little things

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 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.