When the Winds Change

from Jacqueline (and written very much on the fly, a stream of consciousness composition ...)

Maybe its my sense of irony, but of all the things I’ve seen here today during my whistle-stop trip to Munich – including the beer hall where Hitler gave one of his first rousing speeches, the headquarters of the Nazi party, and Dachau concentration camp – the thing that will stick in my mind is walking through Marienplatz later in the day, and stopping to watch a Jewish klezmer trio busking in the square under the famous Glockenspiel.  Children were skipping around to the music, tourists snapped photos with their iPhones, while others hurried to and fro carrying bags revealing their shopping habits – teens who’d been spending money in H&M, forty-somethings in Zara, and the wealthier of any age in Prada, Burberry or Chanel.  Along the way a woman of middle-eastern origin held out a Starbucks cup to beg for money, and a couple of very blonde German twenty-something lads with shoulder-length dreadlocks seemed to bounce along to shared listening through earpieces attached to the same device, whatever it was.  I stood there feeling as if I was having an out-of-body experience, and not for the first time in my life, a completely different memory converged with the scene - I'm strange that way.

I remembered the Point Reyes fire, not far from my home in northern California; it must have been nigh on twenty years ago now.  It was a massive forest fire that consumed over 10,000 acres in the blink of an eye. I remember riding my friend’s horse to a higher elevation so I could see the fire in the distance, and being quite stunned by the power of the conflagration, even though it was some miles away.  I moved off quickly in case the winds changed.  Then just a couple of months later, I’d heard that my beloved cousin, Stephanie, was dying following a brave fight against the cancer that eventually consumed her body – my mother had called to tell me she was in a coma and not expected to live another day. I had no family close by to gather with, so I called my friend, Jamie, who said, “Jack, I’m coming over right now – we’ll hike out to Point Reyes.”  And as we walked along trails flanked by the blackened remains of a grand forest, and as we talked and I grieved, I looked down at the burned branches of once-magnificent trees and saw the bright green shoots of life bursting up through charcoal stumps. 

I don't know when the green shoots of life began to rise up through the terror that became Munich in the 1930’s, but I know I have wondered, on many an occasion, why we have to go through this fiery experience we call war. As a child I meandered across a field where King Harold was supposedly felled in 1066 - our teachers let us know how bloody a battle that was - and many years later I stood in exactly the place where Great War poet Siegfried Sassoon lingered to watch the opening salvos of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.  I have peered into the achingly clear waters of Pearl Harbor and seen the ghost of tragedy that lingers just beneath the surface, and I have had a drink or two in the pub where Battle of Britain pilots raised a glass to those who hadn’t made it home.  I have listened to the stories of veterans, and in my time I have hoped someone I loved would come home from war, and somewhere along the line I have come to believe that peace is the most precious jewel we humans can possibly have in our grasp.

Peace, the gift and all it encompasses – freedom from fear, freedom of expression, freedom to love and commit to whoever we want to be with in this life, and freedom to worship any deity – or not to worship at all.  Seems to me that peace and freedom go hand in hand, and surely peace is a freedom in and of itself.

When I think about all the places in the world that have seen a terrible tyranny – and have come through it as if it were a sickness, a feverish epidemic of killing and inhumanity – I start to wonder why it happened in the first place, and I have come to the conclusion that it all starts when someone thinks they’re better than someone else, when some sort of elitism plays a part in the conversation, and that a sense of being right and being better gives an out of control belief in an outrageous level of singular or collective power – and that power can be rooted in money, in education, cultural background, skin color, a mode of speech or any number of elements. It happens when one person thinks they’re a notch or two above their neighor, or there is cause to put another person down.  It is the result of intolerance and a hunger to be really important – and many men and woman have put that into words far more eloquent than I could ever compose.

So, I wonder where the next killing fields will be – and in the fullness of time, the next regeneration.  Will there be tentative green shoots of peace in Libya, in Syria, or in places closer to home where we're afraid to acknowledge discord as something akin to war?  I wonder where the fire will consume everything in its path, and when the winds will change.  And I wonder where the music will be played loud at the site of terror, in time, and where the children will dance instead of running for cover. 

I walked back across Marienplatz, stopped to place some coins in the woman’s Starbucks cup, and made my way to my hotel.  I had so much to accomplish when I set out this morning, I'd not had a bite to eat all day – but been given plenty of food for thought.

Grass

BY CARL SANDBURG

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. 

Shovel them under and let me work— 

                                          I am the grass; I cover all. 

And pile them high at Gettysburg 

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. 

Shovel them under and let me work. 

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: 

                                          What place is this? 

                                          Where are we now? 

                                          I am the grass. 

                                          Let me work.

And sorry about the different fonts - I don't know why this happens when I post, really I don't!

Have a great weekend ....