Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

When we were kids my sister used to say, lasterday we did this....lasterday. Well lasterday is also lasteryear today. Chinese New Year. We are celbearting .chinese New Year tomorrow. Yesterday i gave the kids in my class an ang pow and an orange. They were all delighted. We sang a chinese nursery rhyme and we learnt how to say happy new year in Chinese. I realise that kong si fatt choy mean share in the good luck. And happy new year is sing chia juk yee. However these things are spelt. The truth is that i had to thuink ling and hard about the things which made uo the Chinese New year for me because once again i live in a completely mixed up world. Firstly, yes, we celebrated it pretty much the same way everyone had, but not in Chinese. My mother's family was peranakan we had our own set of traditions. The food we ate, the cookies which slowly became the cookies that everyone else ate too. It was all done in English. We did not have the chinese new year songs we also did not have th...

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde  is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and these are the forces they had ranged against us, and these are the forces we had ranged within us, within us and against us, against us and within us. Adrienne Rich There are beautiful exquisite simple days. Of being with the boys, of working at the school, of coming home and making food. Of watching the clouds sweep over and above the winter lands, of walking in wet streets and across busy roads. I live in a foreign la...

I don't know if anyone else has this problem. I have a bag problem. I have a carload of stuff and lots and lots of bags and yesterday, after a spate of messing about and doing admin, i said to myself, enough is enough - i am now going to do bags. This is therefore a post about bags. If you don't want to know how i have taken the first step into a brave new world of bags, do not read the rest of this post. First, it has to be said, i have lots of stuff. I acknowledge that none of it is necessary. Say if i was in a completely desperate situation and was told to only take what was necessary i would take nothing with me. Except perhaps my purse. Everything else is pure not necessary. Fold up umbrellas, tesco coupons, folder for receipts, admin and files, etc etc... nothing. But somehow, in order to function in this society i need them. I am therefore carting around a load of necessary evils. And i need bags to put this in. Because i am the person i am all of my bags are prett...

So loads as usual happened this week. Most interestingly was this man who is a Brit who works in Singapore. His car was at the workshop and he took the MRT. He then posted a picture of his poor five year old son on his FB page, and said, his son said, Daddy where is your car and who are all these poor people? Then when he got his car back - it was a porsche - he said he was glad to be reunited with his baby and that he was going to wash the stentch of public transport off himself. Hmmm.... If it was supposed to be funny, somehow, no one found it funny. Nope. No one. His wife, who was an ex-Miss Singapore was called a whore and death threats were issued against his family. Within the space of 24 hours, the internet mob effectively placed a fatwa on his head. The bloke then hired a PR company to help him apologise. Amongst other daft things he did was also change his FB account name to that of a woman's name before deleting his and his wife FB account. His company - he i...

The Burger King binge Fries and ice cream - don't knock it till you've tried it I think the most important lesson life has taught me thus far is HANG IN THERE... it is never as bad as you think. Today i got up at 4.30 and Facetimed my mom, cleaned the house and started work. Well when i say start work, i mean just have the quiet time to myself and then think about what i'll be doing throughout the day. I have also been reading bits of St Patrick's autobiography. It is incredible, not for what he has been through, but for the tone which comes across. It comes across as a man who is really humble. He starts off by saying. I am Patrick, i don't amount to much. Like i'm only the Bishop of Ireland. I really didn't want to write this book too early cos you know, people will gossip, but i think it may be a good idea to write it, just in case. Also i think when you read - yeah, he was a slave for 12 years, you don't realise what that means until y...

We went up Divis today. Myself and fifteen other people... Nine children the rest adults. Ghin was a hero, he walked for two hours in January weather. What is it about hill walking? Even if the weather is dreadful, it is still good.  It was cold but not windy. Right at the end there was snow. Just a little. Enough to make me think, ah...soon we will be in the warmth of the car. Oisin and i dreamt of spuds and soup. Of Sunday roast. Ghin whined spectacularly for a while and then stopped whining in the end when we eventually got to the end. I carried on my back sometimes....i told stories other times. When we got to the top, we could see the Glens of Antrim. We could see the Mournes. I think that is what i love...when you get to the top. It was busy. Unlike many people who do nature, i love seeing a nature spot occupied by people. That people are out and about enjoying the great outdoors cheers me immensely. Often it is the easy to get to spots that are full of people. If you really ...

Testing out the webcam on Oisin's MacBook Pro Today started at 9 am, which is just as well since i fell asleep at 3 am. I cuddled Ghin and before i knew it, viola! 9 am...i had really weird dreams. I dreamt i was at an RSPB team thingy day. I will not go int the experiences glorious, though they were. But since this was a dream, i there was also a demo. For some reason then, at this demo, i had my entire class with me as well. It was quite stressful trying to make sure they were safe during the demo. Then one of them ate a berry thinking to was a blueberry and it was not... so it went on. In the end everyone was safe and sound, but i did wake up thinking that is completely CRAAAAZY. After we got up, the boys decided they wanted a proper fry. It has only taken me 15 years to perfect the fry. It was really really good. The bacon, the sausages, the potato bread, the white pudding and the scrambled eggs. In the process of getting all the ingredients together i discovered this swe...

Today i just saw the most beautiful jewellery i have ever seen in my life. And it was in Holywood, of course it was. It all began with the pizza. Oisin and Ghin were having the Friday afternoon blob and Oisin, all bathed and slippered with his felted slippers and wearing the fisherman's trousers which he had sewn himself, said to me, mom could you go and get pizza. By this he means Holywood pizza in Holywood. So, i head down. The town is seething as usual, as much as a North Down town can seethe, and i head to the pizza place. I place the order and BESIDE the pizza place is the equivalent of a crack cocaine joint for me. The art supplies store, Art and Home. I go in and it is like i have died and gone to heaven. I proceed to stroke all the books and tubes of paint and sniff the pastels.... to the point where the woman then asks me...er, do you need help? I say, oh no...i am just really enjoying myself. I go to the framing section and then, THEN i spot it. It is in a glass c...

It will b almost a week since my mom left. Its been alright really. Reconnecting to the world and taking pleasures in the general amazingness of being alive. Yesterday the kids in school built a path using woodchips. We loaded the woodshavings from the fallen tree and then wheelbarrowed it up to the veg patch. It had been raining so everything was wet and muddy. The woodchip pile was smoking with warmth, the sunshine bedazzled. The children worked tirelessly. We carried logs. We had hot chocolate after that. We washed the mud from our boots. We listened to birdsong and identified birds. Two boys in my class are really into their birds. They have started to distinguish birdsong and ask me.... What's that? After school there was curry with a friend, home made of course, and the last of the homemade chocolates. And conversation. Of course we talked about the children... The children, why do people want children to stop being children and start being statesmen, businessmen, authors, sc...

 Gorgeous wee handmade angel necklace made by a student of mine....she made it all by herself :-)

Mama and cucu hangout Yesterday we chilled. Well we did a bit of cleaning the house, shopping for boxes and stuff and then we just chilled at home. This consisted of blobbing - the last FEW hours of blobbing - and eating. Oisin and I watched the Woman in Black at 11 am as well. It was an easy going kinda day. I read more of An Outline to Escoteric. I think much of this needs rebranding, although there is a part of me that thinks, if people REALLY wanted to find out more about this stuff all this would not deter them. Rebranding makes assumptions about the nature of human beings. Assumptions which perhaps i don't want to make any longer now that i do not have to. It is also really interesting regarding the position of Schumacher from this point of view. I said to my mom, i wonder if he recovers and regains all his senses, will he be a different person? What do you mean my mom asked me. Well, it's just that people with near death experiences often are different people....

Behind the glass Simulacrum, a word that suddenly came to my mind there and then. I remember having this conversation with a friend in the 90s regarding what Baudrillard said regarding how everything is not real. Everything is a copy of something else, says Baudrillard. It went to extremes to saying that war was not real. This friend said, Let's just drop him into the middle of a war zone and see if he thinks this is real. These postmodernists go too far... I cannot remember for the life of me any longer what the man was saying about simulacrum beyond that which i have said, but perhaps what he was trying to hint at was what spiritual science has said all along. We have the real - or the desert of the real - and then we have that which is beyond that desert... that which creates it. The spiritual. Perhaps what Baurdrillard was trying to express was the dissatisfaction, the instinct that there HAS to be more than just this. If there is, what is it? Yep...

Today, i went for a walk in Cairn Wood, in the Craigantlet Hills. It was galing and thus perfect New Year's walking weather. I went on my own, in a long white dress, dress boots and an umbrella. It made me feel very special. Instead of feeling sensible... Fallen trees are truly awe-inspiring The nearest forest is a pine woodland... After that it is mostly beech Moss and leaves and water... everywhere Umbrella! Trees grasp  Heart stopping beauty If you listen carefully you will see the music You will inhale its sounds Rivulets and streams all around The running streams within and the running streams without Gold, green, copper, bronze and jet, colours ring out Little creatures play Giant silences and solitudes Fallen not forgotten   As golden as honey Mysteries within mysteries, questions that can only be answered by questions