Remember You Are Dust

Did that title depress you? It’s not intended to, although I do wonder at my own morbidity at times. It must have to do with growing up Irish Catholic. It’s a spooky religion, when you factor in the relics and the blood, and all that talk of ghosts.

Death and dying occupy a central position in everyday Irish life. By the time I was 20, I had drunk tea and eaten sandwiches beside the coffins of three grandparents and two aunts.

When my mother comes to visit, she picks up the local newspapers and reads the obituaries of people she doesn’t know. Death is a part of life, something both of my parents repeated so many times over the years, that I came to accept it too.

Between all the death and my years growing up beside the sea, you can understand my fascination with the tides, and with life ever after. What will become of this? Perhaps I’ll end my days in a stone hut on the side of Skellig Michael beside the roaring Atlantic, in a nice cheesecloth shirt, before dying of a dental abscess like those poor half-starved monks.

From Dust

Lent began this week, marking the 40-day journey to Easter.

It’s an important and sombre time for the devout, mirroring Jesus’s wandering in the desert; hungry, alone, paranoid, scared and in emotional turmoil, which is also how about two thirds of the world feels, all the time.

Lent isn’t intended to be an uplifting experience. It’s about humility, and sitting in all that makes us feel wretched or even despairing. Everything has its place and time.

On the first Wednesday of March, observers attend church and receive a cross of ashes on their forehead, drawn on with the priest’s thumb, with a prayer: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.”

Dust is what’s left of parts of Ukraine right now. Like you, I follow the live updates and watch in sorrow as the tanks roll in, scattering the debris and dust of what used to be someone’s home, someone’s office. Someone’s child. “To dust you shall return”. Yes, but not like this. This isn’t what we meant at all.

A client of mine employs Ukrainian software engineers. A week ago, these guys were sitting at their desks typing code. Now they’re hiding in woodland with their families. Lent for them will not be a symbolic experience, but a very literal wilderness.

Whether you are in a real or metaphorical wilderness yourself, accept it is so. Feel the helplessness and despair but without going under, like our brothers and sisters in Ukraine. How horrible that how they are dying is how they are teaching us to live - with astonishing courage, right to the end, and probably beyond too. Slava Ukraini.

The Return

I wrote these words in Liverpool Central Library.

This is the second library I have been to this week. The first was my local library, a tired but enduring place, currently under threat of closure. Older residents with hiking shoes and tired mothers like myself make up the bulk of this library’s patrons.

It’s a different story in the Picton Reading Room here in Liverpool. Under the glorious domed ceiling and ornate book stacks, the population is mostly well-dressed students with really big headphones.

I can’t say I prefer one over the other. One is more impressive but one is more needed by its community. What I will say is that since registering at the local library in January, I’ve read eight books; an astronomical amount given the demands on my time.

I’d forgotten how good it feels simply to choose books, for free, in a random pattern that makes your choices feel serendipitous. Those plastic covers and the delicious dusty smell take me back about 35 years, to the beginning of my trips to my home library. To dust we return.