I found these photos. They are from my window in mexico and the two doves hung out for ages on the branch, playing and preening each other.
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We are six and two. Six humans and two caterpillars, who arrived the second day of our journey to Teotihuacan (the pyramids outside Mexico City), on the tree outside the salon and entombed themselves to die and be reborn. They were huge and furry and black with yellow stars down the length of their backs. We are doing the same, on an inside space we retreat into the layers of our beings and our pasts that we still carry to transform these slow caterpillar bodies into lightness and colour and wings.
As we enter the salon every morning for yoga and evening for talks I look at the two white bundles underneath the branch and I wonder what is happening to the skin and small caterpillar bones inside the cocoon. How are they stretching and pushing and forming and tightening. Is it painful for them? Or do they sleep and then wake with a new body and brand new wings?
My insides are stretching and reforming, new energetic muscles are testing their boundaries and there are butterflies in my stomach as I prepare to leave here and go to Tepoztlan for the second half of the journey. I find myself impatient to be home to plan my new life already and get things moving and change and tell my partner all my new plans but now is not time for movement, I am still the caterpillar in the cocoon and this journey is the tree with its roots in the earth drawing substance and sustenance from the earth and giving it to us, all six cocoons receiving the love.
I discovered that I have love for myself, I want to be happy, I want to create my own dream of happiness that includes everything I want for myself. My relationship with Paul, my life with him and living somewhere beautiful and also I want to be successful at my art and sell and make money doing what I love doing, creating. Find a balance between the two, I need to find an agent, someone who knows how to sell and promote so I can concentrate on making and creating.
Universe, I want all this! So now I can move forward and keep my eyes open for opportunities.
If there is one thing I have learnt for certain in doing this work is that you pull towards you what you hold inside. If you hold fear and limitation that is what you will find, if you hold trust and openness that is also what you will find.
We finish the journey with a marriage. A couple from Belgium decides to get married in Tepoztlan. We scurry round the town the day before buying flowers and a gift for them and wondering what to wear and the next day we gather in the small chapel on the property and listen as they speak love to one another. I think of my own wedding last January and smile and send some love to Paul where ever he is. We go outside and in a traditional Mexican ceremony shout their names to the four directions and watch as they feed each other cake and hot chocolate. Yellow flowers everywhere.
It is the day of the dead in Mexico, families watch vigil at graves all night and yellow flowers line the streets and pave walks. They celebrate death to welcome life, to honour those who have gone before to honour the life that is living right now.
I allow a piece of myself, the old self that lived in limitation, to die every time I do one of these journeys and it brings space for something new to be born, something new and fragile, that I don’t recognize at first but I watch it and shelter it until it is strong enough to walk on its own.
We emerge from our cocoons as butterflies, wings still wet and weak but growing stronger in the sunlight and colours emerge, reds and blues and silvers and golds…. And we fly.
While in a sushi restaurant recently I was staring (as I usually do) at the fish in the big fish tank near the entrance. It contained four large goldfish and I thought for possibly the umpteenth time of how pretty and amazingly and satisfyingly balanced the pattern of their scales were. How gold and shiny and marvelously put together they were as they glided back and forth.
‘A quilt’ thought I, ‘a quilt of goldfish scales that shimmers and shines’ and I set out on the long journey towards quiltdom today. I have made a quilt before, it was complicated and took way longer than I thought it would so I am marignally more prepared now than I was the first time of the nature of my commitment to this quilt.
I made the pattern and sewed the patches and i am doing it the old fashioned way of sewing the patches onto a paper backing and I will stitch them together by hand. It holds their shape better and makes curves easier to sew than on a machine.
Onwards onto the path of quilt!
which doesn’t happen in mexico… completely ignored in fact, though once a mexican person knows I am irish I get to hear the story about the turn coat irish who adandoned the american side in some border war a long time ago when they were still fighting over texas and ran over to the mexican side to fight for them instead.
thats the thing about being irish the whole world is happy to see you, generally for stuff thats completely cliched like an ability to drink the rest of the pup under the table (my alchohol tolerance is practically zero) and myths of the fighting irish from american history. We would pour off the famine ships dirty, hungry and looking for the nearest bar.
One thing about being irish from over the seas is that there is a view of ireland that is completely romanticised and in soft focus and hazy memory and nothing what-so-ever to do with the reality of back home. I suppose this happens with any displaced people and there is a part of irelands history that is everything to do with being displaced from need and a hope for a better place somewhere else and if you weren’t the one to go personally then all your hopes and dreams went with the person who was going. Even now every single family I know has relatives in america or england.
Maybe it is buried in our physce to consider somewhere else as better, more money, more opportunities, someone from somewhere else is more exotic, wiser, richer, better; or maybe thats just me. Its one thing I have realised in all my travels. Doesn’t matter where I am or what I doing its still me being there and doing it and trying to find that better place just doesn’t work because I can’t run away from me.
I finished the two paintings I was working on. Time to tell the story. Paul kept asking me what they were about and I would just say ‘you know, freedom’ very articulate I know but sometimes I can’t say until they are finished and I am so much better at writing this than saying them. So here it is!
I had a dream about a wee brown bird. I took this brown bird away from where it was living because I wanted to protect it. The bird was angry with me for having done this and was going to fly back to where it came from. I was really worried about it because I figured it was too small to do this safely but then I looked and the brown bird had turned into a young man with a backpack on his back and I realised he could do it if he wanted.
The moral of the story? wee brown birds are perfectly capable of looking after themselves
The meaning of the dream? I am that part of me that I figure can’t look after myself. I mother the bird, trying to protect it and it gets angry with me for not letting it live its own life. The bird/young man is that part of me that is very able to take care for itself but just looks small and fragile right now. I have to stop trying to look after it and trying to keep it by me but let it fly and go where it wants to go. Let myself go where I want to go and do what I want to do and trust myself and my wishes and heart wants in life.
I will have the other finished painting and the story behind it in a day or two..
x
I love oil paints.. have I said that before? probably a few times, I love the smell of them, they make me feel like a real artist, but also the depth of the colours you can achieve with them and the lustre of the paint and the malleability and also the fact that they take a whole heap of time to dry so I can take my time with textures and details.
Watercolours are like a zen meditation.. brush poised.. hold it… take a deep breath.. now go! and don’t stop until you finish!
Oils are more like the progression of a turtle.. ambling happily on the journey, pause, admire the flowers, ponder on significance of this, take the wrong turn, get it right, oh look we have arrived and just in time for tea!
I use washes under colours, deep blue under light blue, light blue under deep, yellow ochre under anything green so I can use a prussian blue wash to get the most incredible green.
I scratch into the paint before it dries, using the colour underneath to be the contrast.
Here is the next stage of the two paintings I am working on at the mo.
I see new artists all the time now, on etsy and outside through others blogs. Some I like, some I don’t really have a connection with, some are really sweet, some I know I like because they remind me of my style and some I look at with a critical eye and would love to give them a few tips or ideas on pushing the edge of where they are. A very few I love, because they inspire me or because they make me happy or I connect with the person who is making the art on some level or just something abstract that art critics have been trying to define for centuries. ‘Why do you like a particular piece of art and not another?’
But! very very rarely I see someone elses art and it just makes me stop. Makes me come to a halt and almost get jealous, (well, ok, leave out the almost) for a second or two. Can’t compare! I have my own paintings to paint!
this is the shop I found the other day ‘obsoleteworld‘
They make me sad and lonesome and draw me into the little worlds that are in each picture. I showed them to Paul and another artist friend later that night and we ooohed and ahhed and ‘this one is my favourite’ and ‘no, this one is I think’! Read her profile too..
Well, time to return to my personal world and keep on with the two paintings I started. I have taken pictures of them and am going to post as they progress! Happy days when my hands are covered in prussian blue and my head aches slightly from the smell of white spirit. Have to move onto linseed oil but I find if I use oil for the earlier layers of a painting it becomes to glossy and washes won’t stick. I actually know nothing about oil painting, I just love the medium and am discovering tricks as I go.
Here is the first stage of the paintings..
