Suddenly, summer
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| The boys enjoy churros and a giant hot dog braswurst outside City Hall in the sunshine |
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| How beautiful are they/ |
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| Everything in the large size please |
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| That's right, SANDALS!!! |
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| Near and far away... |
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| Me posing with my turtle T-shirt before the Forest School |
I have been following Sir Ken Robinson's talks on TED and i think he is wonderful. But he is high on the entertainment and short on the solutions. I was not impressed when he said that the Singaporean and South Korean education systems were ones he thought we should emulate. I know the Singaporean education system, i have been through it. Why do you think education systems around the world are increasingly paying obeisance to the exam? Because of the Singaporean education system which is all about The Exam. I thoughtm hmmmm... he hasn't found a solution yet. Not yet. Because for me it ain't the Singaporean education system.
Summer has suddenly occured. It snuck up on us when we weren't hoping. We sat in the grounds of City Hall yesterday at the war dead memorial and the boys played like puppies. I'd like to think that the dead looked on with delight. These days in Belfast, we live in a world where there is freedom. I know that not everyone is so lucky. Many live hemmed in by circumstances, by prisons of the mind, by other difficulties which have been visited upon them. But for now, the boys and i live in a place where we can enjoy the sunshine and the continental market. The last time i was there it was my birthday. It was cold and i shared a bratwurst with a friend. This time i shared it with Oisin. We laughed at the size of it. He pretended it was his willy, as boys his age would do. I joked with him about it. It was all ridiculously pleasant.
Isn't it funny time? I kept thinking about the eve of my birthday, and then kept on being pulled back to this sunny day. Life in the fast lane, i thought. How time passes, how things pass, and then the next thing happens - life happens - we can only say yes or no. I hope to say yes all the time, despite the pain it will bring me. Because saying no, saying i do not want this is to deny the gift, and there always is a gift, no matter how hidden it may seem.
I continue to go to the gym. There are parables everywhere of overdoing it there. I do a few simple exercises, have a sauna and a swim. And then i go home. It is my time where i am immersed in the spirit in a very simple way. Not quite blacksmithing or wood chopping, but it is my one real hard physical workout moment in the day and i love it. However there are people who clearly should have stopped sometimes back. There is a woman who seems to have become mostly head. There are many others who have taken their spray tan colour from the Ronseal colour chart. It would seem that as in pubs, gyms are places where addictions can occur. I never speak to anyone. Everyone is intent in their own little world of working out. I imagine i'd have very little in common with many of the gym types. I am probably completely wrong. Sometimes we simle at each other as we switch equipment. But apart from that, nothing.
Now the sunshines pale through the grey. It might not be as warm a day. But we'll see. I have given up hope on summer and it seems to have not failed me so far this week. There is the Forest School on Wednesday, The children love it. I think that this is where their wish to do something for the world starts. I will never forget my first camping trip at the age of 10. To it i can trace my enjoyment of the outdoors, my wanting to do something for the rainforests of the world, my fascination with the natural world, but not in the way some conservationists are fascinated.
I was reading news articles on the State of Nature report. As far as i know conservation has been coming up with reports not unlike this one since it began as an industry. Nature is in trouble if we do nothing about it, we will lose it. It would seem that over the last sixty to 100 years nothing has happened to reverse that reporting, in fact i has become worse and worse. I think that the conservation model is flawed and this is because conservationists love nature, but by and large hate people. They see people are ways to get politicians to change their minds and to get money to do what they need to for nature, but they don't seem to understand that if you want things to change, you need to engage people in a real way. You need to show them why nature matters. And you could do worse than start with children. If you were serious about changing the world, you would ensure that every school had a Forest Schools or an outdoor programme. If you had done this fifty years ago there would be four generations of children who would have come through this - perhaps it would have been different from what it is now.
Also human beings have lost the connection with the sacred. Our relationship with nature is a sacred one. It is an intrinsic one and we cannot put a price tag on it. But how do you tell people who make decisions that? You can't put a monetary value on it because it is priceless. Like love. But if you take it away, you will wither and die. Like love. Surely you must understand that? It's funny so many fairytales i tell the children are like this. The quest to be yourself, for self-determination is always balanced by your relationship with the outer world and once you are in it for vainglorious reasons, then the balance is upset. But the point is that you can always recover by making good, by going through sacrifice and coming to a sense of awareness. It is the same story told over and over again in all kinds of stories - be they Chinese, or Russian, or German, or Native American.
But i'm only a school teacher, what would i know. Anyway, i think we will go and see the tall ships today. We are so lucky in Belfast i think. It is an amazing city.
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