Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

Blackboard drawing this week I know i have said this many many many times before but the King of Ireland's Son is the most amazing story that can be told to 8 year old children - and the catch? It must be TOLD. It cannot be read. you must remember it and then tell it - in installments - and the children, oh man they love it. Today i was telling it and the Old Woman of Beara had three birds who came an went - the swallow, corncrake and cuckoo. Over and over again i am grateful for the stint i had in the RSPB because the birds i talk and tell stories about - and the animals and the wildlife and the insects and the habitat i speak of i have been in and seen and understand and know where we were and where we are now. When i speak of it, i speak of the field fares or ground skylarks that covered the ground and the fields of buttercupa dn daisies and thousands of butterflies, and the birds like the crane and the animals like the weasel and the pinemarten and the fox...i i know thes...

Oisin used to love saying this a few years ago - "a good cup of Joe". It was weird cos i never called it a cup of Joe. I don't know where he got the expression from. A cup of Joe. What you need mom is a good ol' cup of Joe. I had only just heard it really. Or found out about it. But there it was - in my son's head. A cup of Joe. I am having a cup of Joe now. Yesterday i got home from my mom's house to find the place clean. This is quite miraculous of course. The place does not clean itself, so someone must have cleaned the place. In the past, cleaning the place would be down to me - now clearly the house has grown someone else to look after it. I was thinking this mid-term, i will clean the place - i have asked someone to come and do the garden. I'll do a good deep clean after going to the gym, and then i'll go to mom's - i'll have loads of chance to read about Columba - the first one who got kicked out for starting a war over the copyi...

Over the last few days there has descended a great sense of peace. I look back on the year and see where i am now and think of the few things i have learnt. Suffering is an inevitable and important part of life. We are here to learn - and suffering is a teacher. It wakes us up, it puts us through our paces. When we are at our lowest it calls upon us to practise gratitude, grace and generosity. Humility. It is our call to stop, listen and discover. Gently. The desert will bloom. Faith is not required. It simply will happen. Suffering restores the soul. We cannot end suffering - we can only endure. Then we can choose the kind of person we are when it is over. That is the purpose of suffering. On some level i chose it, and on some level i knew i had to learn from it. On some level i take responsibility for it. And my answer is, yes, i will change. Yesterday i was driving home from a friend's house. It was a full moon. There it shone, so pure, so desolate in the...

This week i read an amazing book. By Emile Bock, it is called The Childhood of Jesus. It is an explaination of why the two Gospels Matthew and Luke were so different and postulates some truly incredible theories - which oddly make weird sence - about the possibility of there being two Jesus, which eventually became one Jesus. It is a tradition of Western Christianity which was lost somewhere in the Middle Ages - when the deadening of spirit through cold intellectuality occured. The fruits of that deadened spirit we can see everywhere now - the Earth is not a sacred place, our bodies are not temples - we are left here in comeplete freedom to rape and pillage the Earth and each other. Limits are only imposed in the crudest sense - through death or bankruptcy. Sometimes not even that stops us. The other reading of Christianity went underground and its manifestations were seen in the Roscrucians, the Gnostics, all those other secret sects - it sort of well became regarded as complete...

The Childhood of Jesus - the Unknown Years I don't really do ill. I mean i'm happy enough to stay in bed and accept ill, but it is a foreign country for me. I end up doing this now...being in the internet which we can all concede is not really resting. I also end up thinking about lots of different things. Currently my favourite thing to be thinking about is Maths. I spent most of last night thinking about the ten times tables and how i will teach this and then use it to teach the tens - which is the gateway to learning about decimals and percentages and the metric system - so volume and area and perimeter. You see people go, ah ten times table, they are easy, they are the first tables you should teach. I think, really, have you thought about how these building blocks all add up? The miracle of ten. How we have ten fingers and ten toes? How these define us as human beings? How stepping from ten to twenty to thirty is no mean feat for some eight year olds. How these late...

Describe the subtlties of life on Quiet Street. The simple ordinaryness of things which makes all so very very beautiful. About an hour ago, i came down and reheated the veg and lentil soup i made for Oisin earlier on this evening. The entire house was silent - being 1 am in the morning - and i lit the fire to heat the soup. The hum of the refridgerator, the bubbling of the pot, the sweet water, cool from the tap. I swtiched on the light. I pressed the boost on the heating. It is a life of privelege, to have all these at my fingertips. To enjoy the silences, to contemplate and enjoy existence. Simple and not so simple. I bow my head in gratitude. I spent the evening cuddled on the sofa nursing my sick son. He had a tummy bug. We watched a film together, we chatted and discussed it. We laughed and giggled. It was safe. There was nothing we worried about. Simple, and not so simple. One day i will look back on this and say, it was more than i could have ever wanted. This momen...

The simple life - a magnified grain of sand Yesterday i had lunch with a friend at Camphill Holywood. After that we strolled around the school and then he took a look at the boiler at my mom's house. The house is in the middle of Ardmore Heights. It is as suburban as it gets anywhere. It seemed all very middle of the road. He made some such comment and i grinned, replying, you know i asked the universe for a dull and boring life after the last 42 years and guess what, it delivered! I am TOTALLY enjoying it and i could not enjoy it more. It is like i'm having a holiday from the vicissitudes of life, which is excellent. It also feels like i'm in some sort of witness protection programme, or i have taken on like a secret identity, but honestly, i have had enough. So here i am, dull and boring. His verdict: It won't last. Before i left Singapore i said to Jac, i would really love a dull and boring life. I have had enough of the drama. She looked at me and said, i do...

The universe is composing When i was 18 i had a friend - actually i still have this friend - who told me that Math was music. I have a tutor he told me who is really really good at playing the oboe and he showed me how beautiful math was. Math is beautiful? All my life i struggled with the pointless drugdgery of math. I passed, of course. I got that flipping A at GCSE but one of the first things i did when i got into the Humans programme in RJC was say, i ain't doing no maths. I'm doing pure Arts. History, Lit, Geog and Econs. Then i dropped Econs because it was irrational and went on to do two S papers in Geog and Lit. I was never happier. But i have since recanted. Maths is amazing and i only discovered how amazing it was when i began the teacher training course. The first thing we were asked in the course was "Can two parallel lines ever meet?" The answer was of course, in my head, no. But then we were asked to draw a triangle and keep drawing the sides of ...

Honestly i struggled over this drawing... far more difficult than the dragon!!! I really try very hard to not talk about Steiner, but find i cannot restrain myself. I think i may have become obsessive without realising it. I probably need to go out, get very drunk and have a massive hangover. Will someone do that with me? I think also that i feel so strongly about education. About children getting the education they deserve and the world getting the people it deserves. Of course it does not all have to do with education - but certainly what i experienced as a Singaporean and a child in Singapore has been somewhat traumatic. Possibly it was good for individuals who enjoy that mad sense of power and the ability to screw up the planet with delusional unsustainable models of development and ways of being, but they actually should not be encouraged. Because that is psycopathic behaviour. Instead we should be encouraged to help each other and bouy each other up - to live lives free ...

Fukushima... new tank leaking The entire world seems to have gone completely bonkers. Well you could try and list the things that are bonkers, but probably number one on the bonkers list has to be the Fukushima nuclear plant which even as i write now is leaking radioactive water into the ground because the storage tanks for the water were so badly constructed and maintained that they are unable to store the water which was used to cool the spent fuel rods. Are people completely barking when they develop this kind of technology? The state the world is in now has led me to finally believe that people who are in power and people who have money are actually nuts. How could they make decisions which have taken us so far into war, conflict, cruelty and fundamental instability? To cap it off, if i have to listen ONCE MORE to people yammering on about climate change i will implode. Of course climate change is taking place but that is NOT THE POINT. Climate change is a red herring....