Still managing the comedown

So yesterday was a beautiful day.

In many ways…

I didn’t have to go to work.

Man, that was beautiful.

I hadn’t had a day off since Easter.

And the weather was gorgeous. So I got out the sun lounger, and my suntan lotion, and my towel, and my new book, The Navigator of New York, by Wayne Johnston, who is my current ‘isn’t he great? How did I not know about him before’ writer.

There is some great writing coming out of Newfoundland. It must be the long winters. Or maybe it’s the Irish influence – there’s great writing in Cape Breton too.

I just finished his Colony of Unrequited Love, which is a fictionalised biography of Joe Smallwood, the man who brought Newfoundland into Confederation and then nearly bankrupted it. As a young man, Smallwood walked around Newfoundland several times organising the fishermen and the railway workers, before eschewing socialism for a career in Liberal politics.

I highly recommend it as both a great novel – the love story between Joe Smallwood and his political nemesis, a journalist called Fielding is very well told – and an interesting account of how England shafted Newfoundland for three hundred years and then passed it on to the nice Canadians when they were done with it.

Although the Germans etc have been very good to us, I can’t help thinking sometimes that confederation with Canada might have been the best thing for Ireland, if we had been able to paddle the island across.

There’s a wonderful account of Smallwood and some other Liberals going to Ottawa to negotiate the terms of confederation, their gradual realisation that the Canadian negotiators were so nice that they would agree to whatever demands the Newfies made, and their complete inability to take advantage of that, due to their ongoing complete inability to see the woods for the Liberal trees.

Story. Of. Effing. Atlantic. Canada.

The Navigator of New York is set in St. John’s and New York and is the story of the abandoned son of an Artic explorer who tries to overcome the pain of his childhood by making it to the North Pole. As with the other book, Johnston peoples Navigator with real characters such as Robert Peary et al. And makes the explorer circle sound like the pack of egotistical maniacs I always imagined them to be.

Like today’s mountaineers.

I know this is a bit late, but I was really struck by the death of that climber on Everest recently. There was a big debate about it in Canada. Of course, two days later, some Canadian climbers saved a man in similar (but not as bad) circumstances. So it was all about how Canadians are the nicest people in the world for a bit. (They can be a bit smug sometimes, but it’s okay because they are tremendously nice people).

But then an Albertan (Albertans are not as nice as other Canadians is an unspoken national instinct here, usually unspoken because Canucks are too polite, currently unspoken because the Albertans are in charge) female climber, who had to leave a partner behind on Everest a number of years ago, got into the fray saying abandonment was the correct approach as you have to keep moving. Which of course, coming from a woman, was particularly difficult for people to take, and so on it went.

What the effing hell are they all doing up there in the first place, is what I want to know?

Is there to be no mystery in the world anymore?

What is it about men (and some women now too) that they have to dominate everything, or take it apart to figure out how it works, or have races over getting to some point on the horizon? Why can’t they just sit back and enjoy it for what it is?

That’s what I spent yesterday doing.

Sitting back enjoying it.

Of course, I’m still coming down from my experience so a lot of the day was spent wondering where all the people I spent all my time with were, and what they were doing. Sort of like the day after Glastonbury, the same type of exhausted emptiness, but with the glow of the experience keeping you upright.

Then Paul cooked me supper. Again.

I would not have made it through the last six weeks without my roomies.

Seriously.

And we ate and talked about religion, which is what we talk about because he’s a pastor who is on a very arduous journey at the moment, and I’ll talk about anything, so long as I can do it at length in a very opinionated manner.

Which religion is good for.

And also, because I have been forced to re-examine my attitudes to faith in the last few weeks.

The woman who administered the office in Glace Bay was a Baptist.

We’d have these endless arguments about original sin. She was convinced of it. I don’t have any time for it, as I believe it is just a two thousand year old male antidote to their ancient fear and jealousy of women’s ability to take part in the creation myth. Which we have never gotten round to reframing, despite the fact that since then, men have figured out how we do it, and taken over the business of birth, and even taken on the mantle of co-parenting.

Yes, I’m still thinking about framing.

Did you know that there are no midwives in Nova Scotia? Well, there are, but they are not allowed to practice here the way they are in Ireland. Isn’t that just insane?

Anyways, at the same time as disagreeing with her absolutely, I realised that it was Ruth’s faith that brought her into the office every day. And her contribution was tremendous.

And she was a lot more sure of her role in life than I am.

But maybe that’s because she was an older woman.

Paul and I talked about the Eucharist last night. We were eating flat bread with Nova Scotia’s famous German sausage (unbelieveably good) and salad, and I said it was strange that this is probably somewhat similar to what Jesus had at the Last Supper, and yet if we want to be Christians we have to sit in a cold building being lectured at before eating a stale wafer, in a totally stylised us and them event, instead of all sitting round in somebody’s house, eating pitta bread and olives with a nice bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

I’d do that anytime.

Paul just smiles to himself when I do this, and then goes off to the computer room to type furiously.

I have a strong suspicion that I am contributing to his sermons in some small way.

I saw a great poster in Just Us! a few months back. It said: “When I feed the poor they call me a saint, but when I ask why they are poor they call me a communist.”

That’s what annoys me about religion, and particularly the Nova Scotia versions of it – Unitarian, Baptist, Anglican, Catholic - which is very focused on the church being a tool for good in the community (as opposed to being an opportunity to socialise). Doing good works is a fine human endeavour and we should all do it. But questioning the underlying cause of human suffering is more important. Otherwise we are just treating the symptoms and not the disease.

Listen Up, United Way!

That's what I like about organisations like St. Vincent de Paul in Ireland. They got stuck into the politics of poverty. And reframed the debate in the nineties.

And Oxfam. Oxfam is one of the best organisations in the world for that.

My friend accentmonkey has just left Oxfam Ireland after making a tremendous contribution to the organisation. They hired her to run a second-hand bookshop, she figured that out in ten seconds, and then proceeded to position them as a funky, politically astute, trendy cause in the national media, building strong relationships with journalists and donors and other key groups. Which is what Oxfam in other countries was doing, but they hadn't figured it out properly in Ireland.

As well as raising their profile in the media, she developed a successful business in the shop and also had to face the challenge of going to work in a charity shop with a sofa near Junkie-ville, with all the stress that entails.

You say you're tired, girl. And you sound tired. Quite rightly. Remember, there is no more arduous job in the world than working your butt off for people who don't have the money to give you stock options.

Half the people in the world have never used a telephone. And you overcame your hatred of said object to make life better for them.

You need to refocus your energies on yourself and Mr. Monkey. If you never do this type of work again it's not a problem, because you've done more than most people. But knowing you as I do, I imagine it won't be long before you are writing letters of outrage about some other cause you've come across in your full, meaningful life. And then sorting it out without getting up anyone's nose, or asking for any kudos, or expecting any of the rest of us to get off our asses and get involved.

Before waking up again one morning to think bah!, why do I do this?

I love when you do that, because your periods of outrage at the world's seeming inability to let you fix it all by yourself follow the same modus operandi - overwhelming irritation at the incompetence of others, followed by a swift stroke of genius that ensures you glide majestically past the effing nincompoops who are blocking the solution - that you use in your many successful efforts to fix the world.

All that 'bah' is is mental exhaustion, I think.

And you probably won't get too much thanks for what you did for Oxfam, because it's an NGO, and you are a woman who doesn't see the point in wasting energy on promoting yourself when you can be promoting your cause.

Like so many others, who climb the Everest of poverty purely to clean up the discarded oxygen tanks and care for the Sherpas, while the mountaineers of charity sit around and brag about the glorious torture of their tough ascent and just GET IN THE BLOODY WAY.

You should be very very proud of what you achieved for Oxfam.

I know I am very very proud of you.

Big kiss from Nova Scotia.