regular

Good Morning!

| Mairead

04 2a

(We went to Dublin on Saturday and saw some socks)

Good morning (no it’s not Sunday afternoon…) I’m sitting looking out the window as the sun is breaking through from behind a cloud – lots of bright rays, like the way my seven-year old self used to draw the sun (well I still doodle it that way…)

04 2b

(We nearly hired Dublin Bikes)

I probably should run out and get a picture for you but it’s quite nice just sitting here looking t it and dropping my head occasionally to write a line. Our cat Fred is sitting on the desk beside me looking at the sun too or maybe he’s looking at the birds.

04 2c

(We walked on the cobblestones)

A plane went by, very high up above the sun’s cloud and I am wondering about the people in it. It’s very hard from down here beside the cat in front of the cloud to imagine more than one hundred people sitting up there in the sky….. possibly having their breakfast. Then it’s very difficult to imagine the life of anyone else as I sit here in my life with the cat and the cloud. Even when I do imagine that life I know it’s only from my point of view. And the details are made up of my experience of a slightly similar situation.

Now Fred is looking at me and I’m wondering about his life…. probably time to get up, Mairead.

Turn off your DLPFC!

| Mairead

27 1a

(Mixed media in progress…)

I’ve been reading and listening to Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine How Creativity Works. I listened to it last summer with the hens in the forest. They weren’t hugely impressed with Jonah but I really like him so I bought his book too. Anyway, the bit I was re-listening to this weekend was about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Rather than try, I’ll let Jonah explain it….

“While the DLPFC has many talents, it’s most closely associated with impulse control. This is the bit of neural matter that keeps each of us from making embarrassing confessions, or grabbing food, or stealing from a store.”

27 1e

(after I heard him say this I highlighted it)

Sounds good, right? Well yes and no…. Most of the time it’s a good idea not to be too impulsive. But what if you’re learning to draw or paint or what if you just want to create a beautiful get well card? What if you want to write something interesting or design something that pleases you? Well, at times like that impulse control is your biggest critic and your biggest enemy. In all fairness it’s trying to protect you from something embarrassing – a silly drawing, an aspiration to write a book, a childish necklace – very scary possibilities.

27 1c

(….playing with disposable….)

Turns out the DLPFC is the last brain area to fully develop, that explains why small children have no problem throwing a tantrum in a crowded shop. It also explains why they love their art! No impulse control… no critic. The good news is Jonah tells us about a study where just asking the adult subjects to think of themselves as seven-year olds (and spend a little time writing as their seven-year old self) caused them then to score higher on creativity tasks.

I’m off to play…. Mairead.

P.S. it’s Sunday afternoon as I write ✓

My dark January.

| Mairead

14 1a

(From winter in Cashel 2010)

It’s January. For me that’s the time of year when my energy is at its lowest. When the winter has been long enough and I want some spring….. now! I want it now like my two-year old self wanted chocolate…. but Spring’s not ready yet. So I have to practice patience.

14 1b

(Spider art)

I thought this year it would be different. I am occupied and preoccupied by my course and I thought that would help me forget it was still winter. It hasn’t. Instead it’s shown up further “issues”. When I’m lacking patience with winter I also lack patience with everything else I meet. I am lacking patience with the accounts (my old foe), with my latest assignments, with housework, with bills, with Denis, with myself.

14 1d

(The lovely side of winter)

I had forgotten it all started with January and I was thinking, “these blasted accounts again”, “how can I ever get this history of art done?”, “when does housework finish?”….. but these are not the problem. In fact there is no problem, I just miss the light. I miss getting up after sunrise and having dinner before sunset, I want more time with the light. So I must choose… between making problems out of normal life and accepting the season called winter.

I want to choose to accept winter…. how hard can it be? Mairead.

Christmas Eve, the seagull.

| Mairead

24 12b

(The doubly recycled Christmas Tree from Paris, last year)

It’s Christmas Eve! Just saw a huge seagull flying over our house. Even though we live near the sea they don’t fly over our house very often. I think it means “storms ahead” when they do. Anyway, I was thinking, the seagull doesn’t know it’s Christmas Eve. She doesn’t know today is any different to any other day, except maybe for her internal storm warning…. She’s not worrying about tomorrow’s dinner, about the table decorations, about the perfect gift or the perfectly thoughtful email she forgot to write… She has no worries about the future.

24 12a

(… and a real Christmas Tree)

The seagull flying over our house is called Eve. Well to be exact she’s not flying over our house now, now she’s getting closer to her safe place… and her full name is Christmas Eve but she likes Eve better. She flies off to her safe place whenever she gets the message there’s going to be a storm. Then she stays there until she gets the message the storm is over. At every other time she fishes with her friends off the rocks in Greystones. There’s always enough fish for today so Eve has always been very content to carry on as if there will always be enough fish every day.

24 12d

(Santa Clause getting ready to round-up the little reindeer…)

She has almost arrived at her safe place, it’s miles inland by the side of a lake. Years ago when she was a small seagull she got a message to follow the other, older gulls. She was so young she thought it might be a little holiday and she was very happy to follow them. But it wasn’t a holiday, there were lots of other seagulls jostling for a place near the lake and Eve got shouted at a few times. She couldn’t wait to get back to the rocks by the sea. Nevertheless, after that whenever she got the message there was going to be a storm she flew to the lake.

24 12f

(Candle in the window… Happy Christmas everyone!)

As she got older and bigger Eve didn’t get jostled so much and when she found a spot near the lake no one tried to move her along. Nowadays she’s one of the strongest seagulls by the lake and she sometimes wonders if she really needs to leave the rocks in a storm. Maybe someday she won’t leave but today she’s on her way to the lake heeding the message. What if humans had an internal message system? What if they learned how to hear it?

What if they began listened to it? Mairead.

What’s Christmas?

| Mairead

17 12b

(Christmas is warm…)

It’s almost Christmas, just another week and I’ve had very little time to prepare in the usual way, but I’ve had a lot of time to prepare in a different way. The usual way involves copious grocery lists and gift lists and household maintenance lists. It involves long, tiring shopping trips. It involves guilt over un-sent cards and undone tasks. It involves a smattering of anger and a large amount of self-talk (aimed mostly at the injustice of labour division over the happy season!)

17 12a

(Christmas is in the attic…)

In drawing class last week we were given a brief for a Christmas Project, it doesn’t have to be completed until after the Christmas holidays… so there’s lots of time to think about it….. The brief was fairly vague (or at least it seemed that way to me) – What changes over Christmas? In order to get a handle on it I began thinking about what Christmas meant to me… before it became a shopping/cooking/cleaning feast.

17 12c

(Christmas is a tree… )

I remembered childhood Christmases, running down the stairs with my brother to see what Santa had brought. I remembered my little boy and girl doing the same. I remembered the bedtime stories my mother told. I remembered the crib story. When I began taking down the decorations from the attic I thought… this is where we keep Christmas. I put the lights up on the tree and they worked. When I turned off every other light in the house I remembered… I love how the lights shine in the dark at Christmas.

17 12d

(Christmas is mince pies….)

And I remembered what all my preparation was about…. It’s about hope. Hope that all will be well, that all is well. Hope that we will have enough. Hope that there will be joy. What changes over Christmas? At Christmas more people believe their hope will come true.

Right, I have twelve drawings and a ceramic visual statement (don’t ask) to do before the new year, no more thinking for me. Mairead.

What’s the story? Part 2

| Mairead

10 12a

(Widen your focus… and see the big picture)

The story of us is part of a big Map. The Map is the representation we have created in our mind of the real world outside our mind. It’s just a representation, it’s not real. Just like the map of Ireland is not Ireland, it’s just a piece of paper that represents a real place. A map is much smaller, so it can fit in your car….  A map does not include everything. A map represents mountains with colours and lines. No one believes mountains are just colours and lines they know that’s just a representation. We know a map is not the country it represents.

10 12b

(Eat well… but not these….)

But we often believe the map in our mind is real…. “this is just the way I am”, “I’m lazy”, “I have no willpower”, etc., etc. We often believe in the story of us…. It’s not real, it’s just a representation…. like the lines and the colours. It’s a representation of something that was said or heard, something that was seen or experienced… and we hung on to it and deleted any experience of the opposite…. and it’s just a map.

10 12c

(Rest regularly)

Most of the choosing of the representation of the world is done in our childhood and is influenced by the people around us – our parents, our grandparents, our siblings, our teachers and society in general. We are affected by their representation of the world. Their Map has a strong influence on how they see the world and therefore how we learn to see the world.

If there’s something you want to include in your story, start noticing it in your experience. Mairead.

What’s your story?

| Mairead

3 12a

(Mount Usher in Ashford, Co. Wicklow)

The story of our lives is not the story of what happened… It’s the story of what we are. The story that starts “I am….” The story we think we became because of our behaviour or our actions. The story that says this is the type of person I am. This story is probably built up from lots and lots of small experiences and things other people told us…  From the moment we learned the story of us everything that happened after that had to fit into that particular story. It had to make sense in our story. If it didn’t then it got deleted… We become very attached to our story.

3 12c

(Strong, beautiful tree even with all its flaws…)

Like a film maker producing a movie about a famous politician – only stories that agree with the filmmaker’s belief about the politician will be included…. if he believes the politician is a wonderful honest statesman then the stories from his life that show him as an honest and a wonderful statesman will be included. If the filmmaker believes that the politician is a dishonest scoundrel then the film maker will depict stories from the politician’s life where he is dishonest and a scoundrel. The filmmaker may be completely honest in his choices, i.e. he truly believes the politician is honest or he truly believes the politician is dishonest.

03 12d

(At the boundary of Mount Usher there’s a fence. Beyond the fence there’s a field with very old trees. You can either see the fence or shift your focus a bit and see the trees…..)

Same with our choice of what fits into our story – the movie of us. If the story we truly believe about ourselves says we are flawed then we will only include the times we have been flawed into our movie. Even if we have been a good friend at some point in our life we will delete or distort that memory and remember instead the time we were a bad friend. This is in order that our flawed friend story remains intact. If the story of you says you are flawed then fortunately, you can start again with a new story.

Choose something in your story you don’t like and start to notice the opposite. Mairead.

Leonard and Leonardo…….

| Mairead

19 11a

(Botanic Gardens, succulents)

We were looking at a very good documentary about Leonard Cohen on Saturday night. It was called I’m your Man and had other people singing his songs from a concert tour, while he chatted to the interviewer (and to us.). One of the songs I hadn’t heard before was called The Traitor. While Leonard explained the song to us I was reminded of Leonardo da Vinci. (Yes, interestingly similar names….)

19 11b

(Fly catcher)

Each week in Art History we get an assignment, this week it’s about the High Renaissance, we have to choose one of the artists of the time and write about them. There are (as far as I can tell) only three artists in that time – Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. I was wondering which one to go for when our lecturer told us a small detail about Leonardo….. he didn’t finish everything he started! Not really surprising when you think of all the things he did. He was a  painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. Not really surprising and yet I was surprised, I thought finishing was really, really important and have felt guilty many times for the things I didn’t finish.

19 11c

(Are they seeds?)

So getting back to Leonard Cohen who was explaining the song. He was saying that it was about a feeling that you had messed up some important mission, some important thing you were supposed to do. But you come to understand that the bigger mission was not to complete it. The real mission was whatever happened…. the deepest courage was to stand guiltless as “people called me traitor to my face“.

All is well, Mairead.

Down memory lane with buttons….

| Mairead

12 11a

(A Sony Walkman picture  – can’t find mine – too small…)

Yesterday we went to the market in Dun Laoghaire. It’s held in the People’s Park and there’s food, books, music (live and recorded), vegetables, meat (cooked and raw), crafts, coffee and cake. We bought almond slices and Americanos (they offered to add whiskey for free if we wanted!) and sat on a picnic bench watching the world go by. I forgot to bring my camera so you’ll just have to imagine the scene.

12 11b

(In case you don’t know – this is a cassette tape)

Then I remembered an assignment I had and we started talking about when I was twenty-one and Denis bought me the latest gadget (I think he had to take out a loan to buy it…) It was the Sony Walkman, a cassette tape player with head phones (not earphones) that worked on AA battery power and could fit in your hand (almost). We thought it was amazing. Before the Walkman the smallest cassette player was a chunky black plastic device needing mains power or huge batteries. The Walkman was shiny with cute buttons.

12 11c

(In the process of making ceramic buttons – will be shiny)

Of course now we’re older and more mature we don’t fall for the latest gadgets, we don’t need to own the latest smallest thing that will make listening to music easier. We don’t get excited by cute buttons and shiny covers……

Maybe we haven’t changed all that much…. Mairead.