in a galaxy, close to here or far away from here, it does not matter, a short while ago or a long while ago, this also does not matter, there is movement in the stillness, a growing and a coming forward, a stretching of life and an awareness of something new…
I have been away from this blog for a bit, i ran out of inspiration, things to say and had a bit of a funk of what do I have to say that anyone wants to listen to anyway.
I have been busy though and following an email form my brother this morning wanting to know what me and my sister were up to (her blog) I decided this was the morning to dive in there again.
I have been working on a story called the little star. I am making puppets and taking photos of them and then doing cool things to them in photoshop. I have come a long way in photoshop since I first started using it about a year ago. Then I would labourisly colour areas and have to recolour them if it was wrong and I didn’t know about layers and selecting areas and clone tool and all sorts. My most recent discovery with it was the liquid filter…. oh joy of joys now I can do all the spirals I want!!!!!
It has been raining pretty constantly here in Galway and I finally realised yesterday why mexico is so dry. Because all the rain is here in Ireland! I am looking forward to going back to hot dryness now.
It is one thing I have learnt doing this work and seeing myself more and more clearly, that women keep themselves small so that men will love them. We blame the men but really it is us that need to stand up and reclaim our power. No more victims, no more ‘poor me’.
I have also been asking myself why I write this blog. Does it really help what I want to achieve in my life right now? It has been really good for me to do this, public expose of my inner doubts and fears which I have always kept secret but now I need to re-evaluate why I write here and what purpose I want it to serve. I think I will keep it ticking along until I figure it out.
What else, I talked to my mother about doing this work, the Toltec path, which I had never done before, fears of their judgment I suppose which is really my own. Also stuff about how we take on things from our parents and how unsaid emotions go to the person who is saying them and if no one is saying them then they rattle around looking for some sort of a release. I was happy afterwards I talked to her about it but there was also a part of me really worried she was going to be angry, and I could feel myself wanting to run and reassure her.
I need to reassure myself. I cannot change or fix someone else. Old dream, look after everyone else first and give all your energy away so you have nothing left. New Dream, heal yourself first then you will have energy to give to others from love and not from limitation.
So with love, from a surprisingly sunny morning in salthill, galway…..
i did these for a ten year old called Megan who loves her dog called Odie. They are quite simple, I do a little applique and some beading and then I sew them onto good paper. When I put them in the frames that they had sent they looked really good.
I think I will do some more. Put them in cheap frames from the Local hardware store. the frames I got to fill for these were really nice and only cost ten euro.
I was thinking I could do the craft fair again with smaller stuff like this to sell for maybe 40 euro or 50 euro a pop.
For now I will do some and put them on my etsy site. See what happens!
There was a cat in my swimming pool a while ago, trapped for the night until the next morning when I went to investigate the mewling. It was only a kitten but when I tried to catch it it was fierce and hissed and spat at me and its fur was on end. I was impressed by it, it was so small yet willing to defend itself to the death. When I did catch it with my cardigan over it it got loose and bit me hard on the thumb, teeth going through nail and all, a mighty crunch from a small fierce thing.
I remember ages ago a dream I had when I had to choose between two kittens and one was soft a cuddly and domesticated and the other was smoke grey and spitting at me furiously. I knew I should probably pick the nice kitten so i would have a cat I could have sitting on my lap but a part of me really wanted the other one, the wild untamed one, the one who would walk by its lonesome like in the Rudyard Kipling story. (maybe I will post it).
So when this cat bit me I have blood trapped under my finger nail and it is growing out slowly. I thought that maybe its a sign that I have until the blood grows out to learn the lesson of the fierce kitten in the swimming pool. Where did my fierce independance go? my willingness to fight off intruders from my space? to stand up for myself even though the other might be a lot bigger than I was? I must remember it. A courage to be different, to stand alone and be myself.
I have had discussions with the boyfriend about it too over the last while. I stop being the little girl and start getting my own life together and this threatens him and he figures I am leaving. Of course there is a fear in me that he will leave, to go and find some more obedient girlfriend who will do what he tells her and doesn’t do pesky things like soul searching and strange workshops. But you know what, the happier I am with myself the happier I am in my relationship. We are getting married next christmas so I have this feeling like if I am marrying him then I had better show him who I really am so he knows what he’s doing 
(hi Paul! x)
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What is it about confrontation I find so scary. Especially angry males who use their authority to silence me and prove they are right. I had a bit of a confrontation today and I walked away before it became a shouting match where he completely changed the story and flatly denied my question.
It made me a bit shaky afterwards but I thought about how I could have handled it differently. How I went in on some level expecting anger and that this would have made me be on one level on the defensive and so attracted that anger. I thought about how I could have remained calm and asked him calmly how he intended to handle the situation, got the information I needed and once I saw that he was being a bit of a rock in hard place, I could have said thanks very much, left and then taken it to a higher level.
Of course all problems are solved with hindsight and I can only make a lodgment in my energetic body that the next time I come into a situation like that to remember this one and the lesson I learnt from it.
Of course the answer to the question above as to why I find it so scary is because I have anger in me and I turn it on myself and so when I meet with someone outside of me who also carries that anger I connect with my own fear. My fear of my own self judgment and authority figure I spend my life trying to appease by being good and non-confrontational.
I suppose we learn everything from when we were little and to a child an angry adult is a scary thing because the child has no defences and is reliant on the adult for everything and so begins to act in a certain way to make the adult happy and so love the child. My parents weren’t especially angry with me and my childhood was happy and secure but I suppose we still fear this loss of love and a child learns to control its environment in the only way it can.
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.
Time is speeding up, at least that what it feels like. The more I take my time and do things slowly and conciously and methodically the more it seems to zip past. Its kinda scary in a way. One of my issues is impatience. I don’t feel like I deserve success so I do things fast and then they don’t work. A cycle of failure which perpetrates itself.
I make a desicion a while ago to really go with the flow. Allow myself to slow down and breathe. Take the time I needed to do the things which make me feel good, do my yoga and my recapitualtion and excercise and plan my next act properly. The upshot? I am sitting with my oatmeal, its half twelve and I am meeting my mother in about an hour to go shopping with her in the dundrum shopping centre. Day is gone.
I do want to meet her, no problem there but I am noticing that the less I try to hang onto time and the less I worry about getting things done within a certain time frame the more it seems to slip past my fingers like water. I suppose I spent a lot of my life worrying about the fact that I was wasting time, I wasn’t young enough anymore to be succesful, I attached succesful onto age and I had failed that, worrying about if I don’t do something NOW I would lose the chance and I would never get another one, if I don’t get something major done everyday the day was a failure. I was really chasing my tail round in circles, agonizing over the moment and feeling like I was failing each one. Getting nowhere very fast.
It is scary to let it go. To say, ‘the gallery can wait till next month or next year when I have something to show them’ or ‘the printing of promo cards can wait until next week until I talk to my artist friend and get some advice on what might be the next best step’ or ‘ I am going to spend my time now getting together a professional proposal together for galleries’. I face my fear of being left behind and forgotton about. I am not as fast as others, not as good.
So now, that time seems to have got loose and taken on its own momentum I am concentrating on letting go and not thinking about it. Go with the flow. I am viewing each day less as 24 hours and more like a heartbeat. Badum Badum Badum……
I have gathered my new embrideries together in my website finally. I want to submit two of them to the RDS craft competition.
I have had a lot of fun doing these embroideries. They are stuffed and even more 3d than before. I am having lots of ideas about what to do next.
I like this next one a lot. I tried to capture the delicatness of the butterflies in the way I constructed it from layers of chiffon and torn edges. The outside edge I embroidered onto a water dissolvable fabric to get the lace effect.
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