finding ones voice

There was once a little girl who said nothing. She was so shy she couldn’t speak, if she opened her mouth to ask someone something no sound would come out, even when she was on her own she couldn’t say anything. She would practice in front of the mirror and make the shape of the words with her mouth but no sound would come out, she would write them down and whisper them into her pillow but as soon as she stood on front of people she would freeze and her mouth would form a smile and that was it.
People all thought she was just happy and calm and they would tell her all of their problems until she felt like she was full of everyone else and there was no room for her own thoughts. One morning she even woke up and realized she was even dreaming someone elses’ dreams. This is it, she thought, I have to do something about this, I need help.
‘I need help’, she told the universe, and the universe said ‘ok’
Now at the time, she was also looking for a job and the very next morning a friend rang her looking for her ‘I have a job for you’ she said ‘a live in nanny for this very old lady whose daughter is going traveling for a month. She is a dear but she can’t hear very well and she refuses to wear a hearing aid, you will have to shout’
‘Ok’ said the girl
At first the girl and the old woman didn’t get on at all. The girl couldn’t shout and the old lady would get frustrated with her and then the girl would get frustrated with the old woman until finally one day the girl shouted at the top of her voice ‘WOULD YOU LIKE SOME TEA!’ and the old lady answered ‘Why yes dear, thanks for asking’. Then the girl shouted everything and they got along great.
Now the girl can shout and she does and she speaks up and people can hear her even in crowded bars or on trains or in noisy streets and she is much happier having found her voice.

Coat Boy

There was once a boy who liked playing with his friends and having fun and being happy and he had lots of friends who loved him and wanted to play with him and so they would pass their days making up games and wandering the countryside discovering lost treasures and making up stories as they went.
He had lots of coats he loved wearing. Some were bright yellow and some were dark blue with stars and some were silver and shimmered in the sunlight and sparkled in the moon light. He had long coats and short coats, some with beads and bells on them and others of the finest silk that slid noiselessly through the air.
He would choose carefully every morning which one he felt like wearing. What colour, what style and at the end of the day he put it carefully back in the coat rack for the next day he wanted to wear it. He took good care of his coats.
One day though, something happened, someone was mean to him, or hit him or threatened him and when the evening came he did not take off the coat. He didn’t want to, he wanted to keep it on as protection or as comfort and he went to bed and slept in it. The next morning he put another coat on, on top of the first one and he went out to play.
From then on he changed. He didn’t take the coats off as he had done before. He kept them on and he began to wear bigger ones and heavier ones to protect himself from the world. He moved slower and didn’t laugh as much as before and his friends gave up trying to cheer him up and eventually left him to his plodding walk and silence. People made fun of him then. Slowcoach, they called him and pitied him and stayed away from him and his gloom. Eventually he stopped going out of the house and stayed there and no-body called to the door.
This went on for a while, until one day, he felt a stirring in his heart. The sun was shining outside after a rainstorm and everything was wet and shone and sparkled like jewels. It reminded him of one of his favorite coats and he looked down at what he was wearing. For the first time in ages he wanted to wear a special coat and he felt dirty and itchy and smelly inside this big coat he was wearing. He took it off and the one underneath and then the next one. How many coats am I wearing he thought to himself?
He continued taking them off, getting lighter as they went down, thinner and as he took each one off he remembered what had happened that made him keep it on in the first place. A heavy black one was the day the bigger boy had punched him in the nose and the teacher had thought he started it and punished him instead. The grey one was the day he stole something and then blamed someone else. The next one down was when he had a fight with his best friend and never said sorry. He also began to remember the good times with his friends in each coat. The green one, now faded with its silver buttons gone, was a day of summer adventure in the mountains when they had found the sheep skull and made a fort. The silver shining one was a moonlight search for fairies and goblins in the forest. He smiled when he remembered how scared and how excited they had been.
He kept peeling them off until at last, none remained and he stared down at his naked body all dirty and grubby. He ran a bath and sat in it until all the soap-bubbles had been burst and he was clean and water soaked and his fingers had water ridges in them. He stood up feeling lighter and happier than he had ever in his life.
I will never let myself wear all those coats again, he thought
He ran out the door naked with nothing on and danced down the street. The children in school saw him and laughed and told their teacher but she didn’t believe them and told them to stop staring out the window. He danced past a house where children were playing in the yard. They ran in and asked their mother could they go with him but she shook her said, ‘You must have imagined it? She said ‘No-one goes out and dances in the street naked’. He danced past a café where people sat drinking coffee but they didn’t see him, they were too busy… reading papers, talking.
Coat boy danced into the hills and the mountains and far away close. He is still dancing to this day and if you are very lucky he will dance past you some day. Don’t blink… you might miss him!

greenwitch

Greenwitch sings alone in the heart of a tree, and yet not alone for in the heart of every tree there is a greenwitch singing. Her eyes are green with gold sparkles and her skin is the mottled green of moss. Her heart is pure gold and shines through her eyes and it is from her heart that her love flows and gives energy and strength to all growing things.
It is for greenwitch that the flowers stretch their heads to the sky and the sun. It is for greenwitch that the spiders spin their webs and do their dance of death. It is greenwitch that inspires the song of the birds and the whirring wings of the hummingbird and it is greenwitch that the donkeys love as they amble their slow way across the mountain.
Rain falls for her and rivers run and she sits at the heart of everything and sings her song of life. She is the weaver and she is the warp and weft and the fabric emerges from the loom in a thousand colours and in threads of silk and gossamer and gold and silver.
She is me and you and everything around us.

where do all the new people come from?

here’s a question? if the whole scientific phrase is right ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed’ then where do all the new people come from?

this question stopped me in my tracks a day ago. Since then I have been pondering on the interconnectedness of our life on this earth. That we are all made from the same stuff, me, you, spiders, rocks, this computer. We drink the water and eat the plants and turn it into us. The plants drink the water and absord the minerals in the dirt and turn it into more plants. What is the differance between growth and not growth is light. The light fuels it all to grow, to reproduce to become endless fractals of cells reproducing and shifting shapes to become life.

Inside every cell is a mini sun fueling it all and taking energy from the light outside and really at the end of the day the propulsion to grow and be alive cannot be pinned down on a slide under a microscope or explained adequately with theories or words. That’s the mysterious side of life, the place where the mind cannot go, cannot understand or explain. Without it nothing would change or move, no endless variations of movement and living things, including ourselves.

Cool huh?

Faces

lots of faces… in watercolour, fabric and oils. I got some big canvases the last time I was in Chihuahua and painted some huge faces and it was great!

Faces are for seeing, for revealing who you are, for validating what i do (as I paint there is someone watching me) for exploring who I am.

I finish a face a realise it’s sad or happy or has a sense of purpose to it and it surprises me.

Faces i suppose go all the way back to babyhood when its the first thing that catches our attention. Our mothers face. A baby reacts to things that have the same structure as a face. They will look at faces quicker than anything else.

yes man!

i went to see the new jim carrey film ‘Yes man’ and its actually really funny, you have to say yes to everything regardless of what it is. of course he gets it wrong and thinks he literally has to say yes to EVERYTHING but sure that’s comedy.

The lesson learns is he has a choice and he has to decide whether he really wants to do it or not. He has to ask his heart if he really wants to do this. He was living in no and changing to yes changed his life and it is true that what we put out into the world is what we attract back to ourselves.

I was thinking of all the times I said yes to things and no to things. I remember saying yes to joining a country band and then putting the phone down and realising I had a week to learn how to play country music or the time I had an opportunity to go play music in a bar in Thailand or someplace close. I turned it down because I was saving to go to spain and I knew I didn’t really want to sit in an irish bar playing tourist irish music for six months no matter how beautiful the location. That was the time of the tidal wave, I missed it cause I didn’t go. It had been hard to turn down too.

I thought about other opportunities which seemed a sure bet and I turned down and wondered had I done the right thing. I generally find out later that if I followed my inner instinct then everything worked out fine and of course there are times when I realise I was saying no from fear. I am pretty good about saying yes though. If I reckon the only reason I want to say no is fear then I push myself a little about it and say yes.

I remember a job offer which freaked me out because it meant a commitment of a whole year! I said yes to that.

I think though the bigger yes’s actually come in smaller packages. Am I ready to live right now? how do I want to live my life? do I want to be open to the people around me? make friends? right now this person is annoying me do I want to keep judging him/her or do I want to see past my stuff/their stuff and see them as they really are and love them regardless? Do I want to be open to Paul right now and tell him what is in my heart or stay closed. Do I want to stop and just look around and see where I am or stay lost in television and work or whatever my adiction is? Yes to life or no to life? That is the question and it comes every second of the day every day of our life. The choice… follow my heart or follow my head… it is the only thing which is truly ours… our ability to choose.

Cafepress and One world-one heart

I have created a new store at cafepress.com. It can be found here at www.cafepress.com/cliodhnaquinlan

They do all the printing and shipping and packaging and I don’t have to worry about any of it. Very Cool. That was the problem with Etsy, just so hard for me to get to a post office and forget about decent packaging supplies and then even finding a good printer to print high quality copies of my work. Now its all done for me! hooray! I can also order promo from them at wholesale prices.

I have a section specifically for clocks with words instead of numbers. I use the image to inspire the words and I love doing them. If you have any ideas or might want a specific image with your own words let me know!

I am getting some publicity together but finally the shop has some sections and blurb and looks like how I want it. I am sure I will tweak here and there over the next few months but I am getting very close.

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I missed one world one heart!!! I had this post written with this magnet below to give away and went to the site to get the link and low and behold the entries were closed because so many people had signed up.

Here is the link if you would like to go check it out and see the list of people taking part. You can leave comments on the posts to be entered for the draw on each blog. Its fun.

xx clio

my new friend…

….is a very special friend

well, ok, its not actually animate and it doesn’t say anthing and it doesn’t actually do very much but after three years of lookig for hot water bottles in this country I went and bought my first electric blanket yesterday. I plugged it in, low, and preheat and then a few minutes later got into bed and oh what bliss and luxury!! this morning I woke up still cozy snuggly and actually quite reluctant to get out of the cocoon of warmth.

You see generally I have beside the furnace that is better known as ‘Paul’ but he isn’t here at the mo and It is cold here at night and my poor feet take an age to warm up.I will be taking it back up to the mine with me too. Paul gets so hot he throws all the blankets off and I am left shivering with breezes making their way on through the gaps.

But now I have my shield of protection,my layer of heat, my upgraded next level of the technological scale from the hot water bottle/bed pan… the electric blanket…

all hail!……

failure

I realized something yesterday. I will find the downside of everything I do. I make something or achieve something and then I will judge it against others or not being good enough and I will make it a failure.

Take threadless for example. I make t shirt designs for threadless and at the back of my mind I know I won’t win, I say I am not cool enough or I am too ‘girly’ for the mainly hip younger male crowd that seems to get designs printed. But the thing is I have good ideas I just don’t have the Photoshop skills to really make them shine and I find they improve slowly as I go. A part of me takes it personally when I get a low score and feel like I am failing again whereas really I am pitching to the wrong audience and there are lots of people out there who like my art and show support and I don’t count those but I count the people who don’t like my stuff. Failure.

Doesn’t mean I am going to stop making designs for threadless, it’s actually been an education to do them. I stretch my skills at graphic art and sometimes the best way to really see a design objectively and see how I could push it further or bring it closer to what I had in mind is to put it out there in front of people. And threadless has some really wonderful artists and designers submitting designs and I learn from them too as to what is possible. I just need to stop judging myself a failure.

I suppose that’s the balance. Knowing my capabilities and skills and how best I use them and where I can improve them and then the other side of believing in what I do right now and not belittling it because it doesn’t measure up to where I think I should be or what others are doing. And also to do things for my own pleasure and practice and not to be secretly looking for approval from the audience I am showing it to.

I remember when I was younger and my mum would always make sure we knew how good we were in relation to the others we were going in against in competition. She had them all pegged and pinned into the level of their skill and value as musicians. I was never going to win, I wasn’t good enough, but sure I could try anyway if I wanted. I did want, and I wanted to prove her wrong, but you know, I always ended up proving her right. There were always lots of kids ‘better’ than me. It became a measure of my worth and still is really but now I don’t want it anymore. To see something is to own it and to own it is to be able to leave it behind. I don’t know what I would have done in her place, if a child of mine was going in for a competition that I knew she wasn’t going to win. I think I would probably say nothing at all and just wish her luck and do her best and maybe I wouldn’t put them in competitions in the first place. Its not her fault, she was just following the track she was taught and it was fun also. We did loads of choir competitions and they were fun to head off to with the class.

Maybe that’s it, I am still in competition and wanting to win and never getting the prize because the prize doesn’t really exist anymore. I am in competition with myself for elusive perfection and self approval that I never give myself because no matter what I do there is always the part I failed to do. I don’t congratulate myself for having learnt the piece and practiced and got up and played in front of everyone I judge the fact I wasn’t the best in the eyes of everyone else out there. I don’t say wow well done I have had a few exhibitions and sold work and make art that makes me happy and fulfills me I judge myself that I don’t sell more or don’t have a big gallery behind me or am not ‘well known’ in the academic art circles which in reality I don’t want to belong to anyway. I wait for the world to recognize me when I am not seeing myself.

wow, just had a thought…. maybe thats why I paint faces all the time… I need someone to see me!