When we dream that we are dreaming, we are at the point of awakening
Gangri Karma Rinpoche
HOW many of us on the North Shore care about what happens in the rest of the world - about how international events have a bearing on our life here?
I'm struck by this thought while on a journey through Ireland, England and France, and by how what's far from home can seem so near.
This past semester, for example, a fair number of my university students discussed a relatively new idea in their research papers - fracking. That's the controversial drilling technique used to tap deep-bore natural gas reserves. Along with explosives, it uses a witch's brew of chemicals and heaven-knows-what to shatter sub-surface materials and release gas. I'm no geologist, but that's the short version as I understand it. You've heard the story about farmers in affected areas being able to set their tap-water alight after the explosions? Or about scientists who've detected nightmare substances, but who can't get all the details because the U.S. Supreme Court has said patent protection trumps the public's right to know about what's going on?
Well, now the remote countryside in green and pleasant Ireland is preparing to join Alberta's tar-sands region, the U.S. southern exploration belt and soon apparently, northern B.C.'s new gas-patch in experiencing this latest technological marvel.
Driving the narrow roads en route to Sligo and the grave of poet W.B. Yeats, we saw hand-painted road-signs out front of thatched cottages declaring "Tourism, Farming, Health, Fracking."
That's a sketchy future.
. . .
It's not all bad, here, though. Across the now-unmarked border in Northern Ireland, the evolving peace process has caused some marked improvement. After generations of sectarian feuding, life for people is far from perfect, but as Irish studies scholar and former Deep Cove resident Jack Foster explained for us during a getting-reacquainted visit, "you hear talk now of a post-political phase in Belfast."
Foster has written extensively on the Titanic. Many of his former North Vancouver neighbours saw him interviewed on the CBC recently at the opening of the fab new Titanic Museum in Belfast, and he was kind enough to show my wife and I about the city's famous docklands. The Titanic was built there, and tourism related to it is key to reviving the city's economic fortunes. Already the young backpacker crowd is turning up for a look.
Other things are happening that you have to like: The Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Belfast's Queen's University, for instance, celebrates Yeats, the heavyweight champ of poetry in English -a Catholic being celebrated in a town where things didn't happen that way for long while.
We can't rewrite history, but healing is possible. Meantime, the nights are quieter and safer for children and for their families working hard to raise them in a better world. That's progress.
Through the Heaney Centre, Foster also works from time to time with beloved local troubadour Van Morrison. As Foster drives us about the streets where Morrison grew up, images from so many brilliant songs jump out.
Images of the island's troubled past are here as well, though. We're never too far either from the sectarian flags that still bedeck unionist streets and that sooner or later will have to go - at least if they want tourists to stick around a while. There are visitor tours that will take you to infamous battlegrounds and mural walls celebrating one side or another's heroes - the Battle of the Boyne, or the Balaclava Men.
What's coming now, though, is a new generation's wall art: images of C.S. Lewis, locally born author of the Narnia books; of homeboy Georgie Best, the most gifted footballer ever to lace his boots; and of other sporting legends. Already history is being rewritten by the young.
In rocking Dublin, surely the youngest city on the planet, they're dancing in the streets. But the economy is battered, victim of reckless bank lending that people will tell you was tied to European Union modernization schemes. New highways run 40 miles from town, then peter out into long stretches of overbuilt, expensive new homes sitting empty in default and receivership. They sell at 20 per cent of boom time prices. Could that ever happen in Canada? Unthinkable. Ironically, that's what they said in Dublin not long ago.
Meanwhile, the rich harvest of the countryside continues. Ireland's deep agricultural reserves of dairy and meat leave for Europe in convoys of 18-wheelers, paying off the nation's debts.
Already they're ahead on their paybacks, even as critics here remind Europe that Germany only finished paying its last instalment of World War I reparations debt two years ago. "It all worked out for them, so what's the rush for small Euro nations to pay back their new EU debts?" they ask.
. . .
On the eve of the Summer Olympic Games, London feels vibrant, more scrubbed than ever. Camden Town Market is the city's hottest weekend attraction, and Trafalgar Square is starting to feel like downtown Vancouver two years ago. An unimpeachable source - my friend's plumber - tells me that West Vancouver's Bryan Adams is a confirmed supporter of Chelsea.
On the continent nearby, Silvio Berlusconi is purportedly readying a comeback in Italian politics. In France the election posters are still up for the National Front, the ultra right-wing party led by Marine Le Pen. Her party did shockingly well. Fears are that if new Socialist President Hollande falters, the fascist element in conservative politics here will surge.
What does it all mean? Sometimes we live in a shadowland, unsure of where the sun is shining.
The best we can do is to stay alert, mindful of what's happening around us.
