Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

I was watching Beck on iPlayer and then i saw my reflection in the glass And i thought, I look awesome!!! This detox is amazing!!!! I am converted. Even Oisin is beginning to eat things which are green now. He has decided that he will stop drinking Coke and eating sweets, etc. My white hair is really working out I think it gives me more gravitas than i deserve That watch has been acting up all summer and now, just before school begins, it starts to work again... the holidays are over! My jeans are loose amd i feel like a zillion stars are dancing in my heart. Oisin asked me yesterday, do you like the colour of your nails? I said, yes. Why? He said, it makes you look tacky. I said, no i think it is really cool. So what colour should you think i need to paint my nails? Well, pink. I said, these are pink. But they are tacky. Then, what kind of pink? Skin pink. I said, god, i know the kind of girl you are going to marry. He said, what kind. The Kate Middleto...

The alchemical cosmos - as above, so below Correspondences and balances The goal of alchemists is to transform matter into gold. We, of course, have always taken this to mean a literal thing, but they were not after just a literal thing. Having spent the best part of the summer holidays trying to understand the matter of matter, via the hierarchies and quantum physics, something occurred to me this morning. I may not be working in a lab, but i am working in my body. My body which is a manifestation of matter. Transforming that into gold, that is my task. Making it a pure incorruptible substance. And suffering is involved in this. Suffice it to say, that love is an important part of this. I want to love boundlessly. This is what i really want to do. But this is not easy at all because, the moment i wander out of my little bubble of contemplation, i meet all sorts of people. People who are carrying so much and then, without realising it, or maybe realising it, dump their bu...

Breakfast It has only been a little longer than a week since the detox diet began and it has been great. I feel slimmer and happier and lighter - as in more energetic - and i also feel liberated. Ah there is that word again. It was something which had to be done though. I am by no means a health fanatic. It is just that if i am planning to take my health seriously, i should also try new things with the eating. I wonder what happens to people who cannot live with the mistakes they have made? What happens to them? I have recently found that people seem to be very angry, really judgmental and self righteous. I wonder, how can people stay so angry all the time? Sometimes they are people i really love too. There is a terrible anxiety in them which manifests itself as insecurity and then, in the saddest cases, as anger. It must be awful. Bought myself a recipe book stand I cook so much from recipes now - because i would like to enlarge my repertoire. I love cooking and chopping ...

Here is Ghin with his new hair So i have decided to stop wimping out on my blog and start posting proper photographs again. Here it goes, might as well start with the cutest creature who is awake. Ghin has a new haircut now. He is funny, he is witty and very quick. We watched Escape from Alcatraz yesterday. It was fantastic. Ghin didn't watch the more violent scenes of course, we just was sent out of the room if we thought something was about it happen. Angel! Look at him! Well, here is my cooking corner This is cooking central. It is super clean and used at least three times a day. I feel really proud of what i've achieved over these holidays. I still can't get over how clean the house is. The spices and larder area There are still so many things which need to be either used or binned, if not used. Today i threw away a bottle of cardamom. The cardamom had no more smell and so needed to be binned. It think it is more than five years ago. It was a rea...

Parc Guell - warm memories of Espana Today i said to Peter, this summer Oisin really grew up. He grew up - he worked, he earned his own money, he really got into parkour and is now very independent. I was speaking to a friend about this and he said, is he falling into bad company then, is he? I said, well, actually no. If you do parkour you need to be sober, drug free and really fit. Except that of course, you could still kill yourself. To be honest, i think that Oisin is a very sensible boy - so if he is getting his thrills from jumping around Belfast, that's ok by me. I miss my camera. I have stopped taking photographs because i have a very crap camera now and because i don't like using the iPad. But this means i do not document our lives as much. I have stopped doing this on FB and gone back to the blog. The blog is something which i find very therapeutic. Something which i have had for such a long time, which has walked quietly alongside me. And so time, it passet...

Starting anything is easy - looking after it, that is the tough part. So today, i began doing what i said i would do - look after what i had cleaned. Hoovering is no longer pushing the hoover around the empty bits of the floor. To really hoover you must lift everything off the floor, hoover under things and behind things, and hoover in corners with special attachments. You also need to hoover the ceilings. If you do this religiously every week, i have come to realise you will have a great house. It's very funny, because by the time i have been through the whole house, it looks like Venice just before the aqua alta. Everything is either on shelves or on table tops. I then go back down and put everything back again. I have found that putting everything down as you go just breaks the rhythm. Moving everything also has an additional benefit. If you move things, they do not gather dust. I also hoovered behind the piano, and hoovered under the sofas and the beds, etc. Really, it is...

Greyabbey in the sunshine Ask, and you shall receive, they say. Well, i asked for something a bit mental and quite cheeky and also daring. I asked the hierarchies to give me a sign that they existed. Actually, i didn't ask them all, I just asked my angel, cos you know, if they did exist, they wouldn't all be able to hear me. I said, if you do exist, please show me. I did this yesterday, after OD-ing on lectures about hierarchies. I really need to know. I think i heard my angel slightly sigh. As in, seriously, now? Like how? As in, i am with you all the time you dozy cow. It is just that you don't recognise it. Anyway, i asked yesterday. Today, as i was writing in my journal at 3 am, reviewing the last week. I had noted that, the last week had been very peaceful. The house was now clean - well, firstly that the mice made themselves known and I had to clean the entire house. So it was very clean and peaceful as a result of that peacefulness. I did feel guilty that i h...

Recovered tins Many years ago, at least like five, i bought some craft paper from TK Maxx, the secret home of great pretty paper. And then i did very little with it. They were a collection of Laura Ashley wallpapers made into craft paper and they were all ridiculously gorgeous. Many of them i turned into gift tags, the others just sat in my giant box of stationery. I have been doing lots of cleaning, as you know, and the upshot of it is that i have found many wonderful books i bought. This one was ALSO in TK Maxx, called Vintage Home. It showed you have to do vintage projects, one of which was recovering things with paper. You paste the paper on the surface. It is really that simple, i kid you not. So that is what i did. I recovered a small bit of a mistake i had made on a table and then i recovered these flour bins, which are now no longer flour bins because of the mice. They are now used to keep apples and potatoes. They both turned out REALLY well, which has left me exceedin...

New books which i got for this year Learning should always be alive with stories and connected to the place So in addition to all the FACTS we also need to give the stories which we have created about these birds, besides many of these stories are simply repackaged observations done very poetically It has been very peaceful now we are living in a clean house. I am detoxing which has been a welcome break from the excesses which i did not even know i was putting myself through. I had a whopping headache on the first night, but no headache yesterday, although it was impossible to go to sleep for some reason. Ghin was also very restless and couldn't get to sleep either. Garden work has to be postponed today, today is an indoor day. I will get Oisin to help with the room - his room. I cleared out Ghin's cupboard yesterday as well. Some clothes i kept, few i threw, and many i gave away. His cupboard is now completely organised. Next it will be mine.  I dusted my room f...

Dear god, today i was watching the wasps, flying in and out of this hole in the ground which is just outside the conservatory. I was watching them. Most people would have destroyed the nest because it would be a frightening thing having wasps living so close to them, but I have just let them continue. Honestly, i don't know what to do about them, will the nest get larger? Will they swarm? I don't know. Anyway, as I was watching them, a thought suddenly struck me, what if Darwin got it all wrong? That we are not here to survive, but to love? And suddenly, as if it had all fallen into place, it locked. It locked. It was the same feeling that I had when after i had spent days and nights working on an essay, it locked, it all made sense. We are here to love. We are not here to strive and compete against each other, but to nurture, love and cherish each other. That is what we are really here for. Success is the success in being kind and loving and giving. And then, i began to cr...

Picasso's Doves from the Las Meninas collection It has been such an achievement cleaning the entire house. If anyone asks me how long it takes to clean a house which hasn't received a proper spring clean for about five years, the answer is 11 days. Yep, 11 days. And that does not mean and ENTIRE clean either. It is a cleaned house and structure to work with. It is now no longer feeling overwhelmed and miserable. And the best part of it all is the feeling of having taken control of the environment. It is of knowing exactly what is where and why it is there. I did a lot of throwing away. I also did a lot of rearranging. Much of the rearrangement was in light of future cleaning, not just hiding things. The underbed storage is gone so i can get at the dust bunnies. I have created spaces so that i can move furniture to hoover behind. I have also hung pictures and repositioned things. One of the many things i have discovered is that cleaning is VERY hard work. It is like do...

People think that i did not vaccinate Ghin - and to some extent Oisin - because of gastrointesinal issues and autism. That is not the reason why he didn't get the MMR. He did not get the MMR because they are of themselves not serious diseases. (Actually I had already decided to not vaccinate BEFORE the MMR debate - i had read into the history of vaccines, their 'side effects' etc around the DPT, before the MMR debate exploded, and this was also BEFORE i had children.) But back to the MMR and chicken pox. They are awful, yes, as children, like myself who have gone through them will tell you. They are highly inconvenient, and they can be very worrying. But i did not appreciate the doctor trying to scare me with, "Oh you know there are cases of fatalities with the measles" Where? I asked him. In Dublin and Wales. It would interesting to find out were they because the parents didn't know how to look after the children? Was it cause by the MMR itself? What wa...

Well, yesterday, i completed cleaning up my bedroom. I wondered why it was so dusty and realised that it was because for the better part of last year the window did not work. However, when I was cleaning the DIY cupboard of requirement, I found a window handle, randomly, and got Oisin to change it. Now the window opens, and air comes through it, and so the dust does not get to settle. Simple things. An airless room collects dust. I found CDs which i had not seen since i first moved here, and I played them. I sorted out the jewelry i had. They sorted into quite nice valuable things, costume jewelry which had lots of sentimental value and also looked quite nice, and things the boys had given me, which i would never part with in a million years, even if they were bits of plastic. The others, if i did not remember how i got them, or if i never wore them, they go into the give away pile. Some of these things are quite nice in the give away pile. But I couldn't keep them any longer. It...