cliodhna’s wave

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.

I am getting ready for a craft fair coming up in Nov. Its in Marlay Park Dublin. I am busy busy making things for it and trying to balance the art part with the craft part.

Now, both are both, if you catch my drift, my art is a craft I am constantly honing and changing and tweaking and seeking new ways to get from the image/feeling in my head to the finished piece hanging in the wall. But in the context of this post let us say that ‘art’ is what I do purely because I love doing it and ‘craft’ are the cutesy small things I am doing to sell.

I find myself getting worried about the money end and plan heart patches and bird iron on patches and more hanging birds and although I do like making these, they are not my lifes dream. I get off balance into time based linear thinking sometimes of having to do more more more…. exhausting

Back to balance, heart based, eternity, we are here on earth to learn how to love and ahhhhhh, ok, I will make something special today, something from the doodles that are hanging on my wall stuck up with masking tape waiting for their time.

But first I will make a few bird patches, cause I haven’t made any yet and I want to see how they turn out. That is the other part of the balance, small versus large, silly versus profound…..

The pictures in this post are all part of a series of small embroideries I did. I wanted to make small jewel like squares of rich decoration. I layered cotton between gauzes and used metallic threads. They are all 4 inches by 4 inches and very cute! I changed the usual edging I do from lace to rough stiching round the edge of the fabric.

x cliodhna

… i was thinking about music and about the fact that there is not really that much music that i really really like to listen to. Oh sure, i got tons of albums (and anyone looking for a great music website check out emusic.com, you pay but they have everything) but left to myself and given a choice I always pick a certain style and ignore the rest. Spacey, meditation music, trance to work to and slightly more upbeat version of the same with swedish and irish folk thrown in for driving. There are exceptions of course, there are always exceptions.

Anyway I started wondering where did I ‘think’ I liked the other musics come from? Why did I buy them? In fact where did I ‘think’ I liked anything come from? clothes, style, food, lifestyle choices. I did some recapitulation on it and came up with the startling revelation that most of my life, if not all was made up of choices made because other people thought they were cool, because I wanted to be cool and fit in, because I wanted to be accepted and if I had a definite game plan of ‘who I was’ then there was something to be liked/loved/accepted.

So begins the clearing, what do i want to ditch and what do i want to keep? what attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, are really mine and what have I garnered from outside myself since I was born seeking approval. I guess I have to find out who I actually am first and then the rest will fall away naturally.

I have noticed this with politicians. Politicians are not allowed to be grey, they are not allowed to be not sure how they think or feel about something. they have to be black or white. I think thats why Hillary Clinton got ditched the last election, she is smart, intelligent, savvy and sometimes stands in a grey area. I am glad Obama got in but I definitly would have voted for Hillary.

A girl stretches upwards to reach for the moon; through the red earth and the stones and the hardness of pushing through she stretches and feels for the silver coolness of the moons light pulling her into the night.

The night is cool and dark and welcoming. It is not scary in this night, it is full of life, full of the life that comes out in the darkness and out of the heat of the daytime sun. Animals watch her coming forth, they are witnessing and waiting and encouraging with their breath and giving her energy to complete the journey.

I was reading the other day about a dog who was helping a war veteran with his panic attacks and I have always thought that dogs were such unconditional love beings. We are lucky to have them in our lives. This is Pala who is a sweet loving snuggle monster. Her fur is soft (and sheds everywhere!) and she likes most of all to be curled up in a lap or an the bed beside me. I spoil her.

We are surrounded by animals giving us love and encouragement, even the small creepy ones or the ones that bite.. they are just trying to tell us something, its not our fault if we don’t understand them.

my work room is on the second floor of the house and directly outside a huge green tree grows. It provides shade from the sun and gives a wonderful green light into the room. The birds love it also, the tiny sparrows and the large black magpie type birds that shriek and squak and make liquid notes when they are courting.

I looked up from my machine and say these two sitting about three feet away. They stayed for a few hours, courting each other, staying close, grooming each others necks, fluffing up wings and feathers and then smoothing them down again. I got a few pictures of them. I hope they build their nest there, that would be too awesome!

The quilt provided me with a reality check the other night. I sat in front of some tv show drawing and cutting out the paper patterns that I would sew the fabric onto and at the end I figured ’sure, I’ve loads done’ but when I put them together to see my heart quailed at the very (very) small section of bed that they covered. If it takes that long to cut out the paper patterns how long is it to get the whole thing done!!!!

It is at this point the artist must toss all fears and considerations of time out the window and just do it. I mean, I once spent three months doing nothing put cut up paper stars for christmas decorations… (I was broke, out of work, bored and had a pair of scissors and a huge mound of paper that was already in squares.. what else is a girl to do?) The kitchen looked incredible after I was finished

and to the two dogs in the title? they are getting restless and need a walk.. better go.. x clio

A year later,

a century later,

or a whole turn of a galaxy later,

a child was holding onto her mother’s hand and looking up at the stars. She pointed up to the sky and she said

>What is that beautiful star called? It looks like it is dancing?

The mother smiled and said

>That is a new star and it shines brighter with every year

>I would like to shine like that star, the little girl said.

A heart is what happens when a yes fills the space of possibility,

And the universe reaches out to gather it into her vastness.

She gives it shape and form so it can express itself through her;

She gives us bodies so we can learn how to love

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…..