cliodhna’s wave

I am sitting in Peters pub waiting for rachel to arrive. i found a free internet hotspot and so I sip my beer and tap away. She has just arrived…

I asked Rachel if she had anything to say for this post and she said its april fools day today and someone left a poo on her chair and all she thought was that her new puppy had somehow managed to make its way into her work and climb up on her chair and do the poo. She was quite confused for a few seconds until she realised it was fake…

ok, time for a toasted sandwich and pint of Paulaner, its so good to be back in good beer land again… though I miss the margaritas!

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.

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.

….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!……

My new years resolutions/aims/goals are

to be healthier, to eat healthier and do my yoga more often, join a gym and learn how to run. To do the next reiki level and start offering it to people and accept the changes that come into my life from taking this step forward for myself.

to keep creating my art and move forward one little step at a time, I will take the opportunities that are given me but I am going to stop pushing and pushing like I am forcing something into creation. I don’t have to make something happen, all I need to do it ask and I will be given the opportunity. Also I accept the pace I am going at right now.

I welcome abundance on all levels into my life. I live connected to my heart and the knowledge that we are all one and living and constructing this dream together. Be happy in my life with myself and with Paul. Explore life and welcome all its changes and forms.

happy new year everyone! x cliodhna

Happy christmas day! eat too much, lie around, cheat at pictionary, watch the bad old timer movie, shuffle through wrapping paper and collapsed children worn down from excitement and uncle paul winding them up with the nerf guns, probably one or two sent to their room in tears for a little time out and a calm down.

My family has only one still not even a year old to contend with, we are quite boring on christmas day, we lie around and read or pick endlessly at the food. This year with pauls family I have entered the kids zone again. There seem to be endless children of all ages.

Ok so now make a wish…. this is christmas present to anyone reading this post (and it doesn’t have to be christmas day you are reading it either). Get piece of paper, write your wish down and then roll it up real small and burn it.

two guidelines to follow

happy language, no negative words whatsoever, so no I don’t want this (Fear, poverty, anger, addiction, etc) anymore, have to phrase it in a positive way.

don’t let your mind tell you whatever you are wishing for is impossible, make the wish, what ever your heart desires, and then let the universe worry about how to get it to you.

happy wishing!  x cliodhna

the two pictures are from a while ago from a story called ‘Crow Makes a Wish’ Crow inserts a wish between sea and sky. A wish for companionship, an equal, his opposite. The second one is when blue baby arrives on the sea shore. It has a memory of wings and rain and salt water.

So I have come to a place where I cannot move past with my mind. My mind stops, comes to a halt and says ‘hold on there, where do you think you are going? This ain’t possible and you know it’ and suddenly I do know I and I am stuck again right back in the mind. Like a flying dream when you suddenly remember you can’t fly.

Looking back I have done this a lot in my life. Got to a certain point and then got scared of the unknowingness past the mind and pulled back from the brink of stepping over. My mind controls how I live my life, it puts meaning and certainty and boundaries on reality and is the police of my understanding and expansion. Even when trying to release it I have realized the mind has stayed in control and given me tricks to make me think I was going somewhere but in reality I was making it happy.

Also, avoidance. Avoidance of my doubts and fears, keeping moving, keep doing, keep practicing, keep judging and I am in a maze of no exit that twists and changes every turn I make. There is no way out of the maze, it is a maze of mirrors and illusion that only exists because I make it real and feed it. Don’t see who I really am because I might not like her but keep feeding the mirrors and I will spend a whole lifetime looking at endless reflections.

The thing is which brings me to a full stop is that I have no idea how to get past this. The mind has no idea of what else could be past it so it is no help. What is on the other side of doing? Well, I suppose I wrote about it in my last post, putting up the reiki posters and then realizing I didn’t have to worry about anything or do anything, the universe would look after all that.

I don’t think I ever quite saw so clearly though just how much my mind has been telling me what to do and think and work its way past problems and I am at a loss as to what to do. I simply don’t know. This is a good thing, I tell myself. It is exactly what I would tell anyone else who posed this dilemma to me so I say to myself that this is a good thing, when the mind is stuck then the rest of me can start emerging. I am not my mind, I am much more than that and the mind has no clue about any of it.

its amazing how words define concepts, give our minds a handle on which to hang the coat of understanding. Such a word is ‘procrastination’. I remember the first time ever seeing this word when I was young and not having the vaguest idea what it meant and then when someone explained it for me, I thought ‘oh! but I do that all the time!’

I try not to do this, or at least catch myself mid-procrastic (yes, I made that conjunction up) and start what ever it was I was avoiding doing. And so to the first official post of this blog.. Thinking to myself all sorts of excuses like I have to think about what I want to write or I haven’t done the shop properly yet or its (I’m) not ready to go yet. I was really excited about setting this blog up and only about a week ago it actually sunk in that I was going to be writing things for real people to read. Outside of my abstract world and into the real one or as Pooh bear says “Sometimes ideas that seem really thingy inside your head don’t seem quite so thingy after all when they are outside and everyone else is looking at them”.

But that is what other people are for really in this case, to bounce the ideas inside your head off and see do they stay ‘thingy’ when they are outside and everyone else is looking at them. We are all connected and we can all learn from each other.

So my new year wishes for this new baby blog are…

to speak the truth (as I know it) as much as I can and allow this blog to go where it wants to go and become what it wants to become.

share my art and ideas with more people and provide inspiration and tips on how they can make their own art or let their own creative voices flow.

and lastly, but not leastly, have fun doing it.

I will be posting two posts a week, though that could change as it goes. This is all new territory for me, I have soaked in seemingly endless bits of information on stats and feedburners and html and other stuff that will take time to sink in and become familiar. The most important thing though is what I write about and that can’t be learnt or studied or prepared but simply allowed to flow.

now make a wish for yourself, close your eyes right now and visualise something you would like to bring towards you in 2008.

xx cliodhna