where I work

First a picture I have finished about here. The frogs that come out of nowhere when the rain arrives.

and  as I said in my last post I took some photos of where I work a few days a week. I do translation and basic administration for supposedly three days a week but actually more like four and last week was five.

Its a mad place. I never thought I would end up doing secretarial work but there is a part of me that just adores organising things. Its a gold and silver mine in the mountains in Chihuahua. There is an open pit and the people I work for do underground mining. The first time Paul took me underground in the mine in Guanajuato I was scared, for about an hour, and then I was fine one tunnel pretty much looks like every other tunnel to me and I had imagined big crystal caves and strange rocks. He did point out some brown dirt and said that it was almost pure gold.

There is a place here in chihuahua where you can go really deep underground into huge crystal caves. So deep you need to bring oxygen with you to breathe.

Huge machinery abounds here. Sometimes I reckon its an excuse for men to play with really big toys and nothing to do with the actual mining.

The portal of the underground mine. They will connect soon with old workings that were abandoned years and years ago.

The roads into here are tight, extrmely steep in places, curvy, muddy, slippy, dangerous and I don{t know how they manage to bring the huge machinery in on them. Some machinery is so big they have a tractor behind the truck pushing it! It takes them three days sometimes to travel what takes us three hours in a jeep. They camp out along the way and go extremly slllooooooowwly.

We were driving home one night and saw this guy standing by the side of the road. Cominvi is the contract company we work with. We have no idea who put the hat and safety vest on him. There are so many donkeys on the roads here, with a wonderfully zen attitude to life. They fall asleep where ever. Paul came across one in the middle of the road asleep, he drove really close to it, no movement, he honked his horn, not a blink of the eye, he inched very slowly up to it and nudged it with the bumper of his pick-up. Not an inch did this guy move until finally he ambled ever so peacefully off to the side of the road. Amazing attitude to life wha!

Amazing cloud formations this time of year, I just keep taking photos of them.

And on the way to the mine in the morning

and on the way home that night looking back over to the mine

Its all blue skies here at the moment although supposedly there is a storm on the way from the ocean. Have to see what it brings with it!

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girly things

check these really cute shoes out! I want a pair. I have them in my favourites list and I go and look at them every now and then. It is a site called Fairysteps

She makes them herself. You measure your feet and send her your measurements and she makes them to order. She has certain ones ready to sell. I love the idea of getting shoes made up for me. I want a pair of high leather lace up boots in bright red.

I just showed these to Paul and he hated them! we have very differant tastes in clothes and things. I think they are adorable.

Also for the girly girl working in a mans world I love this site. Oshatoes

Its safety gear and steeltoes shoes but they are for girls! There are pink hard hats and pink safety glasses. So cute. I look around this mine site and I think it would be great to have everybody wear pink hard hats! I shalll take some pictures today of this place for this blog.

What else, oh yes, the puppy turns out to be a girl so she is back being Pala again. Its strange how we treat things differently as to whether they are male or female. I found myself thinking differently about the puppy when I found out she was a girl.

And I sold two purses from my etsy store! surprised I was, I haven’t sold anything from there for ages. I had kinda left it alone. Cool.

xx clio

revelation #?????

had a major revelation recently about my art work.

I was constantly painting people into my pictures (and a picture had to have a person in it) because I didnt feel as if I was really in the situation I was painting. I was painting myself in the picture as reassurance, as telling myself the story over and over again who I was and who I could be.

Now this is ok, and I needed to do it, I needed to paint the possibility to show myself the way and give myself guidelines or encouragement, process whatever was going on in me at the time. But I realised suddenly a while ago I didnt need to do it anymore. That if I experience a moment fully as it happens I dont need to explain it to myself or tell myself I was there.

Thats the best I can explain it. Its a sense of freedom too, I am painting directly what is around me now instead of what could be or might be or what is inside my head.

Anyone else have any good freeing revelations about their artwork or even about themselves?

toilet training…

… is a long slow messy process. Once again I am cleaning up piss at 3 in the morning and getting all stupid and baby talky when he actually does it outside.. who’s the good little puppy wuppy!!

I am of the stick their noses in it, shout NO and throw them outside school. As he gets older a slap on the but gets added. It seemed to take ages with Cubo until he quit doing it inside. I tied him beside the bed at night to teach him to ask me if he needed to go out. They don’t like doing it in their sleeping area and he would whine until I woke up and took him outside. I have to start doing that with the puppy but I am afraid Cubo might step on him (which he does frequently and the puppy squeaks, I was joking yesterday that he is Cubo’s squeaky toy). Cubo is like an incredibly clumsy enormous older brother but the puppy has incredibly sharp teeth which he uses on poor ol Cubo. They play and either Cubo is whining or the puppy is squeaking.

His name actually means ’stick’ not ’spade’ Pala is a spade but that ends in ‘a’ so it can’t be a boys name. Well, it could but I actually thought palo meant spade. I get confused sometimes!

We have moved house, away from all the spiders and alacranes living in all the cracks of the brick work and away from the pond and the frogs to the civilisation of tarmac and a shop just a block away. I did see a big Black Widow spider living in a pile of bricks right outside the house. She can stay there.

Scorpion Charm….. catch the scorpion/alacrane in a jar or something with a piece of paper underneath. Take it outside somewhere dry (they like dry places with crawly spaces) and explain very carefully that it has to tell all its friends to stay away from the house. That they will probably get squished if they come in. Then let it go (carefully.. sometimes they get a bit pissed from being caught) step away and leave it alone. Sometimes you have to do it a few times but they get the message and stay away. This works with all insects, bugs, vertebrates, and all sized shaped wonderfully coloured creepy crawly things.

rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain

did I mention it was raining?

life, death and all the other stuff in between

Life

I went to Teotihuacan recently for a ceremony for the death of an old shaman woman named Sarita. Her son was there and his sons and wifes and all the people she had touched during her life whether directly, through the people she had taught and healed or indirectly like me who had never met her but felt it was important to be there.

The reason why this is in the life part is that death is not a dissapearing rather a passing onto somewhere else. The reason I went is not that I was sad she was dead but to honour her life here and the teaching that she passed onto others including me. She passed it onto her son (Miguel Ruiz, he wrote the ´Four aggreements’ you might have heard of the book) who passed it onto the teacher I work with who is passing it onto me. This teaching has been around since before the aztecs, way before that and went underground when the spanish arrived here in mexico. Each generation gets it, changes it slightly and then passes it onto the next one. The essence remains the same however. Knowledge of self, stalking the self, to be in your own centre and power with your own connection to the heart. It was great to be there.

Death

I had my principals tested the other night. I have been bemoaning that fact that we kill anything we see that is slightly dangerous to us. Spiders, scorpions, snakes, wolves, bears, tigers, rats, all get squished under the heel of the human fear of death.

The other night wandering around the house with a torch to see what I could see (counting the scorpions on the wall outside, the bumbling june bugs in their season of dying, the praying mantis waving back and forth doing its best to look like an innocent twig swaying in the wind) when in the corner of the kitchen shiny black, with the ever so familar bright red hour glass shape on its belly was the classic spider of all the spiders…. the black widow. I looked at it for ages and then thought “I suppose I should kill it” The idea of going back to bed with it still in the kitchen didn´t appeal to me. I was still looking at it when it ran back under the cupboard. I went and put on boots and got the broom, checked the corners and turned the cupboard over. Got a towel and squished it. I really didn´t want to but I suppose I discovered that a black widow spider outside is one thing but a black widow spider in my kitchen was another thing entirely. I thought of catching it but to tell the truth I was kind of nervous about it, my mind was telling me about death and bites and poisin and generally creating fear. 

Just checked on the net and apperently they are not very deadly, their venom (15 times stronger than a rattlesnake) produces severe muscle cramps (very painful) for about three days and hospitals generally prescribe morphine for the pain. The anitvenom actually kills more people than the venom. Old, sick, pregnant and children are most at risk of dying. Maybe the next time I won’t be so scared and catch it instead of killing it. One of the mine workers got bitten by a Violin Spider in Chihuahua and he is still in hospital with operations on his arm. I guess its easy to be idealistic about thiese things when you grow up in a country which has no dangerous anythings what so ever…. not even ants that bite!

all the other stuff in between

the dogs got their injections and the puppy shrieked and yowled for about ten minutes. Puppies are such babies. Went to the vet the next day and got pipettes to give it by the mouth, much better.

and now go outside look up at the sky and see past the blueness of the sky and think about the fact that we are on a spaceship of green and blue and things growing and dying but always changing, in the middle of nothing sailing round a huge ball of light and warmth. We get so lost in our little fears and desires. We don´t actually have to do anything except be here and live and learn how to be happy and let it all flow until its time to go, time to leave this place and go travelling again. Thats my hippy thought for the day… man

x clio

and the rain it raineth

the rain starts at approx four o clock every day, the roads turn into muddy rivers, muddy rivers occupy any available downward trajectory. Its cold and wet and the thunder and lightning complete the picture.

All the creepy crawlies are coming into the houses to find dryness. Paul got stung by a scorpion. It fell from the ceiling onto his head. He sits up in the darrkness saying ’something just landed on my head’ and then OWW, something stung me, man that stings, $%#@#$, Light goes on and there it is, an alacrane, pale brown, bout an inch and a half long. Two of us sitting in the bed at four in the morning wondering was it the really dangerous kind or not. He was fine after an injection. He also saw a huge centipede in the sink and there are spiders everywhere…..

I finally saw a whole turtle today after days of just heads dissapearing under the water.

A swallow, who has a nest beneath the house, drinking water sitting on a wire.

A wonderfully coloured beetle. I actually thought it was a fake one until I picked it up. There also dung beetles with big horns on their foreheads a beautiful iridesant blue. as long as your thumb.

There are loads of lizards here, tiny small and so fast you rarely see them. This guy was doing a chest stuck out thing and I wondered what he was doing until I caught a glimpse of smaller brown one dissapear beneath a rock and this one after it. So I guess rainy season is courting season for the lizards.

Another picture of Cubo and the newly named Palo. Palo means spade and Cubo is bucket so I have a bucket and spade, perfect for the beach! Actually they both have the mange and I have stuff to inject them with for the next seven days. I tried to do it but the needle looked so big I chickened out. Paul can do it, he has emergency medical training, he has actually done injections in the past. I was feeling slightly guilty about giving Cubo mange by bringing the puppy home but the vet said he had it for longer than I have had the puppy. All the dogs here, or at least some of the scrawny ones that skulk around my house have it.