A mighty graveyard

We have all these ideas, these possibilities for accomplishment and venturing thoughts of dynamic deeds,  that get drawn out of us like ship captains who never come home. It’s as though, for every one action we take, a thousand more potential actions drown, sinking to the depths along with their homeward-bound ships; ideas that often cry out from the sea-floor in ghostly recall, but that will never come to be.

I find myself plagued with ideas. Wonderful ideas – big ones, small ones – that could make of me the most interesting and useful human specimen if I were to follow them all (or the most laughed at, but we will ignore that possibility). I could be noteworthy for my accomplishments in newspaper-clipping collages, my skills of button organization, my strides in language and literature and the making of lasagna. I could be the first to break new ground in operatic singing, and then go on to conquer the realms of bringing belly dance into the forefront of the church. I could write poems of liberation and print them on napkins, then drop the napkins from hot air balloons into the cages of imprisoned zoo animals. I could knit kites, kill roaches, and have better reflexes than a cat’s ninth life. For each one idea I pursue (often to its failing demise), infinite more are lost; however silly, or successful, they might turn out to be.

So many ideas lost. It makes me think of armies strewn about shores; dead to their lives, but deader-still to their possibilities.

We recently spoke in one of our classes about the battle of Gallipoli in WWI, fought in Europe between Australian and Turkish troops. Some of you may not realize that Australia, at the time of WWI, was only just over 100 years old, compared to America’s 500-year-plus history. The first British ships landed in Australia in 1788, compared to America’s wonderful, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and the accomplishment found in the signing of the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776.

It was said of the Battle of Gallipoli, a battle in which Australia failed miserably, that “A young nation could not afford to lose such men.” This brought out the reality that, in all the lives lost, there were thousands of potential doctors, engineers, agriculturalists, mayors, fathers and brothers and scientists and artists …. Thousands of men who would have been forces of national forward-propulsion for the young country of Australia, and for the lives of those left behind. Thousands of men with ideas, and thoughts, and potential actions that could have changed the history of a place. In response to a European request for more Australian troops to be sent to fight in the war, Billy Hughes, the Aussie Prime Minister at the time, declined, saying, “I speak for 60,000 Australian dead.”

It is a mighty graveyard, the resting place of ideas. 

The image above is from the War Memorial in Canberra. I will write more about the memorial later, but this is a portion of a boat retrieved from the site of the Battle of Gallipoli, riddled with bullet holes. It is eerie to think of what was hit by those bullets after they pierced straight through the shell.