cliodhna’s wave

The day is clear and sunny and the air has a bite in it. It is Ireland at her best in winter… the sharp air makes everything brighter and more defined, shadows are stronger and highlights are brighter.

I went for a walk with my camera… I am surrounded by brown at the moment, brown, and blue where the waterlogged fields reflect the sky. : Of course I should really get out at sunrise, which in winter is not difficult seeing as the sun rises so late. The hard part though is just getting out of the bed on a cold morning and braving the chill outside a nicely insulated house!

Warm sepia tones of the dead grasses

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Texture of dead foliage with the hardness of the barbed wire

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Wood, gnarled and worn by weather

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The ditch is full of life,

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Dark umbers and burnt sienna’s in a boggy ditch. Life moves slow in this ditch

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Now this, would make an incredible tapestry

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yellow shells shine out like flowers in a field, small and unshowy but when you look closer there is so much colour

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The water reflects the sky and the sand and brings all the colours together

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I sit on a rock for a few minutes, eyes closed, listening to the world around me. The water is gently lapping the shore, the birds wheel and cry as they skim the rocks, in the distance out to sea the waves crash against the rocky promontory. Nice place to be, caught in the centre of movement that becomes stillness. I find the place where time stops and open my eyes to the sparkling sea.

the house from the beach

So, by hook or by crook, I am not sure which, I have found myself living in north-west Ireland for the next three months. A stormy, rocky, wave beaten, wind scoured, almost desolate, treeless, sideways landscape it is too. Yesterday, were it not for the rain battering against the french doors into the back garden I could have imagined that the ocean and land had traded places and and the squalls of rain were sea currents and the birds being tossed here and there were fish. the view from my back window the beach down from my house The birds fly backwards, its easier and doesn’t get their feathers ruffled so are we going or what? the beach at the end of the road I went down to look at the waves and crossed the rocks to get nearer. The ocean is a scary heaving beast with a life of its own and a casual disregard for all things small. I would be a pebble, an annoyance, a fly, a speck of dust to it. The waves got closer and sprayed me with sea foam.. I got scared and backed off… a lot… to the safety of the grass. The waves are huge here closer and closer

The rock here has fossils in them. Apparently they are famous for it.

Louis the dog

I have a dog and a cat into the bargain, which stops me missing my own dogs and cat too much (though I still look forward to getting them here) and there is a stove to warm the house. Perfect to make art and relearn my songs on the guitar and dream away the nights as the wind howls outside. There is silence now, but I can hear the waves thundering onto the rocks in the distance and a clock ticking somewhere in the house and the dog sighs as he sleeps. And to top it all of two fields away (to quote Margo) is Ellen’s Pub which has a session every Friday night I will go when I have a few songs mastered and when Paul brings my fiddle to me from the states.

Good Night!

So i know I am very remiss in posting posts on this old blog of mine but I realized the last post but one is me getting started on the fish quilt then how perfect to post the ending of that project.

My mother just bought a quilting machine and we rolled it up and off I went… so cool and so fast!

The quilt hung in the knitting and stitching show in the RDS.

and the stall at the knitting and stitching show. I met some lovely people at the show.. some women from my facebook page stopped by and the ladies from Green Angel were across the way from me (I was right beside them last year in Marley park) and beside me was the owner/editor of the Irish Quilting Magazine who is from San Francisco so we had a barney about being homesick and living in a different country and the perils of driving in the states. I had a great time at the show and it was inspiring to be around so many textile artists of such high quality. I look forward to it next year!

I just got a comment on the previous post from two really good friends of mine, Linsey who I went to art college with and Simon her husband who owns the nicest jewellry store in the world! ( dublin, wexford street) I worked there for many a happy hour polishing silver, deciding which piece I prefered, this would change by the day and i never really made up my mind. Too many choices

http://www.djinnjewellery.com/

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…

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.

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! 

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.

wonderful!

nap done and I am feeling a lot more mentally together. Teaching is exhuasting. I am out of practise of how to appear like the stern teacher and I used to hate that bit anyway and also with a strange class it takes a while to get to know them. Its funny, with the discipline bit, I am not sure what my mother has in place as to what is acceptable and what is not but when someone does something thats really out of line then the rest of them freeze for a second. Then they realise I am not going to do anything and they go back to normal.. Trouble is in a classroom messing and noise escalates rather than them keeping themselves calm. They just get giddier and giddier.

Plus I am unknown territory so they have to try everything to see if they can get away with it. They started with the fake coughing round little break today until I offered to send anyone who wanted to go up to the principal to ring their mothers and tell them they were sick. That stopped that in a hurry. I think whats so tiring about it is that you can’t switch off for a second.

Schools have changed. When I was in primary it was all about sewing and art and drama and singing and projects with history and geography and maths fitted in round the sides of those. Now its all curriculum and there seems to be no time for what I would consider the important things. I ask myself why teach a young child endless facts about geography that he or she won’t remember when we should be teaching them creativity at a time when their minds are still forming and are open to new ways of thinking. Teach them the facts later when they will learn them faster. If I had a child I would definitely send them to a steiner or a waldorf school or teach them at home if I could.

Their pictures turned out great. I would take photos but the camera isn’t at home so…

I am teaching in my mums school for three days. I have a bunch of 12 year olds. 6th class. Already they have lost the innocent magic of the really young and now are worried that they can’t draw and anything they do will not live up to their own exact standards. Its kinda frustrating especially since I love what they produce, so fresh still and naive. I am doing an art project where they have thought of who they would like to be when they are older (outside any considerations of backround, whether they think they are clever enough, gender, in short anything the mind reckons is a reason not to do this) there are quite a few beauticians, an architect, a trillionare (I asked how she was going to get there and she said win the lotto, right…), a vet, and of course the usual few who shrug the shoulders and mutter ‘I dunno’ .

Tips for art in the classroom, particularly this age group

Talk about what you are going to do beforehand. Talk about the story or poem you want to do. Discuss with the class the kind of things they could put in the picture, ask them how they think they could illustrate the scene. They will give each other ideas. It helps to have a starting point, a theme a goal you can work towards. You can ditch the goal but its good to start out with one. Tie it in with music. The sorcerers apprentice, peter and the wolf, the nutcracker suite are a few good ones.

Stress most strongly the importance of drawing BIG. I find they gravitate towards small. Especially 10 to 12 year olds who are using pencils. Younger than that give them big chunky crayons and markers. I told them today I wanted the head at the top of the page and the feet down the bottom. Ask them whats in the backround, what else could you put in there, fill the page.

Get them to choose one scene or one character and develop it. In a scene maybe try to pick three characters and talk about how you could show the action happening. The thing is to get them thinking about the picture before they start drawing. To expand their ideas on what could be in a picture.

When using paint give them a tutorial in keeping the paints separate and washing the brush properly before they use it on the next colour. Give them big brushes.

At home you can give your child a wall and let them loose. When its full take a photo, paint it white again and they start over on a fresh wall.

For me its a balancing act between giving new skills and encouraging creativity and staying out of the way for them to discover it themselves. They get great satisfaction from gaining more control of the medium they are working in and discovering new ways of manipulating it and my job is to give them that and at the same time push them past the ‘I can’t draw’

They will draw the picture and then we are going to stick fabric instead of paint. I have buttons and sequins for them to sew on and wool for hair. Should be fun.

and there is no such thing as not being able to draw