MY STORY
THIS IS WHERE I LET YOU SEE BEHIND THE CURTAIN AND YOU REALISE THERE ISN'T MUCH GOING ON BACK THERE AFTER ALL. IT'S ALSO WHERE I FEEL MOST UNCOMFORTABLE. SO NOW YOU KNOW.
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SEEKER: COMMUNITY R.I.P.
I’m a self-confessed life-long lone wolf; always have been and always will be. Being one of those people who are quite comfortable in their own company has many advantages – not least of which is the lack of a need for an ever increasing cadre of ‘friends’ and therefore not feeling lonely as often as others might. That’s not the same as reclusive and introverted, I can and do interact well when in company, but if I’m to be brutally honest company is not something I seek out too often and when I do I’m ridiculously selective who I want to spend my time with. I explain this attachment to solitude by citing the fact that I work in a people intensive situation where my job requires me to talk to people all day long and when I’m…
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SEEKER: RELIGION vs. PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY
“In a world beset by fundamentalists of both believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.” Alain de Botton All of my adult life I have been what I would call a “Seeker”. By that I mean I have always felt there is a need for some sense of ‘spirituality’ in order to prevent chaos in the mind, body and spirit – not to mention society as a whole – and I have been searching for the elements of that spirituality for well over thirty years. I was raised a Roman Catholic, growing up in Ireland one had more than a 90% chance of the coin falling on that side, and was a reasonably good practitioner for most of my first two…
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WHO AM I?
Not that you dear reader have done anything wrong to deserve this momentary interlude during which I intend to let slip the curtain and ‘expose’ my inner me and set forth my manifesto to boot, but let’s face it it takes a certain amount of ego to release upon an unsuspecting blogosphere regular rantings about items that really only seem important to me (sometimes only mildly at that). The Ego has Landed you might quite rightly think. In a previously undeleted manifestation in cyberspace I described myself as “Middle aged and proud of the achievement. Working in Adult & Community Education for decades. Expanding my knowledge base but not at the same fantastic rate as my waistline. Trying to leave a record of my existence, like a tattoo on the blogosphere, before the Grim Reaper comes a calling.…
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LISTENING TO THUNDER
On Thursday evening I sat in a French garden listening to huge peals of thunder rolling across the fields and vineyards and watching the rain clouds slowly head on collision courses through the heavens and I thought of two people and two lessons they taught me. The first was my late mother who never wasted an opportunity to draw our attention to thunder, and indeed even lightning, and remark how exciting it sounded. She would point out how charged the air was and the static electricity that made the hairs stand up on our arms. On those occasions when the thunderstorm would result in a power outage, she would light candles, cook on an old camping stove we had tucked away under the stairs and tell stories until bedtime. We loved every minute of these storms and…
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COUNTRY ROADS
My old pal Denver is 12 years of age (84 in dog years) and despite the down at heel look on his face – it’ll stop soon if you ignore it – he’s actually over the moon about going on his road trip today. Unlike other migrating species he heads south for the summer and loves it. It doesn’t seem so long ago when he used to first scramble into the boot as a pup and then later bound in when he was fully grown. Today Denver managed to get his front legs into the car by himself but the back legs were my job. Dog years didn’t really mean anything to me when I was young and how could they, I had little to measure them against, but now I’m one of the Golden Guys I really do…
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I’LL BE MISSING YOU…
My little buddy will be zooming off on her next adventure to Dubai in a day or so and the photo blogging will heat up then “for real” – as she might say. It’s strange how the world has shrunk over the past twenty years or so. When I was her age the notion of spending a summer in Dubai would have been the stuff of high adventure, but today it’s like dropping in on friends in Galway for a few weeks. You hear more and more people saying they have a cousin, sister, aunt in Dubai or Abu Dhabi and they’re on their way out or on their back from visiting them. Social media of course closes the gap a little too and I suppose I’m going to have to succumb to using Skype if I…
