Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

I love writing. I write to think. Unfortunately i have this condition whereby if i do not write in my journal, it all gets stuck like a massive traffic jam. I have this consciousness constipation. Not good. I also find that when i journal i am able to take control of my life. Instead of it revolving like a huge mess, floating about me with me in the middle of the cesspool of my mind, it helps me organise things. I usually leave my writing sessions, mostly daily, feeling happier. It is like i have cleared out the mess and dumped all the nonsense and the flood waters have recede and i can once again feel delighted with life. How people deal with life without having the daily writing/jounralling habit, i do not know. It doesn't make me a better person, it just makes it easier for me to live with myself. Again it does not mean i am easier to live with... Usually at the end of the year i will do some organisating. Yep. Organisating. I will sort of think, hmmmm what it is i...

Sassafarato's Madonna and Child ...is what my mom told me when i went to go for a bath. This about sums up what life has been like for me the last five months. My mother has looked after and taken care of me now through this year and i am so so grateful. I have never really understood the power of mother until now. Christmas is mostly over for me by the time 21st December comes round. I said to friends i really don't think we have had any Christams traditions. I mean i did try weakly to create some traditions of my own, but it never really worked out. When you don't have an extended family around you its not very easy. So our tradition now is that we don't have a tradition. We do something different every year and that's cool. I do make gingerbread houses and chocolate and i tell everyone how much they mean to me. Really, what else do you need. Like today when i got out of the steaming hot bath, i thought, isn't it a wonder that we can have a bath ev...

The final Christmas display in the Main Building Well, school is over for the next two weeks. I remember when i was working in the RSPB i would have to beg people to take my children. Please, could you look after my children? Please. Now i pack up and go home with them. Sweet. Anyway, what a week it has been. There was the marathon gingerbread making session. So much GINGERBREAD. Then there was doing all the school stuff as usual. On Monday i thought, well they are quite hyper i shall play games with them. WRONG. Playing games with them is not good. They needed peace and quiet. So of course i got them to do work. We recited the 12x tables, did three pages of Main Lesson book and sat for a sneaky test/assessment. As a treat they got to do photocopied sheets. Could we please do photocopied sheets they begged... instead of making gorgeous drawings with high quality paper. Alright, i said, for a treat. It's like giving the children McDonalds. Just kidding. Anyway we soldier...

Lots of the dough. About 1 kg white flour, baking powder, four eggs...maybe six cant remember. Sift with mixed spice. Half a tin of golden syrup the big one, 750 g butter, brown sugar. About 350 gms. Melt altogether. Put it in with the dry mix. Add in eggs. Should be warm and slightly wibbly. Knead. ,y favourite part of the process. You should get the slab. Mother optional. Get the stencil out and cut the pieces tog. Easier to cut each house out. Bake each bit for ten minutes. Maybe eight. Also make the base pieces slightly thicker. The roof less thick. Take selfie...   Put the pieces in with each other. Take another selfie. Right at the end....of the baking part. Should take you about an hour and a bit to bake all of it. Oh yes, the dough should be in the fridge overnight. Roll roll roll cut cut cut bake bake bake...drink drink drink... Pipe! Three egg whites, icing sugar, cream of tartar. The icing is soooo important. If you make it right it will be like cement and hold everythin...

What a weirdly evenful week. First it began with riots in Singapore. It ended with a bomb thing in Belfast. In between Nelson Mandela had the funeral where world leaders behaved like teenagers. There was the Steiner Christmas dinner where we were treated to the BEST caberet show in town courtesy of the Belfast Circus folk. I taught maths. We drew wolves. I continued reading Soul Economy and Waldorf eduction. Oisin was at circus school. Also i took Ghin's friends down to Crawfordsburn. It was such a hodge podge of many bits and bobs. Also it does not really feel like Christmas. The weather has been weird. Warm and windy. But very dark because it is dark at this time of the year. I told my mom by next week the light will be returning. It feels strange. Anyway here are the few highlights - Crawfordsburn.... I spent a ridiculously idyllic day with these three gentlemen. Now that i teach small children i am actually a better mother. This is a strange thing to say, b...

I now declare i am really really bored with Facebook. I am bored with FB because it is just so useless and pointless the way TV is useless and pointless. It used to be useful. Interesting. Now it is just information overload. Also i have noticed when there is too much information, then you might as well have no information at all. Because you don't do anything with the information, really. Information is only useful when you can do something worthwhile with it. Most of the information on FB is surplus to requirement. Bored. Pointless. The stuff on FB that is interesting is the stuff my friends post. That stuff is good. I am bored of Upworthy. And Mother Jones and all those other supposedly lefty sites. I confess i still like I fucking love science and Word Porn though. The political stuff, that is all just pointless. I am going to unlike many of these sites. And my friends will repost most of this anyway. So, there is no point seeing these things a million times. Today wa...

From concrete to... This is how we teach the kids to do shapes. Never ever in abstracts. This is the house of Gilly the Goatskin...and the forest he lives in. It is made up of things which we have called shapes. The children then draw with the shapes. I draw along with them. St Nicholas - the original painting comes from the Nicholas cathederal in Amsterdam I think i am so up on the blackboard drawings because it used to annoy me from when i was very very young that the teachers did not use their chalk in the right way. I used to think, there are all these colours, surely you could do more with them. It is probably no accident that the first thing i did when i could was to learn to draw in pastel. I am now going to talk about my journey in anthroposophy. I will now confess that when it began it was a hairy one. I was really worried that it would be new age bullshit. In fact it can look very like new age bullshit superficially. A lot of new age bullshit has the same trapp...