NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote to a young friend, begging him to "have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.” I remarked to a friend some years ago now, that I wished I had been exposed to the knowledge in my 40s that I was discovering in my 60s. The answer I received was ‘Perhaps you did, but you weren’t ready for it then.’ This knowledge however has just led to new questions. Unfortunately, unlike Rilke suggests in her quote above, I have yet to find myself any nearer to an answer. Instead I find the questions themselves are proliferating. 

I wrote this on All Saints Day this year. And as I wrote it, the tune Sine Nomine to which we yearly sing “For all the saints who from their glories rest… was going through my head, just as it had been all day. But rather than thinking about the words I have sung so often, I found myself thinking about who or what a saint really is… and let me tell you, there are many ideas out there.  A saint  is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as  a good and holy person and especially one who the Christian church declared to be worthy of special honour, or a person who is very good, helpful or patient. “A man does not have to be an angel in order to be a saint.”  Albert Schweitzer This is demonstrably true. One only has to look at those officially named saints by the church. There is the fourth century St. Augustine of Hippo, who was a playboy of sorts. There there was Junipero Serra who was tied to a system that decimated the population of Native Americans ad was canonized by Pope

Church bells rang out across our communities celebrating 100 years since the end of WW1, "the war to end all wars"  as once again we gathered on November 11th to observe Remembrance Day. So as the Middle East, as well as many other places on this globe, reverberated with the sounds of of gunfire and of bombs detonating, we gathered: the young and the old. There was talk of the sacrifice made by many men & women, not just in World War 1 but in the many wars and conflicts since that time: all those  who gave their lives in service to their country, whatever country that might be. And so we remembered…. Achieving a lasting peace has become more and more important as the weapons of war have gotten more deadly, until we now have the capacity to end all human life on this globe. What about the millions of people whose lives have been turned upside down by this latest violence?  Do we remember those who have been killed either by enemy or ‘friendly fire’ or have lost

I have one favourite day each year. Do you? Mine isn’t Christmas, nor is it my birthday. But instead it is that day each Autumn, when we set the clocks back an hour at the end of Daylight Saving time and we all get that extra hour of sleep. Now, an extra hour of sleep mayn’t speak to speak to you but it is very important in the life of someone who has never been a ‘morning person’! This year I have been thinking about just why I am so drawn to this day [other that the reason above, that is. …lol…]. It is a time my reality and the reality of the universe are the same.  When I don’t have to fight against that reality. When I can pretend just for a few hours that I am really in control! Sound strange??? Well in the spring, I can try to outfox the beginning of daylight saving when we set the clocks back, by going to bed an hour early. That makes it possible that I get the sleep I need, BUT at the expense of whatever else I might have done in that hour. So one way or another I a