cliodhna’s wave

there is a cat trapped in my swimming pool (which is empty, by the way) and I listened to it yowl all night long thinking it was a neighbours cat pissed at being left outside for the night. This morning though I get up to go look. A cat usually doesn’t care whether its been left out and sure enough there it was, the invisible cat I have been leaving food out for the past week or so.

I get down into the swimming pool thinking I could catch it and make a pet of it, it is only a kitten. But no, this cat is wild, and by wild I mean a hissing spitting ball of teeth and claws looking at me furiously. I might be 30 times its size but its not going to go without a fight.

I haven’t caught wild things in a while. I used to be an expert at it when I was younger, but recently I haven’t scaled my walls or hung upside down off trees in hunt of a stray kitten that needed catching ( I even remember falling into a wasps nest once and couldn’t see out of one eye for a week, but i caught it!). I round up the kitten saying reasuring things and making mommy cat noises with my shawl held out to throw it over it. I miss the first time and then the second time there is an intense flurry and I have kitten pinned down on the ground safely. You have to be firm but not too strong and the end result must look like your hand on the back of its neck… this is important. So then I make the mistake of being too… whats the word? to try to make friends with something too soon, or kinda hippy thoughts of poor little kitty witty, anyway I tried to scratch behind its ear to calm it and I know have a hole in my thumb. It actually managed to bite through the nail, I am sure its teeth met in the middle somewhere.

Reality check. Wild thing, give it some food and space and hang a blanket down over the swimming pool, it will figure it out and it will probably go back to being the invisible cat I leave food out for. I can see it now, it ate the food I gave it but it hasn’t tried the blanket and it is sitting quite comfortably in the curve of the pool like a dusty black rag.

So on to this blog a year later. Can’t believe I have been doing this blog a whole year. I have gone through stages of only writing about my art and craft, to wanting to write about my own journey, to running away from said journey and putting posts up about You tube or other fillers to returning to the point and the heart of the matter. I have made some virtual friends I have no idea what they look like or who they really are except what I see from their own blogs but I like their energy or maybe we are all disparate and separated around the globe but we are all really on the same path and that’s why we gravitate towards each other.

So I wonder where I will be in another year? or where this blog will have gone? Or who I will be? probably me but with a little less weight on my shoulders and a little happier and following my dreams still.

I had an idea of something I would love to do. I have always wanted this but never really figured it was for me or I could get the money to do it. I will set up a workshop space, my own little sanctuary, my space, but to use it for workshops for the toltec work or for yoga and I will have my own studio there too to work in. Somewhere really beautiful, beside the sea? or at least near the sea on a mountain side somewhere or in the jungle or… don’t know yet.

I have joined the stock market to invest some money my mum gave me to work towards this goal. Cool huh? online broker, small start up accounts. You see its interesting how money is so relative. I thought ooooo 100′000 dollars would be an amazing sum to have but then I check the leading stock broker in Ireland and they want minimum 125′000 euro as a start up fund. Gave me a start, and made me realize how really money is just energy and we call it towards us or not depending on whether we think we deserve it or whether its important to us. I never really cared about being rich in the past but also never saw myself as a person with lots of money, that was kind of unattainable, out of my reach, for the whizz kid bankers or older people, not me. I guess maybe I also felt a little superior to them, I didn’t need money to do what I wanted to do.

Anyway I change that agreement. Now I want money. Not for itself but to use it to construct my own dream and make my life the way I want it. To be self sufficient and in charge of my own finances, to take responsability for how I want to live and think ‘I can’

It started with a question my teacher posed us in a letter at new years. What would you do if you had unlimited finances at your disposal and all the love and support of the universe.

Well, what would you do?

My new years resolutions/aims/goals are

to be healthier, to eat healthier and do my yoga more often, join a gym and learn how to run. To do the next reiki level and start offering it to people and accept the changes that come into my life from taking this step forward for myself.

to keep creating my art and move forward one little step at a time, I will take the opportunities that are given me but I am going to stop pushing and pushing like I am forcing something into creation. I don’t have to make something happen, all I need to do it ask and I will be given the opportunity. Also I accept the pace I am going at right now.

I welcome abundance on all levels into my life. I live connected to my heart and the knowledge that we are all one and living and constructing this dream together. Be happy in my life with myself and with Paul. Explore life and welcome all its changes and forms.

happy new year everyone! x cliodhna

Green is the colour of life, it is the heart chakra, it is courage and the ability to change and be fluid. It is shining forth of the sun through the blue of the sky. I read somewhere once that the colour of the world when it was born was blue and it sent a shiver down my spine. I think I have changed to green now for a while. It heals me and changes me and now is the time to sit quiet and let it do its work. Be patient and allow the changes to take place, not knowing what they are or where they will take me. Maybe I will change back to blue afterwards or maybe I will stay green, I don’t know.

Added to this feeling is the awareness of being immersed in the world, surrounded by energy and part of it with no separation as surely as a fish is part of the water around him or better still a drop of water that contains awareness in the middle of the ocean being part of the water around it. I am the water and the fish; I am the awareness and the ‘I’ looking at ‘you’ looking back at ‘I’. Sometimes I have had these understandings in the past for a little while, maybe five minutes maybe half a second and maybe a whole day but they faded and I was left with the intellectual knowledge but not the connection. Maybe the knowledge of it spurred me to search for a surer connection to that timelessness. I have thought we get given gifts of knowledge, little glimpses into the possibility of what is ahead so we can work our own way back to it.

Well this time it doesn’t seem to be going away. I look for it and there it is; the deep understanding. I get stressed and annoyed or frustrated and I look for the connection and the frustration ceases or becomes smaller and I am back on track again. Very cool altogether, I like it. The temptation is to judge and push and try harder but somehow I know it’s time just to wait.

Happy christmas day! eat too much, lie around, cheat at pictionary, watch the bad old timer movie, shuffle through wrapping paper and collapsed children worn down from excitement and uncle paul winding them up with the nerf guns, probably one or two sent to their room in tears for a little time out and a calm down.

My family has only one still not even a year old to contend with, we are quite boring on christmas day, we lie around and read or pick endlessly at the food. This year with pauls family I have entered the kids zone again. There seem to be endless children of all ages.

Ok so now make a wish…. this is christmas present to anyone reading this post (and it doesn’t have to be christmas day you are reading it either). Get piece of paper, write your wish down and then roll it up real small and burn it.

two guidelines to follow

happy language, no negative words whatsoever, so no I don’t want this (Fear, poverty, anger, addiction, etc) anymore, have to phrase it in a positive way.

don’t let your mind tell you whatever you are wishing for is impossible, make the wish, what ever your heart desires, and then let the universe worry about how to get it to you.

happy wishing!  x cliodhna

the two pictures are from a while ago from a story called ‘Crow Makes a Wish’ Crow inserts a wish between sea and sky. A wish for companionship, an equal, his opposite. The second one is when blue baby arrives on the sea shore. It has a memory of wings and rain and salt water.

I am sitting in montana in snow country for my first White christmas ever! Its so cold here, a big drop from Chihuahua where when the sun was out it could actually be hot and then at night it got a bit nippy. There is a big mountain straight out the back window and the snow flakes are gently gliding their way downwards. I bought a North face coat yesterday, the big buy of the year, I have wanted one for a couple of years now so took the plunge and went for it. It was expensive but it is an investment, I have found in the past that sometimes its worth it to buy something expensive that is well made and actually works. Years later I expect I will still be wearing this coat and still be warm and cozy. I feel the cold and I am tired of coats that look amazing but when you go outside you are still cold.

In about two hours my boyfriends daughter is going to take us up in her helicopter. She is training to be a helicopter pilot and I think that is the coolest thing ever. I always wanted to do something like that but just never really went for it and now she is totally intent on this. She has found her passion and she is focused and happy and going for it. Working her brain too, studying flight trajectories and weight versus fuel ratio and lift and all sorts. Good for her.

What else, it seems a while since I have actually sat down and wrote something. Oh yes Ariana and iron man. Ariana is at a wonderful age of three years and is adorable, she is obsessed by Iron man and Paul got her an iron man costume and play figure. Its wonderful being around small kids, even on the flight over here there were a few really cute children on the flight and it surprised me that they were on quite happy and cheerful and only cried when we were landing and the air pressure started making our ears hurt. It makes me broody actually, I want one of my own. Sitting at three in the morning stuck in seattle airport watching people go by and being at one with the universe and all I saw a woman pass with a child about that age, a girl. There was a man sitting opposite with a tired stressed look on his face (weather was delaying and cancelling loads of flights so there were a lot of strays lying on floors and wandering around with lost looks) and when the woman passed the girl waved at him and then blew him a kiss. It was so beautiful, his face lit up and he waved back at her and when she had passed and gone with her mother he was still smiling. It was a gift of innocent love and it changed everything around it.

That’s the lesson from children this age, how to be innocent and open and see love everywhere and have it reflected back to us, before we teach them to be afraid of strangers and instill them with our fear of what might happen if they live that way always. I don´t have children but even so I can feel the struggle I would have between wanting to teach them how to be careful about the world and be wary of strangers because I know they would cheerfully wander off with anyone and then not wanting to spoil that wonderful innocence and love.

On the flip side of that Ariana woke us up this morning screaming her head off and when I asked Rachel later what had happened she said she (Rachel) got out of bed and Ariana wanted her to stay there longer! That is the other lesson for me from this age, that the world doesn’t comply to my wants, it doesn’t stop turning just because I say so. My mother is not attached to me by a remote control held in my hands and she has a will of her own. I suppose there must have been fear in this realization (I don’t remember but I am guessing) that I didn’t control my surroundings. How was I to make sure I had enough of everything if I wasn’t in control? I guess at this point in where the manipulation starts, who do I have to be to get what I (think I) need to survive?

It is this manipulation I am picking through now 36 years later. What agreements did I make with myself then that don’t serve me now? To not manipulate and control my world brought huge fear and a feeling of panic and resentment. Everyone else was doing it, if I didn’t I would get left behind and ignored. Scream for attention in any way I could. I am learning to see it and I have ditched a lot of it and it gets easier as it goes along.

I got quite hippied out by the stars last night. First I started looking at the constellations, Scorpio, Libra, Orion the hunter, the tiny little dipper beside that triangle that has a red star in it. I suppose I can look them up on goggle later, I think one of those two constellations are the Pleiades with the Dog Star. Then I realized with a shock I couldn’t remember the star sign after Leo, earth, ruled by mercury, like forgetting the name of an old friend.

So I meandered like this for a few minutes then I really started looking at them. The stars, like our sun but so far away, (or maybe not, I have always wondered that maybe distances in space are also the product of our mind, things are as far away as we think they are) and I got a shiver down my spine. There are so many of them and so many more we cannot see and they hold their own space. They are kind of impossible in my head, where do they come from? Points of awareness. Maybe all our search for star people is because each star holds its own life like our sun holds this earth.

We occupy this earth round our sun and it is so fragile and we are doing our best to upset the balance and in our own little lives we forget to look up at the stars and look down at the ground beneath our feet and see it for what it is; a miracle, impossible, awe inspiring. Even scientists admit there comes to a point in their splitting the atom and the quark and the whatever down further and further that they are stumped, they don’t know what makes life tick. They will never find it; it is like cutting a brain up to find a thought or cutting a word up to find the meaning.

and its ‘virgo’,  I had to go look it up…

First came the in-breath, the gasp from nothingness, the awakening the awareness of being. Nothing still was, just pure awareness and stillness, waiting for the impulse to move.

Then came first pondering; A simple ?. No words as yet just pure question, a wondering of the awareness.

Next came second pondering, an awareness of ‘self’ as something different to ‘other’. In the vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world ‘self’ looked round and thought ‘I’ and ‘you’

The vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world did not say anything back, did not look back, just was, in its awareness there was no difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’

The self began to name things; self needed some landmarks to make the vastness smaller and easier to live in. Tree (big green fluffy), grass (green soft), mother (love),

The world began to turn and the stars began to move and the self was frightened. Self asked the world “Why are you so big and all? And do not pay me any attention?”

The world did not answer.

Self asked again “Why do you not do what I say?”

The world did not answer

“You do not love me” said Self sadly

Then he heard a voice inside him “You are loved little self, you exist because you are loved, there is no difference between you and me, we are, look around you at the vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world and stop putting names on things to make it seem smaller”

“Who is speaking” cried Self

“I/You are speaking” replied the voice and suddenly Self understood, the world had begun and everything, self included, was part of it. Everything was on the journey and self was there to witness and be a traveler on the voyage. Self smiled.

The stars twinkled, “Hello stars”

The rain started to fall from the clouds “Hello clouds, hello rain”

Self looked in a puddle at the reflection “Hello Self”

It’s that dark time of year again. The Cooks put up Christmas lights on the dining hall and it looks so pretty twinkling red and blue and green. I felt nostalgic for Christmas, but almost for the Christmas that is portrayed in books and films, that Christmas of snow and huge trees and long lost relatives and home comings and personal healings and one big happy family and everyone gets their wish fulfilled. You know, that one, the fairy tale one. Maybe the Christmas of my childhood, before I figured out Santa didn’t exist and there was a real magic about the day.

I went through a while of wanting to avoid Christmas and came through the other side, teenage angst probably. Now I love Christmas, and the Christmas’s in my house growing up were full of love and sharing and all of the above. I love the present buying and the rituals and the lights on the streets in dark Nov and Dec and then getting up on Christmas morning and making the croissants (from the tin, the ones you roll out) and getting Eoin/Daire/Grainne/me (pick whoever) out of the bed because we want to start opening the presents. And I love the day before Christmas eve in Dublin, wandering around meeting people in pubs for a drink before getting the seven o clock dart to bray to continue on the Porter House with friends from bray (hence the need to get people out of bed the next day!) and home by twelve and ham sandwiches. My mum still make us stockings and will make a stocking for any friends who happen to be visiting, but know she puts them on the end on the bed in the morning when she wakes up instead of waiting until we fall asleep; that became an impossible task many years ago.

The thing that has always struck me about Christmas though is the first Christmas I was nostalgic about, the one from the media, the perfect Christmas, is that is belongs in the same box as the perfect nuclear family, it doesn’t exist but it is the measure everyone uses to construct their own personal perfect Christmas. This of course is not a problem but where it falls short is when for some reason someone can’t have that perfect Christmas or doesn’t have the money to buy their children the perfect present and how we portray it as a shortcoming if it doesn’t happen, a failure, poor them, how sad, god love them, and then in the media someone comes to the rescue (Santa Claus or a rich relative) and fixes the problem.

It’s like we are trying to be perfect for one day, be perfect people, be a perfect family, be a perfect mother, father, child, a perfect society, peace and love for one whole day on earth. It is like we have taken this day and pinned all our hopes on it, make this day perfect and we will be ok.

I like the original reason for all the lights and trees better than the catholic one, seeing as Jesus was actually supposed to have been born sometime in late Feb early March. The pagan celebration was the death of the old sun and birth of the new sun, the darkest day of the year when the world started slowly turning its face towards the light again and the sun began to recover and get stronger and stronger. This makes more sense to me growing up in a country where there was barely 8 hours of daylight in the winter. Put light in the darkness, light up the streets and be happy, only in the dark winter do the fairy lights have the full impact.

My relationship with Christmas changed when I decided I liked it just for the excuse to have a party and celebrate life in the middle of death and put lights up in the darkness and think about the people I loved and what could I get them that they would really like for Christmas, depending on budget (and some years we had a family agreement that we couldn’t spend more than 5 euro on each other, which only made the present picking more inventive) and then it is just as much fun to see them open my present as it is to open theirs to me.

I am going to Montana this year to visit with Paul’s family. Paul’s relationship to Christmas is to give any children around everything they ever wanted o make up for the lack of his own happy Christmases. He admits this himself. He is already planning the shopping trips to the toy stores and I have overheard conversations with his daughter along the lines of We can get her (her being his granddaughter) this or this! And the reply Dad, she’s only three. He doesn’t care though; this is his particular perfect Christmas and the kids treat him like their own personal Santy Claus.

What do I want for Christmas? I want a down duvet, a big huge one, like a queen size or king size, one with really warm down fill. Can’t find them here in México and its COLD right now in these mountains.

Here I sit, 8 in the morning, in between making cups of tea, calling my dogs back, thinking about breakfast, yoga, should I take the dogs for a walk now, my English lesson later on. I write and look for the inspiration to take me. Wondering also about the things I have learnt I don’t want to share yet and reckoning that’s exactly where this stop in inspiration is coming from. I am trying to edit what I say.

Ok, let’s just get it over with. We are all part of one big life. We are all little reflections of it and because we are part of it each one of us has our own connection to it and also, we are all connected to each other and to the earth, in fact we make up the whole thing. Everything you can see around you is part of this life and what holds us together is intent. Intent is life.

That wasn’t so hard. I have been in resistance since I did this last journey. I don’t know why. Alongside the resistance is a surer and firmer knowledge of my place here and what I do here. I guess the resistance will just give up and go away soon. It’s like my dogs in the morning when they want out. The little one starts scratching the door around 7 am; she is a good, if slightly annoying alarm clock. The point is that the first few times she did that I got up and let her out. Now, it is in her head that door scratching=out and it is the same with limited patterns. The mind uses them as an escape route and it takes an effort to break them. I know this resistance all my life. It comes from childhood, from resistance to the catholic church and all its control, resistance to my parents trying to teach me things I didn’t want to learn. Resistance to school and why did I have to be there. I never opening rebelled though; I became the master at passive resistance and that is exactly what my mind is trying to do to me now, even though I don’t want it anymore.

So I am part of everything I see around me and my resistance is part of me. I have to just accept it and it will fade out slowly, like a scratched record playing an old tune I don’t listen to anymore. I am not going to wind up the gramophone anymore.

I remember when I first started doing the Toltec work my first big realization was that there was not going to be a Knight in shining armour who would ride in on his white horse and sweep me up to look after me forever more and love me and I would be happy… hey presto!

Man, I cried for about half a year over that one. The other side of that realization of course was the second one that came hot on the heels of the first. The fact that I was terrified of actually meeting said Knight in shining armour. In life, I had always run away from the guys I really liked. I am sure at least one or two of them thought I didn’t like them at all. Pride, ego, expectations, most of all fear that they would find out that I was not the cool, ultra-hip, rock and roll chick I portrayed on the surface. I was in hiding and had locked the door and hidden the key.

Those fairy stories, I understand them now, about the woman hiding her heart somewhere and then forgetting where she had put it. In the fairy stories there is generally a knight in shining armour wandering around with the key but in life I lost my heart and it was only I had the key. Actually now that I think about it, most of these women are old wise crones so maybe what I really lost was the connection to my own wisdom and power.

I think we women do that a lot. We give away our power to be looked after. We exchange wisdom for security and we believe the mind (man) when it (he) says we need it to look after ourselves. Of course I am not blaming men here, they will not learn to face their fears as long as we are behind them being small and keeping them happy by making ourselves powerless. We both need to change and grow and it needs to come from men and women but imagine the world if all the women suddenly stood up at the same time and stopped living in fear? We are the shapers and holders of society, we are the ones who hold the traditions and make sure they are passed on. I know men do too but really the way I see it we women hold the true power in this matter.

So, I accepted, slowly, that I can look after myself and still find myself sometimes getting annoyed with Paul that he wasn’t taking care of me how I thought he should. It is a struggle. I remember that summer of love (hard unconditional love), when I was going through that sense of loss and anger that I was not going to be rescued, looking around and seeing just how society is absolutely saturated with that idea of love, the old dream, you love me and I love you and we will look after each other because we are terrified of being alone. I will be who you want and you be who I want and we will be happy. Television, advertisements, magazines, books, songs, chat shows, news, celebrity gossip and of course looking at everyone around me searching, searching, searching, for that one person to make them happy.

I was angry because I felt that I had been abandoned. By letting go this illusion I really wasn’t going to find anyone. I felt angry because of all those years and energy invested into this dream, being the good girl, following the rules, doing what I was supposed to do and now it was a big lie. I felt loss because I was saying goodbye to an illusion that was comfortable like a pair of old shoes and now I was barefoot and facing who knows what.

But, it was only by saying goodbye to this old dream that I could move on and meet someone I could have a real relationship with. Someone I loved and who loved me and with whom I could face myself and learn about myself through being in a relationship.