cliodhna’s wave

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

I have been given a gift of solitude. Two days alone in a house in Chihuahua city. It wasn´t supposed to be this way, my partner having promised he would be there to collect me. I was pretty annoyed I tell ya when I first read his email but then I realized I wasn’t actually really annoyed, just thinking I should be annoyed and I calmed down and you know it is actually good to have this time to catch up with myself and let myself rest and have silent time for a day or two before properly diving back into the fray of life and all its attendant madness.

We are driving to the border to change our visitor status and then we drive to Guanajuato to collect the rest of our stuff. We are getting a new house here in Chihuahua city and I am organizing my English language lessons for when I return to Palmarejo.

I am still coming together after two weeks of emotional intensity, whether mine or other peoples and when you are in a group like that it doesn’t really matter whose it is. After two weeks I could feel my hold on my inner calm wearing, which of course just means I have more stuff to look at, but it is a longing to be alone again, without the constant friction of being aware and present in every moment. Makes me realize how much time I spend not being present when I go to these journeys. All the stuff comes up. It comes up in me, it comes up in somebody else and triggers something in me, I compare and judge myself for it, I make mistakes and judge myself for it. I come clean and tell all and it feels so much better until the next stuff comes up and I have to do it all over again.

What did I discover… well if it can be put into words. Here is the biggie; I had an epiphany about how I have resisted my parents trying to teach me things all my life. I had always thought it was about music, or school, or the Irish language (when I was six I told my mother this was a stupid language and I am not learning it… I didn´t) but I had a feeling then that it went way back before that. I think, possibly, that I was just resisting… full stop. I was not going to be who they wanted me to be but I didn’t really have anything else to be so I daydreamed glory and being amazing at something, anything, so they would have to think I was great. Combine dreams of glory with passive resistance and an insecurity complex about not being good enough and what do you have? Stuck.

The thing is I realized was that it wasn’t about them trying to make me into what they wanted or whether they were or not. I was in resistance even before they tried to teach me anything. I think I was born resisting being here. I know that sounds stupid but it made sense at the time it occurred to me. I don’t even know if it’s true or not, doesn’t really matter, what was great for me was the fact I saw it as mine, not theirs and so now I can keep it and own it.

So, I am going to stop resisting. It will take practice I am sure, I spent the last three days of the workshop with a tight band around my stomach. Pure resistance, my mind in a last ditch attempt to hang on, and I am sure it will use wily means and old tried and tested patterns to hold me here. But I have seen past it now so in the end it will have to let go and learn how to float.

so, out the other side of one journey, quick rest for a day and then off into four days of dreaming.

These journeys are so intense and so fulfilling to do. Anyone who has done this or any other work like it knows the futility of trying to explain to friends and family what you went through. It is so personal and inside that words just don’t do the depth of the experience or the inner release and gifts of awareness justice.

The dreaming is changing inner perception. Going deep into my personal story and changing it for a new one. You do this on a near sleep level which is where the mind has no control and you literally rewrite your personal code. Better explanation here Dreaming a New Reality

The photo is of my nephew, taken by his dad, so cute and so open to the world around him He has no masks between him and the world yet, he is open to see and be seen. That is the goal of this work, to strip the masks between who we really are and who we think we need to be to survive.

x clio

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.

why do we mislay what is precious to us? why do we forget what is important to us, getting caught up in insanities and foolishness. Life is a remembering, a finding of things we carefully put in a safe place only to forget what that safe place is and then forget that we hid them so carefully in the first place.

Remember years later something precious that was lost, can’t quite even remember what it was, but I miss it and I want it back, a feeling of freedom or joy or happiness came with this thing.

A realisation of clarity for a few seconds than the mind jumps in and trys to understand, catalogue, put words on this thing, put names on this inner knowing and it is gone, gone like sand or water flows through a hand when it tries to grasp the unknowable.

I have been thinking about food recently. I am living in a camp where all my food is cooked for me and I have no access to my own kitchen. This is hard for me. I am used to cooking my own food. I have been thinking about all the judgments I have about food. All the ideas and preconceptions I have about food and whether they are true or not.

In the spirit of questioning everything I have to ask is our mental and physical health really dependant on the food we eat or is it just that we think it is and so our intention produces bad health when we eat bad food. Now, I have always been of the school of the food I eat= who I am and I have fallen into control many times around food. I remember being in a supermarket and looking around thinking ‘I can’t eat any of this food’. I think I was off dairy, wheat and sugar at the time.

I grew up in a house of allergies and the basic root cause of any behavior disorder was the food. The food was always the culprit. Stop eating this or that and you will be fine. So by the time I left my family house and moved into my own little flat I had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of allergy/food intolerance/celiac/lactose intolerant/ calories/ carbohydrates v protein and all about controlling the food I ate to produce a given result.

Now, the interesting thing about not eating one of society’s food staples is that you are out of the loop. You realize, as I did in that supermarket just how much of our diet is dairy/cow milk, refined sugar and white flour. How much we as a society blindly eat what is given us not questioning anything and out of touch with our own bodies. I worked in a health store for a while and I remember in particular one man who wanted something to make him sleep at night yet didn’t want to stop drinking his twenty cups of tea a day.

So I had the thought that maybe my control around food is me not accepting what society is feeding me. I don’t want to be a part of it. My own anger at my part in victim stance turns against the system and I want out. So maybe it is these unrecognized emotions that produce indigestion, bad health and a wish for other food in me and not the food itself, and to be in balance I need to balance myself with everyone around me and the world that I choose to be born into. That all my control around food and not eating this or needing to eat that is me seeking to control myself because without control we are lost in a sea of unpredictability…. and that’s just too scary.

Of course, I am not about to start eating Mc Donald’s everyday. I still have a choice and I choose good food that nourishes me in body and mind and spirit. But to heal myself I need to heal myself from inside out and find those judgments that don’t let me be happy as who I am right now and reassess them. I choose good health for myself and if, as at the moment, I don’t have access to the food I think I need to keep me healthy I will not let my intention produce bad health but accept that that is where I have found myself right now in my life and within the limited choices I have I can still eat well and be happy.

How do you explain to a fish what water is?

You take him out if the water and show him the air. Then he will understand better than a thousand words what water is.

How do you explain to a person what life is and what we have surrounded ourselves with?

You take them out of it and let them see eternity. Then they will understand what life is better than a thousand words.

Perspective. A very little used tool in our army of rationality. In fact most of the time it is ignored, abused, shoved under the bed into the far corner where dust balls come to rest and forgotten about. We lose the perspective on our lives in a thousand moments every day. We don’t take the time and space we need for ourselves and we surround ourselves with things and responsibilities, and deadlines and bills to pay and all important things that make us think we HAVE to keep going and going and going like a hamster on his wheel.

If we don’t take the time we need who will give it to us? If we don’t give ourselves the space we need who will provide it for us? We get ratty with partners and people we love because we don’t look after ourselves. Nobody else can do this for us, we have to do this for ourselves. We have to give ourselves the love and healing we deserve and not wait for someone else to do it for us, not wait to be looked after and then get annoyed when it doesn’t arrive.

I get annoyed and frustrated and cranky when I feel I am not being looked after, but when I honestly look at my life it is because there was something I wanted that I didn’t do/ask for/ go and get because I was waiting for someone else to do it for me. It is an ego battle too, I WANT the world to pay attention to ME! My spoilt controlling child self takes over the reins because she reckons the grown up me isn’t cutting it, I am not giving myself what I want/deserve so she steps in to get it for me.

Perspective is about standing back from your life and your emotions that rule you and breathing fresh air for a minute. Away from the drama of the minutiae of daily life. Away from the soap opera that hooks us in, feeds us its never-ending looping circles of storylines, keeps us caught on what is going to happen next. It doesn’t want to let us go, we have to escape from it ourselves. It wants us to stay caught in its current, because we give it energy, without our energy it dies, cut of its head by taking away our attention and it dies.

Our life is our own responsibility. We shape our lives as we want to, and this includes knowing when we are being dependant on others and also knowing when it is time to ask for help, when we can’t do something on our own. Balance and perspective.

Water…

…is incredible, it is the fuel of life on this earth, it is the biggest shaper of life on this planet, it gets bigger when it freezes and gets bigger when it gets warmer. It has a ‘skin’ on it which holds it in shape, which is why we have raindrops, rivers, clouds, bubbles, water walking insects. It comes in so many forms and shapes and sizes and functions.

I was in Mazatlan a little while ago and was thinking about water. There is a hurricane on the coast swinging its way around towards Baja California and although the sky is blue and I wear factor forty sun screen the waves are huge rolling in towards the beach. Really huge, no-one is swimming, the jet skies are away in their sheds, the guy who hires the belly boards and surf boards shakes his head when I ask him to hire two ‘Not right now’ he says and points at the red flag flying nearby.

I go into the water and its feels strange and a bit scary. The waves are a wall of water coming towards me, pulling at my legs and pushing me towards shore then dragging me back the other direction as they leave. We have fun for a while jumping around and splashing onto the waves as they smash into us and we marvel at the size of the ones breaking further out. As a contrast the hotel pool is blue and calm and safe and the sun reflects patterns of light from the surface.

I forget sometimes the power of water until I see the it in all its glory and wildness. Rivers that are mere trickles turn into raging torrents during the rainy season and turn city streets into four feet deep unpassable for cars or pedestrians.  I took water for granted growing up in a rainy wet country and the concept of water shortages was alien to me. It rained, it came out of the tap went back to the sea and it rained again. Now living in high desert I see the hills and mountains turn brown again after the rains have gone, the cattle and horses will grow thin again until next year and water will be shipped in from far away reservoirs.

Water is life because we were formed in water and we come from water and it carries us and the moon moves the sea and the water inside us and moves us back and forth and we work to the rhythm of water without even knowing or thinking about it.

So how important it is that we look after our water and keep it clean and pay attention to it. I wrote a post about water ages ago about snowflakes and the memory of water here. We take it so much for granted and it is the fuel of life on this planet, it is life on this planet, it flows in our rivers and seas and underground wells and clouds and rainbows and in the blood of every living thing on this planet.

Sitting in Temoris train station waiting for the train I was thinking about waiting and what it means to me. We rushed to the train station to get there for the half three train only to be told it wasn’t going to arrive till seven. I used to hate waiting, I was the world’s worst waiter. I had to have something to amuse me while I waited; a book generally or my phone games or something to mull over or sketch. Anything to fill the gap so I wouldn’t have to reflect on me or my own life. I was actually the world’s best day dreamer also, when there was something I had to pay attention to off I would go into daydreams.

I had to change my view of life and come to peace with myself and the present moment before I could learn how to wait. How to be present and aware of each moment and use the pause in movement to look and take in where I was and where I was going.

The osho zen tarot have a wonderful card about waiting. She is pregnant and smiling, with a peaceful glow. Expectant possibility and looking forward to the future but also enjoyment and thankfulness for the gift of this growth and peacefulness in the acceptance that she is not going to rush what is coming, that would spoil it, she lets whatever is coming to develop in its own time and she holds it in her heart until it is ready to emerge.

It’s that time again… buried emotions start surging to the surface, there is an inexplicable need to cry and be vague and irrational and then get annoyed when Paul doesn’t get what I am talking about or doesn’t want to talk about it. Or I say to myself he is only humoring me, he doesn’t really mean anything he says.

Yup, that time. The time when I walk around really wishing someone would piss me off so I could bash them over the head with a frying pan or disembowel them and tie them to a tree, the time when I go to bed and bury my head under the pillow to get away from these thoughts.

I realized that all the emotions that come up with PMT for me are all the emotions I can generally deal with the rest of the month. They annoy me but I have a sense of perspective about them or maybe even, I am not dealing with them properly, that they sit there and wait until they get big enough so I have to do something about them. So once a month is a release valve. The stuff that I am not looking at grows horns and a tail and gets as ornery as a scorpion in a glass jar. Reason goes out the window and everyone else gets the blame.

What was pissing me off this time was the fact that I was waiting for Paul to take care of me, to sort out things in my life and I was feeling trapped. Honestly, when I look at my life and the choices I have made in the past few months I have put myself here in this position. Things I want that I have to be patient until they arrive. I have to get proactive and take care of myself, then I don’t have to be pissed off at him or annoyed at him and we can all be happy!

Interesting thing about PMT is that I am starting to learn to use it as an early warning system. What is annoying me that I am ignoring when I have the energy to keep it buried? That at this time of the month when my defenses are down it all comes out in a rage. It is a time also though that I don’t want to confront these things, I don’t have the perspective about it, I just want to get annoyed about them and bite someone’s head off, I go to bed sometimes and cry. I feel weepy and vague and unfocused and unable to really voice what I am feeling in any way that might make sense to me, let alone to anyone else.

What I do is note what’s going on, make little mental flags and stick them up and try to live with the red ball sitting in my stomach. Curl up or go for a walk. Sometimes I can’t even work because the frustration wants me to do something, anything, to fix what I am feeling, fall into control, control anything, just to make me feel better.

I still get caught by it. I still get depressed and think I am no good and my art sucks and my writing is no good and who am I to share how I see the world with anyone. It takes me anything from a few hours to a whole day before the light dawns and I think ‘oh, yeah, it’s that time again, this will pass’ and I feel a little better.

So run away! Warning flag is up and waving and I am going to hide until I have access to my rational faculties again and can look at my life with a clear view and decide how I want to sort out what came up this time…