cliodhna’s wave

I was working last night and in comes a guy with no money wanting a cappuccino. He promises to have money in a half an hour, my first impression is that he is a few fruit loops short of the whole bowl and I pass him over to Patrick (who works day shift) to handle and go off to continue organizing for the night shift. He is quite young, has shaggy unkempt hair, dressed well but hippy and he has a pink guitar with a heart shaped hole in it. He seems cute, harmless and definitely touched by the fairies.

I pass his table and he is writing a list written in big letters ‘THINGS I WANT’, underneath in descending order ’sunshine’, ‘a job’, ‘world peace’, ‘close all pubs’ and one more I didn’t get a glimpse of. He was getting this list ready to hang up someplace, industriously sellotaping it to another piece of paper with various business cards stuck to it  but he wouldn’t tell me where. Then he left without paying for his coffee.

Apparently he was fine until a few years ago when he went off a journey of the mind to seas uncharted on the ‘normal’ social scale. Maybe he will make his way back, maybe he will go further.

The understanding I always get from genuinely mad people is the place between the state of normal and madness. They remind me to get in touch with that place again. Where rules are words written on paper and meanings tossed around like confetti in the wind ready to be used for whatever you would like them to be. Also what strikes me is the utter seriousness with which they believe the trip they are on. It makes me reflect on my own life, what trip am I on that I am utterly investing in that is madness? what beliefs am I endorsing in myself that I could drop and be happier?

I dropped one recently a few months ago which the guy last night reminded me of. The need to be doing something constantly, to be someone to receive worth, to achieve to be happy. I had better look at it again and refine it.

x cliodhna

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A friend gave me a lump of coal when I moved into my new house and i said thank you and left it wrapped up in the tissue and put it on the windowsill. Not having a fire to burn it in it stayed there for a few weeks as i wondered what to do with it.

About two days ago I washed it. Coal is Beautiful!! who knew? under all that dust and black dirty powder coal is black and gnarly and midnight dark and shiny blue at the same time. I was so surprised.

So anyway, sitting in a steam room in Kilronan waiting for Nessa to show up I head off with my lump of coal in my hand to ask the old woman on the island what was the coal all about. I got a few answers,

Coal is about showing that inner light we have and shining out to the world. Our inner fire (creativity, warmth, hearth, passion) can’t go out and we can’t use it up so the more we use it the more we have. We can stoke the fire of our own hearth and like the coal it will glow red and yellow and white with heat and energy.

Coal is also about honouring those parts of ourselves we take for granted. Coal is dirty and unregarded but without coal we would not have achieved so much as humans. Its keeps us warm, cooks our food, gives us energy but we never think to thank it or honour it or give it pride of place. We expect it to work for us. Same as with parts of ourselves that work and work and are ‘dirty’. We expect these parts to keep going and shape our lives yet we never stop to say thank you or let them rest.

I had a dream that night about waking Kali up. She was black and pitted and shiny blue and it was only when I woke up the following day I realised she was like the lump of coal. I am waking up the earth fire, that cleanses and destroys and rebirths again. Feminine energy that so often, like the coal, is taken for granted and kept small.

So light the fire and stoke the coal and feel the heat as it builds and you can see the centre of the fire starting to glow white with the heat. Let it warm you and guide you and create your inner hearth fire as you want it to be.

xx

The day is clear and sunny and the air has a bite in it. It is Ireland at her best in winter… the sharp air makes everything brighter and more defined, shadows are stronger and highlights are brighter.

I went for a walk with my camera… I am surrounded by brown at the moment, brown, and blue where the waterlogged fields reflect the sky. : Of course I should really get out at sunrise, which in winter is not difficult seeing as the sun rises so late. The hard part though is just getting out of the bed on a cold morning and braving the chill outside a nicely insulated house!

Warm sepia tones of the dead grasses

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Texture of dead foliage with the hardness of the barbed wire

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Wood, gnarled and worn by weather

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The ditch is full of life,

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Dark umbers and burnt sienna’s in a boggy ditch. Life moves slow in this ditch

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Now this, would make an incredible tapestry

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yellow shells shine out like flowers in a field, small and unshowy but when you look closer there is so much colour

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The water reflects the sky and the sand and brings all the colours together

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I sit on a rock for a few minutes, eyes closed, listening to the world around me. The water is gently lapping the shore, the birds wheel and cry as they skim the rocks, in the distance out to sea the waves crash against the rocky promontory. Nice place to be, caught in the centre of movement that becomes stillness. I find the place where time stops and open my eyes to the sparkling sea.

…as it says on the title I am setting up a Toltec stalking group in Sligo town. Everybody is welcome even those who are scratching their heads right now wondering what on earth is a stalking group and what does toltec mean?

Stalking is technique perfected by the Toltecs ( who lived in Mexico many many years ago) for Self awareness and inner freedom. We all have limited patterns and beliefs about ourselves and the world around us that stop us being everything we could be. We live in a dream that is not in accordance with our higher selves and when we have limited beliefs about ourselves these are what we project onto the world and the dream we create around us is limited. Stalking is a tool to find these limited patterns and beliefs, change them and heal them and start dreaming from love. To create the world we want around us that is unlimited and everything we can dream of.

I have worked for the last eight years with a Mexican shaman called Don Luis Molinar. He is a nagual in the Eagle Knight Lineage and received the teaching from Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements, Mastery of Love) who in turn received it from his grandmother who was a powerful shaman and healer.

The meetings will be in Sligo town in the evening time for two hours every two weeks in the Yoga Centre on Castle Street (purple door!). There will be a charge of 5 euro per meeting. Contact me for further details, we are still deciding on a day but we will start soon. Text or ring me at 083 4014336 or message me on this post.

If you want to read more about stalking or the Toltecs then check out
www.ToltecHeartWisdom.com for Don Luis

www.MiguelRuiz.com for Don Miguel

love and light! x clio

the house from the beach

So, by hook or by crook, I am not sure which, I have found myself living in north-west Ireland for the next three months. A stormy, rocky, wave beaten, wind scoured, almost desolate, treeless, sideways landscape it is too. Yesterday, were it not for the rain battering against the french doors into the back garden I could have imagined that the ocean and land had traded places and and the squalls of rain were sea currents and the birds being tossed here and there were fish. the view from my back window the beach down from my house The birds fly backwards, its easier and doesn’t get their feathers ruffled so are we going or what? the beach at the end of the road I went down to look at the waves and crossed the rocks to get nearer. The ocean is a scary heaving beast with a life of its own and a casual disregard for all things small. I would be a pebble, an annoyance, a fly, a speck of dust to it. The waves got closer and sprayed me with sea foam.. I got scared and backed off… a lot… to the safety of the grass. The waves are huge here closer and closer

The rock here has fossils in them. Apparently they are famous for it.

Louis the dog

I have a dog and a cat into the bargain, which stops me missing my own dogs and cat too much (though I still look forward to getting them here) and there is a stove to warm the house. Perfect to make art and relearn my songs on the guitar and dream away the nights as the wind howls outside. There is silence now, but I can hear the waves thundering onto the rocks in the distance and a clock ticking somewhere in the house and the dog sighs as he sleeps. And to top it all of two fields away (to quote Margo) is Ellen’s Pub which has a session every Friday night I will go when I have a few songs mastered and when Paul brings my fiddle to me from the states.

Good Night!

So, when I was in Guanajuato, Mexico there was a guy… he was quite mad and would wander the streets of Guanajuato with a briefcase under his arm, muttering to himself, shaking his head and generally brandishing a shief of papers in his other hand. When I first saw him I wondered what he was up to, where he was going and what was all the fuss about, big meeting maybe… But then I realised as I saw him again and again that that was his particular madness. He was always on the way to or from a big important meeting. I thought at the time… what a good analogy for the human race, we are constantly on the run around from one place to another big important doings that really don’t mean squat in the bigger picture.

Thing is though I didn’t apply that to myself. Blind spots are wonderful things, they cushion us and protect us from things we would rather not face. I was recaping this morning about a time in Chihuahua when I was in denial about certain broken aspects of my life and it hit me I was doing exactly what this guy had been doing. Not so much.. I mean I wasn’t racing around in dirty clothes calling into businesses demanding to speak to the managers about a big important non existent projects but I was investing all my energy and self esteem into being successful and selling art. Anything to be doing something, I would chase short term goals with obsessive energy and be crushed when they wouldn’t work. I wasted time on circles when I could have been focused on long term achievements that would actually mean something and be achievable.

That’s self sabotage for you though. When we are in denial about some aspect of our life the rest gets affected too. It becomes a shield to protect us and keep us in oblivion and so nothing gets fixed and everything stays the same in self enclosed circles that we run on endlessly.

Now I have to figure out how I am still doing the same thing and stop doing it!

So i know I am very remiss in posting posts on this old blog of mine but I realized the last post but one is me getting started on the fish quilt then how perfect to post the ending of that project.

My mother just bought a quilting machine and we rolled it up and off I went… so cool and so fast!

The quilt hung in the knitting and stitching show in the RDS.

and the stall at the knitting and stitching show. I met some lovely people at the show.. some women from my facebook page stopped by and the ladies from Green Angel were across the way from me (I was right beside them last year in Marley park) and beside me was the owner/editor of the Irish Quilting Magazine who is from San Francisco so we had a barney about being homesick and living in a different country and the perils of driving in the states. I had a great time at the show and it was inspiring to be around so many textile artists of such high quality. I look forward to it next year!

I found these photos. They are from my window in mexico and the two doves hung out for ages on the branch, playing and preening each other.

I started this about eight months ago, got caught up in other stuff and have been working on it steadily for the last month. I am making the patches and embroidering them and then will put them together. The picture here is the first third laid out so i can see how it looked.

This is my workshop, small I know, a table in the corner but the view out the window is wonderful. I left my oil paints in chihuahua and so I don’t need a big table right now.

I am liking Guatemala. It rained today and the thunder rumbled and there is always a breeze which is nice in comparison to Chihuahua, where it was either really cold or intensly hot. I went shopping in the central crafts market and bought some bags and textiles. Have to send them home now to the folks. I promised my sister a wall hanging for her new apartment.

I am getting ready to drive. A scary prospect because they are even worse drivers here than in Chihuahua. On a par with Mexico city I would say. I kinda know the layout now though and how to find my way to places. It looks simple, laid out in a grid system of Zones, avenues and streets, but in actuality the one way streets and the diagonals twist everything and an address that looks simple on paper becomes a maze of puzzles when confronted with reality. A house is numbered for its distance from the edge of the street or the avenue its on. I still don’t quite get it….

People here routinely work 24hr  shifts and the security guards at the hotel we were staying at work 48 hour shifts. I don’t understand this, how can you expect anyone to do a job properly if you work them 48 hours? and what is wrong with even a twelve hour shift, send them home for sleep and rest and get them back in the next day. Makes me appreciate coming from a country where the wealth is more balanced and even the minimum wage, small though it is, is actually enough to live on. Like in Mexico, you can survive on the minimum wage here, just about, but anything else to better yourself or buy books, electronics, cars, forget about it. Books here are twice the price of Ireland or the states. I suppose its a good technique to preserve the status quo, if you only make enough to survive and feed your family you won’t have enough time off to think about the injustice of it or do something stupid like form a union or demand better wages.

I have been here for three weeks now, i think, living in a hotel while we look for a house and eating in restaurants and getting the office organized and generally looking and learning.

Some first impressions

There seem to be either rich people or poor people here with not much of a middle class. I had a thought yesterday that its like looking at first world people living in a third world country. When Paul first tried to drive to the mine the army had blocked the road and he had to turn back. We thought, ‘great, we move from chihuahua and the out of control army to guatemala and its worse’ but then we discovered that the government doesn’t pay them very often and when they get tired of waiting they block the roads and wait to get their money. Police do this also and even other groups like teachers, construction workers.

The textiles are wonderful! I love them and the colours and the embroidery. I have already got a few things and now just need a house to put them in.

To cross the road in guatemala is to take your life in your hands. there are white painted lines on the cross streets but nobody stops, you wait for a break in traffic and run for it. traffic is horrible in the city buses pull out where ever they want, it is up to the car to get out of the way.

there is even more paperwork than mexico (if thats possible). Everything has to go through a lawyer. We rented two apartments for the company… it took two weeks for everything to go through… two weeks!

there seems to be an amazing amount of lakes and rivers and jungles and beaches and I can’t wait to start exploring!

I am in food heaven! every single restaurant here has been delicious. Food from italy, peru, mayan, sandwich shops, sushi.. After two and a half years in Chihuahua and its steak based cusine this is wonderful!