new embroideries

I have gathered my new embrideries together in my website finally. I want to submit two of them to the RDS craft competition.

I have had a lot of fun doing these embroideries. They are stuffed and even more 3d than before. I am having lots of ideas about what to do next.

I like this next one a lot. I tried to capture the delicatness of the butterflies in the way I constructed it from layers of chiffon and torn edges. The outside edge I embroidered onto a water dissolvable fabric to get the lace effect.

please come and visit.

there was once a prince…

There once was a prince that lived in a kingdom of shadows and rain. The colours were shiny and bright when the sun shone and the dark and gloomy and grey when it was raining, which was often. He loved it when the sun shone and he thought how amazing it would be if the sun always shone.

He had a cousin who lived in a far away land and so the prince abandoned his kingdom to go and live with his cousin in the land when the sun never stopped shining and when it rained it was a relief and a joy.

This land appeared at him to be barren at first. With so much sun and so little rain there were very few plants and the plants that did grow were tall and prickly or small and stubby and the animals were thin and scrawny from lack of water and at first he missed the greenness and bright colours of his own land. He loved the warmth of the sun though and so he stayed.

He began to look properly at the land where he was, and he realized thought the desert looked empty it was actually full of life. When he looked closer there were subtle colours he had not noticed before, pale greens and purple pinks and slow growing dry lichen covering the rocks and tiny flowers that grew and died in a day and bright red ants and shiny black spiders with hourglasses in warning red on their backs and pale almost clear scorpions that looked as fragile as water but packed a punch in their curved tails. When it rained the desert burst into life and colour and bright green singing frogs emerged from everywhere by magic and the spiny plants gave forth huge flowers.

The next time he went home to his own rainy land he looked at it differently also and he saw all the colours he had not seen before. Colours that were beautiful, not grey and sad like he had thought before. Earth colours and greens and rich colours and dark brown mountain water from the rich peat lands and mosses a foot deep that were cushiony to walk on and when it rained they glistened and shone with life. He realized that these colours were a part of him also, he had grown up with them, they were in his innermost being and in his dreams and he loved them.

He remembered when he was younger not understanding colours, being afraid of them when he painted pictures and not knowing how to use them and being clumsy with them and he realized it was because he didn’t like his own colours and he was trying to use other colours. He had to understand and love his own colours before he could understand them and use them how he wished in his paintings. He began to use these colours and to look around him for inspiration for his colours and he became much happier than he had been before. Now he can be in his own land and love the colours there or be in the land of sun and heat and love the colours there also.

misty walk

a wet cloudy day in the mountains, it felt like being back in ireland! I went for a walk and took some pictures, it is so different in the rain, much cooler and refreshing after the hot sun.

makng a decision #2

So i was telling the girls in the office yesterday that on certain kinds of rainy days in Ireland we say it’s a ‘soft day’. They thought this hilarious but then they come from a place that when rainy season hits the rains fall with a fierce purpose of inundating the world. Flash floods, instant lakes, life springs from nowhere to frantically grow for three short months. The idea of rain seeping its way downwards is an alien concept. It’s like walking through a cloud I explained. They got that, they live in high mountains so walking through a cloud is a casual occurrence and is walking through a damp grey mist.

I have been thinking about making choices. About the last post I put up and I would have to add that I don’t think a choice can be made until the moment arrives to make it. When that moment is, is of course another choice, but then choices are the only things that are truly ours in this world. How we choose to live our life from moment to moment. In the past I have rehearsed choices and practiced them in my head and ran over all possible scenarios to make sure I would know the right thing to say or do when the moment arrived. Of course when that particular moment did arrive (if ever it did) then it would be completely different to anything I had ever imagined and sometimes I would get it right and sometimes I would get it wrong. I would get it wrong because I was afraid to live in the moment. At that moment I would have been rehearsing another choice somewhere further up the life stream and so still in fear and making choices through fear.

I don’t want to make choices through fear anymore. I don’t want to be so attached to/afraid of the outcome that I am paralyzed in the moment and my head makes me spin in circles. Sometimes the choice is to do nothing and let it all pass by, sometimes it is to step in and grab and hold, and sometimes it is neither and something completely different. The thing is though that the impulse comes from the heart and not the mind; and that I cannot know until the moment arrives to make the choice.

What is at stake is everything. My life is at stake here. My wishes for myself, my path as a soul making its way along life, that is what is at stake. Not possessions or career or relationships or my self-image or my pride. These things in the end of the day are not important and when balanced against self discovery and growing to be the person I can be are small. It is not what I have that is important it is how I live them.

the egg

I haven’t been able to breathe properly for months. Feeling a certain level of fear and frustration that I hadn’t felt before. So I did a cleaning on myself with the egg and a cord cutting and then another cleaning an hour or so later and hey presto I immediately feel lighter and calmer and able to catch my breath properly.

To explain all this when a man has sex with a woman they have a cord connecting them and this cord is a conduit that transfers emotions and energy back and forth. Most of the energy goes from the woman to the man to support him (I don’t know why but somewhere in our past we humans made an agreement that this was to happen) but also when one of the partners is not processing emotions then it gets passed onto the other. This is generally from the man to the woman because in society it is more acceptable for the woman to be emotional so she becomes ‘the emotional one’.Now just to be clear, this is not an emotional attachment cord, this is a cord of energy that connects a man and a woman after intercourse. Cutting this cord does not mean ending the relationship. If you cut the cord it will connect again the next time you are with that person.

The egg cleaning is a form of healing particular to mexico and central America. It is a shamanic technique and after the egg is used you break it into a glass of water and ‘read’ it. I don’t know how to read it yet. There is a book I am thinking of buying here that explains it or at least probably points me in the right direction to use my intuition. You don’t have to know how to read it to use it though. You can do it to yourself in your own home. Has to be done with intention of cleaning and you rub it over your whole body. The shamans here do it with smoke and chanting.

So to me personally I was holding all of Pauls’ emotions that he wasn’t dealing with and processing them for him. But the thing is I can’t process someone elses’ stuff. He has to do that himself and I had a conversation with him last night about it asking him to do that and did he think it was time. There is nothing harder in this world than to turn around and face yourself. We are all taught to project outside of ourselves, it’s her fault, they need to change, go to war and kill a few thousand people; but in reality there is nothing outside of ourselves except us, what we project onto the world.

So it is time also for me to stop holding onto his stuff. It is tempting to do, if I look after his stuff then he owes me, he needs me. If I supply him with energy then he will stay with me and I can control him. It is not fair on him or me. If I hold onto his stuff then when will he ever need to look at it? I am denying him the chance to grow. It is time for me to ask him to do it himself and for me to keep the cord cut that joins us until I can properly distinguish between his stuff and my stuff, process my stuff and ask him to take responsibility for his.

The egg can be done by anyone, the cord cutting needs to be done by someone who knows how to do it. Think about it, every person of the opposite sex you had sex with in the past seven years you are still connected to and you are indirectly connected to everyone they had sex with. All the unresolved emotional energy that nobody else is dealing with is searching for a release valve, is going to the one person who is expressing emotions. Explains why sometimes women are emotional basket cases doesn’t it? You know, we all know someone who is sooooooo emotional they can’t handle it or are constantly crying or expressing emotions to a point where it’s too much? Well maybe they are expressing for others and maybe they need to disconnect for a while to find out what is theirs and what is someone else’s. I remember the first time I got it done for me I felt like a balloon that had been let go and had no attachment to the earth. It was an amazing feeling.

You can read about the egg cleansing below. I looked for links to the cord cutting but couldn’t really find any. I guess write an email to my teacher Luis and ask about it if you are really interested. His link…

http://www.eggcleansing.com/

http://www.newconnexion.net/article/11-03/eggcleansing.html

my dogs

My dogs make me happy. They are such pure emotional beings unfettered by reason or what ifs or any of the other things that stop us from being truly happy in the moment.

I have a big slobbery Rottweiler called Cubo who just wants the love. He comes over, barges in between my legs and then with a sigh collapses slowly down onto the ground at my feet. If I move away a few feet and stand still he slowly gets up comes over and does exactly the same thing again.

I have a rescue puppy called Pala who is the dancy dog. She wiggles and turns and dances her way over to me her tail going in circles and her happiness overflowing. I am trying to train her a little but to get her to sit is an impossibility. She collapses onto her back legs in the air, smile on her face. She follows Cubo everywhere and sleeps curled as close as she can to him.

They are happy when we are there and they wait patiently for us to come back when we are not and, except when the kitchen is cooking lunch or breakfast (we live in a camp at the moment for miners) they are my two shadows. Of course when there is food available at the camp kitchen they are a permanent fixture at the door and selective hearing comes into play.

the food I eat versus the food I think I should be eating

I have been thinking about food recently. I am living in a camp where all my food is cooked for me and I have no access to my own kitchen. This is hard for me. I am used to cooking my own food. I have been thinking about all the judgments I have about food. All the ideas and preconceptions I have about food and whether they are true or not.

In the spirit of questioning everything I have to ask is our mental and physical health really dependant on the food we eat or is it just that we think it is and so our intention produces bad health when we eat bad food. Now, I have always been of the school of the food I eat= who I am and I have fallen into control many times around food. I remember being in a supermarket and looking around thinking ‘I can’t eat any of this food’. I think I was off dairy, wheat and sugar at the time.

I grew up in a house of allergies and the basic root cause of any behavior disorder was the food. The food was always the culprit. Stop eating this or that and you will be fine. So by the time I left my family house and moved into my own little flat I had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of allergy/food intolerance/celiac/lactose intolerant/ calories/ carbohydrates v protein and all about controlling the food I ate to produce a given result.

Now, the interesting thing about not eating one of society’s food staples is that you are out of the loop. You realize, as I did in that supermarket just how much of our diet is dairy/cow milk, refined sugar and white flour. How much we as a society blindly eat what is given us not questioning anything and out of touch with our own bodies. I worked in a health store for a while and I remember in particular one man who wanted something to make him sleep at night yet didn’t want to stop drinking his twenty cups of tea a day.

So I had the thought that maybe my control around food is me not accepting what society is feeding me. I don’t want to be a part of it. My own anger at my part in victim stance turns against the system and I want out. So maybe it is these unrecognized emotions that produce indigestion, bad health and a wish for other food in me and not the food itself, and to be in balance I need to balance myself with everyone around me and the world that I choose to be born into. That all my control around food and not eating this or needing to eat that is me seeking to control myself because without control we are lost in a sea of unpredictability…. and that’s just too scary.

Of course, I am not about to start eating Mc Donald’s everyday. I still have a choice and I choose good food that nourishes me in body and mind and spirit. But to heal myself I need to heal myself from inside out and find those judgments that don’t let me be happy as who I am right now and reassess them. I choose good health for myself and if, as at the moment, I don’t have access to the food I think I need to keep me healthy I will not let my intention produce bad health but accept that that is where I have found myself right now in my life and within the limited choices I have I can still eat well and be happy.

water is wonderful

Water…

…is incredible, it is the fuel of life on this earth, it is the biggest shaper of life on this planet, it gets bigger when it freezes and gets bigger when it gets warmer. It has a ‘skin’ on it which holds it in shape, which is why we have raindrops, rivers, clouds, bubbles, water walking insects. It comes in so many forms and shapes and sizes and functions.

I was in Mazatlan a little while ago and was thinking about water. There is a hurricane on the coast swinging its way around towards Baja California and although the sky is blue and I wear factor forty sun screen the waves are huge rolling in towards the beach. Really huge, no-one is swimming, the jet skies are away in their sheds, the guy who hires the belly boards and surf boards shakes his head when I ask him to hire two ‘Not right now’ he says and points at the red flag flying nearby.

I go into the water and its feels strange and a bit scary. The waves are a wall of water coming towards me, pulling at my legs and pushing me towards shore then dragging me back the other direction as they leave. We have fun for a while jumping around and splashing onto the waves as they smash into us and we marvel at the size of the ones breaking further out. As a contrast the hotel pool is blue and calm and safe and the sun reflects patterns of light from the surface.

I forget sometimes the power of water until I see the it in all its glory and wildness. Rivers that are mere trickles turn into raging torrents during the rainy season and turn city streets into four feet deep unpassable for cars or pedestrians.  I took water for granted growing up in a rainy wet country and the concept of water shortages was alien to me. It rained, it came out of the tap went back to the sea and it rained again. Now living in high desert I see the hills and mountains turn brown again after the rains have gone, the cattle and horses will grow thin again until next year and water will be shipped in from far away reservoirs.

Water is life because we were formed in water and we come from water and it carries us and the moon moves the sea and the water inside us and moves us back and forth and we work to the rhythm of water without even knowing or thinking about it.

So how important it is that we look after our water and keep it clean and pay attention to it. I wrote a post about water ages ago about snowflakes and the memory of water here. We take it so much for granted and it is the fuel of life on this planet, it is life on this planet, it flows in our rivers and seas and underground wells and clouds and rainbows and in the blood of every living thing on this planet.

waiting for…

Sitting in Temoris train station waiting for the train I was thinking about waiting and what it means to me. We rushed to the train station to get there for the half three train only to be told it wasn’t going to arrive till seven. I used to hate waiting, I was the world’s worst waiter. I had to have something to amuse me while I waited; a book generally or my phone games or something to mull over or sketch. Anything to fill the gap so I wouldn’t have to reflect on me or my own life. I was actually the world’s best day dreamer also, when there was something I had to pay attention to off I would go into daydreams.

I had to change my view of life and come to peace with myself and the present moment before I could learn how to wait. How to be present and aware of each moment and use the pause in movement to look and take in where I was and where I was going.

The osho zen tarot have a wonderful card about waiting. She is pregnant and smiling, with a peaceful glow. Expectant possibility and looking forward to the future but also enjoyment and thankfulness for the gift of this growth and peacefulness in the acceptance that she is not going to rush what is coming, that would spoil it, she lets whatever is coming to develop in its own time and she holds it in her heart until it is ready to emerge.

results of the giveaway

so I wrote all the numbers down on a piece of paper and then with my eyes clothes after turning round a few times I stabbed blindly with a pen, First I landed on 30 which when I looked was a comment by me! the winner is me!!! haha just joking.. then I did it a second time and the I landed on number 23. Scrolled down and found a name… Nici! congratulations… I will need an address and a choice of colour.

It has been really good to do this, fun, informative, inspiring and I have made some new friends and contacts I wouldn`t have usually. Thanks to all of ye who took part and to all the wonderful advice and encouragement that came with it. Now I have to really read and ponder and think about it all and make some changes here and there.

Actually Nici herself had a cool offer of posting out some of my promotion cards in her home town. I was thinking, not now maybe because i have to actually print some and also I am living in the back end of nowhere but in the future I might see if anyone wants to join in reciprocating the offer. I pass out some where I am and I send some to someone else for them to pass out in their town. I travel to dublin a fair bit and also missoulla montana and my sister will be living in vancouver soon.

Thanks to all and I hope everyone got something useful from it. An incentive to go look at your business side and give it a little push.

x clio