cliodhna’s wave

…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

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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!

We are six and two. Six humans and two caterpillars, who arrived the second day of our journey to Teotihuacan (the pyramids outside Mexico City), on the tree outside the salon and entombed themselves to die and be reborn. They were huge and furry and black with yellow stars down the length of their backs. We are doing the same, on an inside space we retreat into the layers of our beings and our pasts that we still carry to transform these slow caterpillar bodies into lightness and colour and wings.

As we enter the salon every morning for yoga and evening for talks I look at the two white bundles underneath the branch and I wonder what is happening to the skin and small caterpillar bones inside the cocoon. How are they stretching and pushing and forming and tightening. Is it painful for them? Or do they sleep and then wake with a new body and brand new wings?

My insides are stretching and reforming, new energetic muscles are testing their boundaries and there are butterflies in my stomach as I prepare to leave here and go to Tepoztlan for the second half of the journey. I find myself impatient to be home to plan my new life already and get things moving and change and tell my partner all my new plans but now is not time for movement, I am still the caterpillar in the cocoon and this journey is the tree with its roots in the earth drawing substance and sustenance from the earth and giving it to us, all six cocoons receiving the love.

I discovered that I have love for myself, I want to be happy, I want to create my own dream of happiness that includes everything I want for myself. My relationship with Paul, my life with him and living somewhere beautiful and also I want to be successful at my art and sell and make money doing what I love doing, creating. Find a balance between the two, I need to find an agent, someone who knows how to sell and promote so I can concentrate on making and creating.

Universe, I want all this! So now I can move forward and keep my eyes open for opportunities.

If there is one thing I have learnt for certain in doing this work is that you pull towards you what you hold inside. If you hold fear and limitation that is what you will find, if you hold trust and openness that is also what you will find.

We finish the journey with a marriage. A couple from Belgium decides to get married in Tepoztlan. We scurry round the town the day before buying flowers and a gift for them and wondering what to wear and the next day we gather in the small chapel on the property and listen as they speak love to one another. I think of my own wedding last January and smile and send some love to Paul where ever he is. We go outside and in a traditional Mexican ceremony shout their names to the four directions and watch as they feed each other cake and hot chocolate. Yellow flowers everywhere.

It is the day of the dead in Mexico, families watch vigil at graves all night and yellow flowers line the streets and pave walks. They celebrate death to welcome life, to honour those who have gone before to honour the life that is living right now.

I allow a piece of myself, the old self that lived in limitation, to die every time I do one of these journeys and it brings space for something new to be born, something new and fragile, that I don’t recognize at first but I watch it and shelter it until it is strong enough to walk on its own.

We emerge from our cocoons as butterflies, wings still wet and weak but growing stronger in the sunlight and colours emerge, reds and blues and silvers and golds…. And we fly.

And the cock crowed at midnight, witching hour!

Space between yesterday and tomorrow

A tiny space of now.

I slept and did not hear its clarion call to the world that caused small animals to look up in wonder and large ones to feel the pull in their bellies

I felt it in my bones though and dreamt of earthquakes and tidal waves and great waves sweeping the earth.

In the chicken coop an egg was beginning to hatch, the chick following blind instinct to hit out at the darkness surrounding it, to crack, to break, to pull to pieces.

Imagine! All the world the chick has ever known is about to get as big as eternity.

But then, the world is the perfect size for each of us and we should not be afraid of the space between the stars.

c. Cliodhna quinlan 2007

I am getting ready for a craft fair coming up in Nov. Its in Marlay Park Dublin. I am busy busy making things for it and trying to balance the art part with the craft part.

Now, both are both, if you catch my drift, my art is a craft I am constantly honing and changing and tweaking and seeking new ways to get from the image/feeling in my head to the finished piece hanging in the wall. But in the context of this post let us say that ‘art’ is what I do purely because I love doing it and ‘craft’ are the cutesy small things I am doing to sell.

I find myself getting worried about the money end and plan heart patches and bird iron on patches and more hanging birds and although I do like making these, they are not my lifes dream. I get off balance into time based linear thinking sometimes of having to do more more more…. exhausting

Back to balance, heart based, eternity, we are here on earth to learn how to love and ahhhhhh, ok, I will make something special today, something from the doodles that are hanging on my wall stuck up with masking tape waiting for their time.

But first I will make a few bird patches, cause I haven’t made any yet and I want to see how they turn out. That is the other part of the balance, small versus large, silly versus profound…..

The pictures in this post are all part of a series of small embroideries I did. I wanted to make small jewel like squares of rich decoration. I layered cotton between gauzes and used metallic threads. They are all 4 inches by 4 inches and very cute! I changed the usual edging I do from lace to rough stiching round the edge of the fabric.

x cliodhna