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I was reading / When you left. The news came / Thirteen hours late. So where were you / In that little space of time? Were you breathing softly / In my consciousness? / Should I keep you alive / In morning walks and birdsong, / The smell of braised pork, / And my every achievement?
Despite a post-pandemic bull-run, both the national and international economy are now stalling. Interest rates are going up. Markets are going down. Inflation seems unstoppable. While many factors are to blame for the rising cost of living, a catalysing force continues to be our response to the war in Ukraine.
It is easy to view homelessness from a distance as only a failure of economic policy and of the political responsibility to deliver material goods. A home, however, is more than a house. It connotes connections that are central to humanity. Left without a home people are deprived of more than bricks and mortar; they are diminished in their humanity.
Daniel Mendelsohn lectures in classics at Bard College, a liberal arts institution in New York State. His retired father, aged 81 in 2011, regrets gaps in his own education, and asks to sit in on his son’s course of seminars on Homer’s The Odyssey. Professor Mendelsohn agrees, and Jay Mendelsohn joins a class of 18-19 year-olds. Later, father and son go on a cruise that retraces The Odyssey where they discover: is home a physical place, or something you carry around with you or within you?
The ‘Land Rights Now’ banner is hoisted against the wind, and the marchers set off for the Embassy. A young Aboriginal woman walks ahead of the banner. She has dyed her hair red. She turns and leans into the wind to face the marchers, holding a megaphone to her mouth. ‘What do we want?’ she shouts, ‘When do we want it?’ And she keeps going, exhorting the marchers. We reply ‘Land Rights … Now!’ The crowd tires before she does.
If there is another civilisation out there peering into the skies like us, what would they see as they catch a glimpse of life on Earth in the 21st century? I wonder what they would make of our preoccupations, and what they might see through their powerful lenses that we ourselves cannot?
The subjugation of the world’s First Nations people was enshrined in the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal decrees made by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, where any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be ‘discovered,’ claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers. The Doctrine of Discovery legitimised Christian explorers’ claims to land uninhabited by Christians, promoting and fortifying Christian domination, and forcing original inhabitants into Christianity.
Joined by our son, I dug four feet down, two feet across, into wet, clayish soil. Deep into the darkness. We can see Cinder’s resting place from our bedroom window, not far from a little apple tree we’d planted some weeks before. She would have loved the spot, we think.
Some 278 Catholic bishops, clergy, religious personnel and lay people will meet as members of an unprecedented Plenary Council during 3-9 July to finalise the resolutions of their first assembly last year. However the May working document ‘Framework for Motions’, despite much worthy content, especially on Indigenous affairs, relies on a narrow notion of mission overly focused on inner-church issues at the expense of the wider social engagement that Francis emphasises.
It was wrong to expect her to wade through the river of sadness of family obligations / Right person, wrong timing and I turned away / I have sought to explain myself by searching / 15 years later it is seemly to vanquish the letter / Guaranteed, she found someone somewhere better.
At a time when a second baby meant my own choices were fading into the background, I thought a lot about Nora and her life-jumping. What if I’d had kids later? What if I’d finished that degree? What if I’d taken that job? What if, what if, what if… The multiverse casts a web of different lives, all endlessly diverging like branches from a tree.
As a kid, all I wanted was answers. As soon as I’d get one, I’d chase the next. Nowadays, I’m happy with holding onto questions. Rephrasing, examining, thinking. The answers I have don’t always add up, and my mania for meaning, for definitive proof, is abating. I am increasingly aware that all of us, regardless of creed, creditworthiness, consciousness or credentials, lack definitive answers to life’s mysteries.