Political overload

Yesterday I did something I thought I'd never do: I bought a membership in the Progressive Conservative party of Alberta. I've worked for the NDP since I was 15 (I fell and broke my tailbone in their Halifax office, which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "busting your butt").

Ron bought a membership, too. But we haven't undergone a radical conversion. It's just that it looked like Alberta was about to go even farther along the road to hell, and we knew we had to do something. The Conservatives are the only party that's going to be in power in Alberta in the forseeable future, so casting a vote in a provincial elections is pretty meaningless. But yesterday members of the Conservative party were voting for a new party leader, and a vote in that election can make a difference. There were three choices: a "suit" from Calgary with fairly moderate views; a southern rancher/professor who is only slightly to the left of the Ku Klux Klan, and a nice farmer from the north. The right-wing crazy man was very likely to win. So out we went and got our memberships. It was a multiple-choice ballot; you indicated your first and second choices, and if no one got over 50% of the first choices, the bottom guy dropped out and the second choices of the people who voted for him were counted. And so the winner was the one who came second after the first choice votes were counted: the nice northern farmer. With any luck he'll be harmless.

Meanwhile the federal Liberals were electing their new leader at a convention in Montreal, so when we weren't out messing around with the provincial Conservatives we were stuck in front of the TV. And the same thing happened, sort of. The leaders were overtaken by a really nice guy who'd been running third most of the time.

The thing that struck me about both these events was how nice all these people were to each other - the Liberals in particular. They'd had some ugly leadership conventions in the past, but this time they seemed to be making an effort to be civilized and kind. It seemed so much more intelligent than some of the alternatives you see in politics.

So politicians really can act like intelligent human beings. Maybe there's hope for this country, at least.

And maybe I'd better go out and buy myself an NDP membership to soothe my conscience

An end - and a beginning?

So I finally told the Bishop I wanted to retire. Last Wednesday we had a lovely chat by phone. Bishop John of Kootenay Diocese is a wonderful man and I would have liked very much to have been able to work with him, but I simply don't have the energy any more to be a parish priest. So now I'm officially retired - or on my way to being officially retired after the paperwork is done.

Now what? We're happily settled into our life in Canmore, enjoying not freezing our little behinds in Izmir(my goodness it gets cold there in the winter!), and being totally lazy. We belong to two choirs and are working a bit on the music they're doing next month, especially the Bow Valley Choir's production of Rutter's Reluctant Dragon and some quite lovely Christmas carols by Rutter. I'm working an afternoon a week at the Canmore Museum shop, which is about all I have the energy for. Eventually I'll see about getting licensed as a priest in Calgary diocese so I can help out at the church here. We're going back to Turkey in March for a few months, so I really can't get deeply involved in much else here. But eventually I guess I need to do something (as in "Don't just stand there..."). What?

One idea is to create another blog, a more commercial one, and write something about the spirituality of computing, or spirituality and computing, or something like that. I'd like to call it Mother Geek, but the name's taken. Saint Geek? Who knows. If it brought in a bit of money that would be nice.

Meanwhile, winter is here in the Bow Valley and the mountains are white about halfway down. The days are crisp and sunny and very short - the sun sinks behind Mt. Rundle about 3 p.m. But our apartment is snug and comfy, full of sun in the mornings so I can lounge in my comfy chair wasting time on the Internet and enjoying the luxury of laziness. Life could be lots worse!

Surprise!

Sunday morning this is what I saw out the window. That was Sunday October 29. The temperature in Izmir that day was 22. In Canmore it was -10, and it's stayed like that for 3 days.

I wanna go back to Izmir!

Quote for the day

My Google desktop started my day with this quote:

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It occurs to me that maybe we're all like Frenchmen that way

Surprises

So here we are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about as far from land as we've ever been. I'm lounging in our comfy little cabin, munching an apple and gazing out on a choppy, bouncy sea, when a bird flies by. A bird! And not just a seagull, which you don't see this far from land anyway, but a tiny olive and yellow warbler about half the size of a chickadee! It lands on our balcony, discovers an Azorean wasp that died there the day before, gobbles it down and hops under the divider to the next balcony.

In the dining room later that evening the steward gave me a little box of granola and the dining room manager came over to compare notes about birds - he has birds and fish back home in Indonesia. I'm hoping word will get around among the Indonesian members of the crew - most of the dining room and cabin stewards are Indonesian - and I'll hear if the little one shows up somewhere else on the ship.

We're skirting the edge of a tropical depression and had quite a rough, windy day yesterday, so I suppose the tiny little thing was blown like a feather from its regular migration route to our ship. I hope he can hang on until we get to Bermuda in 4 days.

Now we're cutting across the northern part of the Sargasso Sea, a calm, rainless vortex in the middle of the Atlantic. Another thing I've always wanted to see - another tick-mark for this trip. The weather is much better than yesterday, calm and sunny and very warm. Sailors have dreaded this area since the days of Columbus (or before - I'm reading a book called 1421 by Gavin Menzies, about the great Chinese expedition that explored the world between 1421 and 1423. They were here, of course, just like they were nearly everywhere else). One reason I'm glad we've got good strong diesel engines and don't have to rely on sails. Anyway, the surprise here is that there really is seaweed floating around. Not thick out here at the northern edge, but in streaks that look at first like some other ship (certainly not the Noordam, which works very hard at being environmentally friendly) has emptied its sewage tanks. But if you dare look more closely, it's just seaweed, the bladder sort that you see on rocks around Peggy's Cove and everywhere else. Kinda comforting, really, but surprising out here in a place that redefines nowhere for me.

While we're at it, there have been a lot more surprises on this voyage:

• Florence: how lovely it all is.
• Pisa: more than just the tower. The whole area around the cathedral is lovely. The cathederal, started in 1063, is my favourite.
• Monaco: all about money, but so clean.
• Barcelona: I knew Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church would be wonderful, and it was, but his other stuff made me laugh with delight too.
• Valencia: ladies making lace in the middle of a circle of needlework shops.
• Cadiz: it felt like home. Not spectacular, but familiar in a way that makes me wonder if my Spanish ancestors lived there.
• The Azores: green! and lovely, every inch. But too humid for me; I'd go moldy in a week. Pity. Otherwise I couldn't think of any place I'd rather live.
• Ron in formal dress. You really can clean that guy up. Just wait until I can post a picture or two!

So it's a fine trip so far. I just hope my little warbler turns up.

All at sea

What day is it today? Wednesday? It must be Cadiz.

We're on board the M.S. Noordam, the newest of the Holland America Line fleet, bound for New York. It's our first ocean cruise, and it's awesome. Of course our more experienced shipmates say this is the best ship they've ever seen, so maybe anything else would be an anticlimax. Anyway, it's pretty good.

Our original plan was to drop in on Rachel in England to celebrate her birthday and get a look at Yorkshire. And then Ron started thinking about alternative ways of getting home and discovered that there's a mass migration of liners from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean in the fall. So we flew to Rome, wandered around there for a couple of days, hopped a train for Civitavecchia, got onto the Noordam, and here we are.

We've had days in Livorno (= Florence and Pisa), Monaco, Barcelona and Valencia. After Cadiz we head out into the Atlantic towards the Azores. Couple of days there, then on to Bermuda and then New York.

The Mediterranean has been wonderful - but hot and steamy. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm looking forward to the cooler Atlantic. I'm curious to see what my father spent his life in the Navy cruising around. But there's always the chance of a hurricane at this time of year - might be kinda exciting.

Anyway, here we are, and when I get home there's going to be such a flood of pictures hitting our Flickr page! Maybe I'd better ration myself to just a couple of dozen a day.

Home on the 15th. Look out for more then.

Looking back at Turkey

I'm writing this on September 11, a day when all of North America seems focussed on "our enemies" in the Middle East and the threat they pose to us. And I'm thinking back to our time in Turkey and wondering how what we experienced there makes sense in those terms.

We went to Turkey knowing some Turkish people and so with solid evidence that at least some Turkish Muslims are trustworthy, loving people. We went expecting to meet more like them, and we did. What would it have been like if we hadn't started with that belief? Who knows. I think we would have learned the truth quickly, but I suppose you get what you're expecting and perhaps we would have interpreted what we saw quite differently.

I've been spending some time wondering what we miss most about Turkey. Number one is our rooftop clothesline on a hot summer day - by the time the efficient and thorough European-style washer finished the second load, the first would be bone dry and bleached. In our Canmore condo the bylaws don't permit us to hang laundry out on the balcony. It looks messy, don't you know? To me, the lack of laundry on balconies looks like we're a nation of energy-hogs, or maybe prudes who are embarrassed to show our underwear in public.

We also miss the fresh fruit and vegetables, of course. Even though the supermarkets around here provide green beans and lettuce and artichokes and tomatoes year-round, there's no taste to them. The sense of luxury that comes from having Peruvian asparagus in September is diminished somewhat by the inability to tell exactly what kind of vegetabular matter you're eating. And now I'm conscious of how much it costs to bring that stuff to our little mountain town. No, I don't want to go back to the days of carrots, turnips and potatoes in the winter, but I really would like to eat vegetables that still remember what it was like to be attached to the vine.

The big thing I noticed about Turkey is how important it is to be connected to a community. Relationships are everything there. That's why a Turk feels naked without a cell phone or two. When our "Turkish daughter" Begum was travelling with us, she talked to her mother at least twice a day and checked in with each of her friends every day or so. One reason we had a good time in Turkey is that we were part of a family thanks to our Rotary-exchange parenting of their daughter a few years ago. Add to that our connections through the Anglican church in Izmir, and we were guaranteed to be safe and cared for.

Canadians are vagrants; footloose, rootless immigrants, we've learned to be self-sufficient and lonely. Turks don't do that, and I suspect that's true of other Middle-Easterners, too. Relationships are everything there.

That's a good thing for people like us who arrive with ready-made relationships. But it can have its down side, too. Other tourists we met were quite justifiably cautious when dealing with Turkish shopkeepers and merchants. Outsiders are fair game. I thank God that we ended up living in a close-knit neighbourhood where people were ready to take us in and accept us. We found we could trust our local vegetable-sellers, pharmacist, and others we dealt with in the three or four blocks around home. Outside that area we could pay twice as much and be treated with something that felt close to hostility or suspicion. Around home we were, as I overheard a neighbour telling a visitor, "Our foreigners." That felt okay.

It also felt okay to see the church working the way it should. Although the Anglican church in Izmir makes no attempt to win converts among the Turkish people (that's against the law in Turkey, and not the Anglican way anyway), it is open to visitors of all backgrounds and more visible than the other churches - surrounded by just a low wall with a gate that doesn't lock. As a result the congregation and the liturgy are half Turkish. And in that congregation you see people mixing who would stay far apart in the world outside: foreigners and Turks, gay men and straight, the unemployed and middle-class. People who have no relationship in the traditional Turkish way are drawn together in Christ. It feels like the sort of place a church should be. There's a reason for its existence, unlike many Canadian churches I can think of.

So what's this got to do with September 11? I think that disaster, and others that have happened since in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, England, and many other places around the world, have at least some roots in this basic difference between western and Middle-Eastern societies. Westerners value self-reliance; for Middle-Easterners relationship is everything. Outsiders are not to be trusted and are fair game. And we sense that mistrust, whether we know it or not, and return it along with fear.

Many years ago a Middle-Easterner we say we love and trust told us to love one another. In other words, relationships are everything. Maybe he was onto something there. I wonder if he had the answer to what's going on in the world today?