timing…

… is a very old art that I have great difficulty in coming to terms with in the moment yet when I look back on situations I realise they happened at the perfect time and I couldn’t have made it any more perfect. This applies to little things like catching a train or going for coffee and to big things like when to travel to mexico.

Yesterday wandering around dublin doing posters I am waiting for my friend to come and collect me to go to her house. I think she must be getting close, I move towards the curbside and who do I see cycling towards me but a college friend I completely lost touch with. I smile at her and she sees me and her faces changes to puzzlement for a second and then she smiles and she stops the bike beside me.

Or I wanted to go to galway today to do posters and then the woman who was going to give me a lift out to a hotel calls and says she can’t so I rethink my plans maybe leaving galway open maybe waiting till friday and I ring a friend to say hi and it turns out her dad had died on sunday so I am going home instead to go to the funeral. If I had gone to galway I wouldn’t have rung her, but it turns out I am exactly where I need to be.

I get worried about not doing enough or in time and life constantly shows me that things happen exactly when they are supposed to happen and the more time I spend struggling against it then the longer I will suffer. The fear comes in when my mind thinks it wants certain things and thinks that if I stop working towards those things then I won’t get them and instead of seeing a future filled with other wonderful possibilities and happenings and achievements it just sees a future of minus the things it thinks it wants. A future of lack.

kind of like the state of the economy in ireland at the moment… everyone is seeing a future of lack and poverty…

also, the posters I am putting up refer to these workshops. I will write some more about them in a bit but here is the link to check them out right now Toltec Self Mastery Workshops and if you want an email with more info on prices and locations email me and I will send it to you

back home

it was strange being here for the first day or so. Jet lag makes me feel odd and drained and I get waves of tiredness that empty my brain of all thought and the idea of dealing with the world or having a conversation or organising the things I need to do are just too huge to be done. Instead i crawl into bed and get warm or have a bath and relax.

I am getting there today though. Went to see my nephew (whom my brother calls ‘the bestest baby’) tonight and he is chirpy and cheerful and I am struck by the randomness of his actions. Maybe as we grow older we continue to act just as randomly but we learn to put structure and impose meaning on the chaos and pretend our acts have purpose and order. I remember there was a mad man who would race around guanajuato always with a bundle of papers in his hands, he was ragged and filthy but he always had something he was organsing, always something important that had to be done, someone who had to be talked to and I would see him and I would think about all the ‘important people’ running around doing ‘important things’ that had to be done or their world would end. I would think of him also whenever I was feeling important about doing something or organising something.

mark (the bestest baby) doesn’t have any importance about what he does, he just does exactly what he feels like doing at any given moment in time. Sometimes for his own amusement, sometimes to get attention and sometimes who knows why…

somethings an airports needs

I am sitting in Houston airport waiting the endless wait for the next flight. I spend quite a lot of time hanging round airports waiting for the next flight. Suppose it’s a metaphor for life or something. Periods of movement separated by waiting for the next stage of the journey.

Anyway there are lots of useful things at airports designed to amuse the traveler and provide traveling comforts, things like charging stations for laptops and mobiles, areas of WIFI (not free of course) restaurants of varying quality, massage chairs for back and neck, duty free (good for at least an hour of aimless window shopping), bars for the occasional beer and so on and so forth.

There are a few things that are missing though

A bathroom with a bath or even just a shower that you can go and get clean. A seaweed bath would be ab fab.

Sleeping benches that could be rented for a few hours. You get a locker to put your stuff in to keep it safe and off you go. Kind of like the mini hotel rooms they have in japan.

Reiki or acupuncture

Televisions to watch shows, you buy credit and then get to choose what you want to watch.

I can’t think of anymore right now, anyone else?

I could really do with that bath right now… imagine having a seaweed bath during your four hour stopover after eight hours already travelling? How amazing would that be?

a very cool website

Stories from Space

Hi, I just have to put this up. I found this website ages ago and was fascinated by it. I love the little worlds she creates and makes us see what is around us in such a different way. It appeals to my sense of fantasy and reminds me of some of my favourite movies. The Dark Crystal by Jim Henson (youtube link) or the Labyrinth come to mind.

st patricks day

which doesn’t happen in mexico… completely ignored in fact, though once a mexican person knows I am irish I get to hear the story about the turn coat irish who adandoned the american side in some border war a long time ago when they were still fighting over texas and ran over to the mexican side to fight for them instead.

thats the thing about being irish the whole world is happy to see you, generally for stuff thats completely cliched like an ability to drink the rest of the pup under the table (my alchohol tolerance is practically zero) and myths of the fighting irish from american history. We would pour off the famine ships dirty, hungry and looking for the nearest bar.

One thing about being irish from over the seas is that there is a view of ireland that is completely romanticised and in soft focus and hazy memory and nothing what-so-ever to do with the reality of back home. I suppose this happens with any displaced people and there is a part of irelands history that is everything to do with being displaced from need and a hope for a better place somewhere else and if you weren’t the one to go personally then all your hopes and dreams went with the person who was going. Even now every single family I know has relatives in america or england.

Maybe it is buried in our physce to consider somewhere else as better, more money, more opportunities, someone from somewhere else is more exotic, wiser, richer, better; or maybe thats just me. Its one thing I have realised in all my travels. Doesn’t matter where I am or what I doing its still me being there and doing it and trying to find that better place just doesn’t work because I can’t run away from me.

ireland

I am going to Ireland soon, In a week and a half, I am looking forward to going back and meeting my friends and smelling the air. It will be spring time which is particularly changeful; As far as smells went and the possibility of change spring and autumn were always my favourite months.
Ireland holds a lot of memories for me, of course, it being the country I grew up in and it always has a hint of mundaneness about it, like I am going home and somewhere else is more exciting. I suppose there are a lot of issues sitting in Ireland waiting for me to see, like my relationship to my parents and all the stuff I still haven’t looked at from growing up or hopes and wishes never fulfilled or embarrassments or bad times I buried or ran away from.
It has a lot of good stuff too, it is a reconnection to the past in a good way also, a reminder of dreams I had and wanted to fulfill but now I am coming round in a spiral a little more ready to bring them to light or truly abandon them and leave them out of my live. A clearing of house one might say, a good old spring clean of the inner psyche.
It has taken me a while to truly accept that I now ‘live’ in another country rather than just travelling and sooner or later I would be going back to Ireland. Now when I visit it is for visit and I have joined the ranks of the millions of ex pat Irish living abroad and returning to the old sod for Christmas and the occasional summer vacation. I think there are more of us than there are Irish actually living in the country. If we all returned at once Ireland would probably sink! 

there was once a prince…

There once was a prince that lived in a kingdom of shadows and rain. The colours were shiny and bright when the sun shone and the dark and gloomy and grey when it was raining, which was often. He loved it when the sun shone and he thought how amazing it would be if the sun always shone.

He had a cousin who lived in a far away land and so the prince abandoned his kingdom to go and live with his cousin in the land when the sun never stopped shining and when it rained it was a relief and a joy.

This land appeared at him to be barren at first. With so much sun and so little rain there were very few plants and the plants that did grow were tall and prickly or small and stubby and the animals were thin and scrawny from lack of water and at first he missed the greenness and bright colours of his own land. He loved the warmth of the sun though and so he stayed.

He began to look properly at the land where he was, and he realized thought the desert looked empty it was actually full of life. When he looked closer there were subtle colours he had not noticed before, pale greens and purple pinks and slow growing dry lichen covering the rocks and tiny flowers that grew and died in a day and bright red ants and shiny black spiders with hourglasses in warning red on their backs and pale almost clear scorpions that looked as fragile as water but packed a punch in their curved tails. When it rained the desert burst into life and colour and bright green singing frogs emerged from everywhere by magic and the spiny plants gave forth huge flowers.

The next time he went home to his own rainy land he looked at it differently also and he saw all the colours he had not seen before. Colours that were beautiful, not grey and sad like he had thought before. Earth colours and greens and rich colours and dark brown mountain water from the rich peat lands and mosses a foot deep that were cushiony to walk on and when it rained they glistened and shone with life. He realized that these colours were a part of him also, he had grown up with them, they were in his innermost being and in his dreams and he loved them.

He remembered when he was younger not understanding colours, being afraid of them when he painted pictures and not knowing how to use them and being clumsy with them and he realized it was because he didn’t like his own colours and he was trying to use other colours. He had to understand and love his own colours before he could understand them and use them how he wished in his paintings. He began to use these colours and to look around him for inspiration for his colours and he became much happier than he had been before. Now he can be in his own land and love the colours there or be in the land of sun and heat and love the colours there also.

misty walk

a wet cloudy day in the mountains, it felt like being back in ireland! I went for a walk and took some pictures, it is so different in the rain, much cooler and refreshing after the hot sun.

age

I looked in the mirror yesterday and what did I see? I saw lines!! On my face and on my neck. Eek! Age check. I guess I was indulging the well known phenomenon called ‘the arrogance of youth’ without even knowing it. It will never happen to me, I think smugly, I am not going to get old, and then even if the remote possibility arrives that I look a bit old I will never do those silly things women do to keep age at bay like expensive creams and plastic surgery.

Now its safe bet that I will never get plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons but I actually found myself wondering about a cream I saw on telly. Does it really work I wondered before I saw sense and laughed at myself for even going there. The thing is though in society women are supposed to stay young. Look at the pressure on Hollywood actresses once they pass thirty and enter into that indefinable space known as ‘old’ and then look at aging male actors still getting parts wooing 25 year olds and we are supposed to believe it? I had a problem with Woody Allen after a while as he got smaller and more wrinkly and more grandfather like and he was still writing parts for himself which involved young women falling in love with him and I saw the old Sabrina a few days ago where a very middle-aged Humphrey Bogart falls in love and is fallen in love by a barely past her teens Audrey Hepburn. I enjoyed the film, the old sets, the acting, the story but I just didn’t believe the love paring.

I guess it annoys me because I still invest in it personally. Because I am a woman and I don’t want to get forgotten or passed over when I am old. I judge women who get plastic surgery to stay young looking but there is a part of me that understands it also. It’s a battle that we have constructed for ourselves. In the search for eternal physical youth we maintain the myth and the struggle, we buy into the myth and if we still buy into it and uphold it when are the men going to reject it? We have to reject it first.

There are plenty of women who have rejected it and I admire them and I hope I can too. I am sure as I get older I will have all the fears of growing old and facing death and losing time and so I guess I can just deal with them as they arrive. No point in worrying about who I am going to be when I am 50. I can’t compare with any other 50 year olds I know because I don’t know who I will be when I am fifty. Right know I can deal with looking a little bit older than I did last year.

makng a decision #2

So i was telling the girls in the office yesterday that on certain kinds of rainy days in Ireland we say it’s a ‘soft day’. They thought this hilarious but then they come from a place that when rainy season hits the rains fall with a fierce purpose of inundating the world. Flash floods, instant lakes, life springs from nowhere to frantically grow for three short months. The idea of rain seeping its way downwards is an alien concept. It’s like walking through a cloud I explained. They got that, they live in high mountains so walking through a cloud is a casual occurrence and is walking through a damp grey mist.

I have been thinking about making choices. About the last post I put up and I would have to add that I don’t think a choice can be made until the moment arrives to make it. When that moment is, is of course another choice, but then choices are the only things that are truly ours in this world. How we choose to live our life from moment to moment. In the past I have rehearsed choices and practiced them in my head and ran over all possible scenarios to make sure I would know the right thing to say or do when the moment arrived. Of course when that particular moment did arrive (if ever it did) then it would be completely different to anything I had ever imagined and sometimes I would get it right and sometimes I would get it wrong. I would get it wrong because I was afraid to live in the moment. At that moment I would have been rehearsing another choice somewhere further up the life stream and so still in fear and making choices through fear.

I don’t want to make choices through fear anymore. I don’t want to be so attached to/afraid of the outcome that I am paralyzed in the moment and my head makes me spin in circles. Sometimes the choice is to do nothing and let it all pass by, sometimes it is to step in and grab and hold, and sometimes it is neither and something completely different. The thing is though that the impulse comes from the heart and not the mind; and that I cannot know until the moment arrives to make the choice.

What is at stake is everything. My life is at stake here. My wishes for myself, my path as a soul making its way along life, that is what is at stake. Not possessions or career or relationships or my self-image or my pride. These things in the end of the day are not important and when balanced against self discovery and growing to be the person I can be are small. It is not what I have that is important it is how I live them.