Sunday, August 10, 2014
What good is melody...
What good is music?
If it ain’t possessing something sweet
Now it ain’t the melody
And it ain’t the music
There’s something else that makes this tune complete.....
It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing. That's what the Sligo Jazz Project week had, and then some. A week of music, of love, of laughter, of such incredible energy and vibes that I'm still not quite over it yet. Meeting new friends, reconnecting with old (and not so old!) friends and just generally living in the moment, it was a week I badly needed, a week to take myself out of this strange new world I've found myself in over the last two and half a months.
Music is one thing that helps. It helps distract, it helps soothe, it helps heal. The right notes, the right melody can hit at times when you least it expect it to, and that's what happened to me a lot last week. There were times when a memory would come to mind, something small and would leave me on the verge of tears. Then a groove would begin to emerge from a classroom, voices or notes would echo down the corridors and life suddenly seemed ok.
Watching returning students who've improved so much over the years, watching new students get their groove on, the kids group so fantastically led by Cathal and watching the reaction of the crowds as they fell into a music induced trance was fantastic. Catching up with returning tutors, chilling out with new ones, and some amazingly sweet moments mid-conversation, mid-drive, mid-gig, mid-jam....just fantastic.
There's so many happy moments that bring a smile to my face when I think of them, hearing & watching Jeanfrancois & Judy jamming together on the first night in 5th, driving a rather lovely gentleman round Sligo as he stuck his hands out of the sunroof was fun, as were the many mad moments during dinners, where Lieve and I would hit the wall of tired insanity and starting laughing at something completely nonsensical. The first sup of a glass of Guinness after a long day, Johnny's constant cheeriness and loveliness around the school, and a rather long and funny conversation about the correct way to pronounce indefatigable (in-de-fatigue-able or in-defat-ig-able) with 3 funny gents will always make me smile, as will the quietness of last evening just chilling in the Sligo Park with a glass of vino and some wonderful company before moving onto 5th to begin the goodbyes.
There were so many beautiful musical moments, not least Alan Broadbent's calm and moving sincerity as he talked about his arrangement of "Wayfaring Stranger" that Charlie Haden sang so hesitantly and yet so beautifully-he spoke of the subtle mood changes in the music, how during the line "I know dark clouds will gather round", the strings surround him like the dark clouds... and then those very same strings soothe us with the hope in the line "Golden fields lie out before me...." . Varying moments in gigs throughout the week, Steve's solo tribute which finished with the tutors all singing along at the end, or seeing all the tutors performing & enjoying themselves during the last show....all just such beautiful moments...
One wonderful personal moment for me was chatting with Alan over lunch one of the days and talking with him about the first time I heard and saw that piece. I felt utterly transfixed, that for those few minutes, all there was in the world, in the universe was Charlie Haden's voice, those strings and me. It's still hard to put into words just how beautiful, how heartbreaking and yet soul soothing a piece it was, and how hard it hit me that first time, but I tried to explain that reaction I'd had to him. And Alan said, "well, that's the whole purpose of music really, to take yourself outta life sometimes.."
Life is nothing without music, and music is nothing without life.
Something changes...
(mostly written yesterday, 08/08/14)
...irrevocably in you when you watch someone you love die. I've resisted somewhat writing about it, because I genuinely am unsure how to word it, how to encapsulate what a beautiful, yet heartbreaking, soul-affirming and yet soul-destroying moment it is.
I know I'll be thinking, feeling, reliving and remembering my Aunt's passing for a considerable length of time yet, and yet, this piece has been started, both mentally, and physically, so many times and stopped, on both the computer and on paper....so we'll see how far it gets today.
I honestly feel like I had no time to contemplate just how hard the loss of Anne would hit me. Out of all my Aunts, she was the one I was closest to, she was the one I would text now and again about something small, something silly. She knew about boyfriends, she knew about work, she knew about what i got up to in my free time, she knew about everything. That's not to say we were texting or talking 24/7, but over the last year, I had been down so much to Limerick for work and stayed with her & my Uncle so many times that I was really looking forward to doing it more often as the years passed. But alas....
It's the stupid things in grief that hit. Those "this time X weeks" ago moments that ambush you. Earlier today, the realisation that this date 8 weeks ago, I had been helping to carry her out to the hearse, despite the protestations of my Uncles and my gammy knee, I felt I had to lend to a hand, even if it was one guided by a limp, to even help to carry her was such an overwhelming emotion that I find it hard to describe. Even though Anne's soul, her spirit was technically gone, it was still her, it was still something I felt I could help her with.
As I said, something changes in you when you watch someone you love so deeply take their last breath. Everything in the world seems more raw, more fresh, more real. You can't understand why people scream at one another in traffic, why people insist on "things" being so important, newspapers and magazines and twitter and facebook tell you that you MUST download this app as it'll change/fix/improve your life, that you must visit this place or check out that band and it all seems so pointless, because at the end of the day, you'd trade everything, every possession, just to have those last few days back, because it would mean life would feel somewhat ok again.
The way the services went, the reposing in Limerick where her friends and colleagues were able to say their goodbyes, the funeral in Sligo, the cremation in Dublin went...they were perfect. Everyone took their own things from them. For me, the Cathedral will always be a place of mourning-i have buried too many friends and family from there to think of it in any other way. Yet I know merely being able to have Anne's funeral there, and especially having her neighbours as the celebrants brought a wonderful comfort to us all, and particularly,a special comfort to those in our family (and friends) of the Catholic faith.
Beautiful and all as the funeral was, the cremation was where I felt Anne's spirit, her essence, her soul and love shone through. From the moment Sean got up to speak, there was love, there was humour, there was heartbreak, there was kindness and compassion in every speaker, which echoed through the walls there. The music was perfect, and my only regret is that we didn't manage to squeeze in some T-Rex too!
There was even some smiles for me after the curtains closed as I realised that the next track on the CD was Pink Floyd's "Time", which, if you're not familiar with, starts off with bells ringing and blaring. As most of the crowd in the crematorium weren't used to cremations, and we'd been told the service should be no more than 30 mins, I had visions of the bells blaring and people thinking that crematoriums rang bells after the 30 minutes and they'd all get up and start leaving as Dave Gilmour blared "Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day..." I had to ask my niece to run down to the staff and ask them to turn it down before it started but the thoughts of the absurdity of the situation left me smiling through the tears.
Smiling through the tears, a good way to describe how I'll forever feel about Anne's passing. I still can't quite believe it's happened, and I know I'll be saying those words for many years to come. I find myself breaking down at the stupidest of times and having to walk back to the car, or to a bathroom just to let the tears out, as breaking down in the middle of a shopping centre is never fun. Seeing jewellery she'd like in a shop, someone who has the same perfume as her, and occasionally, from nowhere, the thought comes that my Aunt is gone from us and nothing can ever change that.
July 31st should've been her 54th birthday. In years gone by, inevitably I'd text either on the day or a day or few later and receive a thankful reply, one which usually referred to her as "the worst Godmother" on account of the fact that she would forget about mine. No matter how often I said it, I could never seem to persuade that she wasn't a bad Godmother, and besides-how could she judge that when technically, she'd never been called into play as both my parents were alive when I was 18?! I loved those moments in conversation, in text, in person, via her phonecalls with Mum, because somehow, they only served to emphasise her love for me.
Suffice to say, I never once envisaged a future where they'd both still be here and she wouldn't be. She's over 20 years younger than Dad, and 14 years younger than Mum-why would I ever have imagined she'd be gone before them? And yet, she is.
Last year, on her birthday, I texted her very early in the morning, as I was in the hospital after my knee replacement, and she was due to pick me up when I was discharged. In her reply, she said she'd forgotten it was her birthday! It was long day, and we had to stop off to pick up my sick brother in Maynooth and bring him to Mullingar-without telling my Mum, who was at my brother Sean's bedside as he had just started his chemo that week.
When we finally got back to Sligo, we had a cuppa and a wee birthday cake whilst discussing my brother's chemo and my knee and the wee holiday that she & Uncle were about to embark on in their new camper van. It wasn't the perfect birthday for Anne by any means, but, looking back at that day, it epitomised her. She'd spent all the day with family, starting the day at her big brother's house and finishing the day at her big sister's house. She spent it looking after nieces and nephews, being full of wit and kindness, and loveliness throughout the long, long day-all that was missing was my Uncle, and how I wish he'd gotten to spend some of the day with her.
We never know how life is going to turn out, and those little things, which seem so small, so insignificant, suddenly take on new meaning when someone we love passes away. Now everything is heightened, everything is different, our world is changed, "changed utterly."
...irrevocably in you when you watch someone you love die. I've resisted somewhat writing about it, because I genuinely am unsure how to word it, how to encapsulate what a beautiful, yet heartbreaking, soul-affirming and yet soul-destroying moment it is.
I know I'll be thinking, feeling, reliving and remembering my Aunt's passing for a considerable length of time yet, and yet, this piece has been started, both mentally, and physically, so many times and stopped, on both the computer and on paper....so we'll see how far it gets today.
I honestly feel like I had no time to contemplate just how hard the loss of Anne would hit me. Out of all my Aunts, she was the one I was closest to, she was the one I would text now and again about something small, something silly. She knew about boyfriends, she knew about work, she knew about what i got up to in my free time, she knew about everything. That's not to say we were texting or talking 24/7, but over the last year, I had been down so much to Limerick for work and stayed with her & my Uncle so many times that I was really looking forward to doing it more often as the years passed. But alas....
It's the stupid things in grief that hit. Those "this time X weeks" ago moments that ambush you. Earlier today, the realisation that this date 8 weeks ago, I had been helping to carry her out to the hearse, despite the protestations of my Uncles and my gammy knee, I felt I had to lend to a hand, even if it was one guided by a limp, to even help to carry her was such an overwhelming emotion that I find it hard to describe. Even though Anne's soul, her spirit was technically gone, it was still her, it was still something I felt I could help her with.
As I said, something changes in you when you watch someone you love so deeply take their last breath. Everything in the world seems more raw, more fresh, more real. You can't understand why people scream at one another in traffic, why people insist on "things" being so important, newspapers and magazines and twitter and facebook tell you that you MUST download this app as it'll change/fix/improve your life, that you must visit this place or check out that band and it all seems so pointless, because at the end of the day, you'd trade everything, every possession, just to have those last few days back, because it would mean life would feel somewhat ok again.
The way the services went, the reposing in Limerick where her friends and colleagues were able to say their goodbyes, the funeral in Sligo, the cremation in Dublin went...they were perfect. Everyone took their own things from them. For me, the Cathedral will always be a place of mourning-i have buried too many friends and family from there to think of it in any other way. Yet I know merely being able to have Anne's funeral there, and especially having her neighbours as the celebrants brought a wonderful comfort to us all, and particularly,a special comfort to those in our family (and friends) of the Catholic faith.
Beautiful and all as the funeral was, the cremation was where I felt Anne's spirit, her essence, her soul and love shone through. From the moment Sean got up to speak, there was love, there was humour, there was heartbreak, there was kindness and compassion in every speaker, which echoed through the walls there. The music was perfect, and my only regret is that we didn't manage to squeeze in some T-Rex too!
There was even some smiles for me after the curtains closed as I realised that the next track on the CD was Pink Floyd's "Time", which, if you're not familiar with, starts off with bells ringing and blaring. As most of the crowd in the crematorium weren't used to cremations, and we'd been told the service should be no more than 30 mins, I had visions of the bells blaring and people thinking that crematoriums rang bells after the 30 minutes and they'd all get up and start leaving as Dave Gilmour blared "Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day..." I had to ask my niece to run down to the staff and ask them to turn it down before it started but the thoughts of the absurdity of the situation left me smiling through the tears.
Smiling through the tears, a good way to describe how I'll forever feel about Anne's passing. I still can't quite believe it's happened, and I know I'll be saying those words for many years to come. I find myself breaking down at the stupidest of times and having to walk back to the car, or to a bathroom just to let the tears out, as breaking down in the middle of a shopping centre is never fun. Seeing jewellery she'd like in a shop, someone who has the same perfume as her, and occasionally, from nowhere, the thought comes that my Aunt is gone from us and nothing can ever change that.
July 31st should've been her 54th birthday. In years gone by, inevitably I'd text either on the day or a day or few later and receive a thankful reply, one which usually referred to her as "the worst Godmother" on account of the fact that she would forget about mine. No matter how often I said it, I could never seem to persuade that she wasn't a bad Godmother, and besides-how could she judge that when technically, she'd never been called into play as both my parents were alive when I was 18?! I loved those moments in conversation, in text, in person, via her phonecalls with Mum, because somehow, they only served to emphasise her love for me.
Suffice to say, I never once envisaged a future where they'd both still be here and she wouldn't be. She's over 20 years younger than Dad, and 14 years younger than Mum-why would I ever have imagined she'd be gone before them? And yet, she is.
Last year, on her birthday, I texted her very early in the morning, as I was in the hospital after my knee replacement, and she was due to pick me up when I was discharged. In her reply, she said she'd forgotten it was her birthday! It was long day, and we had to stop off to pick up my sick brother in Maynooth and bring him to Mullingar-without telling my Mum, who was at my brother Sean's bedside as he had just started his chemo that week.
When we finally got back to Sligo, we had a cuppa and a wee birthday cake whilst discussing my brother's chemo and my knee and the wee holiday that she & Uncle were about to embark on in their new camper van. It wasn't the perfect birthday for Anne by any means, but, looking back at that day, it epitomised her. She'd spent all the day with family, starting the day at her big brother's house and finishing the day at her big sister's house. She spent it looking after nieces and nephews, being full of wit and kindness, and loveliness throughout the long, long day-all that was missing was my Uncle, and how I wish he'd gotten to spend some of the day with her.
We never know how life is going to turn out, and those little things, which seem so small, so insignificant, suddenly take on new meaning when someone we love passes away. Now everything is heightened, everything is different, our world is changed, "changed utterly."
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Níl aon cois farraige mar do cois farraige féin
(I've become rather bad at actually posting these ramblings...I write them, then think I'll come back to double check them and then post, but no, I write them, and forget. So here's a few from the last month that I've decided to publish...I've included the original writing dates on them so hopefully that'll remind me in times to come of the times when they were written!)
(16.07.2014)
For those of you whose gaelige ain't so good, that roughly translates to, there's no seaside/beach like your own seaside/beach-it's a slight paraphrasing of "níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán fein" (in Dorothy-speak, there's no place like home)
I spent part of last weekend in Sligo, just seeing family and catching up on some SJP stuff. A colleague of mine had been away on a mini-surfing break last week, and seeing the photos of the sea and the waves and the shore made me desperately want to be back home, back beside the sea, back to the waves. So yesterday morning, I got up and went to the beach (with my booties. My new kneecap and I are brave enough to go into the water, just not stupid enough to go over rocks with no grips on my feet!)
It was around 10.30 and the sky was cloudy and grey. It seemed like rain was on the way, but, to steal a quote from Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me worry?!" I figured once I was in the water, I'd be wet anyway. So, swimsuit on, booties on, and off I waded.
I'd forgotten that, once you get over the chill, the sea feels so beautiful against skin-it's a strange sensation, one that can't be compared to the feeling of the treated water in swimming pools, or the tepid crap that flows in houses. The sea is something magical, something special. I will never forget that first look around after surfacing, Benbulben to my left, and the first beach, with Knocknarea peeking over the edge of the cliffs to my right.
Although after 10 mins, my knee (and eventually calf & quads!) were killing me, and yet, I couldn't bring myself to get out of the water. It was still such an amazing experience, to swim with the flow of the waves sometimes, to swim out against them, to dive through them other times, and occasionally, to just lie back, and let the wind and the waves take me along. Lying back, looking up at that sky was bliss. Grey clouds drifting, the sounds of waves breaking, birds flying and a feeling that I could've stayed in that moment forever.
I stayed in for almost half an hour, thinking about everything and nothing in between, my family, my friends, those who've gone before me, and how they enjoyed the sea and the scenes that I was drifting along in front of. It crossed my mind how lucky I am to be who I am, where I am; that I'm not a Palestinian, a Syrian, that I'm not living in suffering every day, that my brother is still here, that at least I was there with my Aunt when she passed, that Sligo is not just where I'm from, but it's something within my soul.
Were it not for growing up in Sligo, spending my teenage years beside the sea (albeit with the most bad grace possible, apologies to the parentals!), I don't know if my love of the sea, of those moments of listening to "water lapping, with low sounds by the shore"*, would have such an indelible effect on my soul as they do now. There is something uniquely spiritual about sitting listening to the sea, to ebb and flow of the water as it glides across sand, as it rushes in and out through the stones, and there is something amazingly awe-inspiring about the power and strength behind the Atlantic waves I've witnessed over the decades that have pounded the beaches and the rocks around my home county.
We humans are supposedly made up of 90% water, so I guess it makes sense to feel so at home in it. Yet there's a calmness, an "at homeness" that I feel in the Atlantic that I've never felt anywhere else, not the Mediterranean, not the Irish sea, not the North Sea....maybe the old phrase "Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile" (Irish for one beetle recognises another beetle") holds true, maybe somewhere, something inside instinctively recognise this place called home.
Or maybe it's just wishful thinking. Who knows. All I know is that there is a soul soothing comfort in that sea that I have never felt anywhere else and that days like last Sunday are something rather special indeed.....and most certainly, níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán fein.
*p.s. I know Yeats was talking about lake water lapping, but the sea does it too..!
(16.07.2014)
For those of you whose gaelige ain't so good, that roughly translates to, there's no seaside/beach like your own seaside/beach-it's a slight paraphrasing of "níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán fein" (in Dorothy-speak, there's no place like home)
I spent part of last weekend in Sligo, just seeing family and catching up on some SJP stuff. A colleague of mine had been away on a mini-surfing break last week, and seeing the photos of the sea and the waves and the shore made me desperately want to be back home, back beside the sea, back to the waves. So yesterday morning, I got up and went to the beach (with my booties. My new kneecap and I are brave enough to go into the water, just not stupid enough to go over rocks with no grips on my feet!)
It was around 10.30 and the sky was cloudy and grey. It seemed like rain was on the way, but, to steal a quote from Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me worry?!" I figured once I was in the water, I'd be wet anyway. So, swimsuit on, booties on, and off I waded.
I'd forgotten that, once you get over the chill, the sea feels so beautiful against skin-it's a strange sensation, one that can't be compared to the feeling of the treated water in swimming pools, or the tepid crap that flows in houses. The sea is something magical, something special. I will never forget that first look around after surfacing, Benbulben to my left, and the first beach, with Knocknarea peeking over the edge of the cliffs to my right.
Although after 10 mins, my knee (and eventually calf & quads!) were killing me, and yet, I couldn't bring myself to get out of the water. It was still such an amazing experience, to swim with the flow of the waves sometimes, to swim out against them, to dive through them other times, and occasionally, to just lie back, and let the wind and the waves take me along. Lying back, looking up at that sky was bliss. Grey clouds drifting, the sounds of waves breaking, birds flying and a feeling that I could've stayed in that moment forever.
I stayed in for almost half an hour, thinking about everything and nothing in between, my family, my friends, those who've gone before me, and how they enjoyed the sea and the scenes that I was drifting along in front of. It crossed my mind how lucky I am to be who I am, where I am; that I'm not a Palestinian, a Syrian, that I'm not living in suffering every day, that my brother is still here, that at least I was there with my Aunt when she passed, that Sligo is not just where I'm from, but it's something within my soul.
Were it not for growing up in Sligo, spending my teenage years beside the sea (albeit with the most bad grace possible, apologies to the parentals!), I don't know if my love of the sea, of those moments of listening to "water lapping, with low sounds by the shore"*, would have such an indelible effect on my soul as they do now. There is something uniquely spiritual about sitting listening to the sea, to ebb and flow of the water as it glides across sand, as it rushes in and out through the stones, and there is something amazingly awe-inspiring about the power and strength behind the Atlantic waves I've witnessed over the decades that have pounded the beaches and the rocks around my home county.
We humans are supposedly made up of 90% water, so I guess it makes sense to feel so at home in it. Yet there's a calmness, an "at homeness" that I feel in the Atlantic that I've never felt anywhere else, not the Mediterranean, not the Irish sea, not the North Sea....maybe the old phrase "Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile" (Irish for one beetle recognises another beetle") holds true, maybe somewhere, something inside instinctively recognise this place called home.
Or maybe it's just wishful thinking. Who knows. All I know is that there is a soul soothing comfort in that sea that I have never felt anywhere else and that days like last Sunday are something rather special indeed.....and most certainly, níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán fein.
*p.s. I know Yeats was talking about lake water lapping, but the sea does it too..!
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