To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
15
Oct
2021
Thursday October 14, 2021
On Friday the 13th of October, 49 years ago yesterday, a plane crashed in the highest peaks of the Andes.
Thirteen people died instantly; five more died soon after of injuries and cold. Another eleven died when an avalanche buried the remains of the fuselage.
In the black and freezing night, Mando Parrado sometimes talked with his friend Arturo, slung in a makeshift hammock to ease the agony of two broken legs.
“What good is God to us?” Parrado said. “If he loves us so much, why would have leave us here to suffer?
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: love, Parrado, Andes, cannibalism
10
Thursday October 7, 2021
I grew up in the United Church of Canada. It’s a rational church.
So it was a new experience for me to attend an all-black evangelical congregation in Barbados, back in my working journalist days.
My host, the Rev. Kortright Davis, a senior staffer at the Caribbean Conference of Churches, was sent to encourage The United Holiness Church to support the CCC’s social justice program – which was, I would guess, anathema to a denomination deep into personal-salvation theology.
As we drove up, I could hear what sounded like a riot down the street.
As we got closer, I could see that the riot was at the church.
Tags: Caribbean Conference of Churches, Barbados, Holiness
Thursday September 30, 2021
On the last day of this summer’s hiking camp, we hiked out to where Ripple Rock used to be, in the channel between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland.
At one time, Ripple Rock was a major maritime hazard. Two great spikes of rock jutted up from the sea floor, right in the middle of Seymour Narrows, barely three metres below the surface at low tide.
So in the 1950s, the federal government resolved to remove Ripple Rock forever. They drilled tunnels under the sea, then up into the rock’s twin peaks. They packed the tunnels with 1,400 tons of high explosive.
On April 5, 1958, they blew up Ripple Rock in the world’s largest non-nuclear peacetime explosion. .
So we hiked to a viewpoint, to see a rock that used to be there, but wasn’t there anymore, and hadn’t been there for 63 years, and that we couldn’t have seen even if it had been there, because it was all under the surface anyway.
Tags: Ripple Rock, grieving, surface
25
Sep
Thursday September 23, 2021
A while ago, I was driving along between appointments, listening to classical music on CBC -- not long enough, unfortunately, to hear the source of a symphonic piece. The sounds of the orchestra filled the car, filled my head, filled my mind.
For a few glorious moments, I heard music a different way.
I didn’t hear it so much as see it. I saw the sounds as colours, swirling and dancing. The brasses were, of course, brassy. Woodwinds were shades of green; drums, deep brown. The strings ranged from deep purple cellos to sapphire-blue violins. A solo violin soared into a laser beam of pure white.
Granted, that’s not how I normally hear music. But why not?
Why do we limit music to the single sense of hearing?
Tags: Senses, music, Art
18
Thursday September 16, 2021
Everyone has dreams. So say the medical specialists, who observe our sleep patterns. Rapid eye movement (REM) signals the state of dreaming, even if we can’t remember having had a dream.
A few years ago, I decided to include my dreams in my daily journaling. It’s been an interesting exercise.
I wake up, for example, clearly recalling two dreams overnight. I sit down at my computer to write about them. By the time I’ve tapped a few notes for the first dream, the other has vanished. Completely.
Writing down my dreams has, however, had a practical outcome. I discovered that there’s a flow to my dreams, a progression of themes and contexts.
Tags: dreams