Being in America

So, back in the USA for an extended visit, from my long-time home in the rugged Irish countryside of West Cork. This country, the USA, has been very strange to me for a long time. I've been an ex-pat since 1981, when I moved from Boston to London to pursue my career as a viola da gamba player-- and also what I hoped was true love. Can I call the stormy decade and a half of musical and personal, painful and very productive struggle, true love? I have to ask myself in response, what love is not true love? Anyway that's behind me now. A tremendous amount of water under the bridge: let's stand here a moment and watch the roaring torrent, racing and foaming, merrily shouting and singing, water and stones and gravity and spray rising into mist and negative ions animating the air, energy to breathe in, inviting a blessing from whatever is the spirit of this stream, the stream of life, the stream of time. What is this bridge we're suddenly standing on together? Shall we parse this metaphor: it must be a bridge of words, and from this bridge as from every bridge I cross in the course of my travels, I pause for a brief prayer, a moment of communion with the water, the movement, the energy which inhabits the crossing point.