Archive for August, 2008
Anger
August 30th, 2008 | Author: Scribhneoir
This is in response to a blog entry in Nurtured By Love…
It’s difficult for many people to be around anger I think. Is it easy for anyone I wonder? I know that even some people who are used to expressing their own anger can be frightened by the anger being expressed by others, while others are desensitized to it.
It takes a long time to unlearn bad or unhealthy habits and of course we can only do something about our own anger, we are not responsible for the anger of others, even when it is directed towards us. Each of us chooses how to react, even when we react so instinctively that it doesn’t seem like a choice, it still is a choice, we get to decide what our reactions are. I am not saying that it is easy but I do believe it (uncomfortably) to be true.
I say uncomfortably because it makes us responsible for feelings that we may be more comfortable blaming on others – she made me angry, upset, sad etc. rather than I am feeling angry, upset, sad etc. It is not always pleasant or comfortable to take full responsibility for our own feelings and many of us have to learn to do it as adults because we did not learn these things whilst growing up.
Often we may need help learning these new habits, it is especially good to chose your companions from emotionally healthy people, those who are really working on positive living, who are really trying to learn or practise integrity and self-awareness.
I notice that many tv “reality” shows and soap operas seem to work very much with a theme of anger running through so that those who watch regularly (phew I am glad I don’t) are subjected to anger on a regular basis and would therefore view it as quite normal. I think that the danger here is that anger can cover so many other feelings which may never be acknowledged, causing many other problems. Why do the media pepper their “popular” shows with anger? Please let me know if you any thought on this.
I know that it is the main reason that I watch so little tv. I don’t need my entertainment to foster feelings of impotent anger in me. I want my tv entertainment to charm me, educate me, surprise me. I like to watch shows with some human values of honesty, warmth, healthy emotions being healthily expressed and dealt with, compassion. Perhaps that’s why I mostly watch reruns of old shows and movies and stay away from the current rash of so-called reality tv.
Having said all that I think it is important to recognise that anger can be a positive force for change, for improvement, it should not be viewed as a negative or unhealthy emotion.
Anger is not an unhealthy emotion, it is just an emotion.
It all depends on how we behave when we are angry, how we use the anger we are feeling, whether we recognise where it is coming from, whether it is hiding any other emotions that we should be aware of and learning how to act appropriately.
The Accidental Gardener
August 30th, 2008 | Author: Scribhneoir
2008/08/30 This post became lost in cyberspace and today was found – it should have been posted back in August 2008 and probably was stored in drafts because of a dodgy modem connection – now it can be put in it’s rightful place – no longer a lowly draft……..
I accidentally did some gardening today, I had absolutely no intention of doing anything in the garden, I was just drawn outside after my morning coffee by a strange brightness and found myself blinded and shocked by the sight of the sun shining with no trace of a rain cloud – no really, it was!
Perhaps cobweb season is already over and sunshine season is with us? Dare we hope?
Anyway I found myself wandering through the garden admiring the colours of the flowers and the beauty of the ponds, everything just looked SO different. If you think I am exaggerating then obviously you don’t live in the northwest of Ireland – the wetlands, soon to be known as the badlands if it keeps up the way it has been – 400% of the normal rainfall this month – that’s not funny.
Yesterday I went for a walk up over the top of the hill and met a neighbour who was moving his cattle to a higher field. He has had to move them a lot recently because the ground is so soft that they are not getting to eat all the grass before they trample it down into the mud and he has to keep moving them from field to field to try and prevent as much damage as possible. He reckons he will have start to feed them silage much earlier than usual this year and may not have enough. I would say that his story is not unusual.
I went astray there – I was talking about the garden – I am still stunned by the surprise beauty of today – as I wandered around the garden I could not help but notice the gooseberry bed that I had been avoiding tending to because it had looked so overgrown and thorny and wet but this morning I just got my trusty leather gloves on and started to work.
As I accidentally gardened I harvested an accidental bounty – I had topped up the gooseberry bed with compost from our humanure pile early in the spring when it was time to turn out one of the compost bins. We had decided to not sow a veg garden this year because we wanted to concentrate on other projects like house building (more on that later) so the only place to make good use of the compost was the fruit bed. I did notice that there were a few potatoes in the compost as I shovelled it around the gooseberry bushes but I had forgotten until today – when I dug out two buckets of lovely looking spuds.
Accidental Spuds
Because I had used the compost from the humanure pile and it hadn’t really rested as long as it would have if I had intended to use it for a root crop I think I will recycle these as seed potatoes so they won’t go to waste. And the goosberry bed really benefited from the spuds growing there, the soil is lovely, the weeds are minimal and the fruit harvest looks good. There was a redcurrant bush growing there that was not great looking at all and it looks great now with a much better crop on it than before – thanks spuds!
Posted in Good Living, Ireland, Co Leitrim, Sustainability | 
Tags: Beauty around us, Food, Gardening, Nature | 
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Cobweb Season
August 30th, 2008 | Author: Scribhneoir
I woke up yesterday morning to find that cobweb season had arrived. When I went for my early morning walk I discovered that our land was cloaked in wondrous cobwebs, each glistening in morning mist. All the thistles and rushes and tall grasses were connected by shimmering bridges of silk where there was none the day before. Unfortunately the camera is off travelling with himself so ye will just have to take my word for it!
I have decided that it is absolutely ludicrous to keep calling the seasons by their usual names because those names conjure up images of what we would normally expect the season to deliver and such expectations inevitably lead to great disappointment.
Therefore, the last season was purple season, as evidenced by the glorious purple flowers that surrounded us here on the hill and this season is now cobweb season. My seasons do not last neat numbers of months like the old fashioned ones, they may even be different to the seasons at the bottom of the hill, they only last a little while and then we have a wondrous new season to enjoy and delight in!
What season are you currently enjoying in your neck of the woods?
Posted in Community, Ireland, Co Leitrim, Sustainability |
Tags: Beauty around us, Nature |
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Gathering With Women
August 21st, 2008 | Author: Scribhneoir
I am very much looking forward to this weekend. I am travelling to meet some wonderful women and we will spend the weekend together. We will listen to each other, talk about our selves and our experiences and cook together and walk on a beach. I cherish these women and these rare weekends.
I also hope that the weather will be good because a few of us will be camping. If I were to place my order with the weather-making gods I would ask that if they wish to make it rain could they please do so at night? It sounds so lovely to lie cosily in bed at night in a tent listening to the rain – as long as the tent is really waterproof!
Posted in Community, Good Living, Ireland, Co Leitrim |
Tags: Friends, Listening, Relationships, Women |
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So Hacked Off!
August 20th, 2008 | Author: Scribhneoir
Funny word – hack: a hacking cough; an old fashioned tabloid journalist; an old horse; a horse drawn taxi (hackney); to have a afternoon horse ride (to hack out); a trick or easy method of doing something; computer hacker; to be annoyed, very upset (hacked off)
It’s the final two which concern me here and they are connected. A friend of mine had a look at his website the other night to find that his site information was gone and in it’s place was a notice telling him that he had been hacked! There was load of blarney in two other languages which as best as I could translate, between googling and bablefish was a lot of waffle about how America was destroying the world climate and it was time to act.
Well thanks lads – that was really news to me! Fair play to ye, using your brains to upset a really lovely person (who wouldn’t hurt a fly and works with healing) in order to get your message out there that climate change is happening. We never would have known if you didn’t do that. You are all just great – Not!
And by the way, the website destroyed was based in Ireland, not in America and the server being used was in Canada, which funnily enough, also is not in America so if these silly people really wanted to cause distress to American “earth destroying capitalists” they need geography lessons.
These wastrels concentrated on only Linux systems, oh yeah, Linux has capitalism as it’s core, pure evil, the downfall of the world – again – Not!
Many of the websites attacked by these *geniuses* were home-made – designed by the website owners using open source software (more on this another time – I promise) and not all were concerned with making lots of money, but rather to do with hobbies and interests.
For the life of me I cannot understand this form of vandalism. These people obviously do have very useful brains, but they have no sense whatsoever. It really made me so angry.
They spend considerable time deliberately causing disturbance of people they will never know and also causing hurt to people they will never know.
Perhaps it is a good thing that I cannot understand this behaviour.
It is fair to say that I am well and truly hacked off!