cliodhna’s wave

So, when I was in Guanajuato, Mexico there was a guy… he was quite mad and would wander the streets of Guanajuato with a briefcase under his arm, muttering to himself, shaking his head and generally brandishing a shief of papers in his other hand. When I first saw him I wondered what he was up to, where he was going and what was all the fuss about, big meeting maybe… But then I realised as I saw him again and again that that was his particular madness. He was always on the way to or from a big important meeting. I thought at the time… what a good analogy for the human race, we are constantly on the run around from one place to another big important doings that really don’t mean squat in the bigger picture.

Thing is though I didn’t apply that to myself. Blind spots are wonderful things, they cushion us and protect us from things we would rather not face. I was recaping this morning about a time in Chihuahua when I was in denial about certain broken aspects of my life and it hit me I was doing exactly what this guy had been doing. Not so much.. I mean I wasn’t racing around in dirty clothes calling into businesses demanding to speak to the managers about a big important non existent projects but I was investing all my energy and self esteem into being successful and selling art. Anything to be doing something, I would chase short term goals with obsessive energy and be crushed when they wouldn’t work. I wasted time on circles when I could have been focused on long term achievements that would actually mean something and be achievable.

That’s self sabotage for you though. When we are in denial about some aspect of our life the rest gets affected too. It becomes a shield to protect us and keep us in oblivion and so nothing gets fixed and everything stays the same in self enclosed circles that we run on endlessly.

Now I have to figure out how I am still doing the same thing and stop doing it!

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.

I started this about eight months ago, got caught up in other stuff and have been working on it steadily for the last month. I am making the patches and embroidering them and then will put them together. The picture here is the first third laid out so i can see how it looked.

This is my workshop, small I know, a table in the corner but the view out the window is wonderful. I left my oil paints in chihuahua and so I don’t need a big table right now.

I am liking Guatemala. It rained today and the thunder rumbled and there is always a breeze which is nice in comparison to Chihuahua, where it was either really cold or intensly hot. I went shopping in the central crafts market and bought some bags and textiles. Have to send them home now to the folks. I promised my sister a wall hanging for her new apartment.

I am getting ready to drive. A scary prospect because they are even worse drivers here than in Chihuahua. On a par with Mexico city I would say. I kinda know the layout now though and how to find my way to places. It looks simple, laid out in a grid system of Zones, avenues and streets, but in actuality the one way streets and the diagonals twist everything and an address that looks simple on paper becomes a maze of puzzles when confronted with reality. A house is numbered for its distance from the edge of the street or the avenue its on. I still don’t quite get it….

People here routinely work 24hr  shifts and the security guards at the hotel we were staying at work 48 hour shifts. I don’t understand this, how can you expect anyone to do a job properly if you work them 48 hours? and what is wrong with even a twelve hour shift, send them home for sleep and rest and get them back in the next day. Makes me appreciate coming from a country where the wealth is more balanced and even the minimum wage, small though it is, is actually enough to live on. Like in Mexico, you can survive on the minimum wage here, just about, but anything else to better yourself or buy books, electronics, cars, forget about it. Books here are twice the price of Ireland or the states. I suppose its a good technique to preserve the status quo, if you only make enough to survive and feed your family you won’t have enough time off to think about the injustice of it or do something stupid like form a union or demand better wages.

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

… in the Art Park in Chihuahua.

It was nice. There was a bit of breeze and I met all the other artists.. Some of whom have been there forever. i got bored around three o clock and then there was a meeting which whiled away 40 mins or so.

I sold two greeting cards and made 100 pesos (approx 7 dollars) but I will give it a few week and see do I make any sales. They said there are more people when it gets a bit warmer. I laugh at that, if this was in ireland this weather would be the most amazing summer day ever. Here, its still a bit fresh for them.

i am in the process of getting my etsy store back together. This time under Green Bird Dreaming. I have been doing some embroideries for it, these are smaller.

The leaves are out on the tree in front of my workroom window. Now I work in a green shaded room with those squawky black birds that always remind me of dinosuars fighting in the branches.

Its hard here to find places to sell art work. I am joining a sunday art exhibition in a Park here in Chihuahua. Like what they have on Stephens Green except a lot smaller. Hopefully fingers crossed!

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.

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.

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.

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