Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

It was a good day. I was almost a normal person. I just had to blow past yesterday and we ended up good today. The weather was stunning and I did a beautiful blackboard drawing. My blackboard drawing skills have improved dramatically. Really, they have. I am so pleased. I am going to take a photo of it tomorrow so put onto the blog. It is one of the nicest blackboards I've done. I am 72 days without booze. I am so so so happy. It isn't even a question any more for me - there is no more struggle. I didn't go running today because my heel was aching a bit. But i'll do that tomorrow morning. Although it was super busy today in school. Loads of walking around, loads of gardening, loads and loads and loads. I cannot express how beautiful the days have been. Just sunshine and the mugginess of the damp after the rain. I love this time of the year, the outbreath, the out like a lamb bit of April. It will be the last day tomorrow and the next four months it will be summer... SUM...

Taken today Well it is Wednesday. It feels empty without Oisín - we miss him so much. I feel absolutely incredible however, I do also know I am being tested. I need to be able to stand in the test and keep on trucking away. It is tough as a teacher. As a teacher you know you have to do what needs to be done to get the job done. This does mean having to break eggs. If there is another way I'd really like to know about it. But it doesn't matter. I was speaking to a friend and they told me to just not worry. Don't worry. Do not let this get you down. It is tough, it really is tough. I think that I am so proud of my own qualifications. I was suggesting that I we have our CVs on the website and talk about our qualifications. However this was thought to be something which would expose us. Honestly, I can't be bothered anymore. I would think that people would be proud of their own qualifications, but maybe I am wrong. It doesn't matter.  Anyhoo... just I was looking at som...

After crawling on its hands and knees the year has finally gotten off to a mental pace. Everything is starting up again and it is great. Today in school we started with the May Day dancing which reminds me I must programme the May Day music.  Began this two days ago... it is now the 28th. It will be two months since i began running. I have twisted my ankle and it is sore, but it's ok.  Two months and I am running up Croft Road Hill. It has been almost three months since I stopped drinking. I do not miss it. It is strange. I never believed I could have lived without wine! And now I am not in the slightest bit interested in it. It is only good as they say. The drop zone has gone well. It will be another two weeks before I am fully where I hoped I would be - and so it is coming along well. I have now got a sore to speak of and muscle tone is coming back. My legs had that a few weeks back and now my stomach area will too. I will wait till end May before trying anything from the go...

Today at the BBQ for lunch, Ghin said to me, I really lucked out having you as my mother. Dearest sweetest most adorable Ghin. Thank you for being you my darling.  And here are lots of selfies. Well if there is one thing I have learnt, no matter how ugly i think i am in a photograph when I have taken it, after a few years I realise how beautiful I am. So that is the reason I am keeping these photos on my blog. It is my blog I get to use it in my own way. I have been given pink highlights. I think I will use them now.  Well, I have completed all my chores and admin for the day and there is only the lesson plans for next week to complete. It is settling nicely. Right. I'm off to do my hair now and see what comes of it.

Well today i ran the entirety of the Croft Road Hill. It was incredible. I was amazed... it was slow and steady but I made it to the top. The week's recovery and rest helped of course. Now that I can do this I can do anything I think. I will now just tighten up times.  I got home did the sit ups and then stretches. I am indeed as fit as I have ever been. It only took two months. Two months. I began running on 28 Feb and by 25 April I have not only gained all the ground I have ever had, I have also surpassed it. That's weird no? It is like I'm living in some kind of simulation. So strange. This T-shirt now fits me perfectly. I looked at the next two months - May and June are the Tone Zones. I will achieve fitness levels which I want to achieve. Then July is consolidation and August is Bedding In. And that will be this year. This year has utterly flown as well. If it is anything like the last two weeks it will fly. Talk about time being relative.  OK I am going to clean the h...

I know this has been a difficult time for so many but when I look back on 2020 and 2021 i will see it as my years of liberation. When I finally returned to myself. After the long sail out. I have never felt so chilled, peaceful and content. Yes, I miss Oisín, of course I do but before he left I got to spend a ridiculous amount of time with him and Ghin did too. He is doing well, which all that you can do, and Ghin is happy back in school. I am pulling away further and further from Peter and Planet Chaos. and I am getting on with things. I still have not had anything to drink and despite drinking weather, I have not succumbed. It feels amazing actually. I wonder if I will make it a no drinking year.  What else? School is going great and Forest School is opening up soon. It will now get very very busy. I really enjoyed the down time but I need to start moving again. I have loved and I mean LOVED everything.  It is falling in love weather after all. The sun so golden and the air ...

Here's a short entry now. Why is it so important that EVERYONE follow everything which is being said? This insistence of conformity in itself is so dangerous. I am watching the population of India and Brazil dying. It is awful but also they have been dying for a very very long time. I wonder if it is the middle class which is now being affected or is it the most vulnerable. The destitute and the ill. You have to wonder about the nature of the virus. Globalisation has contributed to it massively. As long as you have travel you will have pandemics. That is the nature of things. God I'm glad I did all that before this mania. It will take years before anything is reset again. I will desperately miss being in Singapore this year though. We have never not gone to Singapore two years in a row. The boys are so used to going there now... for the past eight years we have spent at least six weeks there. It is the other place on Earth where they spend the most amount of their time... excep...

I have had the BEST weekend. It has been chilled and beautiful and restful and I cleaned the house. I bedding will be done by 9 pm this evening and then Ghin and I will have supper. Here is this week's blackboard drawing. I'm really delighted with it. It is possibly the most arty drawing I have done. Everything else has been very much a reproduction of what was on the page... the image. Even the bust of Alexander was more or less a reproduction. Here I have had to interpret the head... I can see why Picasso and the modernists fell in love with African art when they first encountered it. There is something really truthful about it. Going to the essence, looking past the illusion to try and distill the spirit of the person. It reminds me of what Basquiat used to do. I remember seeing his exhibition in the Serpentine in 1990. It was incredible.  After this I will clear the table downstairs and do my lessons for the week. Ghin and I were talking about organising the house. This has...

As long time ago I began to question what success really was. It became very clear to me very quickly it was not about having things. Many things, expensive things, things which let you fit in, things... in general. It was also not about money. Yes, you did need money, like you needed things, but not at the extent and level with which we were led to believe. Just read what a day was like in Versailles and you get the idea. Most people who were deemed successful were mostly psychopaths.  It was not about achievement. I look at so called scientists today and what they are celebrated for. Then I look at the state of the world and I despair. What is the point of being able to put a bot on Mars or see what the outer moons of Jupiter look like if we have not found the solution for world peace? Or solve starvation? Or the state of the planet. To me from where I am standing we are not living in the most advanced time ever, but in the most idiotic time ever. For some reason having a giant g...

The two week rule is basically me noticing that anything you do to your body take two weeks to start to kick in. The next two weeks then has some effect, you see slow noticeable changes and thereafter, the next two weeks everything happens very quickly. Similarly, if you stop doing something, it takes two weeks to kick in again.  So, for instance, it took two weeks before I saw anything happening by way of my changes. Whether it was taking supplements, etc. If I stopped running, it would take two weeks before the body started to plateau. This is where I think people think.  Also going back is not an option. People think I will make these changes and then I will stop. You cannot stop. Once you have started making semi long term changes in your life - anything after a month in, going back will bascialy be unpicking everything you have done. You need to stick with it and keep going. The body will not lose anymore - it will stabilise. Any positive changes which have taken place ha...

I see a city of glass and light with greenery and abundance. It is the Garden of Eden. The city of humanity before we fell. I do wonder if the individuals are not human as such but the consciousness of humans - humans before we had bodies... but still human nonetheless.  There is pure harmony and the fall - that brings about another stage... but we still have had to fight for it.  ======================= I see the city.  It will soon be gone. Shattered into impossible fragments to become the world. The people of Atlantis they are able to move in and out of the spiritual and physical state. One day they will stop changing and be unable to return to the spiritual state. People who have moved to Lemuria have gone there to die physically. It is what we do to vivify the Earth. It is like a detective story really - piecing the pieces together.  We see the futuristic city because it was our past. We carry this inside us. We move towards it, it is not the future, it is our m...

I am now doing ancient Mesoamerica and have suddenly had the time to contemplate Darwinism. I have always found Darwinism offensive, without every questioning it. The idea that only the 'strong survive' is what I have picked up from the Origin of the Species. I have not read the book, but it is slightly suspicious that such thinking would arise at the precise exact moment when the British Empire was at its height. The idea that variations and mutations which become the dominant species occur because they have bred traits which help them overcome extinction and those who do not go to the wall. Based on this thinking, many of people born with disablities should go to the wall. And yet they do not. Oddly enough Darwinsim is never applied to the dominant species - e.g. people who want to conceive can now use IVF when in the past they would have had to live with this condition. Children who are born very premature now have a really good chance of survival. All this is good, but it i...

I am doing a non religious fast. I will have breakfast of toast and dinner of seaweed gloop. I will drink tea and coffee - two cups and water. In real Ramadan you don't drink anything either. It's so strict. I'm not doing that. But the whole point is to help with the last bit of the Steph 50.0. Well 50.33. I promised myself I would not put on any old clothes that were too tight for me previously, but I did. I put on the pink linen skirt. It was a size looser. And I put on my black Burberry polo and it fitted perfectly. And I put on my baggy jumper and it was very loose too. So it's great. I'm not putting on anything else until the end of the month. It can be dispiriting but it hasn't thus far. But I don't want to tempt it. Already the things which I CAN wear I am very happy with. I especially love the leggings and how they are now all loose too. And the stripy cardigan, that is loose as well. Yeah, it is all getting there, slowly but surely. The nice thing a...

I have had the best weekend before school ever. Yes, I was nervous, and yes I felt I was unprepared but when I started getting ready I did feel much much better.  Usually when I start doing this I end up beating myself up for not doing things earlier, not doing more, etc BUT this time round I was, I enjoyed myself. I get to enjoy myself and just take things easy. To have this time for me. I get to do that. That's NICE. So I enjoyed myself. The running today was amazing, again. It is strange how I make these tiny improvements everyday. Even in the stretching and sit ups... everyday there are small bouts of progress. Tomorrow Ramadan begins to I'm going to use it to fast for the month.  I helped Emma with her car and we ended up in Groomsport. It was such a gorgeous day... then after that I went to school, did the drawing and then ended up back home to fall asleep for a short while before I organised everything. I feel wonderful really. It has been such a long time since I have ...

Well it has been a good day. I completed my ADHD, Autism and Asperger's course and I did some English. Cleaned the house. Ran. Watched some X-files and it was good. Oh yes did the laundry. All good. A bit hungry, but it's ok. I had fried rice and seaweed goop.  The ADHD course was illuminating. So many questions answered and so many questions raised. It is pretty primitive the treatment of ADHD I have to say. I also think there is a problem with overdiagnosis - as in no attempt is made to change the expectations or environment before the child is said to have the condition. Autism also has a really weirdly broad spectrum. You have children who are seriously handicapped by their condition and then you have children who clearly have issues around socialisation and habits, but are able to get on with life in general. In the future, my recourse to action is going to be for children who are cruel to other children is zero tolerance. I have taught for long enough to know what is usua...

The run was fantastic today (yes it my blog I will write about running all the time if I want to.) Cold and frost gliding everything and just the waking up as the body heads out over the hills. The steepest part of the hill was easier yet again today. When I say easy I mean relatively. I did have to stop but I could see I could stop at a later crack in the paving and I could start earlier as well. So the walking was reduced to a little over 40 metres... possibly less, then all other hills are non existent. Even the last hill back up which used to be semi formidable. I am able not only to run through the top but still have another ten minutes left in me which I don't take because I end up doing my sit ups and stretching instead. I'm up to 45 sit ups at the minute which is the number of sit ups I used to do in Belvoir when I was running. The stretches get easier and easier. I'm now lunging 20 per time and my flexibility is almost where I feel I can do the suryanamaskar probab...

This blog is now admittedly obsessed with my running and my health. There are other things going on as well, but in my brain it is all about the return to health. In many ways I CANNOT WAIT till the end of May when this is over. It is strange - each day seems long, but then, here we near the end of two months since the start of Lent and a week since its end, and 42 days of running. It seems like forever but also not. I have more or less unplugged from what other people think/do. Last night as I lay in bed, just a sense of delight and pleasure filled me. This was my time. I have mad my time. It reminds me of when I am in Singapore and I have nothing to do apart from chill.  I also had this astonishing sense of completion. This pride in my solitude. I now look at people who have to compromise with each other, who secretly can't stand each other, with a pity. I love being here, proud and single and on my own at this time of my life. It is just liberating.  Oh Facebook has now sta...

It goes without saying I am 50.33 years old. Over the past two months I have discovered that it is very easy turning back the clock on the body. The formula I have gone over it repeatedly so I won't go over it again. I know that I will plateau in a month and three weeks. I will have reached where I was in my early 30s and I will stay there. Many bad habits e.g. drinking and eating too much meat have now fallen by the way. Running daily, eating simply and in small amounts are habits I am putting roots down in. Not to mention the cleaning and laundry and other areas of order and pleasaure. Today I decided to go to Belvoir Park Forest. Partly because you know, Forest, and partly because I wanted to see how I was in tackling the hills there.  Let me be clear the hills in Belvoir are nowhere near as formidable as the hills of Holywood which I began running two months ago - 40 days ago to be exact. In that time I have managed to very closely run all the way up the Croft Road hill. Almost...

I love being alone. I love just sitting and thinking and not doing much. Although I did really not do much yesterday after the boys left.  I will look back on this time in my life, if it ever passes, and remember that for this year there was a shining moment when I was responsibility free. I ha discharged my main duties as mother - the practical side of things - and was no longer cleaning up after the boys. Washing tonnes and tonnes of clothes. That everything could be done once a week and it would be enough. I could spend hours watching TV and the world would not fall apart. I could do whatever I pleased and pleased I would be. I will look back on this time as an oasis. A time of plenty of time. It has been exactly five weeks since I began running... right? Yes, yes it has. I tried looking at running shoes online and they are very manageable in price, but the thought of getting them, discovering they are not fitting then having to return them just is soooo annoying. Also the drive...

The Easter branch this year - finally completed it yesterday  I had much fun doing it - partlu inspired by what I could find around the house i.e. sequins and geegaws e.g. buttons and partly inspired by Faberge i.e. sequins and geegaws Oisín informed us he was leaving tomorrow yesterday  That was super quick Easter branch by night The dark blue was used on brown eggs and the pastel blue was used on ducks'.  These are two colours which are found on eggs in nature I woke up sad today. Mostly because Oisín is leaving for Norwich tomorrow. The news came suddenly. He was supposed to go next week and a trip planned with Peter was cancelled. I asked him if he had booked his flight yet and he said no. Then he went up stairs and booked it. You told me to! he said. No, I said it was supposed to be next week! Well he said, it was a cheap flight. Look I can't complain. I have no leg to stand on when it comes to children deserting thei...

The majority of ads around weight loss and exercise are about cheating - well I assume they are about cheating because I never watch them, but they try and hook you by saying things like 'when celebrities (yah, like I care?) need to buff up fast they...' at this point I would have skipped the ad. The visual will be some person I have never seen before or know about nor recognise at some machine looking like an idiot because they are completely made up and working out - who does this shit? put on make up to sweat - it is so bad for you and your pores for a start secondly you will look like a maniac at the end of it - in leggings or without a shirt on and clearly the ad is about selling some kind of short cut to looking good. It could be weight loss, but right now it is getting fit. Presumably because some machine is reading this blog and thinks that ads - especially inane ones - work on me. This is why AI will never work. Anyway, the whole point of exercising is not to look good...