Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

My sons go through a LOT of clothes. This is understandable. As boys who are encouraged to do whatever the hell they like when they are in the great outdoors this means that everything they wear is often covered in some kind of mud/grass/whatever stain by the end of the day. They come home and they put their clothes on the floor - at some point i will yell and tell them to put it in the laundry. And thus it goes. Doing the laundry would be easy - but for one thing - the absence of the sun. And the presence of rain. If there is no sun, it means that things don't dry - and if there is rain it means that everything gets wet again. So more often than not we have laundry hanging on our doors, radiators, backs of chairs. It takes about three days for anything to dry. The back up ensues. (Yes i have no tumble dryer.) By the end of the week there are several laundry loads of clothes and it feels as if another dimension has opened and it is now using my laundry basket as well. In a pa...

The last week i have been really soooo tired that it hasn't been funny. It has been compounded by the feeling of being fed up with people in general. Specifically the stupidity of people who keep doing things which endanger the Earth, insist on being wedded lives which are bad for them and which are bad for everyone else. Where is it all going to end? This obsession with materialism and consumption and GDP has resulted in a society based on war. How come we do not understand the actions of our consequences? How come people can't join up the dots, do the maths, cut out the bullshit? It is so frustrating. How come they don't understand that the made up war in the Middle East is the driver for the refugees? How come they don't understand that cheap food and plastic and their shampoos and all of THAT results in the destruction of the rainforest? How come people don't see through the illusion of advertising...and on the subject of advertising, my eight year old son...

Yes, when would be a good time to get the hair done? I am feeling loads better today. Yesterday i wondered if there was a god? You know someone who looks after you? Who brings angels into your life. That makes it rain the moment you need to go home after a really good day of gardening. My relationship to the school has been one which i would not have been able to predict. I arrived in it, with Oisin, when he was very small, for the Christmas fair. I had more or less decided that he was going here because of Steiner education which i had encountered elsewhere. To me, this was the future of education, it was the future of the world. The education which i had in Singapore had not made me or any of my friends happy. It was utilitarian and reductionist. At a time when as a child i wanted to embrace life, it told me to sit in the corner and generate exam results. If you were good at generating results your result was to generate MORE results - in fact, it was like Rumpelstiltskin - e...

The natursiums, poppies, honeysuckle and love in the mist My compost pile - a thing of beauty Tidying up the parsley, verbana, and calendula Strawberry plants and violas with nasturisums The pond area - i have not seen any birds here lately Cleared out the veg area I bought this vase in Daimaru when it first opened... all those years ago.... The bay is going strong and the ivy just peachy Potatoes have been harvested and eaten I experience bouts of misery from time to time. I detest them because, well who likes feeling awful right, especially if it is for no discernable reason? However yesterday i spent most of the day in the doldrums and wondered what was wrong with me. I just lay about listlessly and complained about feeling awful. Why, my sons would ask me... i DON'T KNOW!!! i said. I went to bed super early and then woke up feeling loads better. I THINK it was because i have so much to do and just no time or energy to do it. However, when ...

I don't know why people are finding the Singaporeans elections results so complicated. It is clear that Singaporeans voted for the PAP because they like what it has done. If maybe like 55% was the margin of victory - well you could say, it was not a resounding one. But it is clear, 70% said yes. And there was quite a high participation rate, so it was not like 70% of 30% said yes to the PAP. The PAP won because people liked what it had given them. Singaporeans are a very grateful lot. The superrich obviously voted for the PAP. The middle classes voted for them because they sorta benefit from their policies, especially the one about meritocracy - which is not meritocracy at all, but really a self-perpetuating cycle of privilege. The working class voted for the PAP because. yes they were exploited, but they have not been neglected. People don't really need very much. As long as they are given the basics - which they have in Singapore - they are quite happy. And if they ca...

How will you gain wisdom if you have never suffered? How will you suffer if you have never lived? I get up around 5.30 am everyday. I do this because i go to bed at 9 pm but also because it is the only time i get head space. To write, to think, to catch up with friends. This is my space and time. I play some piano to wake the boys up and then i go to school. It is a good way to start the day. I think of my life now - quietly teaching and drawing everyday. Yesterday i stood in the school's garden with a friend and we admired how awesome it looked. We patted ourselves on our backs several times and then we planned what we would do over the next few years. The REALLY nice thing was that we discovered that we did not have to do an awful lot over the next few years. We had done all the hard graft and now - it was just a question of weeding and looking after the place. I said, i want to plant lots of lavender and rosemary for my Class 7's main lesson on chemistry where we di...

Often the trees get turned into planks there and then by chainsaw welding men who are wearing singlets, flipflops and smoking a fag. My  mother stared complaining to me about the haze. I love the way Singaporeans only experience suffering when it inconveniences them directly. The haze is back, she began - i said stop right there. I don't want to hear about it. Because i don't want to hear some whining about how the rainforest, millions of years old with an ecosystem which is more majestic than the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China and the Hanging Garden of Babylon put together is going up in smoke because you want to wash your hair and eat some noodles. What pisses me MOST off about Singaporeans is how they only ever notice anything when it begins to affect them negatively. They never seem to do anything for the right reason. They only do it because it has slapped them in the face. It is seldom you get someone taking a principled stand. The rainforest is being destroye...

Really, like you have a choice So.... it is understandable that people are upset that the opposition did not get more seats. I was hoping that at least East Coast GRC would get in. I mean what's there not to like about the selection posed by the WP? And the PAP - well if they had fielded pigs in skirts (as my Perakanan mother would say) they would have won. So clearly the vote was for the PAP, not the candidates. But that is the nature of democracy - people have chosen and that's that. So will those who had hoped that the opposition would get more seats stop trying to justify the win by the PAP and giving advise to the opposition. Enough already. You need to respect the will of the majority - if not, then, well - leave. I certainly did. What i can't bear are the armchair critics. Oh you should do this and that. And the people who go on and on about why the opposition lost. It is not rocket science. They lost because the people preferred the PAP. There is no poin...

The Impossible Community.... After about two weeks of eating, sleeping and following the Singaporean elections, there is now a huge empty hole in my life. The hole is bigger as a result of the results themselves, but the people have spoken and 70 per cent of the population of Singapore want the PAP to be in power. It is how democracy works. In many ways Singapore is like a pure experiment. You'd think that a country which more or less came from a mostly equal beginnings - save for the very few which escaped after the British left - that the ideals of equality would be cherished. This means that we all moved along together - that there would be no superrich or very poor. There isn't the abject poverty in Singapore which you see in other countries, of course there isn't, but there is growing class of superrich and this is very worrying. Anyway, back to the pure experiment. You would think that people who came from the same base line, more or less, had Ministers who ga...

What ye gonna do about it? There is for some reason, no doubt that Moses was a great man. When anyone reads the Old Testament closely, it is hard to not ask the question - why? Why is Moses considered a great man - because he fought for the poor and oppressed. Because he was a prince and gave it all up to take the side of the slaves. Because he gave the world the ten commandments which is what most laws are based on today. Because he kept going despite everything. Because when he was about to reach the Promised Land, God then told him he could not go into it because he did not believe in God enough. The question i would ask is WHY BOTHER? Why the heck did Moses bother his arse to take these whiney, miserable Israelites all over the desert for 40 years, fighting and killing lots of people along the way - to finally be told in the end, really he was quite shite. So the only conclusion i can come to is that it is because he enjoyed doing it. I mean would you do any of this out o...

Taming the dragon - September, Michael's month Something incredible is happening in Singapore. People all over the very tiny island are saying that money is not the most important thing in the world. They are saying having lived through THE economic miracle of the 20th and 21st century are so not impressed. Instead of the so-called wealth which they have been given, and the elusive opportunity to earn even more, they are saying, really what we want is to... just have a regular life and to spend more time with the people we love. We don't really care for millions of people even if it makes the most economic sense. The realities of living in these conditions are just unpleasant. In fact, they are more than just unpleasant, they are driving us completely mad. They are saying we need space to breathe, to be. We need to have questions asked about assumptions made. We need to say the wealth is to be shared. That we don't really like having this disparity between the superri...

This is a copy of a drawing from Norse Myths by the Delauires In this drawing, Odin looks so much like St Michael. I only realised this when i started drawing it. Many years ago - well four years now! I drew St Michael on the Class One board. He was in the almost same pose and the horse was doing the almost same thing. Odin is one of the Aesirs. I still have not figured out if the Aesirs are Archangels or Angels - or something in between. Schwarz says they are Archangels which gave up their Archangelic status to be angels and as a result they have gained superpowers - ie powers which are extra to their angelic status. But they aren't quite archangels. It is interesting - Odin also has Christlike qualities - for instance, he hangs on the World Tree Yggsdrassil and he sacrifices himself to himself - it is a form of initiation to gain knowledge. He gives his eye so he can read the future. The Norse cosmology In Class Four they start to learn geography - this is the first m...

Morning light It is a stunning morning. The entire sky is gold and lilac. I am sitting here gazing at it through the windows, just over the fridge. My garden is subdued, hushed by the wonderful light. I can hear cars travelling in the distance. On the road beyond. I am so thankful for this sunrise. So thankful for the sunshine, Today after some piano playing, breakfast for the boys. School, to finish the blackboard and blackboard drawing, the final touches to the classroom, which will take an hour or so, and then preparing the boys for school tomorrow, which means stopping over at Heidi's for supplies. Then shopping for food supplies then back for more planning. It has been really difficult getting the form into the main lesson because it is the first main lesson. It is always like that. You spend ages doing the lesson prep, trying to imagine what it could be like, looking at the goals we must teach the children and then when you deliver the lesson it is nothing like the les...