I float on a sea that my father sailed,
as his many fathers before him availed
Destinies entwined, fatedly twinned,
spun of a whole, upon a web of wind.

Unseen currents coursing deep beneath
carry me forth as a leaf in the breeze
Tides, ignorant of my will to reverse,
propel me along their confident course.

Swells of primal brine buffet my soul;
I fear a shift will cast me onto a shoal
Intimate waters, generations long gone,
wash over eternal stones in unending song.

Waves of memory crash and arise,
explosions of consciousness pulverize,
Surges of conscience scream in the night
erode the illusion of my naïve sight —

That I’m somehow different from ancestral peerage,
the ancient ones who’ve given me steerage.
Forgive me, my fathers, unknown and unseen:
I have sailed in your seas, in your names, in vain.

But your voyages aren’t mine, though the lanes are the same;
Your odysseys have flown off, distant mists into time.
This journey now trumps mere paternity:
This is my lone crossing of the ageless sea.

My fathers, I’m yours not by breath, just by seed,
I am my own child, I will breathe and conceive:
I will right this, my ship, I‘ll hold fast to the rudder;
You’re all gone now, I will be my own father.

 

To wish, to hope, to yearn:

these are the nature of the species.

To aspire, to envision, to strive:

these are the nobility of the species.

To wander in reverie, contemplation, even fantasy:

these are creativity of the species.

To surrender to delusion, to trance, to hallucination:

these are the greatest dangers to the species.

To truly wake to potential, to promise, to possibility:

these are the salvation of the species.

Christmas Eve, December 24, 1818, Oberndorf, Austria. “Silent Night,” the new Christmas carol with lyrics composed by Father Joseph Mohr and score composed by local school headmaster Franz Gruber, is sung for the first time.  In an untimely turn of events, the church organ is broken, so, at the last minute the composition is set to guitar.  (This was long before the folk guitar mystique of Pete Seeger or the campfire aura strumming of Kumbaya.)  What was intended to be an august, reverent introduction of a new Christmas hymn with swelling organ embellishment was instead a gentle, intimate rendering of a heart-warming carol plucked quietly on six strings.

The original Nikolaus-Kirche in Oberndorf was demolished in the early 1900’s as the result of a flood.  The now famous “Stille Nacht” Chapel was built in its place shortly thereafter and has been the site of a tourist tradition ever since.  One Christmas Eve, I stood with a few friends and hundreds of others in the frigid clear cold of an Alpine night outside the chapel. (It is far too small to accommodate crowds inside).  All was calm, and all was bright.  A codified ceremony of generations proceeded, culminating with the singing of Silent Night (in German, of course) accompanied by guitar.  It was not a Woodstock moment, nor a mountaintop experience, but it was quaint and sentimentally uplifting.  It got me to thinking about times when things do not turn out as expected.  Here we all were, freezing our knuckles, observing a century old tradition because long ago the organ was broken.

Consider how often in life the thing that was planned, and does not happen, is surpassed by the unexpected substitute that succeeds marvelously and may even gain legendary status.  This is not an uncommon turn of events; it happens all the time in circumstances that are both trivially ironic and those that are of geo-political import.  Call it the Will of God, call it fate, call it what you will.  When one considers how frequently this phenomenon is repeated – in matters both great and small – it ought to evoke two responses.

First, humility in our intentions. Even our best-laid plans often end up manifesting themselves differently than envisioned.  Sometimes the results are better than we could have imagined or deserved. Second, modesty in our expectations.  Many things we plan and try to micro-manage down to the nano-level of strategy end up proceeding far differently than we thought.  This is true in things like careers, marriages and wars.  Since things sometimes end up worse than projected, modest expectations at the outset would seem a reasonable posture.

Humility.  Modesty.  These are offensive words in an era driven by a quest for self-satisfaction and arrogant claims of rightness.  But perhaps long ago Joseph Mohr had it right. “Glories stream from heaven afar.”  They come to us, often unbidden and beyond our merit.  And when our human foibles result in a mess, well, Mohr reminds us of a “dawn of redeeming grace.”  Arrogance cannot recognize such.  But humility can.

The Getreidegasse, Salzburg, Austria

 

Many Medieval cities in Europe were constructed as a network of narrow streets with several story buildings lining them like walls of a gorge.  Human foot traffic and animal-drawn carts flowed through them like streams in search of a preordained gradient.  That the store-front walls of these citified canyons were raised so high is easy to explain: five hundred years ago it was cheaper to build up than out.  And so, some of the ancient streets in the Old Town section of Salzburg, Austria, are almost claustrophobic.  Any on-coming traffic, even if it is merely fellow pedestrians, creates a logistical immediacy, both in terms of navigation and human interface.  Depending on one’s temperament or mood, walking the Getreidegasse can be either an intimate experience or an intimidating one.

The Getreidegasse, also known as “Grain Lane”, was once a market street, but since World War II it has taken on the mien of the busiest shopping street in the Old Town and a mecca of tourists.  There is now, and has been for centuries, a significant hub-bub on this ancient lane.   At house number Nine on the Getreidegasse Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, and he lived there until he was seventeen.  It’s a typically narrow, creaky old wooden home laden with memorabilia and history.  The living space is spread upward through several floors of slender rooms, steep stairways and tight passageways.  Young Wolfgang lived there when he composed his earliest works, starting at age four!  Before he left Salzburg as a teenager he had composed dozens of symphonies and piano and violin concertos, many of which are still performed in our era.

To this day one can take in a Mozart dinner concert in the cellar of old St. Peter’s Church, where period string instruments and costume clad opera singers perform his works.  Sitting in this old stone hall, listening to Mozart on the night of his birthday, was a most pleasing and humbling experience.  His brilliance started so early, he composed so much, and then he died so young.  But, emerging from the restricting environs of the Getreidegasse, graduating to Vienna, the epitome of arts in his day, and then broadcasting his music across three centuries and every continent, W. A. Mozart is a paradigm of the notion of expansive imagination.  His craft began in cramped, unconducive quarters and eventually pushed the extremes of artistic creativity, touching the most intimate chords of the human soul.

Not infrequently, the keenest of observations, the most creative of insights, and the clearest ideations of the human species have emerged from highly unfavorable surroundings.  Perhaps the best in any of us has emerged from some such corner of least expectancy.

First there is the wheezy etching sound of a diamond wheel scoring the surface,

then tap, tap, and clink, the glass breaks predictably along the indicated path.

The grinder wheel whirs as the edges of the raw cut shards are smoothed away,

dross removed in the mist of lubricating water spray.

Now it is snip, file, straighten and bend the aitch-shaped caming lead

to fit the rigidly linear or sensuously curving profile of the pieces.

Finally, smoldering solder dabs the joints of lead to freeze the structure

in a permanent design of color and texture.

Still, the essential element, the central character, in this play of art is missing;

the design, for all the vision and craft invested, is still, lifeless.

One more eternal, cosmic component is needed, or, if yet lacking,

the entire composition is for naught, worthless.

Stained glass has no charisma without light; it remains dark, dreary and dulled;

but light brings life to the glass, whether brilliant, indirect or occluded.

Moreover, the character of light is altered by stained glass.

Light itself has no color until it passes through

this prismic veil of fashioned lens to don its fragment of designated hue.

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most ancient and valued artifacts in the Western world.  It depicts fifty scenes of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 at which the Saxon King of England, Harold, was slain in battle by forces of his half-brother, William, Duke of Normandy, who has since been known as William the Conqueror.  The “tapestry” was made in England (not in Bayeux, France) in the 1070s to commemorate the battle, but after a journey of unknown nature was later discovered in Bayeux Cathedral where it remains.

The Bayeux Tapestry is not actually a tapestry at all; it is a linen cloth of colossal proportions embroidered with tiny colored woolen yarns.  It spans nearly two hundred and thirty feet and is comprised of nine panels of varying lengths, some over forty feet long, which depict various scenes of the famous battle.

While each panel has its own theme and scheme, the same colors are repeated throughout the entire configuration – russet, blue-green, dull gold, olive green, dark blue, sage, light yellow, orange and black.  The panels illustrate scenes of battle and triumph, valor and suffering, victory and death.  While the subjects of the scenes change, the colors of the threads flow from one panel to the next featuring distinguishable details of historic account in a unifying interplay of hues.

Our lives, too, are stitched with the hues of joy and tragedy, success and failure, healing and brokenness.  The colors of our lives are tinted by our discoveries and relationships.  The hues of our scenes bear striking resemblances even though our particular experiences are unique.

I once knew a woman whose son committed suicide.  As part of her grief and healing she wove an abstract tapestry of varying stylistic elements through which ran a single strand of color, representing her son’s life, uniting the tension of the parts in a harmonious whole.

Curiously, the last panel of the original Bayeux Tapestry has been mysteriously missing for centuries, later adaptations having been added to the original composition in a superimposed attempt at approximated completion.

None of us knows in which colors the final scene of our life will play out. But the common threads, woven matrices of relationships, and strands of growth and discovery that define us so far mark each of us as a single filament in a bigger fabric.

Temple Mount in Jerusalem is one of the most hotly contested pieces of real estate in the world.  This is the site of the Second Temple of Israel, which was demolished by the Romans in 70ad, and later it became the third holiest site of Islam.  This geological table-top comprises thirty-seven acres in the center of Jerusalem.  The Mount became occupied by Islam in 638 and the Dome of the Rock was completed in 691 by Abd el-Malik, ruler of Damascus (who was himself a Jew), for Jews as their “last house of prayer.”

The “Dome” was not initially built as a mosque and has never served that purpose.  Rather, it is a Muslim shrine for pilgrims to Jerusalem.  It was built over a sacred stone – for Muslims, it is the site of Mohammed’s ascension on his “Night Journey” to heaven; for Jews, the rock is where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac.

Part of the timeless pedigree of the dome is that it was built with impeccable mathematical precision and proportion; each outer wall of the octagon building is 67 feet long. The dome’s diameter is exactly 67 feet.  The dome’s height is exactly 67 feet.  In fact, the dome was built in a style like other Christian Byzantine churches throughout the Mediterranean world of the first millennium.

While the glistening dome is the most dominant feature from a distance – it was initially comprised of gold, then later copper, and later still aluminum covered with gold leaf – drawing closer one becomes preoccupied with the incredible artistry of mosaics covering much of the exterior and interior.  And, finally, the archetypal pillars that support the dome are of classic Islamic antiquity.  The Dome of the Rock is stunning in its grandeur and arresting in its exquisite details.

Getting to it is not always easy, however.  Due to security angst, the Israeli government has winnowed access to the Temple Mount to just a few heavily guarded points of entry.  I had to stand in a long line under a snaking cyclone fence-lined asphalt pathway topped with a corrugated steel roof.  The security check point was thorough; I had to show my passport, answer some routine questions, and open my camera bag for examination.  Finally, I was permitted to proceed and climb the stone staircase up to the Temple Mount.  Even then it was a gingerly walk to the Dome of the Rock.

As it is a shrine of Islam, one must remove shoes upon entering, which is somehow, even for Westerners, a natural gesture not just of respect for the host religion, but out of sheer humility under the aesthetic weight of such beauty and artistry.

 

 

After several days in Jerusalem, where the appearance of automatic rifles slung over the shoulders of soldiers was common place – in a grocery store I turned at the end of an aisle to be suddenly face to face with an Uzi held upright in the arms of a drab-faced uniform – I visited a remote little village nestled on the “green line” between Israel and the West Bank. Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam (Hebrew and Arabic, respectively, for “Oasis of Peace”, from Isaiah 32:18) is an olive branch holding forth in the eye of the storm of competing visions of nationhood and religious a-prioris.  It is a village founded in 1970 jointly by Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel who choose to live together in peace.  In 1979 the village started the School for Peace to educate their young and to offer on-going workshops and training programs for youth and adults from not only Israel, but from all over the world, who desire to work for peace, equality and understanding between the two peoples.

 

Situated near Latrun on the road from the coast up to Jerusalem, the area was a site of some of the most ferocious fighting in the 1947 war.  The area is still littered with the corpses of various tanks and personnel carriers, corroding in place for over six decades. Now in the virtual shadow of these relics of carnage, men and women, boys and girls, who are Arab and Jewish by birth, have decided to live in a community created to challenge the vicious cycle of perpetuating mistrust, inequality and hate.  The population of the village itself has never been very large, usually under 200 residents.  But, the trail that has led thousands there as pilgrims and peace-seekers is now indelibly intertwined in their souls.  In the darkness there is a small light; in the great loaf there is a measure of leaven; in the harmonic voices of children there is the seed of hope.

 

 

 

Glendalough (Gleann Dá Loch, “Valley of the Two Lakes”) is a rustic ancient monastic settlement in a pictueresque natural setting about an hour south of Dublin in County Wicklow.  The monastery was founded by St. Kevin, a hermit monk who died about 618 AD. The extensive ruins of Glendalough include several early churches and graveyards, a graceful round tower, a quaint stone bridge over the Glenealo River, and various sites associated with the life of St. Kevin.  The settlement is located near the opening of a vale that sweeps steeply up into the stark and rugged Wicklow Mountains, but not before embracing two pristine lakes.

In the Sixth Century St. Kevin was born into a ruling family and was educated by three noted holy men.   Nonetheless, he was unsettled in both spirit and temperament, and Kevin decided to retreat to Glendalough where he took solitary refuge living in the hollow of a tree and finally in a cave on the steep lakeside.  Later, he brought a small group of followers to the remote site.  After a life of sleeping on stones, wearing animal skins, barely eating and (according to legend) making friends with birds and animals, Kevin died in about 618.

The monastery founded at Glendalough in Kevin’s honor flourished for the next six hundered years, punctuated with the deaths of abbots and various Viking raids, all featuring heavily in the Irish Annals. By the Ninth Century, Glendalough rivaled Clonmacnoise as the leading monastic city of Ireland.

In its heyday, the settlement included not only churches and monastic cells but also workshops, guesthouses, an infirmary, farm buildings and houses. Most of the buildings that survive today date from the 10th through 12th centuries.  The most impressive of them is the circular tower that commands the valley.  It is probably the best preserved specimen of circular towers that once dotted Ireland.  The entrance to the tower is about fifteen feet above the ground, a feature that was meant to discourage raiding and pillaging by unfriendly visitors . . . . like the Vikings.  Upon threat the monks would hole up in the tower, pull up the ladder after themselves, and blockade the door.  It seemed a last resort to safety until the Vikings discovered they could light the door on fire and then the tower would become a chimney smoking out the residents within.  Even so, the tower survived many centuries of rude abuse and ignorant neglect.  Even when English forces destroyed the settlement in 1398, the tower survived as the keystone of a ruin that continued to be a local place of worship and a pilgrimage destination.

Like many ancient sites in Ireland, Glendalough reaches into the soul of a visitor.  The narrative of its life story is compelling of humility and simple wonder at the tenacity and atrocity witnessed by the stones that remain, mostly intact.  But it is not merely the stones of the ruddy sheds and the tower that have survived.  They are really only tangible simulacra of the tenacity and devotion of the human souls who inhabited them.

 

Des Lavelle is a boatman, photographer, historian, diver, ornithologist, lecturer and author.  He lives in the West of Ireland in Portmagee, just across the channel from Valencia Island, where he operates a tour boat to the Skellig Islands.  Des has taken thousands of visitors to the islands through the years.  He is the son, grandson, and great grandson of a lighthouse family, and author of The Skellig Story: Ancient Monastic Outposts.  Des is the epitome of an Irish seaman.

From April to September (subject to up-to-the-moment evaluation of the sea conditions), Des Lavelle’s boat, the “Beal Bocht,” sails daily to cruise by Small Skellig, in order to show off the 27,000 pairs of nesting gannets, en route to Skellig Michael.  Laying eight miles south west of Valentia Island’s Bray Head, Skellig Michael is an enchanted, holy, knife-like rock protrusion from the ocean where visitors spend about two and a half hours rambling around the ancient 6^th Century monastic site and climbing 700 feet to the summit.

Des is less than memorable when you first see him in his frumpy hat and mundane sea garb. In fact, even after you meet Des there seems to be very little notable about him.  But hang around and listen to his stories of the sea.  And listen to the stories he tells that are cultural hand-me-downs from generations back.  And listen to his wisdom of survival on roiling waters where three thousand miles of the Atlantic crash into the western most land mass of Europe.

Des is crusty, but courteous.  His humor is dry (droll, even) and laced with subtleties of the obvious.  He is cautious, but courageous.  Des is a businessman, yes, but he is a humanitarian as well.  On our return trip from Skellig Michael Des turned the boat around in order to rescue a gannet, which had become entrapped in a fishing net and would have drown otherwise.  As he lifted the huge, entangled, skewer-beaked bird on deck he said, “Keep yer distnce.  He likes eyes the best; they’ll be gone in a blink if ye get too close.”

Des Lavelle is a walking encyclopedia of the sea and seamanship, and he is a ripe figure of human fortitude and devotion.  I’ll not soon forget him or his qualities of character.  Now I am reminded of him every time I see an ocean swell and taste salt in the air.