cliodhna’s wave

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.

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

I have figured a fun thing to do would be to pick a colour and see what i could find. I decided on yellow for no other reason than it jumped into my head.

I love yellow.. a rich warm sunny yellow. I don´t wear it I paint walls of kitchens and bathrooms with it (and eat it, paul just handed me a yellow M&M) and revel in the warm light it makes in these rooms. I would probably paint my whole house yellow if I could.

Yellow is sun, warmth, light, happiness, simplicity, joy, childish playfulness. At the moment here there are yellow flowers everywhere, shining in the sun and making far away hill look orange. I had an idea to make a coat. A chinese cut, green with yellow flowers all over it. It is forming in my mind as one of those future projects I might just accomplish if I don´t get distracted by more in the moment ideas.

I found this wonderful book on the web. I like her style. Julie Paschkis is her name

And these soaps on etsy.. there are so many yummy soap shops on etsy, I had about thirty tabs open and had to be really strong, favourite a few of them and take just two for this blog.

Skin Journey Shea Butter

Dennis Anderson Lemon lustre shea butter massage bar

These victorian tags are kinda interesting, from Farouche

Yellow citrine, one of my favourite stones…. from Lee Ohio Designs

Quince, known here as Guayabana. It sets into a jelly when mashed up. They use it make a sweet called membrillo here. really good. I also have a recipe for quince cake which I took with me from Ireland to try. I will try it soon I think and let ya`ll know…

a cute baby wearing a yellow hat….

and of course please refer to my yellow umbrella two posts down for extra cheer in an already sunny climate!

x clio

I have become the proud owner of a collection of umbrellas! I have had cool umbrellas in the past but only ever one at a time. I had a pink polka dot one for about two weeks before I lost it and for a while I had kids umbrella with a ducks head on the top and two wings out either side. I would walk down the street to a symphony of nudges and cries (in tough inner city dublin) of “would ya look at the state of ‘er”. It made people smile though, made a rainy day a happy escuse to use my bright yellow duck umbrella.

Women use the umbrellas here as Parasols. To stay out of the sun and I have taken up this habit. When you live in the sun you actually spend most of your time staying out of it rather than taking your clothes off and smathering yourself in quick tan lotion and lying very still for hours. I never had the patience for tanning.

Here they are in a row from big to little. The smallest one is a kids one and the blue one was my first and the brown one is a very pretty parasol and the yellow one I just bought in Los Mochis because it was raining.

Paul after I persuaded him to let me take it.

He said I could put this one on my blog if I put another one of him looking tough and being a miner so here is one of him looking tough at his son Arthur and Art very obviously taking him seriously.

I also bought some new oil cloth to make some new purses from. Very excited!

Here is a fish I have done in the last while. It is good to get back to fabrics. I got some cool new fabrics in mochis too.

My butterfly embroidery.

On the way to the mine in the morning the air is filled white big white butterflies. They are beautiful and fragile. I used a fabric that dissolves in water to do the outside lacy effect (i wish I had more of it now) and then the butterflies and background were done on chiffon that I pulled and stretched and embroidered over. I want to explore these fabrics further…

I love mermaids. I didn’t know this until recently when I looked at the work I had done for my last exhibition and realised there were loads of mermaids. I have dreamed of being a mermaid. I am not sure why the fascination. They are from the sea, from the subconcious, from dreams, from magical possibility. They are emotion and from our deep-selves. My name comes from under the sea. There was a race of Tuatha de Danann living in the kingdom under the sea.

I think i just love the idea of them. I love the sea but it scares me too. Deep water, seaweed. Anyone else get a panic in their stomach while swimming over seaweed? Maybe its because they are at home under the sea, in a strange murkyness, belonging to the moon.

When the sirens sing you don’t feel seasick. Mermaids are the souls of sailors who loved the sea.

Maybe they come from the need for sailors to put a beautiful face on the sea. The sea was changeable and dangerous and uncharted and mermaids were its soul and reflected how the sailors felt about the sea. Dreams about women on the long lonely voyages out of sight and contact with land for days on end. No cell phones or fancy navigational aids on those days.

When you catch a mermaid you had better hold on tight, she is as slippery as a fish and will vanish from your grasp if you don’t keep her in your sight.

Mermaid, who does my dream self love?

I haven’t gotten over it yet. I have mermaids on my wall from mexico. They are still sitting in boxes in my new house in chihuahua so when I get there I will take some photos of them. I want to do some more. I have ideas! I even made a mermaid puppet I was really proud of, she turned out wonderful, until the house cat got a hold of her and chewed her head off.

Maybe she is my sea soul, my feminine side of my soul, my dream part. I will ask for a dream from her and see what she has to say to me. I would ask her to help me release my fear of deep water, to see the beauty and power of the sea and the hidden treasures waiting for me.

What would you ask her? x clio

Zopilotes is spanish for Vulture and these guys are turkey vultures who live in the mountains of chihuahua. I was getting the train back from Chihuahua city (awesome train ride, goes through what is called the Barrancas del Cobre. In parts deeper and wider than the grand canyon in america) and just got a glimpse as we passed of all these vultures dining on a (very) dead cow. The image stuck with me and became this painting.
These birds are incredibly common here. You can see six or seven of them at a time hovering in a circle over some distant valley. I wonder do they have a special ’somethings going to die’ sense.

and check out my sisters new blog/online portfolio Grainne Quinlan. She is currently looking for a job in an animation studio so if anyone has any ideas. She worked on El Tigre, a super cool cartoon set in Mexico city. In one episode they are being attacked by evil guacamole and the arch villaness is an electric guitar playing skeleton called Katana

Also while I am at it the company here in mexico is looking for an Autocad drawer (must be good, with experience) to draw the ramps and drifts under the ground. Pay is good and no expenses! Anyone know anyone?

First a picture I have finished about here. The frogs that come out of nowhere when the rain arrives.

and  as I said in my last post I took some photos of where I work a few days a week. I do translation and basic administration for supposedly three days a week but actually more like four and last week was five.

Its a mad place. I never thought I would end up doing secretarial work but there is a part of me that just adores organising things. Its a gold and silver mine in the mountains in Chihuahua. There is an open pit and the people I work for do underground mining. The first time Paul took me underground in the mine in Guanajuato I was scared, for about an hour, and then I was fine one tunnel pretty much looks like every other tunnel to me and I had imagined big crystal caves and strange rocks. He did point out some brown dirt and said that it was almost pure gold.

There is a place here in chihuahua where you can go really deep underground into huge crystal caves. So deep you need to bring oxygen with you to breathe.

Huge machinery abounds here. Sometimes I reckon its an excuse for men to play with really big toys and nothing to do with the actual mining.

The portal of the underground mine. They will connect soon with old workings that were abandoned years and years ago.

The roads into here are tight, extrmely steep in places, curvy, muddy, slippy, dangerous and I don{t know how they manage to bring the huge machinery in on them. Some machinery is so big they have a tractor behind the truck pushing it! It takes them three days sometimes to travel what takes us three hours in a jeep. They camp out along the way and go extremly slllooooooowwly.

We were driving home one night and saw this guy standing by the side of the road. Cominvi is the contract company we work with. We have no idea who put the hat and safety vest on him. There are so many donkeys on the roads here, with a wonderfully zen attitude to life. They fall asleep where ever. Paul came across one in the middle of the road asleep, he drove really close to it, no movement, he honked his horn, not a blink of the eye, he inched very slowly up to it and nudged it with the bumper of his pick-up. Not an inch did this guy move until finally he ambled ever so peacefully off to the side of the road. Amazing attitude to life wha!

Amazing cloud formations this time of year, I just keep taking photos of them.

And on the way to the mine in the morning

and on the way home that night looking back over to the mine

Its all blue skies here at the moment although supposedly there is a storm on the way from the ocean. Have to see what it brings with it!

… is a long slow messy process. Once again I am cleaning up piss at 3 in the morning and getting all stupid and baby talky when he actually does it outside.. who’s the good little puppy wuppy!!

I am of the stick their noses in it, shout NO and throw them outside school. As he gets older a slap on the but gets added. It seemed to take ages with Cubo until he quit doing it inside. I tied him beside the bed at night to teach him to ask me if he needed to go out. They don’t like doing it in their sleeping area and he would whine until I woke up and took him outside. I have to start doing that with the puppy but I am afraid Cubo might step on him (which he does frequently and the puppy squeaks, I was joking yesterday that he is Cubo’s squeaky toy). Cubo is like an incredibly clumsy enormous older brother but the puppy has incredibly sharp teeth which he uses on poor ol Cubo. They play and either Cubo is whining or the puppy is squeaking.

His name actually means ’stick’ not ’spade’ Pala is a spade but that ends in ‘a’ so it can’t be a boys name. Well, it could but I actually thought palo meant spade. I get confused sometimes!

We have moved house, away from all the spiders and alacranes living in all the cracks of the brick work and away from the pond and the frogs to the civilisation of tarmac and a shop just a block away. I did see a big Black Widow spider living in a pile of bricks right outside the house. She can stay there.

Scorpion Charm….. catch the scorpion/alacrane in a jar or something with a piece of paper underneath. Take it outside somewhere dry (they like dry places with crawly spaces) and explain very carefully that it has to tell all its friends to stay away from the house. That they will probably get squished if they come in. Then let it go (carefully.. sometimes they get a bit pissed from being caught) step away and leave it alone. Sometimes you have to do it a few times but they get the message and stay away. This works with all insects, bugs, vertebrates, and all sized shaped wonderfully coloured creepy crawly things.

rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain

did I mention it was raining?

the rain starts at approx four o clock every day, the roads turn into muddy rivers, muddy rivers occupy any available downward trajectory. Its cold and wet and the thunder and lightning complete the picture.

All the creepy crawlies are coming into the houses to find dryness. Paul got stung by a scorpion. It fell from the ceiling onto his head. He sits up in the darrkness saying ’something just landed on my head’ and then OWW, something stung me, man that stings, $%#@#$, Light goes on and there it is, an alacrane, pale brown, bout an inch and a half long. Two of us sitting in the bed at four in the morning wondering was it the really dangerous kind or not. He was fine after an injection. He also saw a huge centipede in the sink and there are spiders everywhere…..

I finally saw a whole turtle today after days of just heads dissapearing under the water.

A swallow, who has a nest beneath the house, drinking water sitting on a wire.

A wonderfully coloured beetle. I actually thought it was a fake one until I picked it up. There also dung beetles with big horns on their foreheads a beautiful iridesant blue. as long as your thumb.

There are loads of lizards here, tiny small and so fast you rarely see them. This guy was doing a chest stuck out thing and I wondered what he was doing until I caught a glimpse of smaller brown one dissapear beneath a rock and this one after it. So I guess rainy season is courting season for the lizards.

Another picture of Cubo and the newly named Palo. Palo means spade and Cubo is bucket so I have a bucket and spade, perfect for the beach! Actually they both have the mange and I have stuff to inject them with for the next seven days. I tried to do it but the needle looked so big I chickened out. Paul can do it, he has emergency medical training, he has actually done injections in the past. I was feeling slightly guilty about giving Cubo mange by bringing the puppy home but the vet said he had it for longer than I have had the puppy. All the dogs here, or at least some of the scrawny ones that skulk around my house have it.

I am currently living in Temoris. Its in the middle of the mountains in Chihuahua and I love it. Its on the train line for the barrancas del cobre which is a huge canyon range strtching from the coast up to chihauhau city. In some places bigger and wider than the grand canyon.

Anyway its rainy season here at the moment and the land which was arid and dusty and bone dry before has suddenly sprung to life. At night the house is surrounded by fireflies and frogs creaking in the grass and crickets out making their song also. I painted a picture about it.

The nearby pond which honestly was a cracked brown piece of earth has turned into a bog pond. I went down at night to look at it and there was a frog singing beside my foot. A tiny green frog making a huge noise. I had a torch but couldn’t see him for ages because I was looking for a big thing not the tiny greenness the size of my thumbnail.

The yesterday I went out in the rain to look at the water and there are turtles in the water. I was so suprised. They must bury down deep into the mud for the rest of the year and just sleep until the water wakes them up and they emerge again. Today the purple dragonflies have arrived.

All is sunny and hot and swealtering until a rumble in the distance announces a storm is on the way. Clouds gather behind the mountain, dark and looming. Piling high with windows of sunshine coming through.

They work their way around and through the mountains, gathering behind peaks and then spilling over.

And look at this wee thing I found tied to a tree. I asked at nearby houses and they said he had been left there. Poor little squidge. They don’t look after animals very well here sometimes. I think a lot of time the poorer families are on survival for themselves and don’t have energy left over to look after dogs. Also there doesn’t seem to be any laws protecting animals or sterilization programs for strays. I found him only two days ago. He has been sleeping a lot and eating a lot and I have been bathing him to get rid of the fleas. I am worried about him today though, his nose is very hot, I hope he isn’t sick.

This is him waiting his turn at the food bowl. He will get his own bowl soon if he stays with us. He is feisty though, Cubo doesn’t know what to make of him. Two seconds after this photo was taken he pushed his way in past Cubo and growled at him! Cubo actually looked surprised and got out of the way.

I want to go back to the river beside the train station soon. I bet theres loads of water to go swimming in now!