Hello, bloggers, and greetings from beautiful green Ireland!
I have come to the conclusion that I definitely am a wanderer, a restless soul almost like the bees going from flower to flower to flower. The great thing is, all the flowers have nectar, and they all nourish and re-nourish me.
The anticipation of leaving one of our homes, and then the sadness of departure, are always bittersweet, but when I arrive at the next place, no matter where I am, it’s always a homecoming. I never go anywhere as a stranger. I’m met by friends who are really family—and the newness, the revisiting, the excitement of coming back are refreshing and uplifting.
When I arrived in my place in West Cork, I did my usual routine, which is to go out and greet the birds and see if they remember me, and this time again I was not disappointed. I always go to the cliff and bring them food while I’m here. I see if they come up, because below me are hundreds of black birds and sea birds, and right on cue they’re all screaming and hollering and flying over my head wondering, “Where the hell is the food?! Feed me, you idiot!”
So I greet them all and then lament that I forgot to bring the bread, and leave as they all follow me.
And then I come to my pond where I have my fish. One of our friends feeds them during the year, so they’re all waiting for their bread, and our neighbors across on an island come up regularly and visit our property...
They noticed that a heron was eating our fish, so they got a decoy heron, because herons are very territorial... They put it in the pool, and this then keeps the other heron away, but I noticed while I was here that the heron still comes and stands on one end of the pool, and lo and behold, the other fish are huddled around the decoy heron, knowing they’re safe.
Sometimes I wonder whether we should be eating these creatures! They’re smarter than we are!I have ulterior motives for my love of fish, because of the predictions of the Maya and Nostradamus, which state that we’re all going to be flooded in 2012. I think when that time comes, it will be good to have gilled friends to teach me how to swim underwater!
That brings me to finding friends... While I’ve been reorganizing my storage area here in Ireland, I came across about 50 paintings that toured Poland for a number of years. They were delivered to my storage area while I was gone. Many of them are huge, and they were all meticulously and professionally wrapped, first in cloth, then in bubble wrap. I would imagine this is how you send your work to the Louvre!
When I saw these paintings, I said to myself, “Ah, let’s see who you all are!”
I started to take the packing off, and encountered these wonderful paintings that I had sent out on their mission many years ago. The more I looked at them, the more I thought: I’ve got to dress up your clothes or wash your shirts or do something, because there’s so much more there that’s unrevealed...
Over the last years I have developed a new varnishing technique, so I decided to revarnish them the second day I was here. It was eerie, because all of my friendly spirits started coming out of the background, greeting me.
I looked at them and sat by my outlook at the sea, and thought long and hard about it, and came to the conclusion that they were there all the time—I just didn’t have the capacity to notice them.
Isn’t that the way it is many times? We’re in paradise and we don’t even know it. We can’t see the length of our nose; we can’t see it until we become older; and all of a sudden it dawns on us that something that we thought was a problem, is really great. I like to put that in the catagory of Opportunity Lost. It’s like having a great treasure and not realizing it until it’s too late.
From there, looking at the sea, I started thinking about my own funeral. As a former undertaker, this is something I think about a lot. And I thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to be cremated and distributed to different places around the world? They could mail me from place to place, and I could then be scattered or put into the ground, and only part of me would be in the old cemetery in Chicago where I’m going to be buried.
But then, because of my education with the nuns, I start thinking about the Last Day. Where am I going to be, scattered all over the world? The latter part of my life, that’s where I have been. So why not? Maybe my ass would be chasing my elbow, or one of my legs would be going in the opposite direction of the other leg!
I envisioned that maybe I would turn into a little mini-tornado, swirling around through space!
When I get up to heaven (if I ever do), St. Peter would be trying to explain to the Holy Father that this is really a friend of the Spirit: “This is the idiot with the Umbrellas! We should really let him in, but he’s having such a great time!”
I’m sure that in the inifinte power of the Father, He would say, “Well, let him spin around some more... Just give him the key and leave the door open for him...”
So I was thinking I need to talk to Rose about that. She’ll probably just bury me whole. But I’ll still have the dream of a mini-tornado.
These are ravings I think about from the side of an ocean, watching the world go ’round, surrounded by my birds, my fish, my wife, and my paintings.
I’m the luckiest person in the world.
Matt