Question time

Is it so terrible to want to be everything to your children when you ARE everything to them? I collected Ghin and Oisin from their various childcare places today and both of them were so sad. Ghin lept into my arms as if we were reunited at the gates of Auschwitz after a long and terrible ordeal and Oisin teared as he told me he had fallen down, with the same look on his face as a street urchin who had been surprised in the shadows. The three of us hugged each other on the poofy at Lara's house and cried as Lara said, stop it now, i can't take all of you crying all together.

I knew that the world of work was a million miles from the world which i inhabited recently, but i had no idea it was in an entirely different universe which wasn't even parallel. I sat down for a marathon 4 hour meeting with the line manager and was directed to several places to do several things. One of these things was to read a several tomed document called "People on Reserves". It is precisely 33 pages long. 33 pages of going on and on and on and on about - what i do not know exactly, but there is a part of my brain, a very large part, which went what in the wide world takes 33 pages to say? Mothers run the world without having to resort to writing one fecking thing. All they have to do is love. I don't know if you could run where i work on simply love, but i can tell you that i much prefer just having love.

And it's not as if work is tiring. One of the reasons i managed to keep off putting on so much weight is that i was never still for more than two minutes. Between the fetching and the cleaning and the cooking, the libraries, coffee houses, excursions and forests, things were pretty much on the go constantly. And the constant refrain of mom mom mom!!!! Don't ever say that motherhood is not demanding. It is the most demanding thing i know - but also the most fulfilling.

It's only two days in, but the maleness, the irrational world of maleness which insists on the bolstering of egos at the expense of practicality and goodwill is the antithesis of the last two years. I have learnt many many techniques over the past two years in facing such adversities, and i think that perhaps this is going to open up a new frontier in self-discipline and self-awareness.

What are men good for? I must seriously ask this question since i have two sons. I see the young men which the school has produced and i feel an incredible tenderness towards them. Men who are gentle, men who care, men who follow their hearts in a quiet unassuming way. It is the best kind of manhood available. Strong and sweet, like well made coffee. That's the way i hope my boys turn out.

I never thought i'd miss the life i used to lead so much. Never. I thought i would get used to it all again. I thought i'd be glad to be back to the place. I'm glad i'm doing work with nature. But i don't know if that's the best way to be working with nature. Reading the Tao Te Ching has made me really question this Herculenean attitude to the work we undertake. I forget now, do we try to work with nature as opposed to use diggers, trucks, buldozers to alter environments utterly. Do we persuade rather than bully? Do we submit rather than manipulate? Water is thought to be the most exemplary of all the elements. It goes around obstacles yet nothing is as powerful as it. It exists in the most inhospitable places and yet is the very source of life. Can we do conservation without doing conservation, and by that i mean can we simply just live and exist and be in perfect balance as we do this? And can we accept that even if this does not happen, that eventually the balance will be restored? All the upheavel that we are undergoing now is simply the earth restoring balance. Is the idea of doing conservation an incongruity? Is it futile to fight against change? To preserve things which were not meant to be preserved? And if we perish in the passing of these things, is it not simply our destiny to do so. The important thing is that we live right ourselves. So much of what we do postpones that present, resists change, refuses to accept and work with reality. It insists in a perverse way on shaping and bending what we have into another deformed version of the present, it springs from a mindset which values dead things more than living things - if we do save something, i wonder at what cost. And can we not do what we do in a more efficient, less cumbersome, more natural way?

Take care of yourself and your family and the world will take care of itself. What am i doing i give our childern to other people to rear? Have we missed the obvious chasing after a foolish dream that may not only never materialise, but be misguided and wrong?