Thursday 27 October 2011

An Appointment With The Waterboys

I have an appointment with The Waterboys in April 2012, Jenna and I are going to see them in Dublin!! We could have seen them play locally at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester as part of the Appointment With Mr Yeats tour, BUT, as Jenna turns 18 on March 26th, she really wants to go to Dublin and she likes The Waterboys, the Universe appears to have offered us an invitation to some Irish magic.  I would be mad as the mist and snow not to accept.  Talking of mad as the mist and snow, here is the The Waterboys playing this little tune on Later Live with Jools Holland.....I fell in love with The Waterboys and Mike Scott (lead singer) when I first saw them live in 1986.  25 years later and they are still rocking with amazing energy, I'm still in love with Mike Scott and he is such a great example of someone who is doing What They Love.  

Saturday 8 October 2011

Reflections

I've been busy reflecting! I've just completed the first week of Susan Conway's Unravelling e-course which encourages you to think about how often we see ourselves reflected back in our everyday lives, Vivienne McMaster's e-course Wading In is about Self Portraiture, and, I'm back at College continuing with my studies to become a Counsellor, which includes alot of reflective work through keeping a learning journal.  Anyhow, I'm very happy with this self portrait I took earlier this week:


As a trainee counsellor, I am required to undergo 10 hours of my own personal therapy, I had my first session on Thursday, and something very useful came out of it.  I felt unable to destroy some old school reports written about me in Junior School, my counsellor reflected back that they seemed to be holding some power over me.  I thought about this, how could I release the grip they held over me? Shredding them didn't seem appropriate but transforming them into something more useful did.  So, I picked up a pencil and began drawing random shapes over the reports then cut the shapes out. Unconsciously I had drawn a bird like shape.  I collaged the bird onto my self portrait picture and wrote the following quote onto the bird "Life is like photography, we use our negatives to develop". Stuck a few negatives around the picture and "voila" - I have transformed the negatives from an old school report into something postive with a bit of Art Therapy!  I found another bird shape so I have kept that to use in a later project, and the rest I was happy to throw away.

Life is like photography, we use our negatives to develop

I feel much lighter after doing this piece of work & I read this this today from The Daily Love - " so many of us lead our lives holding on so tightly that nothing new, nothing miraculous can find us" - how true.