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Crafty Batteries.

| Mairead

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(I made rhubarb crumble)

For the past few months the husband has been making his own craft project. While there’s no wool or fabric, it is kinda interesting. He’s made an electronic box. That’s not the interesting bit. In the box are some bits and pieces of things you might find in a computer and on the box there’s a place to put an AA battery, there’s also a little screen (picture below). Did I mention before that he likes bargains? Well, he does. Ever since his brother, Liam, taught him the rules of bargain hunting at the supermarket, he’s been bringing home trophies. Sure we don’t need ten bottles of Pino Grigio, or five bags of spinach but they were 50% off.

NewImage

(The electronic box)

But there was always one product at the supermarket for which there were no rules – batteries. It seems like everything else has a sticker with the per kilo or per litre price and so no matter what weight (or volumn) your chosen bargain is you can see at a glance if it really is a bargain or just looks like a bargain. Batteries have names that indicate their weight. Names like Ultra Power or Plus Power but is one Ultra equal to two Plus? No one knows…… until now.

‘NewImage

(The bits and pieces)

So to the project… Buy lots of different makes of batteries. Put one of each pack into the slot on the electronic box. Turn on the switch. Battery starts giving up its power. Electronic box measures how much power it gives up. When battery’s power is all gone that’s how much power there was in the battery. By the time Denis had tested just ten batteries he knew much more than when he started…

NewImage

(The victims, now all deceased. Btw the Tesco battery is zinc chloride (I have no idea..) so it wasn’t part of the final analysis)

I don’t understand all the complications of the electronics, the alkaline versus the lithium, the watts versus the joules but the bottom line is….. there’s a difference between one battery and another and it’s nothing to do with the cute names. The entire article is at www.denishennessy.com where you can see which battery we’ll be buying from now on.

Go bargains! Mairead.

PS If you want him to test your favourite battery just send it over and he’ll plug it in!

Pattern Dancing is So Yesterday!

| Mairead

Pattern 2

(Material Pattern)

I’ve talked about my love of patterns before – I love patterns – it’s one of the reasons I like material. Material always has a pattern. So does wallpaper. So do we. In fact we have many patterns. Not the patterns on our clothes (although we have them there too) or the freckles on our skin. Our patterns are to do with behaviour, our behaviour. A simple pattern of behaviour would be…. when a particular thing occurs you always do something, the same something.

Pattern

(Light Pattern)

One example: when someone (anyone) shows displeasure you (always) feel you’ve disappointed them and you attack yourself internally. To complicate matters the displeasure might not even be real, but that’s another topic. So, the someone may have a look on their face or they may be saying the word No or they may be disagreeing with your opinion. Whatever sign they are showing of their displeasure is irrelevant to your next step…. a feeling of disappointment and internal attack.

Tiles

(Tile Pattern)

It’s a bit like a dance. The someone takes a step, then, you take your step. You, me, all of us learned this dance early in our lives and it worked really well then. It got us what we wanted, comfort and attention. We danced it so much we forgot we were dancing, so that even when it doesn’t work we dance. The only one who can stop the dance is you… but first you have to notice it.

What’s your pattern? Mairead.

The Christmas Decorations

| Mairead

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(Light and dark on New Year’s Day in Cork)

I took down the Christmas decorations yesterday. I had been itching to do it for days, but there’s a “rule”. Yep, they can’t come down until after the 6th of January…. Waiting that long gave me the motivation to really get them out of the way. The very deserved celebration included a visit to a new coffee shop, where ideas and plans for the coming year flowed forth with each bite of a very nice apple and almond scone. So all in all the decorations have been very inspiring or at least their removal has been.

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(Amy’s Christmas boots)

So the ideas will soon be on the website and I will be depending on you readers to spread the word about the April workshop in France and the weekly creativity mornings and of course the ongoing Success Teams.

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(Tea and blank paper)

Also, we will be touring on the motorbike again. Where to this time? Then there’ll be the visit to my sister and family in Canada, by plane not bike. You can read all about it as it happens here in full Technicolor.

Can’t wait, Mairead.

Monday morning in Paris

| Mairead

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(View from the cafe window)

As I write it’s Monday morning and we’re still in Paris. The weather is warm (for December) and the sun is shining and there is no rain… in other words, it is perfect. We are on our way home and visiting the last few cafes. I may not be able to sleep tonight from caffeine overload but the coffee is so good. Just now I found a very cute shop, where they sold material, buttons, bells, ribbons and flowery covered notebooks, sigh.

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(Very close-up of the almond croissant)

I picked some beautiful buttons and little bells for a garland I’m going to make next week. Waiting to pay I said a few words in French but the young girl behind the counter said something I didn’t understand so I reverted to English. And so did she…. she was saying “you have an accent”. Well…. I am prepared to take that as compliment. If someone thinks you have an accent, then they recognise you are speaking their language… just a little differently! So I told her I was from Ireland and the second young assistant got involved. She loved Ireland…. “the people are so friendly.” Of course, I agreed…. we are friendly…. aren’t we?

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(We were on the fourth floor….. )

I’ve been wondering about that. Paris is not noted for it’s friendliness…. and yet the two assistants in the shop were very friendly to me. The waiter who served my cafe au lait and almond croissant  (magnifique) was friendly and spoke to me in perfect English because he knew I wasn’t French (how did he know? no self-respecting French person drinks cafe au lait in the middle of the day!) In the restaurant last night the waitress and waiter were very friendly, asking about Ireland and our experiences in Paris.

Maybe we’re not so much friendly as we encourage friendliness in others?

Or maybe we’re just nosey? Mairead.

Another busy day…

| Mairead

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(Pots and pots and more pots)

I kinda hoped that once my course was over I’d have no more busy days…. But today, I was at the dentist at nine, buying a pair of jeans at ten, on my way to Somatics at eleven, back at two (it’s a long way), having lunch at three (while talking to my sister in Canada, rude but necessary), wrapping presents at four, bringing back overdue library book at five (only saw the letter from the library at four), making dinner at five and a half, eating said dinner at six and a quarter, half-blogging at six and a half, meeting my success team at seven and completing this blog at twelve.

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(Up close with willow (the fencing not the dog))

Things will always keep us busy. All that changes is our intention. Unless we set our intention (i.e. consider what we want) then we get the default (i.e. what someone else wants…) My intention at the moment is packing to go to Paris tomorrow! Yes! Paris!

À bientôt, Mairead

Good Work You!

| Mairead
The Deck
The Deck

Ok I know I promised I’d get out and take more photos….. I didn’t do it. Instead, I launched my new website (www.maireadhennessy.com) and it was wet and cold outside. But before it got dark on Sunday I did run out on the deck and take the three photos I’m sending you. I’ll take pictures tomorrow… maybe… hopefully.

The Moon
The Moon

I have high expectations for what I can accomplish in a given space of time and I feel guilty if I don’t do it. Not exactly useful or helpful or even nice. While we (Denis was a great help) were getting the website up and running I found two blog pieces from 2003. I didn’t recognise them and initially thought they were writing I had liked and saved to read later…… but they were mine!

The Blue Pot
The Blue Pot

Sometimes we don’t give ourselves credit for the good work we do and we only see what we don’t do or we only see the bad in what we do do (do be do be do).

Look out for the good, Mairead.

The Sugar Blog Part 1 – No Sugar No Cry!

| Mairead

Remembering the Bob Marley song No Woman No Cry, I thought it was a good place to start my Sugar Blog. There’s a line in the song,

“Everything’s gonna be alright.”

and it repeats eight times, it’s very comforting!

I started a candida albicans diet on Wednesday. Thinking about it for a long time I had even made an attempt at it last November. The difference this time is I have support. My friend gave me the name of a Medical Herbalist and I’ve found her help really useful. She’s given me supplements to keep my body nourished and books to keep my mind occupied(!). One of the supplements even seems to have stopped the sugar craving. But I didn’t know that last Wednesday.

On Wednesday morning the sky was grey and my mood was black. I had a “sort of” plan to follow but wasn’t hopeful. The previous Monday night at the cinema I had eaten a €5 bag of sugar coated jelly sweets! I ate them one after the other almost without tasting, almost unable to stop. If I had done that –

How am I gong to survive without any sugar?

But it turned out that wasn’t the important question. Feeling miserable after my breakfast (porridge, rice milk, cinnamon, sprinkle of crushed flaxseed and supplements) and not wanting to share my misery I went up to my bedroom and wallowed for a bit. In my head I could hear, (well, I wasn’t hearing voices … it was my own voice!)

This is so unfair…. How am I going to manage?……. Why can’t I just eat what I want?……. Where am I going to find the energy?……. I’m so tired……… I’m so fed up…… I’m useless……. I never do anything right……. How am I going to feed myself? …….. How am I going to cook for everyone else? … What can I eat?……

And I started to cry. Now I’m no stranger to wallowing, but I hadn’t done it in a while and I may be loosing the knack, because soon I was hearing,

This is just an outward manifestation ………. What? This is just stuff happening out there, and you can use it to grow calm in here …… Oh…. ok that sounds just like something I tell other people ……

And then I started to feel calm. I wanted to go back to wallowing but it wasn’t working. I talked to myself for another few moments and then I heard,

What about a book with recipes?……..

Well, now you’re talking! I love books. That’s what I’ll do. So I got up, dried up and went to buy lots of vegetables and a new cookbook. The funny thing was I was feeling so good that when I made the grocery list I crossed out the book because I have plenty of cookbooks and I could find suitable recipes in them.

Wanting to buy vegetables I drove to the vegetable shop but for some strange reason parked near the book shop. Walking past it occurred to me that I could just look to see if there was anything interesting. So I walked in and found the healthy eating section. There were a few books and I flicked through them until I came to the one that had a recipe for Yoghurt Soda Bread, and it had two stars beside it.

Before I go on some background information: I’ve never liked cooking! Probably because I do it everyday for my family, whether I feel like it or not. And also because I didn’t think I was that good a cook. This has changed a bit in the past couple of years, and when I cook calmly the food tastes better! Leaving aside the cooking, I love baking. Scones, Apple Tarts, Rhubarb Tarts, Queen Cakes. Yum! I love eating the result of baking, now that I think of it that’s probably because of the sugar! So when I saw the recipe for the Bread I started to get excited.

The other thing about my diet is it excludes yeast and I thought I wouldn’t be able to eat bread, but Soda bread doesn’t have yeast! Yippee! But the MOST exciting thing about the recipe was the stars. You see this was a book written by a lady, Erica White, who had to go off sugar and yeast and she knew what that was really like. She knew that there could be bad days on this journey and she had come up with a plan to help! Star ratings. There were three star ratings. One star was a recipe for days when you are just surviving. Two stars for a day when you’re reviving and three stars for a thriving kind of day! The fact that making bread could be considered harder than easy and easier than difficult and I was willing to make it, made me feel great. I must be doing better than I thought. So I bought the book.

After that traumatic first day, things got easier. I picked out the recipes I wanted to make and bought the ingredients. I accepted that I might need to go shopping each day, and that made the almost daily trip easier. I stopped watching food programs on TV, stopped having biscuits in the cupboard and kept my eyes from straying to chocolate at the shops.The fridge had alternative sources of food always available. A week into the diet now the important question is –

Why do I want to eat when I’m not hungry?

The answer’s not clear yet, but it’s related to using food to comfort myself. I had a very busy day yesterday and there was some stress and some excitement and I was tired by dinnertime. For the first time since beginning this diet I wanted to eat something “nice” (“nice” to me means sweet) after my dinner. Fortunately there were plenty of non-sweet choices in my fridge. It was only after I had eaten some beautiful red Pesto with multigrain rye bread that I became aware that I was not hungry when I began eating. For the first time I considered that sugar may not be the problem, the problem may be that I eat when I don’t need the food for physical nourishment. Could this be another drug? This is just week 1, await further revelations!

For now all is well and I’m surviving, reviving and thriving through my sugar-less journey.

Let’s dance……

| Mairead

 

Sometime last year my son put me onto a video at http://www.stridegum.com/#/mattsplace/  (the Dancing 2008 link) It’s a guy call Matt Harding who travelled around the world (including Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green) with his girlfriend doing a silly dance. His girlfriend Melissa Nixon recorded Matt and the people (or monkeys) who joined him. The video lasts about 4 minutes. I found it again earlier this month and I’ve watched it every day since. I cry every time….. I wonder if I’ll ever be immune to its effect. 

 

I love the music, it’s playing as I write. I love Matt’s enthusiasm. I love his openness, lacking any embarrassment. I love the children. I love the people running in to dance. I love the bad dancers. I love the Bollywood dancers. I love the guy in the wheelchair. I love when it gets to Tel Aviv and then East Jerusalem, and I cry some more because they’re almost dancing together, they’re almost laughing together and they’re almost together.

 

I long to be so free that I could go to St. Stephen’s Green in the middle of Dublin and do my own silly dance, with a big smile on my face. But I’m afraid. Even imagining it makes my stomach knot and my face burn up with worry about what the people passing by would think.  

 

This guy, Matt has no fear, or seems to have no fear of what others might think (he is afraid of spiders though!). And that in some way is what makes him and his dance so attractive. He does the perfect silly “Matt Harding dance” and he has an impact on lots of people, he has an impact on me. What a simple way to have an impact.

 

Is there something simple that you want to do? Are you worried about what others would think? A passerby, your parents, your brother, your sister, your friends? What if what you wanted to do could have this kind of impact on just one person – would it be worth the fear? Would it be worth courageously doing the thing you want to do?

 

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.

  ~Ambrose Redmoon


No one can do the dance quite like Matt. No one can do your “dance” quite like you.

 

 Let’s dance……

The Spirit Drinker.

| Mairead

I’ve been reading Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (1954). He’s the English author of Brave New World (1932). In the Doors of Perception book he was testing the effects (on himself) of taking a hallucinogenic drug called mescaline.

The thing that most interested me was his reasoning for drug taking. Why do people take drugs, including alcohol and cigarettes? He says it’s because they have a sense of something greater than normal, (their own spirit or their own connection to spirit), and they want to experience that.

We can sense it when we are climbing a mountain, or running a marathon or watching our children sleep or when we’re caught up in creating art. It’s fleetingly there and then gone and it’s a let down to be in the ordinary world  We search for a way in normal day to day life to recreate that experience. Maybe we’re not even aware of having had an experience, all we know is there’s more to life than this…..

Huxley says that’s why humans choose to get high or get merry, it gives them a taste of this connection to something extra-ordinary.

This makes sense to me. There’s another drug to add to the list. It has always been easy for me to make that connection to spirit and I didn’t even think of it as something unusual – it was just part of life. As a child I loved going to church, and even went to extra masses during the week. It wasn’t strange when I was a child in rural Ireland, lots of people were doing it and there was an acceptance that this was the right thing to do.

When I became a teenager and started going out with boys, that place where I got spirit connection became unfriendly for me. As teenagers my peers and I were judged sinful and evil by the rules of the religion. Trying to follow the religious rules was difficult because they went against my own wisdom. For many years things continued like that, keeping the rules breaking my wisdom, breaking the rules keeping my wisdom, there was a lot of guilt. But I wanted the spiritual connection so I continued taking the religious drug. For me, there was no separation between spiritual and religious, and to have the spiritual nourishment I had to follow the religious rules.

But how can any religious structure/organisation have exclusive rights to spiritual connection? Spiritual connection came first and religion followed as a man-made symptom (at best) of that connection. When I realised that, I could honour my own wisdom and still have connection.

My drug was religion, I thought it was necessary to experience the spiritual connection. Some people’s drug is alcohol or cannabis or whatever… Is it necessary to drink alcohol, take drugs or attend a service in order to experience a sense of spirit? Would it be enough to have the experience without the drug?