cliodhna’s wave

To listen to silence is a very rare gift these days. We are surrounded by so much noise we cannot hear the silence behind everything. A child can hear silence, can listen to the song of the world as it turns and the song of the birds.

A house on a hill. A garden with a pool in it with three huge old fish, two gold and one silver. A child climbing over the wall, silently, cautiously, he had heard too many tales about this house in the past,

To sit on a hill where there is no noise except birds and wind and crickets is to listen to the world as it was in the beginning when we were not here, when there were no humans, it is timeless. Listen, hear and the world expands in every direction. We are too used to looking we forget to listen too. So listen and behind the sounds of the birds and insects there is a vastness and a sense of something timeless that surrounds us.

We have lost this connection I think, living in our machine age. Our televisions, radios, mp3 players, there is music and chatter everywhere. In supermarkets, cafes, buses, lifts, we live our lives in a shell of aimless sound and gossip. Our attention is always hooked outside of us. And we allow this to happen because that silence is too scary to experience. That vastness is too huge and we, who have not faced our true selves and found the inner core that cannot be blown away, are too afraid to face it for fear of not being enough.

To connect to this silence for a few minutes everyday puts us back in connection with ourselves and who we really are. I have heard it said that only troubled people seek peace. If that is the case then I am grateful for my worries and my inner angst because it pushed me in a direction I would not have found otherwise.

The child walks through the garden his eyes and ears open, his mouth open in wonder. Trees shaded him from the sun, parrots squawked and flew in a flurry of colour, a fig tree laden with fruit offers a branch with ripe fruit. He takes one and eats it, startled at the intensity of the flavour. He walks on soft grass, cut short and tidy, a white peacock ambles across his path, not bothering to take notice of him. He walks, taking in everything eyes looking up and down and around and above him and below him. He comes across a pool, an ornamental pool, quite large, with a small wall around it. In the pool are three huge old fish swimming in slow circles, two gold and one silver.

They swim in endless circles, when the sun shines and the pool is a mirror of glass they swim, when it rains and the rain makes a hissing noise as it hits the surface of the pool they swim, when it is winter and the surface of the pool is frozen they sink to the deeper parts and swim even slower. The water is their world and is all they have ever known, this water, this pool, this branch hanging over head, this face that hangs over their pool twice a day and drops the coloured flakes that is their food. They rise slowly and with gulping motion of their wide mouths they swallow the red and yellow and brown flakes.

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.

people with candles where their hearts should be, or stars, shining out to show our true selves past who we think we are

my victim self pulling my real self behind her on a cart, the power self is tied up, unable to move or act because the victim is running my life for me,

morning face… the face i have on in the morning before my first cup of coffee to wake me up

a wave of the sun destroying the earth, like in that film presagio, I had a dream about it where I was trying to hide in cow shit to protect myself. Meaning of dream? I think I was afraid of the suns power and being swallowed up by its flames and so I hide in cow shit. Cow shit= waste from a domesticated animal who gives and gives and gives, or rather we take and take and take. I realised a few days later that the sun will only burn the pysical selfs, that which is not light and my essence would be left. We are all light anyway pretending to be humans.

the picture I drew in Cancun of a male figure standing beside the sea perspiring because of the heat, the sun blazes in the top left hand corner, maybe i will put a fish in each drop of persperation. Water… emotions…. the mind…

letting go to flow free.. open hands and let the bird fly away, no point in making wishes and then holding them so tightly they smother!

I wish for a gift of clarity

I wish for a gallery to show my work in, to have an exhibition to work towards

I wish for success for my business

I wish to write always from the heart so even if I get it wrong sometimes I have done my best

I wish for a happy life for me and Paul

I wish for a really cool old car to drive around

I wish that my puppy and my cat will get on when they meet.. I anticipate fireworks!

what do you all wish for?

Standing on Sandymount strand one early evening with my bike propped against my hip I gaze out into the sands and pools of shimmering water left by the outgoing tide that stretch for easily a mile out of shore. The sky is that wonderful almost transparent blue/purple that has a promise of mystery and a hint of things hidden about to be revealed. The sun has just dropped below the horizon of houses behind me, the moon is just peeking over the horizon in front of me and just up to the right Venus shines in her first star glory.

I begin to do a mental exercise. I imagine it all in 3d. I put the sun behind me and the earth a ball on which I stand spinning on its axis on its orbit around the sun. I put the moon on its smaller orbit around the earth and Venus on her orbit, a smaller one closer to the sun and moving faster then we are. I put aside all notions of up or down or flat orbits and I place us all in space, where these considerations do not apply

I play with this idea for a minute, and then suddenly it hits me with full force. It becomes real. I look up/down/sideways and grip my bike tightly as if to give me weight. There is nothing above me. Nothing, really nothing holding me onto this spinning ball we call home. There is no such thing as ‘sky’; that is a word made to give us a safe concept of having a roof over our heads. Only reason its blue during the day is because of reflecting light. I have incredible vertigo for a few seconds and then slowly it passes and I am once more feet on solid ground again.

Thank you gravity, whatever you are!

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.

Life

I went to Teotihuacan recently for a ceremony for the death of an old shaman woman named Sarita. Her son was there and his sons and wifes and all the people she had touched during her life whether directly, through the people she had taught and healed or indirectly like me who had never met her but felt it was important to be there.

The reason why this is in the life part is that death is not a dissapearing rather a passing onto somewhere else. The reason I went is not that I was sad she was dead but to honour her life here and the teaching that she passed onto others including me. She passed it onto her son (Miguel Ruiz, he wrote the ´Four aggreements’ you might have heard of the book) who passed it onto the teacher I work with who is passing it onto me. This teaching has been around since before the aztecs, way before that and went underground when the spanish arrived here in mexico. Each generation gets it, changes it slightly and then passes it onto the next one. The essence remains the same however. Knowledge of self, stalking the self, to be in your own centre and power with your own connection to the heart. It was great to be there.

Death

I had my principals tested the other night. I have been bemoaning that fact that we kill anything we see that is slightly dangerous to us. Spiders, scorpions, snakes, wolves, bears, tigers, rats, all get squished under the heel of the human fear of death.

The other night wandering around the house with a torch to see what I could see (counting the scorpions on the wall outside, the bumbling june bugs in their season of dying, the praying mantis waving back and forth doing its best to look like an innocent twig swaying in the wind) when in the corner of the kitchen shiny black, with the ever so familar bright red hour glass shape on its belly was the classic spider of all the spiders…. the black widow. I looked at it for ages and then thought “I suppose I should kill it” The idea of going back to bed with it still in the kitchen didn´t appeal to me. I was still looking at it when it ran back under the cupboard. I went and put on boots and got the broom, checked the corners and turned the cupboard over. Got a towel and squished it. I really didn´t want to but I suppose I discovered that a black widow spider outside is one thing but a black widow spider in my kitchen was another thing entirely. I thought of catching it but to tell the truth I was kind of nervous about it, my mind was telling me about death and bites and poisin and generally creating fear. 

Just checked on the net and apperently they are not very deadly, their venom (15 times stronger than a rattlesnake) produces severe muscle cramps (very painful) for about three days and hospitals generally prescribe morphine for the pain. The anitvenom actually kills more people than the venom. Old, sick, pregnant and children are most at risk of dying. Maybe the next time I won’t be so scared and catch it instead of killing it. One of the mine workers got bitten by a Violin Spider in Chihuahua and he is still in hospital with operations on his arm. I guess its easy to be idealistic about thiese things when you grow up in a country which has no dangerous anythings what so ever…. not even ants that bite!

all the other stuff in between

the dogs got their injections and the puppy shrieked and yowled for about ten minutes. Puppies are such babies. Went to the vet the next day and got pipettes to give it by the mouth, much better.

and now go outside look up at the sky and see past the blueness of the sky and think about the fact that we are on a spaceship of green and blue and things growing and dying but always changing, in the middle of nothing sailing round a huge ball of light and warmth. We get so lost in our little fears and desires. We don´t actually have to do anything except be here and live and learn how to be happy and let it all flow until its time to go, time to leave this place and go travelling again. Thats my hippy thought for the day… man

x clio

On the drive through dirt roads and tall mountains covered in trees I saw a log on the side of the road which looked like a big bird. You know the way that happens. I got a feeling of a huge bird under the mountains, asleep, or singing softly. And me standing on top of the world (which is kind of what its like driving through these mountains in chihuahua). This is what emerged, the bird I saw was much darker, it being dusk and all. The green things in the ground are seeds waiting to become and the bird on the sky is waiting for the girl to walk to the sun.

born from the old the new comes flying forth, a rabbit leaps upwards in green growing plants, seeds yet to be germinated wait for their time to take nutrients from the earth and burst forth into life.

x spring time!