cliodhna’s wave

And the cock crowed at midnight, witching hour!

Space between yesterday and tomorrow

A tiny space of now.

I slept and did not hear its clarion call to the world that caused small animals to look up in wonder and large ones to feel the pull in their bellies

I felt it in my bones though and dreamt of earthquakes and tidal waves and great waves sweeping the earth.

In the chicken coop an egg was beginning to hatch, the chick following blind instinct to hit out at the darkness surrounding it, to crack, to break, to pull to pieces.

Imagine! All the world the chick has ever known is about to get as big as eternity.

But then, the world is the perfect size for each of us and we should not be afraid of the space between the stars.

c. Cliodhna quinlan 2007

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.

There was once a girl who always believed the stories she heard, whether they were stories about the rain and the clouds or stories about aliens landing on earth. She believed them all. If someone said she was beautiful she would believe them and feel happy and if someone said she was ugly she would believe them and feel sad and ugly. If she failed at something she believed she was a failure and if she succeeded at something else then she was a success and the world was her oyster. She believed men when they said they loved her and she was the most wonderful creature in the world and that they would never love another and she gave her energy and her life to feed these stories to keep them coming to validate her because if we are not our stories then who are we?

One day she found out someone was lying. This was a huge shock to her, it had never occurred to her that someone would lie. Then she looked around her and realized everyone was lying, including herself. She was lying to herself. She believed each and every one of the stories she heard and told them to herself and there had been a part of her that knew they weren’t true but she ignored that part and kept believing the stories because they told her how to feel and how to be.

She stopped listening to the stories. She stopped listening to all the stories, when someone told her a story she would smile sweetly and look for the truth behind the story and the truth behind the story generally ran something like ‘listen to me I am lonely’ or ‘please believe this story of how amazing I am because I need your approval’ or ‘if I tell you how wonderful and beautiful you are you will stay with me and love me’ or simply ‘I need love’

As she stopped listening to the stories she began to lose her own stories and she saw that she wasn’t beautiful or ugly or a failure or a success or the most wonderful creature in the world capable of inspiring undying love in men, that these were simply stories to make people feel good or bad about themselves and it made her sad to let go of these beliefs. She wanted to be beautiful and a success and the most loved and most adored but these were illusions and stories and so she let them go.

What was past the stories? I am still finding out, it is a place of calmness and sense of unshakable self that comes from the heart. It is my own connection to my truth that does not depend on outside approval or a need to comply. It is not selling myself for love and realizing that being on my own does not mean failure, it is the letting go of all the stories bit by bit and facing the fear that comes with letting go my way of manipulating the world to see me the way my mind wants to be seen. It is happiness and a feeling of freedom that is greater than anything the stories can offer. It is love.

There was once a boy who liked playing with his friends and having fun and being happy and he had lots of friends who loved him and wanted to play with him and so they would pass their days making up games and wandering the countryside discovering lost treasures and making up stories as they went.
He had lots of coats he loved wearing. Some were bright yellow and some were dark blue with stars and some were silver and shimmered in the sunlight and sparkled in the moon light. He had long coats and short coats, some with beads and bells on them and others of the finest silk that slid noiselessly through the air.
He would choose carefully every morning which one he felt like wearing. What colour, what style and at the end of the day he put it carefully back in the coat rack for the next day he wanted to wear it. He took good care of his coats.
One day though, something happened, someone was mean to him, or hit him or threatened him and when the evening came he did not take off the coat. He didn’t want to, he wanted to keep it on as protection or as comfort and he went to bed and slept in it. The next morning he put another coat on, on top of the first one and he went out to play.
From then on he changed. He didn’t take the coats off as he had done before. He kept them on and he began to wear bigger ones and heavier ones to protect himself from the world. He moved slower and didn’t laugh as much as before and his friends gave up trying to cheer him up and eventually left him to his plodding walk and silence. People made fun of him then. Slowcoach, they called him and pitied him and stayed away from him and his gloom. Eventually he stopped going out of the house and stayed there and no-body called to the door.
This went on for a while, until one day, he felt a stirring in his heart. The sun was shining outside after a rainstorm and everything was wet and shone and sparkled like jewels. It reminded him of one of his favorite coats and he looked down at what he was wearing. For the first time in ages he wanted to wear a special coat and he felt dirty and itchy and smelly inside this big coat he was wearing. He took it off and the one underneath and then the next one. How many coats am I wearing he thought to himself?
He continued taking them off, getting lighter as they went down, thinner and as he took each one off he remembered what had happened that made him keep it on in the first place. A heavy black one was the day the bigger boy had punched him in the nose and the teacher had thought he started it and punished him instead. The grey one was the day he stole something and then blamed someone else. The next one down was when he had a fight with his best friend and never said sorry. He also began to remember the good times with his friends in each coat. The green one, now faded with its silver buttons gone, was a day of summer adventure in the mountains when they had found the sheep skull and made a fort. The silver shining one was a moonlight search for fairies and goblins in the forest. He smiled when he remembered how scared and how excited they had been.
He kept peeling them off until at last, none remained and he stared down at his naked body all dirty and grubby. He ran a bath and sat in it until all the soap-bubbles had been burst and he was clean and water soaked and his fingers had water ridges in them. He stood up feeling lighter and happier than he had ever in his life.
I will never let myself wear all those coats again, he thought
He ran out the door naked with nothing on and danced down the street. The children in school saw him and laughed and told their teacher but she didn’t believe them and told them to stop staring out the window. He danced past a house where children were playing in the yard. They ran in and asked their mother could they go with him but she shook her said, ‘You must have imagined it? She said ‘No-one goes out and dances in the street naked’. He danced past a café where people sat drinking coffee but they didn’t see him, they were too busy… reading papers, talking.
Coat boy danced into the hills and the mountains and far away close. He is still dancing to this day and if you are very lucky he will dance past you some day. Don’t blink… you might miss him!

A girl sits on a stone on the sea shore, lonely for her friend who moved away. She sits and remembers and feels very alone. The sea is grey and the waves are endless and there is a chill on the air that makes her shiver. She makes up a story about a sea creature, the spirit of this place who also has lost a friend. This friend left the sea shore and went on search of where he belonged in the world. The sea has no answers, only shifting moods of colour and tide.

She tries to write the story to avoid the ache in her own heart and she can write endless reams of dream prose, of sea grays and blues and pangs of loss and loneliness and all from the perspective of the creature left behind who cannot leave the shore and must sit and wait endlessly for the friends return.

The creature bemoans the fact that she had ever met this ‘other’ because before that she had no memories. She thinks she might have been happy. She remembers light and darkness and water and wind and movement of crabs and anemones back and forth across the shore but no more than that. She remembers warmth and cold and the bright sun and the silver moon that changed shape as the sea changed shape and the waters inside her also were pulled back and forth.

The first real day the creature remembers in full, as a whole day, from dawn to dusk with awakenings in-between was the day the ‘other was washed up on the shore and opened its eyes and looked straight at her.

Here the girl becomes stuck and cannot go any further. She cannot imagine what these two would say to each other. Maybe she does not want to imagine. It would make too real what she has just lost and so she reads and rereads what she has already written and she skips to write the end where the ‘other’ has gone again and she is back with her creature on the sea shore mourning its loss and now awake and conscious of her loneliness.

The other is made of what people have thrown into the sea and brought to life by all the unanswered unfulfilled dreams that the sea holds for us until we are ready to receive them. The creature is the soul of the sea and can’t understand why the other would need to go in search of something that was already here.

That was then and this is now and the girl healed her heart and resolved her loss and found what she was looking for. The moon made her a gift of a silver heart, a little battered but still whole, the sun made her a gift of wisdom, the wind gave her a push out into the world and the world gave her a true friend to share her life with. Now maybe the story can be written from both sides and brought to an end. x.

this picture is about the judge that lives in us. I find him very strong sometimes. The guilt that tells us we have done a bad thing, the voice that says we shouldn’t have fun, should be more successful, more happy, more creative, more talented, more whatever. It is also the voice which judges other people too. We judge outside of ourselves so we don’t have to face our own perceived shortcomings. The judge in the picture is not touching the ground because he is not connected with the earth but lives entirely in the mind.
There is healing going on here too though, my higher self sees the judge giving out to the small child and is sending healing energy.
Down with the judge! We are all perfect just the way we are…

The next picture is tears. I find I go straight to tears whenI am doing emotional work. Part of it is buried anxiety or hidden fears or old sadnesses that I haven’t faced and which have built up and part of it is fear of letting go, the mind wants to hang onto to its control as long as it possibly can. I have actually gotten quite accepting of crying in front of people and very accepting of other people crying. I am happy to sit and be a witness, give support and just let them go through their process.

I am sitting in my parents house in Ireland writing this and it is beautiful outside. A perfect irish summer day. Sunny, calm, birds singing. I am going to have breakfast and then go for a walk in the mountains.

x clio

Crow makes a wish and brings it to the sea.
It is a wish for companionship or for knowledge, he can’t quite decide.
But it is a definite wish for something
and so he takes a piece of sky, he takes a piece of the skies love for the sea,
and he drops it into the waves.
The sea swallows it in a rustle of sand and his wish is gone.
He waits by the shore hoping in his heart for a friend
and in his mind for the answers to the questions he asks himself constantly

This was a story I wrote a few years ago, its doesn’t really go anywhere but I still like it. There is more to come. Blue baby arrives and grows wings but I think I will let it tell itself instead of trying to guess where its going. I am having fun painting them.

I found a blog I thought I had lost its called the Mud Girls Blog and it is a collective of women who build cob houses and straw bale houses and I was enchanted at the pictures of the sweetest house I have ever seen

check it out!

This is the inside and there are more photos on the blog. Its beautiful, round corners and little hidden things. It is a gnome house, (do you ever notice the way some people are gnomes or elves or something but just don’t come from the same place the rest of us do? I know a woman in Galway and she has come straight out of the limestone of the burren).

Their home site is here if you want to read about cob building and ovens.

Now for something on the other end of the spectrum but still in harmony with our environment and still beautiful have a look at this building

It cleans the air and its wonderful to look at. Read the post about it. Its a cool site, called the Green Geek

…and the cock crew at midnight, witching hour, space between yesterday and tomorrow, a tiny space of now.

I slept and did not hear his clarion call to the world, that caused small animals to look up in wonder and large ones to feel the pull in their bellies. I felt it in my bones though, and dreamt of tidal waves and earthquakes and great winds sweeping the earth.

In the chicken coop an egg was beginning to hatch, the chick following blind instinct to hit out at the darkness surrounding it, to crack, to break, to push outwards. Imagine! all the world this chick has ever known is about to get as big as eternity.

But then, the world is the perfect size for each of us and we should not be afraid of the spaces between the stars.

x cliodhna,

to all us little chicks pushing out and breaking out of all the world we have ever known!

So… it is time to get the new years resolution into action! I decided this year I would try and clear as much of my past as I could. Release old ways of thinking and behaviours that don’t work any more, finish projects or definitely say good bye to projects that aren’t working. Use up the big pile of fabrics I have on the floor of my work room before I can buy new fabrics. I get more inventive when I have to improvise.

I did this once before, about four years ago when I was coming to mexico for the first time. I reckon, looking back, I was about 95% ruthless. I burnt old diaries and sketches and stories and writings that I had been hanging onto since secondary school. I went through my clothes and books and jewelry and gave away anything that I never wore or rarely wore or just some items I knew a friend would really like. It was really hard to do but I felt so light after it was all gone.

Clearing the past is not forgetting people or places or times but rather clearing any old negativity or limitation round the memory and remembering with love and acceptance. It also clears any energy blocks that are preventing me from going forward or achieving my goals.

I bought paper this morning to get started on the illustrations for the crow story and I have three nearly done embroideries waiting for borders and a skirt hanging waiting for a hem. All the new stuff can wait for a week or so while I get everything sorted.