Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn performed in Eugene Sunday and I’m so glad we went (vaccine cards required, audience all masked). His voice is powerful as ever and the guitar work intricate and evocative, the way he always is. I still remember the moment I first heard a Bruce Cockburn song. I was living in Bellingham and “Waiting for the Moon to Show” came on the radio. I had to stop what I was doing and listen. Been listening to his music ever since. He reminds me of a renegade Catholic priest who doesn’t care what the Vatican is saying or doing because he’s busy feeding hungry people. Last night he played two of four new songs written this year and one of them was just stunning in its sharpness and simplicity. Here’s a link to a video of the four songs. The one I love starts at the four-minute mark, titled “Orders.” Here’s the second verse:

The cynic and the crooked priest
The woman wise the sullen beast
The enemy outside the gate
The friend who leaves it all to fate
The drunk who tags the bathroom stall
The proud boy rushing to his fall,
The list is long; as I recall
Our orders said to love them all

It’s easy to get tugged off course. But I want to hold in mind what matters to me even as I’m engaged in the daily bustle. I want to be more conscious about the choices I make. Today I’m thinking about refugees held in horrific conditions in Libya. I know about this because reporters took time to research and took risks to provide a window into a brutal reality. The New Yorker published “The Secretive Prisons” last week. I’m grateful for this effort. It reminds me, once again, why journalists matter.

And that brings me to poet John Donne’s thoughts about human connection:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.“

Awareness first.