Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

Our forest school fleg which we still use! The room looks like a bomb site. Albeit hit by a stationery bomb, probably the best kind there is. Sticky note papers all over the place, half drunk cups of tea and of course all kinds of paper everywhere. I have completed the evidence for the Forest School portfolio and as a consequence, relived the last two years of my life. If i had to choose a habitat i loved, it would never have automatically had me thinking - Forest. Beach. Mountain. Beach and mountain. But Forest, nope. And yet i have spent a lot of my productive time in a Forest - teaching children and trying to save it. Interesting. So here are some great links i have discovered due to the entire process. http://www.childrenandnature.org/ is AWESOME. As if anyone ever needed a reason to take children out in nature this site provides you with LOTS of great ideas and is a clearing house for information. Scientific papers on the benefits of nature. The Internet is also a goo...

OK... so update on the hair adventure...yes, well... more procrastination, i know... anyway... i have been not using shampoo now for more than a month i think. I forget for how long now. BUT in any case, here is the low down on it. things i have learnt... Exhibit A 1. As you can see my hair is fine. I wash it every four days. It does not smell! 2. The mix is like this. One teaspoon of baking powder or soda to a cup of water. You don't need much baking soda to clean your hair. Be careful of using too much. I did once and it was very dry. 3. Lemon is better than cider vinegar. If you use cider vinegar make sure you dilute it until you are able to drink it without making a face. 4. Always put in something else - honey, egg yolk or aloevera - into the conditioning mix. Dilute this as well. You can also just leave the honey, egg yolk or aloevera on for a few minutes - up to five is perfect and more is even better. 5. Brush your hair every morning and night. 6. If you think ...

Almost there! It has been a really productive holiday thus far. Really productive. I have been getting the Forest School evidence sorted. It has been great looking at pieces of research about how good the outdoors is for kids and really research is a confirmation of what i already have known for the longest time. I have to thank the school for supporting me and a few others in getting the quals and these small things - well actually it is NOT such a small thing - but these things all make life worth living. Because my own netbook is on its last legs and has no CD ROM i have had to use Oisin's MacBook Pro. This has made me think maybe i'd like one for myself. It is a really great machine. Well made and it has a great spec. I dunno. I need to think about it some more. It is not cheap! I have also decided to put self doubt away and work with confidence and love. Lately lots of things have been making me question myself, but after feeling a bit depressed about it, i have ...

The last time i was at Belvoir Park Forest it was Easter AND there were trees!!! I went back today with the boys cos i wanted to see the oldest oak tree in Ireland and there were no more trees! Most of the pine forest had been cut and there was light everywhere. There was water running down the streams everywhere and it was distinctly squelchy. Magic. Getting ready to run down the hill The Hill All that light! I barely recognised the place! Climbing a fallen tree over a stream What gorgeous October days are for! That one hd a distinctly rainforesty feel to it God i miss the forest! I could live in a forest for the rest of my life, no question My sons hopefully feel the same way How sweet is that? Look Ma, no hands Fantastic! Jump! This one had a distinctly rainforest feel to it! There were scores of piles of sawn logs. I had to do everything i could to restrain the boys from climbing them.... I could not bel...

There is nothing QUITE like someone pushing you to a wall to start a fight back. I think that's what is happening with feminism. In the late 80s we experienced the Backlash - feminism, we were told, had gone too far - and men were fighting back. How did they do this? Through the media mainly. Images of women - especially of their new found sexuality - were co-opted by men. FHM, lads mags, advertising exploited this to the max. Miley Cyrus was probably the nadir of this example. The second wave of feminism was probably also partly responsible for this. It was because the male role models which it had taken its interpretation of power from was mostly male. Being empowered meant 'having balls', typified by the shoulder pads and power dressing of the 80s and early 90s. Women treating each other like shit and women who had babies were treated the shittiest of all. We did not fight for better paid stay at home time, but equal pay in the office. We exploited other women an...

I first heard about retrogrades when i got my first moon woman diary back in 1993. It was called the We'moon diary. Back then it was, the diary, as magical to me, as the entire cosmos. I had just discovered feminism and was busy reclaiming gooddess spirituality. There were poems, pictures, paintings, inspirational quotes and it was all in a diary. In days pre FB and internet, it was a quiet piece of solidarity with my sister feminists across the world. In addition to the feminist spirituality and political quotes was the astrology/astronomy readings for the year. Someone had taken the trouble to do the various moon risings, moon phases and they also had significant cosmic events, like the equinoxes and solstices, as well as Mercury in Retrograde. I had no idea what Mercury in Retrograde was and despite going to MPH and reading Linda Goodman's Love Signs i still did not understand what this was. For many years this puzzled me.... Mercury in Retrograde... it sounded both cool and...

The first image i uploaded on my first blog post My blog is almost eight years old. Some years i have blogged more frequently than others. Some months have passed with an entry or two. During that time with social media things have changed so much. The internet is a much much darker place. More commercialised. More nasty. I can say this because i have watched it change. Last time TYPING IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS WAS CONSIDERED RUDE. I remember the first time i was told this by a tecchy. Stephanie, your emails are all in caps. It means you are shouting. Really? Was my reply. So i stopped using caps. That was in 1993. Then i remember the message boards. I was there with FTP was still a thing. I was there when the modem sang to you. 468 bpm was the height of speed. I was there. I was there roaming the innards of Sim Lim with Bim looking for dodgy software. I was there when the slightest impolitesness was considered flaming. And now, now... The illusion ...

Here there be gnomes! Today we continued with the farming main lesson. I had written two stories about Seamus, who was a boy on a farm in Finaghy, who heard the call of the corncrake when he was sleeping and who saw lapwings in his field. They had horses on the plough and lots of farmhands. Then his dad came home one day with a tractor and everything changed. The horses had to be sold and the farmhands dismissed. The birds and their fragile nests were no match for the tractors and one summer there was no more corncrake and no more lapwing. In fact there was no more farm. It was actually quite a poignant story and lest anyone thinks i am making that up, it is a true story - told to me over and over again by the many many farmers i spoke to at the Balmoral Show over the years. Today we looked at other features on farms, like hedgerows and ponds and ditches. Field margins. The children were completely fascinated as we drew up the farm bit by bit. It was interesting how farming in...

A carving from the Rosslyn Chapel It rained on Friday evening - in fact it rained for most of Friday. It was such a relief to see and feel the rain. Oisin said to me, isn't that funny, it is October and it is as if the rain knows that autumn is now here. Yesterday i went to St George's Market with my parents. I have always loved the markets. My mother said, when i first took her there, nobody comes here. Yesterday she said, it is too crowded. Yes mom, i replied. First you said there was no turnover, now there is too much noise. I met the regulars there and it is always good fun catching up with them. I got some cheese. My dad got ducks' eggs. I made challah with it, since it was Yom Kippur. a sombre day indeed, a day of atonement. I always think of the Yom Kippur War when i think of Yom Kippur, which was when i heard the first term. It is horrible that the bombing of the Middle East has begun on Yom Kippur as well as Eid. The Western governments have become complete...

Hair today When i was 25 i learnt how to do basic HTML markup. This was in the early 90s. It has stood me in good stead every since. I have always been grateful that i could look at my blog and go, sod you GUI i will subvert this by just going straight to the coding. I am saying this because i could not edit the composer element, but was able to edit the HTML element. And also i am showing off. In fact we were just recalling this when i was back in Singapore. How my colleague and i were holed up in Technet in NUS, with geeks who would only speak to a UNIX machine and we were doing hard HTML mark up cos back in the day there was no Hotdog. Then we gave dear Dr Tan Tin Wee palpitations by decorating the room we were in with Christmas decorations made from recycled Shared Values posters. It actually sounds like an episode of the Big Bang. Perhaps that is why i never found the sitcom funny. Cos i lived the Big Bang Theory. These were not parodies, these were real people. And unfort...