Another extraordinary day of rainbows, picking up threads and trying to understand creativity

So today I have been at the Tower museum in Derry visiting the exhibition called the Human cost of War which is made up of some stunning textile art and put together in part as a response to remembrance Sunday. I began the day coming in on the train through glorious countryside and seeing a rainbow rise from the sea, I ended it listening to a man from Kabul speaking about his hopes for the political and social situation for his country. I have listened to a woman speak about how her house was machine-gunned, another woman speak about her fear as a child that God was on the dictator Franco's side because this was what was written on the coins; I've seen young people brought into the story of the Chilean dictatorship by Roberta Bacic's wonderful story-telling; I've seen needles threaded and concepts struggled with and seen how creativity needs midwifery; and I've struggled to see how we could visualise just peace or an ecumenical theology of the cross; and I have stood in front the the poured lead quilt made by a German woman as a result of the the "cast lead" campaign against Gaza and been stunned by its beauty and then understood the terrible painful story it tells. The dangling silver globes are bullets ... this is blood and not poppies of remembrance ...
And then the huge red quilt of scraps of cloth for the number of people who died in "the troubles" here in Northern Ireland ... the scraps with teddy bears on them represent the children who died ...
so I have soaked all of that up and ... try to process that which it is not possible to process - pain, creativity, history ...
And meanwhile here in Derry the new peace footbridge is being built so that CAtholics and Protestants can walk to each others communities.