cliodhna’s wave

A friend gave me a lump of coal when I moved into my new house and i said thank you and left it wrapped up in the tissue and put it on the windowsill. Not having a fire to burn it in it stayed there for a few weeks as i wondered what to do with it.

About two days ago I washed it. Coal is Beautiful!! who knew? under all that dust and black dirty powder coal is black and gnarly and midnight dark and shiny blue at the same time. I was so surprised.

So anyway, sitting in a steam room in Kilronan waiting for Nessa to show up I head off with my lump of coal in my hand to ask the old woman on the island what was the coal all about. I got a few answers,

Coal is about showing that inner light we have and shining out to the world. Our inner fire (creativity, warmth, hearth, passion) can’t go out and we can’t use it up so the more we use it the more we have. We can stoke the fire of our own hearth and like the coal it will glow red and yellow and white with heat and energy.

Coal is also about honouring those parts of ourselves we take for granted. Coal is dirty and unregarded but without coal we would not have achieved so much as humans. Its keeps us warm, cooks our food, gives us energy but we never think to thank it or honour it or give it pride of place. We expect it to work for us. Same as with parts of ourselves that work and work and are ‘dirty’. We expect these parts to keep going and shape our lives yet we never stop to say thank you or let them rest.

I had a dream that night about waking Kali up. She was black and pitted and shiny blue and it was only when I woke up the following day I realised she was like the lump of coal. I am waking up the earth fire, that cleanses and destroys and rebirths again. Feminine energy that so often, like the coal, is taken for granted and kept small.

So light the fire and stoke the coal and feel the heat as it builds and you can see the centre of the fire starting to glow white with the heat. Let it warm you and guide you and create your inner hearth fire as you want it to be.

xx

So, when I was in Guanajuato, Mexico there was a guy… he was quite mad and would wander the streets of Guanajuato with a briefcase under his arm, muttering to himself, shaking his head and generally brandishing a shief of papers in his other hand. When I first saw him I wondered what he was up to, where he was going and what was all the fuss about, big meeting maybe… But then I realised as I saw him again and again that that was his particular madness. He was always on the way to or from a big important meeting. I thought at the time… what a good analogy for the human race, we are constantly on the run around from one place to another big important doings that really don’t mean squat in the bigger picture.

Thing is though I didn’t apply that to myself. Blind spots are wonderful things, they cushion us and protect us from things we would rather not face. I was recaping this morning about a time in Chihuahua when I was in denial about certain broken aspects of my life and it hit me I was doing exactly what this guy had been doing. Not so much.. I mean I wasn’t racing around in dirty clothes calling into businesses demanding to speak to the managers about a big important non existent projects but I was investing all my energy and self esteem into being successful and selling art. Anything to be doing something, I would chase short term goals with obsessive energy and be crushed when they wouldn’t work. I wasted time on circles when I could have been focused on long term achievements that would actually mean something and be achievable.

That’s self sabotage for you though. When we are in denial about some aspect of our life the rest gets affected too. It becomes a shield to protect us and keep us in oblivion and so nothing gets fixed and everything stays the same in self enclosed circles that we run on endlessly.

Now I have to figure out how I am still doing the same thing and stop doing it!

To listen to silence is a very rare gift these days. We are surrounded by so much noise we cannot hear the silence behind everything. A child can hear silence, can listen to the song of the world as it turns and the song of the birds.

A house on a hill. A garden with a pool in it with three huge old fish, two gold and one silver. A child climbing over the wall, silently, cautiously, he had heard too many tales about this house in the past,

To sit on a hill where there is no noise except birds and wind and crickets is to listen to the world as it was in the beginning when we were not here, when there were no humans, it is timeless. Listen, hear and the world expands in every direction. We are too used to looking we forget to listen too. So listen and behind the sounds of the birds and insects there is a vastness and a sense of something timeless that surrounds us.

We have lost this connection I think, living in our machine age. Our televisions, radios, mp3 players, there is music and chatter everywhere. In supermarkets, cafes, buses, lifts, we live our lives in a shell of aimless sound and gossip. Our attention is always hooked outside of us. And we allow this to happen because that silence is too scary to experience. That vastness is too huge and we, who have not faced our true selves and found the inner core that cannot be blown away, are too afraid to face it for fear of not being enough.

To connect to this silence for a few minutes everyday puts us back in connection with ourselves and who we really are. I have heard it said that only troubled people seek peace. If that is the case then I am grateful for my worries and my inner angst because it pushed me in a direction I would not have found otherwise.

The child walks through the garden his eyes and ears open, his mouth open in wonder. Trees shaded him from the sun, parrots squawked and flew in a flurry of colour, a fig tree laden with fruit offers a branch with ripe fruit. He takes one and eats it, startled at the intensity of the flavour. He walks on soft grass, cut short and tidy, a white peacock ambles across his path, not bothering to take notice of him. He walks, taking in everything eyes looking up and down and around and above him and below him. He comes across a pool, an ornamental pool, quite large, with a small wall around it. In the pool are three huge old fish swimming in slow circles, two gold and one silver.

They swim in endless circles, when the sun shines and the pool is a mirror of glass they swim, when it rains and the rain makes a hissing noise as it hits the surface of the pool they swim, when it is winter and the surface of the pool is frozen they sink to the deeper parts and swim even slower. The water is their world and is all they have ever known, this water, this pool, this branch hanging over head, this face that hangs over their pool twice a day and drops the coloured flakes that is their food. They rise slowly and with gulping motion of their wide mouths they swallow the red and yellow and brown flakes.

The Dragonfly is the gatekeeper to the land of illusion. He holds truth and reality and illusion and if you want to break through an illusion and find the truth behind it then dragonfly knows the path.

I could do with some of that! it is hard finding the truth sometimes, or more exactly, it is hard to find the real truth hidden under layers of illusion. Sometimes illusion disguises itself as the truth. I am angry at someone cause they won’t help me, I think the truth is that I am feeling disrespected and ignored but really the issue is that I am feeling judgemental and guilty because my business/art/money isn’t going as planned and because I invest my self esteem into these things I berate myself when they don’t work. This means that I can’t deal in a calm manner with the original problem because really my mind is a war zone and I am a war with myself.

I hate being inside my head sometimes, I want an off switch, and toggle that goes to ‘happy’ and I don’t have to do any work to get there… and even using the word ‘work’ in this context. I am obviously equating being happy with work, its not easy, its work… you are not working, better get busy!

So, finding my way to the other side of illusion is a slow process for me, gently picking away at the things in me that hide the truth of me from myself. Finding my way to just being happy and then everything else gains perspective and falls into beautifully balanced place.

I remember working in a store on Georges st and standing at the doorway on a slow afternoon when it was sunny and bright and fresh outside, and two dragonflies came circling and dancing through the air down the street. Iridescent blue and green they sparkled in the air as they flew and I watched them until they danced onwards and dissapeared.

x clio

To not be emotional is to be good, to be the quiet no fuss easy going child, to be the one who doesn´t cry or kick up or assert herself. This is not being emotional. To keep it inside, even though you might cry on your own, hidden away from everyone, because you don´t want them to know.

To be emotional and to cry is to be needy, to be the ´problem´ child, to be the one who makes a fuss and gets what she wants no matter what everyone else thinks.

To be needy is to be sticky and constantly wanting attention and then no one will want to be with you or play with you or love you. A little bit is ok, because we are all human and it is good to cry sometimes, but a lot is not ok and better get controlled.

The trouble is, after a while, all the unsaid emotions get so tangled up inside that I don’t know what’s what anymore, and they all get filed under ‘better get controlled because you don’t want to appear needy’ and then when I want to just take one out to express it they all fall out at the same time in a big mess.

I guess I am starting to get them sorted out now. Express them one by one, little by little as they come up until the mess becomes an interesting tangle to be sorted through patiently.

i am organising workshops here in dublin for Luis Molinar and its fun, I like it and i am learning a lot about advertisng and what works and what doesn’t and the prices of things and what to say to people and how to say it and all sorts like that. Interesting and informative.

What I am also learning is letting go of the outcome. I wrote a post about ‘attachment to the outcome’ and this is the same thing. I am attached to the outcome because of taking it personally and judging my own self worth on the doings of other people. So if they choose not to come to event I have organised then I am a failure and I judge myself and make myself feel bad after and before the event. 

This means sometimes I actually don’t want to do the thing or go to the event because of my fear that it might be a failure according to the ideas my mind has about it and then I will beat myself up afterwards. They (the events) turn out good and I look back at the agonies I put myself through beforehand and see what a waste of energy that was. I could have been happy and enjoyed the time beforehand. 

anyway, onto the trust. I have a set of pieces by jonathan goldman which are the seven chakras, wonderful and a good focus to clear the chakras and meditate on them. I was listening to the heart chakra one and thinking green, peace and then I felt that this chakra was not only the love chakra but the one where trust is. If it is open then we trust and love. 

I sat there for a while feeling this trust and felt how nice it was, how warm and comforting and peaceful it was. How easy it was to be there and comparing to the usual state of anxiousness I am and worry about ‘what if’ and the future how much nicer it was. I made a resolve to stay there more often.

We are subjective beings, even when we think we are being objective we are still looking out from a lifetimes store of experiences and assumptions and learnt behaviours.

I was thinking about this when I was trying to describe the Toltec teachings to people as I wander around putting up posters and leaving fliers and talking to people who are interested. Anything I say about it comes from my experience of having done the work and felt the changes that took place in me. I feel freer and happier and more at ease with myself and others around me. I can say that to people but I can’t show them. Except of course by being who I am.

I was making an ad for the irish independant this morning, small space, vital I choose the right words. At the beginning i put the fact that it is an ancient mexican teaching of warriorship for changing your life. Then I thought about this and I realised that this what appealed to me. I loved the history of the teaching, the fact it has been aound for centuries being passed down from generation to generation, changing and staying the same with each transition. Maybe that won’t interest others, maybe it will but I have to describe it somehow to grab attention in 10 cm of space.

Same with my art work. I was remembering from art college when they taught us to look objectivaly at our work and cut through the padding to get as close as we could to what we wanted to express. I can look at my work objectivaly to a certain point and I am very grateful to have received the training I got but still when all comes to all I am still looking at my own work and there are certain things I cannot see because I am still looking subjectively.

So thats the thing, I really don’t know what someone is thinking about until I ask them and sometimes I don’t even know what I am really thinking about until I sit down and really ask myself. Because as with the art work there are things sometimes about my life I can’t see because I am the one looking at them.

The birds in the photos flew over my head very close and very fast and I could actually feel the noise of their wings. A very cool, very subjective experience.

I was standing on a kerb yesterday waiting for Marie Therese to pick me up to go out to Ballyvaughen. A car passed by with a family who were black. Mother, father and a pile of kids in the back seat, my mind wandered off on little thoughts of immigration, and how ireland is changing and how I am never here either but living in another country to the one I was born in like these folks and then I saw another child in the back of the car and I remembered on long journeys when we were little the back of the car was the best place to lie down and sleep.

Then the next car had a young man in it and I thought about my brother who drives very fast and is trying to acheive something from his life.

The next car had an older woman in it who looked like my aunt and I wondered did she drive the same way as my aunt (my aunt constantly puts her foot on the brake so the car always seems like its trying to go but she stops it with little jerks of the brake)

A few more cars passed by before I pulled myself back and realised this is how projections work. I didn’t know these people at all. I had never spoken to them or met them or probably was never going to meet them but yet seeing them triggered a little story in my head which would change when the next one came into my range of vision. The story triggers an emotion and all of a sudden I am hooked on the emotion and the story and they have become my reality.

This realisation triggered a thought of ‘mm, must write a post about this’ the mind never stops trying to create the world, thoughts are like clouds they shift and change and move and dissapear and create shapes and illusions. They take us out of the moment and into the past and the future.

I shall leave you with a quote from Joni Mitchell

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

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…

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.