The emotional upheaval of two flight cancellations in four days has left me feeling drained, needing to hunt for resilience, which normally I don't lack. Thankfully I am sleeping well and have plenty of physical energy, but any time I stop to think during the day, I start to doze off. So I need to yield to this and take a few days retreat. 'Underneath are the everlasting arms' as Deuteronomy 33.27 says. Stopping, relaxing, being silent, being attentive to life's simple physical rhythms and not pushing at anything, a bit like floating instead of swimming. Not easy if you're nervous about sinking!
After breakfast, I walked down to the sea shore road at Cala de Bou and found a bay I hadn't visited before. The shore line is built up with holiday apartments, but there's not a great expanse of beach, as it's very rocky, with old eroded volcanic material I think. What did catch my eye was one of the five island 17th century watch towers, constructed like others on Spain's Mediterranean shore at a time when Berber pirates from North Africa were a significant threat in the region. I have seen them on remote cliff top promontories and just above isolated beaches. I took a long range photo of one we could see further south along the coast when we climbed St Josep sa Atalaya on Wednesday. This one is set against a development of holiday apartments, thoroughly domesticated.
In the evening, Kath Anto and Rhiannon invited family and friends to a WhatsApp party to share in the streamed replacement programme for this year's cancelled Eurovision song contest, called 'Love Shine a Light', bringing artists together via a live video link from all the 42 participating countries. It wasn't a competition, and only featured extracts from all the songs which would have taken part. It featured solidarity greetings from artists and musicians involved, a few of them veterans of the contest 40-50 years ago. A superb idea, brilliantly executed technically speaking, the message simply being, a morale boosting 'We'll keep on singing, we will survive this together.'
I watched with interest, even though most of the music and performances were not to my taste, I love the energy of young enthusiastic artists. I had no energy to participate in the WhatsApp fiesta. Apparently over four hundred messages were exchanged in a couple of hours. Morale was definitely boosted back home. And across Europe and the rest of the watching world, I hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment