MY PSALM

To the chief musician on an eight stringed harp and a tin whistle.

THE PSALM OF K.E.L.L.S
( Kingship- Enlightenment-Love-Life-Spirit )

You are my God of many names
Yesterday, today, tomorrow – You are still the same

JEHOVAH ROHI You are my Shepherd
From your warm embrace, I can soar like a bird

JEHOVAH JIREH You are my constant Provider
My blessings overflow, I am content forever

JEHOVAH SHALOM, You are my Peace
My fears and worries, to You I release

JEHOVAH ROPHE, You heal me inside out
Gaping wounds disappear, as I gladly shout

JEHOVAH SHAMMAH, My God’s there for me
Through the seconds, hours and days…faithful is He

JEHOVAH TSIDKENU, righteous is my God
You teach me holiness in deed and in thought

You are my God of many names
Yesterday, today, tomorrow – You are still the same

(For safekeeping at Trinity College……….hopefully)

FORGIVE AND BE FREE

THE 14th Dalai Lama arrived in Ireland for his first visit in 20 years last month.
The 76-year-old exiled Tibetan leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who fled his country in 1959 spoke on universal responsibility and the individual's responsibility to take action for change at sold out events in Dublin, Kildare and Limerick.

One of the underlying themes was on forgiving those who had hurt us. Sitting in the audience was heartbroken Tyrone Gaelic football manager Mickey Harte whose daughter, Michaela McAreavey, 27, was found strangled in her hotel room. She had been on honeymoon on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

Judging from the responses from the audience, I could see that no one was spared the agony of carrying grievances, both recent and long past.
Of late, I have decided to take advantage of the sunny weather to plant potatoes. I have the privilege of having strong arms to plough and break up the topsoil.

All I had to do was to arrange potatoes at selected distances from each other.

As the tubers grew, I had to top up the soil until the potatoes were ready for harvesting. If I did not do that the potatoes would not reach optimum growth and would be choked by weeds before they could be harvested for the cooking pot.

Using this potato planting allegory, we have to consciously invest time and energy to see dreams come true. However, many of us are also unconsciously caught up in an intricate web of grievances and nursing them when we continue to playback hurtful memories with dogged insistence.

Just like adding more top soil to the potato tubers, we feed our wounds and increase the pain.

If we can harvest potatoes, we can also pull out the hurt by the roots so that it grows no more.

I was in Derry in Northern Ireland recently and saw first hand the impact of pain and hurt.

A certain enclave still stands with the words "We will not surrender" and the Bogside murals testify to the atrocities of war.

There is one mural named "The Death of Innocence", which commemorates the death of 14-year-old Annette McGavigan who was the 100th victim of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and one of the first children to be killed.

The little coloured stones at the foot of the mural are the objects she was collecting for a school project when she was shot.

As in many wars, the innocent are caught in between just like the Malay proverb Gajah sama gajah berjuang, pelanduk mati di tengah-tengah (When elephants fight, mousedeer die in the middle).

Forgiveness is the first step towards taking action for change, though it is easier said than done.

Being human, forgiving someone who has wronged us is like physically removing a mountain with our bare hands.

When we cannot forgive, it is us who suffer, not the perpetrator. Paradoxical but true.

Yet, when we will ourselves to forgive a person, the release is immense. We can actually feel the shackles falling off, the same shackles that have kept us captive for so long and we wonder why we had not forgiven sooner.

Some say wounds will heal but scars remain to remind.

I think true freedom comes when you see the scar but you no longer feel any animosity towards the person who hurt you in the first place.

A beautiful example is Richard Moore, who was blinded when he was 10 years old in Derry in 1972.

Charles Innes, a British soldier, had fired a rubber bullet at point blank range into his face.

Moore said: "You can take away my sight, but you cannot take away my vision, which is to help impoverished children all over the world."

Moore went on to found Children in Crossfire, an Irish-based international development charity, which envisages a world where every child can realise his rights.

In fact, the Dalai Lama's visit to Ireland was on the personal invitation of Moore.

Innes was also in the audience and Moore had forgiven him.

CHALLENGING JOURNEY OF MOTHERHOOD

Today is Mother’s Day and as we see the shops decorated with gifts we can buy for our mothers, we think of the mothers that we have and the mothers that we are or will be.

What is so often synonymous with the word ‘mother’ are the words ‘comfort, love and sacrifice’. It is not uncommon to see a mother placing her child’s welfare and interests above herself. She gives the best part of her time and her life to her child.

My mother would make sure that there were hot meals on the table. My pleated school uniform was always neatly ironed and my hair plaited. When I was not feeling well, she would walk a mile to my school during break time so I could take the medicine or the herbal concoction. When I had an upcoming Mandarin test, she would be the examiner, making sure I had a few trial sessions at home before the test. There were so many of us with different personalities but she was exemplary to all of us. She was the one person who was always there for us and never betrayed us.

Now that I am a mother myself, I am still learning to be like her. Whether we like it or not, motherhood is a daily learning process. There is no perfect mother and the lessons never end. Every child is unique and just when you think you have learnt how to handle the child, along comes his brother or sister who is completely different in make-up. I am talking of biological children, step children and adopted children.

Cross cultural adoption made famous by the likes of Angelina Jolie and Madonna has its fair share of trials. I went to see the Chinese State Circus at the Limerick University Concert Hall recently and was pleasantly surprised to see Chinese children with Irish parents sitting in the audience. The children bought popcorn, coke and circus paraphernalia like dancing paper dragons and plastic plates that swivel on sticks. Dressed in their smart little coats, they spoke English with an Irish accent. Looking at the faces of both parents and children, I could see that love, respect and understanding were the pillars behind that union. The Dooleys of Kilkenny were one of such and they had brought their daughter Ruth to the circus to help her understand her roots. I thought that it was a great initiative to bond with their child.

Most mothers worry. When children are studying in a different state or country, we wonder whether they are alright and we constantly pray to God to watch over them, to give them wisdom and to protect them. There will come a time when the children will grow up and leave the nest. Even if the child gets married, he is still a child to the mother. Such is the mother’s heart.

Many mothers can share how their hearts bleed when the children snap at them or are disrespectful. Take the story of Peter Rabbit for example.

When Peter Rabbit disobeyed his mother and entered Mr McGregor’s farm, he ended up hiding in a watering can full of water and caught a cold. When he got home, his mother put him to bed after a dose of camomile tea while his siblings had bread, milk and blackberries for supper. I thought Beatrix Potter had captured ever so beautifully the picture of how a loving mother handled an errant son.

Discipline is one of the hardest tasks of a parent and no child should be left to do whatever he wants. It is much easier to say ‘wait till your father gets home’ but many times the mother is the one left with the enviable task of disciplining the child for the obvious reason that the child misbehaves at no specific time and delayed punishment may lose its impact.

It is hard to watch your child leave for days on end when he does not heed correction but it is important that the mother’s pain and his future is not intertwined. Even as my friend tells me she is still waiting for her son to talk to her, I can feel her heartache. But patience is her fortitude as she waits for the prodigal son to return home.

Motherhood is a journey. Even when we become grandmothers, the challenge not to interfere with the upbringing of the little one is very real.

NOT END OF THE WORLD IF PROBLEM IS NOT FIXED

There is this interesting slideshow that I received recently which started with comforting words for the lonely and lost. Watching slide after slide, I was expecting a helpline like the Befrienders at the end of the whole show only to be amused by the last slide which read ‘If no one else remembers you, the Inland Revenue Service does.’

It is that time of the year again where we have to tabulate our income earned and the claims that we can deduct. This reminds me of the time when I was asked to supply supporting proof for my income and claims for the last six years. As it is not everyday that you get selected for this task, with it came three big words: anxiety, anxiety, and anxiety (especially when some receipts were missing).

The first S.O.S. call was to friends for advice and help. Offering differing answers to my questions, I was no wiser. Like a toddler who has pushed his dinner onto the floor from his high chair, I was getting agitated. I needed someone to clear up my mess so I could go have a cup of strong tea. So entered Elvis, the tax consultant who in no few words promised to lead me to Graceland, for a fee. I was hesitant but when Elvis started to take over the documentation, he had indeed melted my wooden heart. A tidy sum in exchange for peace of mind. That confirmed that I had done the right thing when confronted with an arduous task: leave it to the experts.

How nice the world would be if there is a ‘real’ expert that you can call on for every small job in the house at a reasonable price.

Throughout the winter months, the radiators in our house were chugging sluggishly way below peak performance. We called in a few self claimed expert plumbers and they all had their theories what was wrong but none could solve the problem. It was trial and error all the way: fix this, bleed that, knock this, cut that. By the time the radiators were reasonably cured, winter was over.

As if in a sinister conspiracy with the radiators, the vacuum cleaner decided to make a lot of noise but not clean the gritty carpets which were a pure embarrassment. So we called up the electrical shops only to be told they sold vacuum cleaners but not repair them. Then someone told us that there is this man living in a big yellow house by the old church about 20 minutes drive away who used to be an expert in repairing vacuum cleaners. Now I have my doubts about lugging a heavy vacuum cleaner in search of a big yellow house by the old church about 20 minutes drive away. Worst still, he did not give me the name or house number of this elusive vacuum cleaner expert repairman.

The next best thing was to buy a new smallish vacuum cleaner which promised to do the job while the more expensive but broken one stands in the shed. Even as I am writing this, I just heard that this new three month old vacuum cleaner had decided to blow out dust instead of sucking in. So here we go again.

The word ‘malfunction’ is perhaps the most irritating word ever. We get upset when our car breaks down. We get bothered when equipment that we purchase fail us. We get heartache when we cannot glue back our favourite broken china. We get flustered when the house that we live in literally starts falling apart because of wear and tear.

But then again, Richard Carlson famously said, ‘Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff’.

Fresh food can become stale. New machines can break down in time. The underlying principle is nothing tangible lasts forever. If something can function, then it also can malfunction. If we cannot find an expert to fix a physical problem, at least no one died and it is not the end of the world.

It is not possible to keep everything in pristine condition over time. To make it easier on ourselves when something breaks down, imagine the things that are more difficult if not impossible to fix: a congenital problem, a broken heart, a loss of sanity.

PRESERVING THE PAST, SAVING THE PRESENT

Whatever little I knew about coal mining was very much the result of watching Billy Elliot, a 2000 British drama film featuring the son of a Yorkshire miner who preferred ballet to boxing. Then when the 33 Chilean miners were rescued suddenly my interest in everything related to mining escalated. Thus when I visited the hill country of North Roscommon recently, I knew I had to visit Ireland’s last working coal mine in Arigna. The mine was closed in 1990 and it is now opened to tourists.

Jimmy Nugent, a tall and handsome ex-miner was at hand to describe the difficult occupation which many had chosen not by choice but by design. Young people then faced few options: they either left Ireland for London or New York or worked at the mines. It was commonplace for boys to leave national school and begin working underground at 14 years of age. For the then teenager Jimmy, it was the mines although he did not come from a family of miners. I marvelled at the way he enthusiastically described his daily routine not because it was a chore but because he took pride in it. He must have been asked the same questions many times over by ignorant minds like mine and yet he did not hesitate to enlighten.

At one stage he caught me yawning and asked, ‘Are you bored?’

Far from it, everything in the mine screamed 400 years of mining history, geography, sociology and human struggle. Like a bear ready for hibernation, I was merely reacting to the cold and may be it was because my body needed more oxygen for respiration, so I could generate energy to keep warm. At any time of the year, it was 11 degrees Centigrade in the mine.

What was it like to go to work knowing the risks they faced and that the goodbye kiss to a loved one at the door maybe the last? What was it like to work for long hours in darkness surrounded by some of the narrowest coal seams in the western world ? What was it like to dig the coal from the vein on their backs against the wet floor? What was it like to know that the air that they breathe was saturated with coal dust?

When a miner went to work, all he had with him in the mine was his lunchbox which was usually securely latched so the rats could not get to the food, the clothes he had on, a miner’s hat, his tools and a carbide lamp.

A dull sluggish world to any one could be transformed by the promise of good things.

The money was good. At the peak of the mining days there were 13 pubs in the area and business was rife. Money from the mines was spent within the area itself and it was not surprising to find the neighbourhood convenience store stocking up a great variety of goods from down-to-earth potatoes to panty hose. Now we are spoilt for choice and we would have to drive to different shopping malls, find a place to park, insert coins into the parking metre in order to shop for either necessities or luxuries. More often than not, money spent at multi-national companies is not ploughed back to develop local communities.

The comradeship was good. In most mines the communities were tight knit, a far cry from many of us living in the city today who do not know who lives to the right or left of us. Worse still, someone could be mugged right across the street and instead of calling emergency service, all we did was watch from behind the curtain, afraid to be involved.

The experience was good. If we have our dialects, slangs and registers, the miners had their own unique vocabulary. Working in coal seams which were usually no more than 0.6 metre high at best, the miner did not see a ‘styme’ of daylight for hours. The coal was then broken up and loaded into ‘hutches’ or cars to be brought up to the surface. Miners referred to that part of a mine from which the coal has been removed and caves in as the ‘gob’.

As I bade Jimmy goodbye and signed my name in the autograph book for visitors I could not help feeling proud that I had been to the heart of man’s tenacity and endurance, basically man’s basic instinct to harness nature in order to survive.

A PLACE TO CALL OUR OWN

A part of the stone wall in our backyard has fallen again. Slowly but surely, the insidious roots of trees and creeping ivy have damaged the boulders when we were sleeping. So with some homemade cement concoction we decided to put the wall up again, boulder by boulder with the wind behind us, whistling all its charm. Physically putting the stones back, one by one requires dedication, commitment, constant drive and dogged persistence. There was this construction-disruption duality of creativity. A sisyphean but therapeutic task indeed.

What is it with broken walls and mending them?

A fallen wall would be the red fox’s answered prayer to lay his paws on the chickens in the coop. The red fox here is certainly not the doe-eyed Disney version of Tod as in the ‘Fox and the Hound’ but the sly, lean and mean type that has no qualms about plucking the chickens’ feathers one by one. On the other hand, a fallen wall would be my puppy’s answered prayer to a glimpse of the outside world, to his delight or detriment.

Do we erect walls to keep intruders out or to protect the inhabitants within? Running Robert Frost’s poem ‘Mending Walls’ through my mind, I would think it is a little bit of both.

Walls create a sense of security.

The Caherconnell Stone Fort in the Burren, stands testimony of the need to construct walls to protect settlements even in prehistoric times. These walls are physical echoes of a distant past. No castle is complete without thick walls and a moat. The Bunratty Castle near Shannon has eyelets in the wall where archers can let fly dozens of arrows without being seen. In times of peace, these eyelets double up as peeping holes for fair maidens to view the dashing suitors and knights who approach the castle. Not unlike the screens that divide the sitting room from the family room in a typical Peranakan house – where modest maidens in the past could view their male visitors in the sitting room.

Walls prevent accidents.

There is also the look out wall which protects the viewer from sharp drops in height and allows him to view the splendid scenery. One such wall is the Ladies View about 12 miles from Killarney on the N71 road headed towards Kenmare. It is a major stopping point for visitors and the view from this look-out area is probably the best known of Killarney. The picture perfect photos of the mountains could be taken either in the mid-morning or mid afternoon. Seemingly, Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting visited this spot during the royal visit in 1861. They were so enraptured with the view that it was named after them.

Walls create a psychological space.

We need a place to call our own away from prying eyes and nosey neighbours. Imagine living in a glass house where others can see us sip our tea or comb our hair.

Having said that, it is also frightening that barriers can confine.

We have seen how walls that have been set up to divide political ideologies fall to allow reconciliation and freedom. The concrete reality can be a focal point for tensions between the factions supporting opposing ideologies. Chaotic celebrations would fill the air with the fall of a political wall.

Finally, we have also seen how walls around our minds shut out possibilities and differences in opinion or ideas. Often times we are left with the impression that if two people have differences, they are not considered equals by society. Take for example the gypsies who have their own customs and practices. I have seen a number of them in the neighbourhood who live in caravans and keep to themselves. It is impossible for us to build lasting relationships while we are still possessed with hatred and discrimination.

There is indeed no room for such walls of separation and segregation.

PERSISTING IN A QUEST

I AM not into submarines but I do enjoy war movies in which the majority of the plot revolves around a submarine below the ocean's surface. Usually, the plots in such films focus on a small but determined crew of submariners fighting against enemy submarines or submarine-hunter ships, or against other in-house problems like domestic disputes and faulty engines.
Some of my favourite submarine movies are Up Periscope 1959, a World War 2 drama starring James Garner as a navy frogman fighting the Japanese, the 1990 Hunt for Red October and the portrayal of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Hallmark Channel in 1997.

Seizing the sudden good weather, I had gone to Lahinch to enjoy the beach and thereafter to the pier to look at the number of fishing vessels moored there as well as smaller boats which use it as a launching site for sea fishing and recreational sports. There were lobster pots and fishing nets, and the air was dank and stale. The smell of fish and brine clung to my clothes like an uninvited guest.

So, it was a pleasant surprise when I found myself at Liscannor, a coastal village on the west coast of Ireland, the home of John P. Holland (1841-1914) a single-minded genius, a dreamer, a schoolteacher and an engineer. Most of all, Holland is widely known as the inventor of the modern submarine.
Sadly, some, if not all, geniuses are often not recognised during their life span.

Van Gogh and Vivaldi died penniless; Mozart was laid in an unmarked grave; Socrates was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock; Marie Curie was subjected to a smear campaign by France's Excelsior magazine, and Holland died a poor man with no public recognition of the fact that he had designed and built the first modern submarine. His only reward was the Medal of the Rising Sun, which he received from Japan after its success over the Russian fleet in 1904 to 1905.

What struck me was the visualisation, the insistence and the persistence of a quest.

Holland's first submarine, aptly named the Holland No. 1, saw the light of day in 1877. It was 4.2m long, powered by a primitive 4hp engine and carried one man. When it was brought down to the Passaic River and launched before a big audience, it sank. Someone had forgotten to insert the two screw plugs.

It took 50 years for Holland to be well remembered and it was not until 1951 with the Albacore that submarine design returned to his original vision and managed to exceed the seven-knot underwater speed that the Holland achieved.

The question remains: would someone lose his desire to excel if not in the right environment?

An Internet post reads: "I am a young adult, 22 years with a high IQ. When I was in high school, I was an avid reader. I could concentrate and focus for a long time. I loved it, but going to college changed that. My college focused more on memorisation. I lost the desire to learn. I finished college in May as a pre-medical student. I am trying to get into medical school. I was diagnosed with depression first and bipolar second during my undergraduate years."

From this post, I can deduce that a genius in the making can be impeded by unsupportive circumstances. It is frightening to note that some geniuses, in pursuing their dreams, have actually gone mad when adversity and setbacks plague their souls.

Being a genius is a process. A process of learning, becoming and being one. It is the "at the moment-to-moment" life that is lived, the sacrifices made and the extraordinary resources within and around.

Thomas Edison gave his famous formula for genius as one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Mustering human perseverance can pay off.

At the end of the day, the full-grown genius is like a submarine that is capable of independent operation below the surface of the water.

And that brings me back to John P. Holland.