Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

Doing mostly pointless things as i procrastinate I have LOTS of things to do. Lots. Reports to write. Laundry to clear. House to clean. Lots. I have things to read and prepare. And what do i do? Procrastinate because the first part of my day was completely banjaxed by having to do something i was not prepared to do, and then the second half of the day did not really start until 3 pm, by which time it was just too late to do anything. So i am now taking photos of myself. I am AMAZED with my hair. Having not looked after it for the best part of two months, i am astonished how great it looks after the henna treatment. I can't stop staring at the results in the mirror. Especially the highlights. I know this sounds very vain, but it is also amazing. It had been horrible and frizzy and unmanageable. For about two weeks i looked like Monster Man out of the Regular Show. I FELT like Monster Man. Right down to the moobs. Which reminds me, tomorrow i will start running again. ...

The sun is out, we are in bed and the entire two months stretches before us Last night i was looking at all the things i am grateful for. When i get this way this often means that one thing, i am allowing one thing, to feck me off. Usually it is the same thing. However last night i thought, this is ridiculous. All my life i have allowed one thing to feck me off. Well i am not letting this happen to me again. I have beautiful children, a meaningful job, i have loving family and friends, i have my health, i have all the things anyone could ever wish for. Except my own horse… but we will just have to let that go. However, i thought, am i going to allow this STUPID thing done by a thoughtless person who should have known better to make me miserable? While we can suffer from someone else's actions, we do not need to live by their mistakes. They need to live with their mistakes, not us. Also i know this and this is that there was nothing else i could have done. I did the right thing ...

Over the weekend during the summer the Downpatrick Railway Museum will be running steamtrain journeys to Inch Abbey. Do yourself a favour and go for a ride. Take a picnic with you. Dress up if you can. You will not spend a more chilled, more fabulous afternoon, away from the madding crowd. Ridiculously idyllic….  Steamrailway followed by a dander in the wildflower filled lanes of Inch Abbey If you have discovered a place NICER than Ireland on a summer's day i would have to say to you that you have probably found heaven. I always maintain that it is impossible to imagine winter at the height of summer and vice versa and today was no exception. Butterflies and pretty coloured flowers, people relaxed, lying about in the sunshine… i have loved every age i have been. Although i must admit the age i have always truly felt i was was around 40. I no longer have anything to prove to anyone and at this stage of my life being who i am just comes quite happily to me. I no longer cr...

Ghin chills out Sacred geometry Trampoline Flowers! Summer days... Selfies

Time to cut the fringe me thinks The truth is that there is no perfect formula for henna. Sometimes it really works and sometimes it does not work as well. I kinda like it like that. Yesterday it really worked. This is how the recipe goes. Take the henna powder, take lemon juice. Mix that together till you get a semi liquid paste. Then get some aloevera gel. Bung that in. Then get some seaweed powder. Put about a table spoon or two in. Mix it all with very very strong tea. Let it sit for about eight hours. Slather it on the head for five hours. Viola! Great henna mix. Highly recommended if you have streaks of white in your dark hair. I cannot vouch for what will happen for people with very blond hair. I know i've written about this before - i DO colour my hair because it make it look nicer. But also it is very good for the hair. Hennaing should be done every month. I have left it for a few. But when it is left for awhile you can see how much the hair drinks up the treatment...

Froghopper nymph... how cute is that? Today i cleaned the house. Then i decided i would get a bottle of nice wine and visit a friend. This is part two of the evening. It has yet to commence. I hope it goes well. :-) The end of the schoool year is an odd one. Today when i was looking at the children i felt distinctly shorter. Mostly because they had all become very very tall. And i had...stayed the same. I say stayed the same, but of course nothing stays the same. Everything changes. There is currently much change in the school - classrooms being moved, new strutcures put in place... people coming and people going - and in the midst of it all it can feel quite painful. Today it was interesting. We played Hunt the Teacher. I got to sit in the patch of giant comfrey and stay very still. It was the perfect opportunity to observe all of life around me. The leaves, the woodlice, the cuckoo's spit, listen to the bees, count how may petals flowers had, marvel at how dry the groun...

How totally awesome to have such wonderful friends Pretending to be mafia in Little Wing! Going feral in the backyard In the last three weeks i basically had my sis over to stay. Well my mom did. It was really, as they say in Norn Iron, hectic. Such a great word Hectic. We did everything. We went to Dublin. We went to Pickie Fun Park. We went to Inch Abbey by steam train. We bought a trampoline. We ate our way through most of Belfast. We laughed... we laughed a lot. We had our children climg all over us. And also most momentously, Oisin got baptised. Into the Christian Community. It is very difficult explaining to people that the Christian Community is not what it seems to be without doing it any justice. In fact they are so atypical that they believe in reincarnation. The first thing Oisin asked me was, if i am a member of the Christian Community, can i believe in something else? Like can i be Bhuddist. Of course you can Oisin. I am not sure if this ...

  Gall and his bear Having spent the past year researching into the saintsi have come to the conclusion that they are ridiculously cool. They are people who by and large went, nope, not doing that, doing this instead and then went on to discover incredible new things. They were so fantastic that people began to tell stories of them doing incredible things. Like taming bears, or saying mass on the backs of giant fish. It is good to have an open mind - is the first lesson i have learnt being a Steiner teacher. So although people like to say - usually academics and scientists - ah there are children stories and these things never really happened, who is to say they did not. It is very fashionable now to read communicating with animals as taming one's shadow side, however, i do believe that it is highly possible that Gall may well have had a pet bear who used to hang out with him. Why the heck not? People have pet dogs and bears are a little bigger but they have deep...

We now have this trampoline in my mom's garden in preparation for my sister and her children coming over Listened to the threefold social order lecture as i put up the trampoline. Yesterday i was sooo tired that i ended up in bed at 11 am once again, mostly unable to move a limb because i was just completely exhausted. After sleeping i woke and then had lunch, watched some TV, mostly about this chap who bought a rainforest and Peter Taylor's invetigations in the smoking industry and then i began fixing the trampoline. This kinda continued till 8 pm then i eventually found out i had fixed something wrong, had to redo stuff and then decided i would do it tomorrow. I got home at 10 pm after watching I Heart 1980 which was presented by Larry Hagman. Life is pretty dull but that's because i have had too much excitement in it really. I have now refixed the trampoline and will after this, prganise more stuff, clean out the car and then go to school to draw St Gall and his B...

Today my mom said we need two more pillows. This is in aid of my sister's arrival with the kids. I was... ok we will go to Ikea... and then suddenly i felt really really tired. I just felt like i could not move a single step any longer and that all i wanted to do was curl up in bed and go to sleep. I sleep quite a lot anyway, but today, for some reason i just could not move another inch. So i think i will just lie in bed and do some reading. Maybe stories from the Rosslyn Chapel collection. They are all short stories which are well written. So maybe i'll do that. I was reading Joyce's The Dubliners. It is just incredibly excellent. The language was tight and accurate. It was like looking at a well cut diamond. If you could read a well cut diamond, that would be it. The rain has not stopped since 7 am today. Imagine if this was yesterday. That would be really shit. But it was today. e have been so lucky with the weather in Forest School. I sometimes wonder how other ...

Our herb spiral is coming along beautifully Each week the kids and i weed the herb spiral. As a result it is looking great. I hope to put down some gravel before i leave so that we don't have to worry too much about it while i am away. I spend each day immersed in the world of the school. It is actually quite easy to forget there is life outside it. I was saying to a couple of people recently it is really important for me to not become smug because it is really easy to be smug. The truth is that everyone is on the journey which they have chosen and they are working in the life they have chosen. So what i do is right for me. Although on these dew laden June mornings when i walk into the school and am greeted with all this life and the fruit of the work we have put into the grounds as well as our classes, it is difficult not to feel that really it does not get better than this. The garden shed The school's policy is really to make sure that the areas which need to be ...

Reuben at the Wind Rises at QFT Thanks Ruth for getting the tickets!! Oh Miyazaki! When i was like twenty four years old, i did my MA in English Studies in the University of Singapore. Part of the course was anime. It was then i was introduced to all kinds of fab anime, including, of course, the incomparable Miyazaki. It was Totoro, really it was incredible. The storytelling and the art. I sat there completely transfixed. I had fallen in love. Over the years, especially with having children, i have slowly made my way through the catalogue of films. Each of them so clever and so simple. So subtle. The questions they ask done so quietly, the point made without even having been made. The story and the art were foremost in the mind of the creator - it was never about the marketing or the budgets. They never drove the film. As a consequence they had great storylines and in this film, Miyazaki explores the moral choice that we all have - to see our dream realised and to compromise wit...