Here is a picture of the High Level Bridge in Edmonton, you can just see it above the light colored bridge. It IS high. The priory is close to a main north-south road, the bus service is good and somebody donated a bus pass for October which has come in handy. Last winter I had the loan of a car and I’d thought not having one this year would be an obstacle to getting business done. In actual fact not having one has proved, so far, to be a positive thing. Years ago, in the 1970’s, I sold my car and traveled by bicycle, a ten speed touring one. At first it was a bit of a wrench however there we plus sides too. It was liberating to be able to use the cycle lanes in heavy city traffic and get to work faster, to not have to be concerned with finding a parking space and, for long trips, the advantage of taking the bike on the train for free. Now I find that foot and bus travel brings me directly in contact with the ‘heart-beat’ of the place and people. That is good.
The other evening one of the people, a person, who comes (on foot) to meditate here said something simple, yet inspiring. Here it is, “I came to it myself-that accepting, ‘whatever’ (physical pain, emotions, my present circumstances), doesn’t mean liking it!” Simple yet true. Yesterday he came in the door of the priory with a 17 pound bag of bird seed in his arms. I thought he had carried it ten blocks, but he hadn’t. He had asked a friend for help and he’d got a ride (a lift as we say in Britain). So, acceptance has an active side to it too. Right?
That link is a very interesting site Rev. Mugo – it’s nice to see such good work going on in Canada to conserve rail heritage.
Isn’t it interesting how ‘reality’ always gets joined up by what I come more and more to think of as ‘the laws of co-incidence’. There is Edmonton with a High Level Bridge and the only other one I know of with that name is in Newcastle on Tyne- the rails are on top there too. Also they reopened that bridge with a Japanese tram (built the year I was born) from the place where Edera lived when she was growing up.
If I ever come into money I’ll make a trip to Edmonton when that tram is running!
Excuse me featuring twice in this list of comments but I’d also meant to identify the song for you. It’s called the “Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond”. The song appeared after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and is said to be based on the reflections of a young Scotsman awaiting execution at Carlisle for his part in those events.
I guess these days he would be labelled an ‘insurgent’ but perhaps we find them easier to accept and understand in our own culture – and so long ago and as a part of our own, rather than somebody else’s, history. I wonder what equivalent songs will get hummed in 250 years about events and incidents in our own time.
Testing posting comments as somebody was having a difficulty doing this.
just to add to the story of the song…
after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat at Carlisle the story is that the soldier awaiting execution wrote the song to reasure his lover that his soul, or spirit, even though it would be taking the ‘low road’, would get to her and Loch Lomond before his surviving companion who was takeing the ‘real’ earthly road.
amazing what flows from just humming the half-remembered bars of an old tune, isn’t it.