Life Story

St. Patrick’s Mother’s Day.

| Mairead

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(The Rock of Cashel – St Patrick definitely may have visited here (before the scaffolding and stone buildings))

Memories of my long weekend:

Saturday… sitting in the lounge of Brooklodge Hotel looking out the window, listening to wedding guests all dressed up and on their way to the church to see their friend/ sister/ daughter/ cousin/ brother get married. I sip soup. Very cosy here in the armchair.

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(St Patrick may have passed by here…)

Sunday…. sitting in my bed reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The sun is streaming through the window, it’s 1pm and I’m waiting for the immersion to heat water for a shower (it’s an Irish thing possibly related to St. Patrick). Feet warming up nicely as I wait.

Monday….sitting on the sofa drinking a glass of water, after a marathon floor washing session. Positively baking hot here in my skin.

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(St. Patrick could have visited here…..)

Tuesday….. sitting in a car park in Maynooth waiting for the son to come back from an appointment. The birds are singing and it’s quite balmy here in the car. Whatever else happened during that weekend is gone, I can remember it… but it’s gone. If I read this in a year’s time or a month’s time or even a week’s time I may not even remember these bits. What’s real, here and now, are the birds singing and the warmth of the sun through the windows of the car.

What’s real, here and now? Mairead.

He Stole my Laptop

| Mairead

 

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(The gift)

I was in a cafe in Dublin today. I ordered my tea (giving coffee a wide berth for a while) and noticed the cashier wasn’t giving me her full attention. Her eyes had drifted from my face to something behind me. Then I heard the words “he stole my laptop“. We were both looking behind me now.

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(Last summer’s rose)

At a tall young man making his way to the front door with three young women in hot pursuit… and the manager…. but no laptop.  Sometimes it’s hard to be precise in the excitement of the moment…. The young man slipped through the door, he didn’t have a laptop.

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(Raindrops)

When he was gone the words were, “he stole my laptop, but I got it back” and although five people saw the man all we remembered were his clothes, “bright yellow” and a faint sense of excitement or panic. Ours? His? Which pieces are real in our memories? Which pieces do we make up, leave out or change….. to fit the jigsaw of confusion? Our minds want a story with a beginning, middle and end. Not the most useful story, not the true story, not the easy story…. but any story and if it has drama, all the better.

Fool your mind – make up a new story, Mairead.

A belief is only an opinion we think is true…

| Mairead

(3fe Abbey Street Dublin)

Still here at 3fe, it’s very busy but they haven’t asked me to leave…yet! So yesterday, I was talking about tying ourselves to a belief. I have another belief to share.

When I was eighteen and making my career choices, I hadn’t a clue what to do. I didn’t want to go to college, but I also didn’t have another option. So I took my career counsellor’s advice and started an Electronic Engineering course. At the time I liked to knit and my big dream was to become a Mom, but none of that appeared on my Leaving Certificate results so it didn’t count…..

(Above ground station on the underground railway, Berlin)

The course lasted for four years… I lasted just over a year. I failed. That was my belief. Added to that was a belief that I could not study, and I was inferior to people who could and who had successfully attained their degrees.

After that in every situation where I would be tested on my ability, I froze….. In case it’s not obvious, freezing in a test situation is not conducive to passing the test. Oops.

(Railway art… detail from previous picture)

So…. self-fulfilling story.

Naturally, I did my best to stay away from test situations….. well… who wants to fail? But the funny thing….. the thing that was guaranteeing my failure was me and my story!

Choose a useful story, Mairead

Coffee shop writing…..

| Mairead

(Coffee Time)

Since I’ve been sitting on the sofa resting for the past four days, I’m a bit stir-crazy. So today Denis dropped me to the door of a coffee shop in Dublin and I can get back to my “coffee-shop writing”. He was going to Maplins, his craft shop, so I’m nearby on Abbey Street at 3fe. Strange name for a coffee shop? It stands for third floor espresso. There’s a story….

(Big lizard outside Berlin aquarium)

This guy, Steve, used to work in banking or the stock market or something and he gave it all up to become a world-class barista. True story… He set up a training room in his  apartment (on third floor) and within a year he had entered the world barrister finals in the US and had come in a respectable fourth. Now he sells coffee in different ways using very geeky gadgets. He and his team also sell very nice sandwiches and very yummy muffins.

But it was the story that got me to have coffee here. Well of course it did, he gave up everything to do the thing he wanted to do? I’m in. Now that I’m here I’m ready to notice what’s different about this coffee shop? And it is different. It’s not squeaky clean, the colours are very bright, the shelves are like granny’s kitchen, not completely square, not exactly fitting and not plastic.

(Close-up of zebra stripes)

So that means it’s not exactly perfect either. Surprise, surprise. If it didn’t have a story I wouldn’t be here. Stories are really attractive to us and they are also really useful. The stories that lulled us to sleep as children. The stories we watched at the cinema or on the TV. The stories we believe about ourselves.

What do you believe about you? Mairead.

Ok we’re home now….

| Mairead

(Charlottenburg Palace)

Right, let’s get a few things straight. I will want you to remind me of these if I mention another holiday.

So pay close attention:

1. Irish-type weather suits me, even though I love sunshine…. it’s not my friend.

2. My delicate constitution is allergic to insect bites…… always bring bug spray….. and use it.

3. One museum a day is quite enough.

(Walk along the river Spree)

4. A rest in the afternoon is essential if I wish to go out “clubbing” (my word for going outside after dark).

5. Early morning starts help no one, all alarms should be set for a time after 10am.

6. Stick with the packing policy of just enough clothes, it’s working…… but maybe some more shampoo would be good.

7. Factor in some all alone time…. no comment.

8. Go for longer.

(Pink flamingos in the zoo)

Ok that’s it, my recipe for a happy holiday. I did have a great time, loved Berlin and the museums (I think we did five?) and the jazz clubs and the symphony orchestra and the zoo and the palace at Charlottenburg and the market and Unter den Linden and the cafes and the people and the history and the street theatre and loved, loved, loved the Segway! Possibly did a bit too much in five days though?

And so to sleep, Mairead.

Taxi Tour Guide

| Mairead

(Lunch…. looking like a green moustached little man?)

We had a very interesting conversation with our taxi driver on the way to the airport. He’d lived in Berlin for sixteen years and loved it. As a teenager he’d been taken on a school trip to east Berlin, while it was still under Russian rule. He was fascinated by the place and wanted to come back. So after he left school he visited Berlin many times, but just the west part.

(Anyone for some Sachertorte?)

It was a difficult journey. It took twelve hours from his home, the same journey now takes five. Going back to our history lesson….. the free Berlin, the west part, was surrounded by a wall (well.. two walls with the no-mans land filled with mines and guard dogs in between all watched over by guard towers…. to be precise). The further complication was that Berlin was also situated in the Russian (not so free) part of Germany, to the east. Maybe a picture would help?

(Former West Germany in purple, former East Germany in yellow. City of Berlin in middle of yellow. Barbed-wire lined road corridor ran from purple west Germany across Sachsen-Anhalt to Berlin)

So…. to get to Berlin (while the wall was still up) our taxi driver had to drive along a road corridor through east Germany to west Berlin. Are you keeping up? He was questioned at the border checkpoint and if anything was amiss he would not be allowed through or could be held prisoner. If he did get through his journey was timed and if he arrived at the Berlin checkpoint later than expected then he was in trouble. If he arrived sooner than expected this was also a serious problem. And yet he continued to make the journey…..

(Checkpoint….. Charlie!)

Incidentally….. the first border crossing checkpoint at the start of the corridor was called Alpha (from the phonetic alphabet for A), the second one was called Bravo (B) and the one between the American sector and Russian Berlin was Charlie (C)…. thus Checkpoint Charlie.

Over and out, Mairead.

You are Here

| Mairead

(Where are we?)

In the cathedral building on the Rock of Cashel, there’s a map of all the buildings on the site. This map is on a stone plinth in the centre of the cathedral. Somewhere on that map there’s a label that says You Are Here. But of course we  all know that’s not exactly true…….. As a child playing in these buildings I used to walk my fingers around the map as if I was walking around the buildings.  But the real me wasn’t in the map, the real me was in the cathedral.

(Do birds have maps?)

There’s a map in my head too. It’s a map of the world around me. I’ve been drawing this map ever since I was born. It helps me find my way around relationships, around work, around society. It’s very useful. It’s also a bit misleading. Especially if I assume everyone else has the same map as mine in their head. The don’t. It also causes me a few problems if I think it’s real.

(Sometimes circumstances make the map incorrect…)

Like the map in the cathedral, the map in my head is just a picture, a representation of the real world. I’m not really in the map in my head, I’m here.

Get out of your head, you’re here, Mairead.

Learning to Swim

| Mairead

(Ellen, who showed me the Living with Beauty swim)

Our nice visitors are gone. We miss them. We do have a pair of shoes they accidentally left behind but it’s just not the same. So maybe it’s not “the clothes that make the man”, or the woman. These people made a big impact on me.

(Jess who showed me the Integrity swim)

Was it their interesting conversation? Or the presents they brought? Or the meals they cooked? Was it the way one of them kept tidying the house? Or was it the chance to be a tourist in Dublin with them? Although I really do like all those things, I don’t think that was it.

(Dan who showed me the Dead Zoo swim)

We had a goldfish for seventeen years. We had to keep getting bigger and bigger goldfish tanks because he got too big for them. One day he jumped out of his tank and landed flapping on the floor. We only realised what had happened when the dog started barking. When we popped him back in the tank, one of his fins was stuck to his body and he swam around in circles for a while….. it was a square tank. Next day he was back to swimming in squares and we bought a lid for the tank.

(Michele who showed me the Let Go swim)

I think I know.

When people have an impact on us it’s like jumping out of our tank. By the time we get back in we realise they’ve shown us another way to swim. In fact many different ways to swim and we can take our pick.

From a very tidy fish tank, Mairead.

ps A goldfish has a tiny memory, so he could be forgiven for going back to his old ways of swimming……

Dublin Rocks

| Mairead

(Pasta (not shown) and salad for dinner)

We went to Dublin today. We have very nice visitors staying with us for a few days. They are so nice that while I’m writing this they are cooking our dinner. Today with them I got to see Dublin from the tourist point of view. As it happens one of the things I wanted to do when I came back from holidays was to go to Dublin and experience it like a tourist. But I put it off….

(Taking pictures in the chemist)

This is what I learned today…..

(Marble (a metamorphic rock) as seen in glass case at Natural History Museum)

It is possible to buy vintage dresses for €10 in a pub off Grafton Street. The slices of carrot cake they sell in Fred Hanna’s book shop are huge. Fred Hanna’s book shop doesn’t sell books, it’s a cafe. The enormous gold ball outside the modern library in Trinity College rotates when you push it.

(Books for sale in the chemist)

You can buy second hand books in the chemist where Leopold Bloom bought lemon soap. You can watch a movie in the National Art Gallery and after watching you will have a greater appreciation for Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ. Metamorphic rock is any rock that undergoes transformation due to extreme pressure and heat.

(Natural History Museum Dublin)

And it was the rocks that got me thinking…  extreme pressure can sometimes produce a thing of beauty.

Rocks have feelings too, Mairead.