly 350 million persons in the USA. Isn't that crazy?  In my short lifetime, the number of us on this planet has gone from around 2.5 billion (when I was born) to approximately 3.5 when All You Need is Love was recorded, to 8.2 billion today.  (That's a lot of gravestones, Ed.) 

Nothing you can make that can't be made
No one you can save that can't be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn
How to be you in time
It's easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

 

John Lennon/Paul McCartney

All You Need is Love

OK I may be blinding myself with gossamer dreams (look what happened to John? Ed.) but there has to be hope, and there has to be love (Though maybe that is what you are missing this morning? Ed.)

I walk on.  The path enclosed in weedy growth, the sky so dense that the Pink-footed geese are confused, their two- or three-syllable scratchy honks sound worried as they flap in chevrons through the murk:

But then, back in the village, I dream there is a rainbow over the cottages. Is this a portent of better things to come, or a symbol of an impending storm?

Truth is, I don't know what to make of it.  I cannot make sense of my life, let alone the bigger picture. W B Yeats comes back, his gravestone in Drumcliff suggesting that perhaps we should not take everything too seriously:

Cast a cold Eye 

On life, on Death.

Horseman pass by!

This evening I will stage a modest celebration.  I will light a bonfire and I will burn away confusion and regret. No effigy will be consumed, for that is not the way.  I will try to give thanks for good.  We can but try....

Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

There's nothing you can do that can't be done
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn
How to play the game
It's easy

 

There is music in the midst of desolation
Laurence Binyon

 

“We are all the same, to notice our similarities is to celebrate it in others. It is to celebrate ourselves and each other as being human.”

Tim Mann

And for more about Tim, please see his website:

 https://timmannartist.com/introduction/