The start of the last term

Yesterday I spent a lovely afternoon with Ghin - we had a snack at A Nice Sip and then we drove down the Lisburn Road. I am always back in Belfast for the first time when I do this. All the shops, all the houses, the road itself. and then, driving with Ghin... I have had to come down hard but not hard on the boy over starting to develop a discipline. Because he is here, working in the dining room I am able to keep an eye on him.

I get him up at 8 or 9 and then he starts work after breakfast. Everything in the last week has been about scaffolding him as best I can. I told him yesterday that he needs to think of it as a short term pain for a long term gain. I also said, look if you don't care what results you get, we can just forget about the work we are putting in. I said, I know these things are very difficult but learning like this does develop a few things. It develops discipline, it develops your memory capacity, it means that foundational facts are very close to you - it is the start of critical thinking. Develop this. Think about Singapore. You can go to Singapore and then have a great holiday - well within reason I guess. he will have to be revising in Singapore as well - Singapore style. But he will have our amazing study spaces.

So there is Ghin, doing it for himself.

I have managed to get him to develop a rhythm - a good one over the holidays. Whether it stays, is anyone's guess. I said get your socialisation from school. Keep parties to a minimum. Focus everything on studying hard now. He has started to call me Asian Tiger Mother. 

Dunno if he is coming over now. 

I said to him that we get his passport done today. I managed to unblock the shower yesterday - and well... apart from that... yes, life is ok.

The Green Man is reborn once again. In many vegetation myths around the world, the Green Man is sacrificed and the Mother - the bios - lives on. Often the is sacrificed TO the feminine in fertility rites. It is a metaphor for the act of procreation - of implantation. So that at the winter solstice the year begins once more...

Sometimes the sacrifice is not male, it is female. In hte Navajo corn myth, the grandmother is planted by her grandson for the first harvest of maize. In other First Nation stories, there is a Corn Maiden which willingly gives herself to the land. 

The labour and the faith which growing something requires is no mean feat. Becoming an agrarian culture changes us more than we know. Something pure was lost. In Hebrew mythology, it is symbolised by the killing of Abel by Cain. Having tamed the Earth, we all now bear the mark of Cain in some way. Compelled to know forever the passing of time, to understand what it means to break the soil, to have a short term sacrifice for a long term gain.

This is the amazing thing about being human - we are able to invent stories to explain things to ourselves and do so in such a way that while it resonates truthfully in our imagination, we do not know how much they help to scaffold us and our thinking. 

There is the unredeemed Cain and the redeemed one. In many ways, all our lives now is about bringing about that redemption from having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge - right now we still struggle with the mark. How can we elevate it and bring it to coherence? Make good what those terrible yet inevitable choices taken so long ago.