oh for a clear path through the shifting landscapes of the moon

life is tricky sometimes, to negotiate each moment with truth and wisdom, what way to go? which choice is the right one? am I obeying my fears right now and hiding or maybe it’s just not the right time to do something. Patience with myself. All is well. No need to rush, negotiate my own inner maze slowly and with love, if I go wrong I can always go back to where I started. Let my heart be my guide, if it is happy then I am going the right direction, even if it seems the wrong way at the time.

lucy is afraid of dogs

sometimes it is only later that I can look back and see why I did a picture and what it meant to me at the time. My first exhibition was full of pictures like that. Lost and lonely characters populated strange landscapes and looked helplessly out of the picture searching for something but they didn’t know what.

I didn’t know what I was looking for at the time either. I thought it was a boyfriend probably, someone to love me when I couldn’t love myself and avoided relationships. Lucy is me and the dog is me, I am running away from my own inner dog, the part the unconditionally adores me for me and will gaze in my direction with big round eyes. Dog owners know exactly what I am talking about.

Of course I didn’t realise this at the time, I just knew I was unhappy and painting the pictures and doing the embroideries was a way of getting it out in the open because my natural state was secrecy and I needed practice in being open with the world. I look back on those pictures now and there were a few I am still happy with and a few I see where they lack finish but at the time they were perfect and doing an exhibition and putting them out in the open for the public to see them was the best medicine ever.

I wish for…

letting go to flow free.. open hands and let the bird fly away, no point in making wishes and then holding them so tightly they smother!

I wish for a gift of clarity

I wish for a gallery to show my work in, to have an exhibition to work towards

I wish for success for my business

I wish to write always from the heart so even if I get it wrong sometimes I have done my best

I wish for a happy life for me and Paul

I wish for a really cool old car to drive around

I wish that my puppy and my cat will get on when they meet.. I anticipate fireworks!

what do you all wish for?

past the known… (or what I think I know)

So I have come to a place where I cannot move past with my mind. My mind stops, comes to a halt and says ‘hold on there, where do you think you are going? This ain’t possible and you know it’ and suddenly I do know I and I am stuck again right back in the mind. Like a flying dream when you suddenly remember you can’t fly.

Looking back I have done this a lot in my life. Got to a certain point and then got scared of the unknowingness past the mind and pulled back from the brink of stepping over. My mind controls how I live my life, it puts meaning and certainty and boundaries on reality and is the police of my understanding and expansion. Even when trying to release it I have realized the mind has stayed in control and given me tricks to make me think I was going somewhere but in reality I was making it happy.

Also, avoidance. Avoidance of my doubts and fears, keeping moving, keep doing, keep practicing, keep judging and I am in a maze of no exit that twists and changes every turn I make. There is no way out of the maze, it is a maze of mirrors and illusion that only exists because I make it real and feed it. Don’t see who I really am because I might not like her but keep feeding the mirrors and I will spend a whole lifetime looking at endless reflections.

The thing is which brings me to a full stop is that I have no idea how to get past this. The mind has no idea of what else could be past it so it is no help. What is on the other side of doing? Well, I suppose I wrote about it in my last post, putting up the reiki posters and then realizing I didn’t have to worry about anything or do anything, the universe would look after all that.

I don’t think I ever quite saw so clearly though just how much my mind has been telling me what to do and think and work its way past problems and I am at a loss as to what to do. I simply don’t know. This is a good thing, I tell myself. It is exactly what I would tell anyone else who posed this dilemma to me so I say to myself that this is a good thing, when the mind is stuck then the rest of me can start emerging. I am not my mind, I am much more than that and the mind has no clue about any of it.

failure… or maybe not

On my recent trip into self-discovery/oh my, I can’t believe I have been carrying this all this time and I made a realization (No. 22356) that I have been carrying failure all my life. That I expect failure and prepare myself for it. I want success but expect failure… and guess what comes to me?

All the times when I was little and I (thought I had) failed and one of the fears about letting go the attachment to the failures was that maybe they were right. I wasn’t good enough.

Anyway, I learnt a lot from having ‘failed’ in doing what it was I wanted to do, I learnt about this attachment and I learnt that my mind was getting in the way, wanting to control and not letting go when it meets something past its comprehension. When I would be better served not knowing it wants to know and would rather keep me here in control than let me not know and be happy.

So, I remember a time a few years ago in Guanajuato when I decided I would offer Reiki. I had done Reiki level two and I figured I would face my reluctance to do it on people (in case it didn´t work, judgment, all that kinda stuff) and I would put up the posters and just go for it and see what happened. So, I put up the posters, had a space kind of organized, looking back now I think I wasn’t prepared at all. But the most amazing thing happened when I put up the posters, I was wondering about whether I was ready to give Reiki or do healing on people when it hit me that I didn’t have to worry about any of that stuff, that who-ever needed what I had to give would arrive to me and I would have exactly what they needed. It was out of my hands and the feeling was so freeing and very happy and I wandered around in a mini state of bliss for a few days.

Nobody did arrive so in one sense I failed but in another sense I was the one who got healed by making a leap of faith and putting up the posters, it didn’t matter that no-one came.

a sense of perspective

Standing on Sandymount strand one early evening with my bike propped against my hip I gaze out into the sands and pools of shimmering water left by the outgoing tide that stretch for easily a mile out of shore. The sky is that wonderful almost transparent blue/purple that has a promise of mystery and a hint of things hidden about to be revealed. The sun has just dropped below the horizon of houses behind me, the moon is just peeking over the horizon in front of me and just up to the right Venus shines in her first star glory.

I begin to do a mental exercise. I imagine it all in 3d. I put the sun behind me and the earth a ball on which I stand spinning on its axis on its orbit around the sun. I put the moon on its smaller orbit around the earth and Venus on her orbit, a smaller one closer to the sun and moving faster then we are. I put aside all notions of up or down or flat orbits and I place us all in space, where these considerations do not apply

I play with this idea for a minute, and then suddenly it hits me with full force. It becomes real. I look up/down/sideways and grip my bike tightly as if to give me weight. There is nothing above me. Nothing, really nothing holding me onto this spinning ball we call home. There is no such thing as ‘sky’; that is a word made to give us a safe concept of having a roof over our heads. Only reason its blue during the day is because of reflecting light. I have incredible vertigo for a few seconds and then slowly it passes and I am once more feet on solid ground again.

Thank you gravity, whatever you are!

fear is a shapeshifter

Fear is a shapeshifter, it has no concept of size or occasion and does not learn from new examples, once is enough and the fear has understood. Thereafter the fear always has the original example in mind and when a new situation comes up that is different to the first but maybe has some common element the fear changes shape to suit the occasion.

My dog fell into water when he was little, it terrified him and I had to find where he was hiding after he ran for his life when he reached the shore and comfort him until he stopped shaking and crying. Puppies are such babies, pure emotional response to their surroundings and they respond like babies or young children. Anyway since then Cubo (who by the way is now a huge heavy marshmallow of a Rottweiler) is afraid of water. Doesn’t matter what shape or form, a puddle, a small stream, a flow of water across the road, anything except his drinking water in his bucket.

It took lots and lots of visits to the nearby stream until he was relaxed enough to start playing in it and even then only up to his ankles. Lots of walks in the countryside and dragging him across streams to keep going and even now he stops and whines and looks desperately for some other way across.

We all have common sense in place, basic survival instinct, don’t stick your hand in fire it will hurt or don’t eat that plant over there you will die, but the fear in us takes it all one step further. It becomes like a guard dog who won’t let you out of your own house because you might get run over (ever see the movie I Robot?) it parades as for your own good but really would prefer if you climbed into a box and threw away the key.

Fear has no sense of size. A little fear is the same as a big fear, open the gate just a little and it all comes rushing out. A fear of death becomes a fear of dogs, spiders, water, losing our partner, whatever is our own personal fear, and it takes a hundred or a thousand examples of something is ok to erase the original agreement of fear.

The interesting thing also, watching my two dogs is that the younger one is also learning to be afraid of water. She learns from Cubo and when he won’t go near the water she won’t either.

So I ask myself how many of my fears have been passed directly to me by my parents or peers without me even assessing them or deciding whether I want them or not and I ask myself what am I afraid of that does not serve me anymore? What agreements made long ago now hold me back from being who I am?

how to ask for what I really want (not what I think I want)

I am currently writing my letter of intent for my life and, as always, have made some realizations about myself and how I ask for things.

There are a few rules which have to be followed when writing this and the main one is that all negativity has to be erased and the intention stated in only positive terms. You can’t say “I will live without fear” because that still holds fear, you are still connecting to fear by saying that. I also wrote one that was too vague, that had no concrete attachment to my life and so was easy to write because my mind is finding loopholes and ways to control the outcome.

I knew this one was going to be hard to write because I was feeling a bit (ok, still am) lost as to how to state exactly what I want in life because in truth I am a bit vague in what do I actually want. My mind knows what it wants and I discovered I was trying to control the outcome of the asking by phrasing things in particular ways. My mind saying I want this, now what words do I have to use to get that and still maintain control and hide? I am stuck because I think I have always done this and now when I want to state it differently I can’t imagine what to ask for because I am not sure what is past the mind exactly. I have a feeling of freedom and peace but then to put words on it my mind is putting up resistance and not allowing me to get past it and put the words in order.

The one thing I did come to a shocking realization was that by saying “I want to do/be this” make it so’ to the universe I was attracting ‘the want’ instead of the goal. It is a very subtle but at the same time big difference. Try it… think of something you would like to achieve/have in your life.

Say “I want to be able to do this/to have this/to be this”

now try “I am able to do this/I have this in my life”

feel the difference? It’s amazing… words have such power and the words we speak have such power on our minds and how we program our lives. I was just increasing my want and also therefore my frustration when I couldn’t do what I wanted to do

I reconnected with a big intention I lose sight of sometimes. Simplicity; the reason why I ditched the tarot, numerology, astrology and all mind based information-rich systems designed to ‘understand’ the universe and our place in it. I am sure they work as good tools for others but I got lost in filling my mind with information and trying to control my world that way. I knew there had to be a better way, of direct, unlimited connection to source. I suppose Star Wars is always the best analogy… join the side of light and feel the force baby! The drawback, according to old fear based system of control is that you have to give up control to gain this knowledge. Give up all ideas of who you thought you were or wanted and go with the flow and see what happens.

First though I need to know what I want to ask for, to manifest in my life, can’t ask if I don’t know. Forget asking myself is this possible or can I do this or how would this work and just ask. The universe will take care of me after that. Will probably be nothing like what my mind thinks it will be, but you know what, it will be better, I am tired of my mind trying to tell me what I need with its limited ideas of what is possible and what is not.

The picture above is about writing these letters and sending them out there to the universe.

Alrighty, better get back to writing the letter so…

X clio

my dogs

My dogs make me happy. They are such pure emotional beings unfettered by reason or what ifs or any of the other things that stop us from being truly happy in the moment.

I have a big slobbery Rottweiler called Cubo who just wants the love. He comes over, barges in between my legs and then with a sigh collapses slowly down onto the ground at my feet. If I move away a few feet and stand still he slowly gets up comes over and does exactly the same thing again.

I have a rescue puppy called Pala who is the dancy dog. She wiggles and turns and dances her way over to me her tail going in circles and her happiness overflowing. I am trying to train her a little but to get her to sit is an impossibility. She collapses onto her back legs in the air, smile on her face. She follows Cubo everywhere and sleeps curled as close as she can to him.

They are happy when we are there and they wait patiently for us to come back when we are not and, except when the kitchen is cooking lunch or breakfast (we live in a camp at the moment for miners) they are my two shadows. Of course when there is food available at the camp kitchen they are a permanent fixture at the door and selective hearing comes into play.

there is a part of me that…

There is a part of me that…

The is a part of me that is my two dogs searching and snuffling and getting excited about the fresh donkey droppings

There is a part of me that is the men going down to the mine to extract minerals

There is a part of me that is the truck, carrying those two men

There is a part of me that is the earth, round and complete and self sufficient

There is a part of me that the rock on which I stand

There is a part of me that is these mountains

There is a part of me that is the air the stretches out before me that seemingly separates me from ‘here’ and ‘there’

There is a part of me that is that tree, leaves, branches, twigs, the dead branch, growing, roots searching for water, limbs stretching towards the sun

There is a part of me that is that star, shining in emptiness that is not empty, unique, filling my surroundings with light, unafraid to be me

There is a part of me that is that insect circling its little space on this earth. Its whole world that it knows and its instinct that drives it

There is a part of me that was that strange shadow that I saw flow over the cliff face in front of me. Twilight to far gone to understand it, the part of me that feels fear at the unknown and strange

There is a part of me that is the gathering night. Change from light to darkness back to light again, rhythm of life, rhythm of change