cliodhna’s wave

Who am I really? Who am I underneath all the pretenses and masks I have developed over the years? All the times I have shifted colour and form to fit in while never really succeeding, always on the outside, not understanding how others made it seem too easy, trying too hard, being seen as the ´weirdo´

That is the problem I have faced in the past. Wanting so much to be accepted but afraid to be true to myself because I wasn´t enough, everyone else seemed to be so much more happy, successful, witty, just plain ‘more’

I didn´t know who I was, not a clue, not an iota, well maybe a part of me knew but was covered over by the masks. How do I find out who I am or want I really want in life if I don´t know and really don’t know how to cut through all those layers I had covered myself with. I wrote a story about it called Coat Boy. I will post it later. How to dig down through those layers and find out what lay beneath and smash those mirrors into smithereens.

I remember about three years ago making a promise to my heart, standing in front of a Rathmines window and gazing out at grey Irish weather that if my heart were to bring the means to finding what it really wanted into my life I would do my utmost to make it happen.

I decided I needed help, for the first time in my life actually admitting I could do with some help. I think now, just occurred to me, that my resistance to seeking help meant that I might actually have to change myself on a deep level instead of wanting it and wishing it but at the same time ultimately avoiding myself.

I did Reiki one and as part of my intention for doing it was to find someone to work with and he presto, three weeks later I find myself agreeing to become an apprentice to a Mexican teacher who works in the Toltec teachings. My life has never been the same since. I have ditched so much baggage and there is more going all the time, I have completely changed my outlook on the world and seen past the stuff that I took for granted and saw into the heart of myself and the world around me. Competition, comparison, my inner fears, my manipulation, my need for attention, my inner tantrum throwing control freak child all get put under the spotlight and seen for what they are. Outmoded tricks of the mind which will do anything to stay in control.

I am writing this from a hotel room in Mexico City, about to go on spirit journey to the pyramids of Teotihuacan. I have done this before and always come out the other side charged and renewed. There will be changes though, there will be upheavals and earthquakes, there will be the tower card of the tarot inside my inner being, there will be resistance to letting go and there will be competition and comparison until I surrender and become in line with the flow. But at the end I bring gifts back with me to my life and they continue to shift and grow inside me until they flower and bear fruit.

A girl sits on a stone on the sea shore, lonely for her friend who moved away. She sits and remembers and feels very alone. The sea is grey and the waves are endless and there is a chill on the air that makes her shiver. She makes up a story about a sea creature, the spirit of this place who also has lost a friend. This friend left the sea shore and went on search of where he belonged in the world. The sea has no answers, only shifting moods of colour and tide.

She tries to write the story to avoid the ache in her own heart and she can write endless reams of dream prose, of sea grays and blues and pangs of loss and loneliness and all from the perspective of the creature left behind who cannot leave the shore and must sit and wait endlessly for the friends return.

The creature bemoans the fact that she had ever met this ‘other’ because before that she had no memories. She thinks she might have been happy. She remembers light and darkness and water and wind and movement of crabs and anemones back and forth across the shore but no more than that. She remembers warmth and cold and the bright sun and the silver moon that changed shape as the sea changed shape and the waters inside her also were pulled back and forth.

The first real day the creature remembers in full, as a whole day, from dawn to dusk with awakenings in-between was the day the ‘other was washed up on the shore and opened its eyes and looked straight at her.

Here the girl becomes stuck and cannot go any further. She cannot imagine what these two would say to each other. Maybe she does not want to imagine. It would make too real what she has just lost and so she reads and rereads what she has already written and she skips to write the end where the ‘other’ has gone again and she is back with her creature on the sea shore mourning its loss and now awake and conscious of her loneliness.

The other is made of what people have thrown into the sea and brought to life by all the unanswered unfulfilled dreams that the sea holds for us until we are ready to receive them. The creature is the soul of the sea and can’t understand why the other would need to go in search of something that was already here.

That was then and this is now and the girl healed her heart and resolved her loss and found what she was looking for. The moon made her a gift of a silver heart, a little battered but still whole, the sun made her a gift of wisdom, the wind gave her a push out into the world and the world gave her a true friend to share her life with. Now maybe the story can be written from both sides and brought to an end. x.

why do we mislay what is precious to us? why do we forget what is important to us, getting caught up in insanities and foolishness. Life is a remembering, a finding of things we carefully put in a safe place only to forget what that safe place is and then forget that we hid them so carefully in the first place.

Remember years later something precious that was lost, can’t quite even remember what it was, but I miss it and I want it back, a feeling of freedom or joy or happiness came with this thing.

A realisation of clarity for a few seconds than the mind jumps in and trys to understand, catalogue, put words on this thing, put names on this inner knowing and it is gone, gone like sand or water flows through a hand when it tries to grasp the unknowable.

I have a fascination with mermaids… they appear everywhere… I have even been mermaids in dreams… have written at least two posts about them and the sea here and here.

I like this bag, mermaid on the front and fishies on the back. I made it so she could give dream energy to the things inside the bag.

Glorious Bags, designs by cliodhna

I have been thinking about food recently. I am living in a camp where all my food is cooked for me and I have no access to my own kitchen. This is hard for me. I am used to cooking my own food. I have been thinking about all the judgments I have about food. All the ideas and preconceptions I have about food and whether they are true or not.

In the spirit of questioning everything I have to ask is our mental and physical health really dependant on the food we eat or is it just that we think it is and so our intention produces bad health when we eat bad food. Now, I have always been of the school of the food I eat= who I am and I have fallen into control many times around food. I remember being in a supermarket and looking around thinking ‘I can’t eat any of this food’. I think I was off dairy, wheat and sugar at the time.

I grew up in a house of allergies and the basic root cause of any behavior disorder was the food. The food was always the culprit. Stop eating this or that and you will be fine. So by the time I left my family house and moved into my own little flat I had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of allergy/food intolerance/celiac/lactose intolerant/ calories/ carbohydrates v protein and all about controlling the food I ate to produce a given result.

Now, the interesting thing about not eating one of society’s food staples is that you are out of the loop. You realize, as I did in that supermarket just how much of our diet is dairy/cow milk, refined sugar and white flour. How much we as a society blindly eat what is given us not questioning anything and out of touch with our own bodies. I worked in a health store for a while and I remember in particular one man who wanted something to make him sleep at night yet didn’t want to stop drinking his twenty cups of tea a day.

So I had the thought that maybe my control around food is me not accepting what society is feeding me. I don’t want to be a part of it. My own anger at my part in victim stance turns against the system and I want out. So maybe it is these unrecognized emotions that produce indigestion, bad health and a wish for other food in me and not the food itself, and to be in balance I need to balance myself with everyone around me and the world that I choose to be born into. That all my control around food and not eating this or needing to eat that is me seeking to control myself because without control we are lost in a sea of unpredictability…. and that’s just too scary.

Of course, I am not about to start eating Mc Donald’s everyday. I still have a choice and I choose good food that nourishes me in body and mind and spirit. But to heal myself I need to heal myself from inside out and find those judgments that don’t let me be happy as who I am right now and reassess them. I choose good health for myself and if, as at the moment, I don’t have access to the food I think I need to keep me healthy I will not let my intention produce bad health but accept that that is where I have found myself right now in my life and within the limited choices I have I can still eat well and be happy.

How do you explain to a fish what water is?

You take him out if the water and show him the air. Then he will understand better than a thousand words what water is.

How do you explain to a person what life is and what we have surrounded ourselves with?

You take them out of it and let them see eternity. Then they will understand what life is better than a thousand words.

Perspective. A very little used tool in our army of rationality. In fact most of the time it is ignored, abused, shoved under the bed into the far corner where dust balls come to rest and forgotten about. We lose the perspective on our lives in a thousand moments every day. We don’t take the time and space we need for ourselves and we surround ourselves with things and responsibilities, and deadlines and bills to pay and all important things that make us think we HAVE to keep going and going and going like a hamster on his wheel.

If we don’t take the time we need who will give it to us? If we don’t give ourselves the space we need who will provide it for us? We get ratty with partners and people we love because we don’t look after ourselves. Nobody else can do this for us, we have to do this for ourselves. We have to give ourselves the love and healing we deserve and not wait for someone else to do it for us, not wait to be looked after and then get annoyed when it doesn’t arrive.

I get annoyed and frustrated and cranky when I feel I am not being looked after, but when I honestly look at my life it is because there was something I wanted that I didn’t do/ask for/ go and get because I was waiting for someone else to do it for me. It is an ego battle too, I WANT the world to pay attention to ME! My spoilt controlling child self takes over the reins because she reckons the grown up me isn’t cutting it, I am not giving myself what I want/deserve so she steps in to get it for me.

Perspective is about standing back from your life and your emotions that rule you and breathing fresh air for a minute. Away from the drama of the minutiae of daily life. Away from the soap opera that hooks us in, feeds us its never-ending looping circles of storylines, keeps us caught on what is going to happen next. It doesn’t want to let us go, we have to escape from it ourselves. It wants us to stay caught in its current, because we give it energy, without our energy it dies, cut of its head by taking away our attention and it dies.

Our life is our own responsibility. We shape our lives as we want to, and this includes knowing when we are being dependant on others and also knowing when it is time to ask for help, when we can’t do something on our own. Balance and perspective.

I love writing. I love putting words together and making a story. Sometimes the story comes first and sometimes the words come first. Sometimes it’s just a name and an idea. My problem is finishing it. Not an unusual problem I know. I can never figure out exactly how to finish the story. I have two finished long stories to date and lots of little ones. One children’s novel which needs to be rewritten (again) and an idea for a book that I could never quite get together involving a man named Winkle Ferrydinkle who left the shores of the faraway sea to go past the mountains of forgetting to find out what is on the other side.

I actually think writing a children’s book is harder than writing for adults. There is a simplicity to well written children’s books that is so difficult to achieve. They also have a shorter attention span and you need to catch and hold them, keep them in the world of the book. Look at Tove Jannson and the Moomin Books, it’s like taking a dip in a cool mountain pool reading her stories. The water is clean and pure and feels soft on your skin and so refreshing after the hot sun.

It has taken me a long time to actually learn this simplicity and to see it in all of the great novels and story books. We only really notice it by its absence. A book annoys us because it is too intellectual, or wordy, or opinionated, or we can feel the writer lecturing us through the characters. One of the best pieces of writing advice I gleaned from my travels was the phrase ‘Show, don’t tell’

Show us through language what is going on. Build the picture in our head of what the character is feeling /doing/seeing. Avoid ‘he was sad’ and instead remember the tempest scene in King Lear where the storm outside reflected perfectly the turmoil that was happening in the kings head. We only have words and they are tools that can be manipulated and controlled just like any other medium.

The other thing that daunted me was conversation. Man, how I avoided it. But, know what? I avoid it in real life too. I am not very good at talking to people. I am a bit of a closet recluse that only now this late in my life am I coming to really recognize that about me and accept it. I avoid people I don’t know very well, they make me uncomfortable. I am never sure about the intricacies of conversation and communicating with people. It takes me a while generally to open up, and thats fine, I am not going to push myself or feel bad about it. Thats who I am.

But… this translates into my art and my writing. This is where I push myself to be open and reveal myself. It means I hate writing conversation so it is the part of writing I need to practice most. Or maybe find my own style that doesn’t rely on conversation. Find my own way of telling things. I can think of a few authors that are dreamwriters, that write a strange world of shifting space that the people say almost nothing in. Also anybody see Belleville Rendez-Vous? Beautiful cartoon and I think there is about five words said by the characters all the way through.

so to be put on the list of blogs on this search site I have to write a review, clever. It gets them publicity better than a simple little widget along the side.

As to how it all works and will it bring traffic, I don’t know, have to wait a while and see. If it does I will post about it and you will have a good link. It has a list of new rss feeds and a list of top 100 which is updated once a month.

Water…

…is incredible, it is the fuel of life on this earth, it is the biggest shaper of life on this planet, it gets bigger when it freezes and gets bigger when it gets warmer. It has a ‘skin’ on it which holds it in shape, which is why we have raindrops, rivers, clouds, bubbles, water walking insects. It comes in so many forms and shapes and sizes and functions.

I was in Mazatlan a little while ago and was thinking about water. There is a hurricane on the coast swinging its way around towards Baja California and although the sky is blue and I wear factor forty sun screen the waves are huge rolling in towards the beach. Really huge, no-one is swimming, the jet skies are away in their sheds, the guy who hires the belly boards and surf boards shakes his head when I ask him to hire two ‘Not right now’ he says and points at the red flag flying nearby.

I go into the water and its feels strange and a bit scary. The waves are a wall of water coming towards me, pulling at my legs and pushing me towards shore then dragging me back the other direction as they leave. We have fun for a while jumping around and splashing onto the waves as they smash into us and we marvel at the size of the ones breaking further out. As a contrast the hotel pool is blue and calm and safe and the sun reflects patterns of light from the surface.

I forget sometimes the power of water until I see the it in all its glory and wildness. Rivers that are mere trickles turn into raging torrents during the rainy season and turn city streets into four feet deep unpassable for cars or pedestrians.  I took water for granted growing up in a rainy wet country and the concept of water shortages was alien to me. It rained, it came out of the tap went back to the sea and it rained again. Now living in high desert I see the hills and mountains turn brown again after the rains have gone, the cattle and horses will grow thin again until next year and water will be shipped in from far away reservoirs.

Water is life because we were formed in water and we come from water and it carries us and the moon moves the sea and the water inside us and moves us back and forth and we work to the rhythm of water without even knowing or thinking about it.

So how important it is that we look after our water and keep it clean and pay attention to it. I wrote a post about water ages ago about snowflakes and the memory of water here. We take it so much for granted and it is the fuel of life on this planet, it is life on this planet, it flows in our rivers and seas and underground wells and clouds and rainbows and in the blood of every living thing on this planet.

Sitting in Temoris train station waiting for the train I was thinking about waiting and what it means to me. We rushed to the train station to get there for the half three train only to be told it wasn’t going to arrive till seven. I used to hate waiting, I was the world’s worst waiter. I had to have something to amuse me while I waited; a book generally or my phone games or something to mull over or sketch. Anything to fill the gap so I wouldn’t have to reflect on me or my own life. I was actually the world’s best day dreamer also, when there was something I had to pay attention to off I would go into daydreams.

I had to change my view of life and come to peace with myself and the present moment before I could learn how to wait. How to be present and aware of each moment and use the pause in movement to look and take in where I was and where I was going.

The osho zen tarot have a wonderful card about waiting. She is pregnant and smiling, with a peaceful glow. Expectant possibility and looking forward to the future but also enjoyment and thankfulness for the gift of this growth and peacefulness in the acceptance that she is not going to rush what is coming, that would spoil it, she lets whatever is coming to develop in its own time and she holds it in her heart until it is ready to emerge.