cliodhna’s wave

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…..

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.