cliodhna’s wave

Paul has just quit smoking after 36 years. his body has gone into shock, I think, as everything the cigarettes were holding down is free and back with a vengeance. He can’t breathe properly and his throat hurts. He says its more than just quitting, he has quit before and this hasn’t happened but I think that maybe he only quit before because he had to and not out of choice and this time his whole mind/spirit/body is involved because it is from a choice to make his life better and more healthy. it is time to purge, the body cries with relief, lets get rid of all of it! i feel for him and I sent him some reiki to loosen some of the stuff.

I remember trying to quit for years, having just the ‘one’ and making myself feel bad about it and then starting again and saying ’some other time’ until I woke up one morning about two years ago and said ‘I’m not going to smoke today’ and I didn’t and haven’t since. A few pangs and my digestive system didn’t work right for a few days but that was that.

The thing is though, I had dealt with the reasons why I was smoking in the first place, my underlying emotional need for a crutch and the fear of facing a future without that crutch. I was staring into an abyss of nothing, an empty landscape where I was lost and forlorn and had no-one to help me. Cigarettes, I reckon, are the sneakiest of the addictive substances, they whisper in your ear and cajole you with thoughts of ‘just the one’ or ‘just a drag’ or they are like the vampire energy sucking ‘friend’ who always wants from you but never gives and uses emotional blackmail and guilt to keep you there.

Paul is also now starting to understand what I was talking about with the smell. Even when I smoked, (and I smoked roll your owns, which didn’t smell the same as ready mades,) I hated the smell of a used ashtray, or the acrid smell of a cigarette burning down on its own. Now that I have quit, I can smell cigarettes off people when they step onto a bus I am sitting in already, or when they smoked, recently or a while ago. I had to get used to it and accept it when I quit. careful not to go the route of the reformed evangelist espousing the cause of the newly converted. Paul has to travel today 8 hours to the mine with his son, who smokes like a chimney, so he will find out exactly what its like!

I still have the occaisional ‘just one’ thoughts, like the other night a friend was smoking the brand of rollies I used to like and I had a moment of wanting and thinking I could just have one, but it passed. I am so glad I don’t anymore, I hated being addicted and depending on them, now I feel so much freer and stronger.

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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

I am off to Galway today to put posters and leave fliers for the workshops I am organizing. It’s funny doing this, It is reminding me of all the times I would have done it for gigs we were doing. Book the venue, do the radio interview, put up the posters, tell everyone we knew and then when the night of the gig arrived we would do the sound check, and then sit back and wait for people to arrive. Sometimes they would arrive early and we would relax and enjoy and sometimes nobody would come for ages and we would have visions of playing to three people, but eventually they would trickle in little by little and we would always have a full house to play to.

Same feeling here, putting the fliers out and spreading the word and waiting for the response. I am feeling responsible for getting people and a part of me wants to push and control it and thinks that if I don’t do it right nobody will come and I will be to blame. This is where, I think, doing your best comes into play, that if I do my best and give it the energy it needs and deserves then no matter the outcome I will know I did what was to be done and I couldn’t have done it any differently, where-as if I had skimped on time and attention I will always wonder what if?

Of course the other side of that is my wonderful judge who will try to make me feel bad no matter what I did but I try not to listen to him.

I remember putting up a poster for Reiki in Guanajuato and having this wonderful realization afterwards that I didn’t need to worry about it or try to control it, if there was someone who needed my energy they would find me so I could relax and let the universe do its stuff. Nobody did arrive but I figured I had put up the poster for me to have that revelation, to not be attached to outcome and then I can take the risk of doing something new.

My latest embroidery of the greenwitch. I have been finishing off and tidying up my work recently, putting borders and names and backs on things that have been sitting half finished. When I go back to ireland they shall be ready to be presented hopefully to galleries to look for an exhibition.

There was once a boy who liked playing with his friends and having fun and being happy and he had lots of friends who loved him and wanted to play with him and so they would pass their days making up games and wandering the countryside discovering lost treasures and making up stories as they went.
He had lots of coats he loved wearing. Some were bright yellow and some were dark blue with stars and some were silver and shimmered in the sunlight and sparkled in the moon light. He had long coats and short coats, some with beads and bells on them and others of the finest silk that slid noiselessly through the air.
He would choose carefully every morning which one he felt like wearing. What colour, what style and at the end of the day he put it carefully back in the coat rack for the next day he wanted to wear it. He took good care of his coats.
One day though, something happened, someone was mean to him, or hit him or threatened him and when the evening came he did not take off the coat. He didn’t want to, he wanted to keep it on as protection or as comfort and he went to bed and slept in it. The next morning he put another coat on, on top of the first one and he went out to play.
From then on he changed. He didn’t take the coats off as he had done before. He kept them on and he began to wear bigger ones and heavier ones to protect himself from the world. He moved slower and didn’t laugh as much as before and his friends gave up trying to cheer him up and eventually left him to his plodding walk and silence. People made fun of him then. Slowcoach, they called him and pitied him and stayed away from him and his gloom. Eventually he stopped going out of the house and stayed there and no-body called to the door.
This went on for a while, until one day, he felt a stirring in his heart. The sun was shining outside after a rainstorm and everything was wet and shone and sparkled like jewels. It reminded him of one of his favorite coats and he looked down at what he was wearing. For the first time in ages he wanted to wear a special coat and he felt dirty and itchy and smelly inside this big coat he was wearing. He took it off and the one underneath and then the next one. How many coats am I wearing he thought to himself?
He continued taking them off, getting lighter as they went down, thinner and as he took each one off he remembered what had happened that made him keep it on in the first place. A heavy black one was the day the bigger boy had punched him in the nose and the teacher had thought he started it and punished him instead. The grey one was the day he stole something and then blamed someone else. The next one down was when he had a fight with his best friend and never said sorry. He also began to remember the good times with his friends in each coat. The green one, now faded with its silver buttons gone, was a day of summer adventure in the mountains when they had found the sheep skull and made a fort. The silver shining one was a moonlight search for fairies and goblins in the forest. He smiled when he remembered how scared and how excited they had been.
He kept peeling them off until at last, none remained and he stared down at his naked body all dirty and grubby. He ran a bath and sat in it until all the soap-bubbles had been burst and he was clean and water soaked and his fingers had water ridges in them. He stood up feeling lighter and happier than he had ever in his life.
I will never let myself wear all those coats again, he thought
He ran out the door naked with nothing on and danced down the street. The children in school saw him and laughed and told their teacher but she didn’t believe them and told them to stop staring out the window. He danced past a house where children were playing in the yard. They ran in and asked their mother could they go with him but she shook her said, ‘You must have imagined it? She said ‘No-one goes out and dances in the street naked’. He danced past a café where people sat drinking coffee but they didn’t see him, they were too busy… reading papers, talking.
Coat boy danced into the hills and the mountains and far away close. He is still dancing to this day and if you are very lucky he will dance past you some day. Don’t blink… you might miss him!

Greenwitch sings alone in the heart of a tree, and yet not alone for in the heart of every tree there is a greenwitch singing. Her eyes are green with gold sparkles and her skin is the mottled green of moss. Her heart is pure gold and shines through her eyes and it is from her heart that her love flows and gives energy and strength to all growing things.
It is for greenwitch that the flowers stretch their heads to the sky and the sun. It is for greenwitch that the spiders spin their webs and do their dance of death. It is greenwitch that inspires the song of the birds and the whirring wings of the hummingbird and it is greenwitch that the donkeys love as they amble their slow way across the mountain.
Rain falls for her and rivers run and she sits at the heart of everything and sings her song of life. She is the weaver and she is the warp and weft and the fabric emerges from the loom in a thousand colours and in threads of silk and gossamer and gold and silver.
She is me and you and everything around us.

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.

i went to see the new jim carrey film ‘Yes man’ and its actually really funny, you have to say yes to everything regardless of what it is. of course he gets it wrong and thinks he literally has to say yes to EVERYTHING but sure that’s comedy.

The lesson learns is he has a choice and he has to decide whether he really wants to do it or not. He has to ask his heart if he really wants to do this. He was living in no and changing to yes changed his life and it is true that what we put out into the world is what we attract back to ourselves.

I was thinking of all the times I said yes to things and no to things. I remember saying yes to joining a country band and then putting the phone down and realising I had a week to learn how to play country music or the time I had an opportunity to go play music in a bar in Thailand or someplace close. I turned it down because I was saving to go to spain and I knew I didn’t really want to sit in an irish bar playing tourist irish music for six months no matter how beautiful the location. That was the time of the tidal wave, I missed it cause I didn’t go. It had been hard to turn down too.

I thought about other opportunities which seemed a sure bet and I turned down and wondered had I done the right thing. I generally find out later that if I followed my inner instinct then everything worked out fine and of course there are times when I realise I was saying no from fear. I am pretty good about saying yes though. If I reckon the only reason I want to say no is fear then I push myself a little about it and say yes.

I remember a job offer which freaked me out because it meant a commitment of a whole year! I said yes to that.

I think though the bigger yes’s actually come in smaller packages. Am I ready to live right now? how do I want to live my life? do I want to be open to the people around me? make friends? right now this person is annoying me do I want to keep judging him/her or do I want to see past my stuff/their stuff and see them as they really are and love them regardless? Do I want to be open to Paul right now and tell him what is in my heart or stay closed. Do I want to stop and just look around and see where I am or stay lost in television and work or whatever my adiction is? Yes to life or no to life? That is the question and it comes every second of the day every day of our life. The choice… follow my heart or follow my head… it is the only thing which is truly ours… our ability to choose.

my new threadless submission…..

I have painted many women with stars over the years. This one is the painting I described here. She stands proud upon the earth but still she has her connection to the stars.

I have started painting on large paper. Good watercolour paper and masking taping the edges so when the painting is finished I still have those wonderful edges. easier to transport too.