News From the Hill

Posts Tagged ‘Beauty Within Us’

I spent the weekend with many friends, listening. We listened to each other as we shared part of our life story. We spoke in turn and did not interrupt each other, concentrating instead on listening.

Not the sort of listening where you are already composing your retort/reply/next question.

It was the sort of listening that was just that – listening. We listened with our full attention, trying not to fidget or get distracted from the role of listener. It was a very active listening.

It is rare to have that sort of listening these days. It requires discipline and patience. It also requires the listener to put away their judgements and take out their compassion. It humbles the listener to hear a friend share fully their joy and their pain, their mistakes and their learning, their tears and their laughter.

I feel very lucky to have such friends and my heart is full…

As I write I can hear rain drops pitter patter-ing on the roof light, it’s a lovely sound at night when you are warm and cozy and do not need to go outside.

We did get some really nice weather week before last and made good use of it too!

A couple of friends from different parts of the country had asked if they could come visit and was there any work that needed doing around the place?

What a silly question! There is always work to be done around our place – everyone is welcome – bring your workclothes and boots, a good attitude and a smile and your dinner will be on the table!

We got lots of work done and even managed to have lots of fun whilst doing it! Double whammy!

We cleared the yard of accumulated “this will come in usefull” stuff and neatly piled it in a better part of the yard. We organised a fox-proof container for keeping the rubbish (trash) bags in ’til it is time to go put them at the crossroads for collection.

We moved around a few old vehicles that actually do have a use – you just couldn’t guess it to look at them! One truck has a very reliable engine that will become our key-start back-up genny for when we have a few of those dark, non-windy days that sometimes happen in the winter, leaving us a little short of electrical power. We moved the truck nearer to where we keep our electrical control equipment and will incorporate it into a lean-to on the side of our workshop.

We shovelled a couple of years worth of couch-grass off the gravel on the yard – hard work! Anyone who thinks that the Earth is in jeopardy has never lived with couch grass! Seriously, the couch grass will inherit the Earth long after we are gone! It’s our own happy, healthy existence that’s in jeopardy.

The foundations to the house got some work done on them too! Now that’s what I call exciting! With a bit more ground-work by the two of us and another visit from some helpful friends and the foundations will soon be finished – yahoo!

Imagine, with all that work in just a few days we still had time to go for wee strolls, laugh at the lambs and their mums who pop in to visit, conveniently keeping our grass down and we even managed to have some really good chats with each other.

So now it’s raining and we are back to a more solitary existence and enjoying those moments too!

Happy St Patrick’s Day! Whatever that means to you…. Maybe green rivers in Chicago, trade deals in New York, for some binge drinking in Ireland and for others putting face paint on the excited kids of the local children’s playschool class. It is a very odd mix of activities isn’t it?

I loved St Patricks Day when I was a child, for starters we had a day off school which was always a cause for celebration in my book! Secondly, even thought we were in the middle of Lent we were allowed a free day – we could eat the things we had given up for lent such as Tayto crisps, sweets and ice-cream. Thirdly, we lived near a city which always had an exciting parade and it was fun to go watch it with our family and to meet friends there too.

Drinking alcohol was not a big thing in my family so my childhood memories of the day do not involve seeing people drink to excess and as I grew older it was not something that I associated with the day.

I found it a little boring when my college friends got “rat-arsed” on paddys day, although I was a party goer most other days of the year, I never could see the whole “it’s paddys day, we have to get extremely drunk” thing.

I am looking forward to the parade in one of the towns that I live near. It will be a lovely simple affair with tractors, both new and vintage, hopefully the fire brigade truck, the playschool kids in colourful costumes, brownies and cub scouts looking so proud. How do I know what to expect? Because it has been the same for the years that I have lived here and I really do enjoy it!

As I said, when I grew up we had access to quite sophisticated parades and they were great fun and very colourful and noisy with all sorts of marching bands, big fancy floats and often American bands with cheerleaders.

There is something really lovely for me in the simplicity of the local small town parade, it seems more real, more rooted in the community, not trying to be something that it is not.

Many people are happy to go and watch their local parade and then have a pint or two with their friends and neighbours and I do enjoy that sort of socialising and may well do that very thing today.

However I will leave early so as not to be in town this evening when it becomes messy and also because I want to cook a lovely meal of bacon and cabbage! – Yeah, I know, it’s a little cliché but I do love bacon and cabbage and today is a really good day for it!

What does St Patick’s Day mean to you? Whatever it represents I do hope that you have a lovely day and enjoy some fun with your family, friends and neighbours this week.

Families can be so complicated, I am sure that it was always thus. Now we have more family than ever, even though the old fashioned extended family has gone by the wayside we now have a new fashioned extended family because we have our in-laws and we now have out-laws.

No, I don’t mean Billy the Kid or the Great Train Robbers, what I mean by out-laws is that we now have the assorted ex-in-laws.

We have our own ex-in-laws, if there are children involved and we are lucky we may have a reasonable relationship with them. Then we have not only our new partner’s family – the in-laws, we have the ex-in-laws and that relationship in whatever state it is. To top that we now also have our siblings’ ex-in-laws and possibly new in-laws as well. Phew, who has a big enough table for that family gathering?

With the best will in the world it is hard to maintain good relationships with all these new “relations”. Family responsibilities may become very confused and boundaries are ever more difficult to maintain – ah! There is the “wild west” motif sneaking in again – fence wars, boundary problems!

For many of us healthy boundaries within our immediate family may be quite enough to concentrate on, let’s face it – not many of us learned about healthy boundaries whilst growing up. By immediate family here I mean our partner and whatever children we may have between us, for some even this distinction is not clear.

I recently had a conversation with a sibling who assumed that by immediate family I meant my siblings, I was quite shocked and so was my sibling. You can imagine the conversation – sibling: but we are your family; me: yes, of course you are still my family, I now have a bigger family and more immediate family priorities with my partner and my partners children; sibling: where do we come in?; me: I actually left that unanswered and I’m still trying to figure it out, hopefully my sibling is also giving the matter some thought…

Family responsibilities are not clear and easy to deal with for many people and now with all the added family it has become even more difficult.

It may be the case that because of a particular skill you possess you may have taken on the role of doing certain jobs or having certain responsibilities within your first in-law family. When divorce or separation enters the picture that role may not be as clear as it was.

It may be that you wish to continue providing that skill to the now ex-family and there is resentment coming from others in that family, on the other hand perhaps you would prefer to keep very clear boundaries and withdraw from that level of family involvement and other family members resent you for doing that!

It’s even worse if there is simmering resentments or bitterness in the out-law family, not necessarily from your ex, sometimes these resentments come from your ex’s siblings and that can be very difficult to deal with. These feeling can sift downward in the generations, perhaps becoming exaggerated as they do and then affect the children no matter what age they are.

Even trying to write that is confusing, never mind actually trying to live it. Think I will put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea.

I hope your day is not filled with confusion…

Just lately it is even harder than ever to avoid bad news, dreariness, negativity etc on the nation’s media. I do my best to avoid the tv news and I haven’t bought or read a paper in ages, still it seeps in.

Today I had a look through my bookmarks for a study that I came across sometime last year, unfortunately I could not find the study however I do remember the gist of it and why it stuck in my mind.

The main point that came through from the study was that repetition is very effective in manipulating opinion. Even if people hear a fact that they know to be untrue, if they hear it often enough they may come to believe that it is true.

That may seem like an outrageous claim and I know that for big things or important issues it may not be true, for smaller or less important issues however it does appear to be true – after all, is that not the result that the majority of advertisers are hoping for?

Repeat often enough that your shop has the best bargains or that a certain product is healthy and people come to believe it, without any effort on their part, it happens in the back of your mind, so to speak.

I wondered at the time if the same is true of bad news, negativity etc. and I greatly suspect that it is.

I know if you wish to have a healthy attitude towards yourself and towards life that it helps to seek out the company of like minded individuals because it simply doesn’t feel good to be around people who are predominantly negative.

I don’t think that it is helpful right now for the media to focus so singly on doom and gloom, to dramatise it. I would love it if there were more good news stories being broadcast.

I feel lucky that I have seen a few really good programs lately. One show was about a bunch of Hawaiians who are teaching the children of the islands how to look after their islands, how to respect the coral, to reduce the use of plastic, to love the environment they are living it.

There is a native Hawaiian word (which I sadly cannot remember) which is an old teaching, the word means both privilege and responsibility. It is this old teaching that is being brought back to contemporary society, the children are learning what is involved in having both a sense of privilege and a sense of responsibility.

I love that these children are being supported in learning the old ways in this modern world, that they are being given a sense that they have power, they can do things to change what is unhealthy. They are being supported in learning to take responsibility, to fully enjoy and appreciate the privilege.

I love to hear and see stories such as this, to know that people are working hard at a very basic level to love this planet that we all inhabit. It is important for my spirit to know that there are a lot of people for whom money is not a high priority, who do not take more than they need, who do not suffer from a greed for power or for money.

Personally, I cannot hear enough of these stories, the good news stories that we can all share with each other…