an end of year wander into international understanding and music

 Having been preoccupied by international politics this year, I have always in the back of my mind: "what was it, how was it easy, where did it go" — the broad, possible communications between people who are different.

Terrorism and the politics and wars of antiterrorism have shriveled our hearts. pandemic closed our doors, minds, horizons. Edginess now rules in the hunt for beauty. 

From a time in the night, recent hours, I have been diverted into music. Not sure how. Much of this is new to me. It's a mind-wander into the question of connections between people in a time of havoc. There is no other way forward.

I found something special in Yoyo Ma's Silk Road projects. In this introduction to the documentary The Music of Strangers Yoyo Ma says in his modest way "I'm always wondering how I fit in the world... which is something I share with several billion people."

Twenty years ago Smithsonian Magazine wrote about early years of Yoyo Ma's fascination with the Silk Road, historical connection not just for goods but also art and music, before the European renaissance, before Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus and the wonders and tyrannies made possible by ships.

In 2018 Ma undertook a global tour of performances of Bach suites, to explore from his personal perspective how culture connects us. A glimpse:

The history of the Bach suites for cello is also about rediscovery of lost culture. 

Some may prefer Yoyo Ma with James Taylor and George Harrison's Here Comes the Sun.

Receiving a Christmas email from Debbie and Doug Townsend, Doug a friend for sixty years and former Australian Ambassador to Kazakhstan, I then stumble across the Silk Road Ensemble and this love song sung across the Kazakh-China border.

Wandering through the YouTube offerings of the Silk Road Ensemble I come upon a performance of a Japanese song Omoide by Rhiannon Giddons, also someone new to me.

This is a very familiar tune being the intro tune to Netflix's Midnight Diner, an addiction for us.  So then I find this Australian blogger Peter's glorious background to Omoide. Deep down on that page find his discover that the origins of Omoide seem to be in Ireland...  A Pretty Girl Milking her Cow sung in a movie Judy Garland, brought into English by Thomas Moore. It's all at Peter's page, with more. This is Peter's blog, about life in international understanding.

It's 7am, day dawns. Time to address the immediacies, exit my expensive wonderful recliner, struggle to my electric wheelchair, go and deal with my incontinence in the toilet with indispensable Japanese bidet. Be respectable for family.

But I wanted first to share these 4am discoveries with you. 

My point is that, not least amid political shouting and spear shaking, the future belongs to shared culture, mind, loss of fear of difference, between people. It should not be as hard as it has become, we have to find the mindspace.

When I presented my credentials as ambassador to China to President Li Xiannian in 1984, I startled him a little by telling him that in Hong Kong, before travelling to Beijing, we had been guests at dinner with a Chinese family, Hong Kong residents, all Australian citizens except the affable patriarch at the top of the table who was a member of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Committee. And I said to him that the future of our relations as two countries depended on the connections between our peoples. This remains so.