A Winter Blessing

Under candlelight and flicker, guided by the spirit of poetry, and the tradition of Celtic Blessings, a group of Poetry Salon participants created a collective blessing for the world. In an act of daring, gentle beauty, as each participant was reading their line aloud, I imagined the ripple effect of their compassion and care spreading out, illuminating pathways through these dark times.

Below the blessing, with an invitation. What line would you add? (you can add in the comments below)

Here was ours, written on Winter Solstice, December 21st 2023, with participants from Ireland, UK, Spain, Portugal, US, Belgium and Switzerland.

Collective Blessing, written by Salon participants

May we allow ourselves rest in the “in between”.

May we remember that we belong to each other.

May we honour the self in ourselves and each other.

May we be the mystery keepers at the crossroads of our senses.

May we pull down the curtain embroidered by those who would keep us apart to quell our power.

May our current darkness birth life and light in the world and in us.

May the people of Gaza have clean water, shelter, medical care, enough to eat and freedom to live without bombs.

May the cycles of life fall gently on you, may your storms be few with many shelters.

May we all the remember our hearts being blessed.

May we accept the protection of our wild waiting kin.

May there be light to open humanity’s dark mind and see what really is.

May we become a sanctuary for ourselves and for others.

May we all turn towards the love in our hearts, and from this place of peace, bless love as the guiding force in the world.

21 December, 2023.

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Hello. I'm Clare

I'm a writer, educator and facilitator, living in beautiful West Cork, Ireland. I love to share resources and learning to help harness the regenerative power of words, place and story. I hope my work offers nourishment for mind and soul. Thank you for being here. Clare x

Available Now

An Intentional Year

Focus on what matters most, and create an intentional 2024. Guidebook and an Intentional Year course now available

Winter Solstice Prompts

December is deep upon us and here in the Northern Hemisphere the days are short and the nights are long. However, celebrated around the eve of the 20th December, the Winter Solstice is a turning point in the year, where a reversal in the light happens and the days begin to lengthen. It is not surprising then that many ancient and religious festivals take place around this time of year, for the solstice represented a renewal of hope and a reminder that the light would return and with it the warmth required for the seeds of new life to germinate. As the light arrived our ancestors knew the tide of the year would turn too. 

In ancient times in Ireland, this magical turning was reflected in the architecture of the day. Newgrange in Co. Meath is perhaps the best known example of this, when, at dawn, the soft winter light is tunnelled down a long passageway to light up a burial chamber. It’s a remarkable feat of science and engineering, and hints to the mysticism and magic embedded in their honouring of the natural cycles of the year. 

Christmas has long been associated with magic. Santa, flying reindeer, presents left under trees are modern day embodiments of these ancient practices of honouring this time of year- a time of giving thanks, of joy, of hope and yes, magic. And yet, for many Christmas is a hard time, the financial pressures of an overly commercialised festival, the missing of loved ones and absent friends, or even the deeper struggles to find a home in the wider place in the world, can all be amplified at this time of year. 

Switching on the global news headlines does not seem to help either- one would not be alone in giving oneself over to cynicism. Hope then, in these days of uncertainty and fear becomes even more powerful and more urgent. 

But what does it mean to cultivate hope? 

One of the origins of hope is pause. To sit still in the fullness of our lives and give ourselves back to the magic of joy, generosity and to the dream of better days to come- for to be hopeful is to have belief in the possibilities of the future, as individuals and as a collective. 

The word solstice comes from the Latin, meaning, Sol (sun) + Sistere (to stand still). And so, I invite you to take a few moments of pause, to sit with the questions of the turning of the season, still honouring the dark while calling in the light, a way to cultivate your own sense of hope in these turning times. 

Prompts for honouring the dark: 

This is a time of year when the light is beginning to lengthen again. Before welcoming the light, take a moment to honour the dark time of the year. 

Consider spending the evening without the use of electric light. As the dusk settles, take a few moments to sit in the darkness. 

What does the dark represent to you? 

What does the dark have to teach you? 

For the ancient celts, there was a deep recognition that life begins in the darkness. The earth’s new life comes only after a period of hibernation and rest. 

Are there areas of your life that are still craving rest? 

What aspects of your life want to hibernate? 

What can you do to honour this need in yourself- is there something you can release? 

Prompts for welcoming the light

Suggestion: write/ contemplate your responses by candlelight. 

What aspects of your life are coming into light right now? 

What do you need to shine a light on? 

And prompts for cultivating hope

What does hope mean to you?

How can you cultivate hope in your life right now?

How can you help to share a sense of hope or light with those around you?

Happy Winter Solstice, and perhaps I will see you at the Special Winter Solstice Salon, on Dec 21st.

Blessings for the Season.

Clare x

Coming on December 21st…

A Solstice evening of Seasonal Poetry, Journaling and Seasonal Ritual.

Online, December 21st. 7-9pm GMT

Book your tickets below, offered on a sliding scale.

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Hello. I'm Clare

I'm a writer, educator and facilitator, living in beautiful West Cork, Ireland. I love to share resources and learning to help harness the regenerative power of words, place and story. I hope my work offers nourishment for mind and soul. Thank you for being here. Clare x

Available Now

An Intentional Year

Focus on what matters most, and create an intentional 2023. Guidebook and an Intentional Year course now available

Nightowl, COP and Constellating

You can listen to this post here. 9 mins. I hope enjoy.

The light has been pared back now, almost brittle in the sky. I watch it linger for moments on the crest of waves, then dance into the long night. In its absence, I seek to create my own. 

November affords the creative hours with a strange sense of abundance. As a natural night owl, much of my imagination comes alive at around 6pm and peaks at around 10. This week, on a few occasions, I found myself wide awake at 3am, still writing, painting; ideas and plans swirling. My mornings, I let my body linger in sleep. My mother tells me I’ve been like this since I was a child. Getting to school on time was a perpetual challenge (Why does school have to start so early anyway?). The evening hours. Time stretches. Email beeps, door knocks, daily obligations, these seem like distant relatives to the rising stillness. It’s taken me a long time to allow myself to trust my own circadian tides, at times feeling like I    am trying to swim against the dominant current. I am still learning to trust it; my nocturnal ways, and the light I find there. But what if I flip that narrative too. What if swimming against is also, in a sense, swimming towards. And what if that’s exactly what is needed. 

Finding, and trusting our own rhythms is anathema to the race, of course. The race to produce faster, more, then more. It is part of what has got us into such a mess, careful of how I use ‘us’. It is a small ‘us’ that has caused the larger body of ‘us’ to find ourselves where we are; in a different kind of race now, literally to turn the tides. 

I watched the images and narrative coming from Cop27 this week. Here we have the regular cast of decision makers. Mostly male. Mostly the dominant political elite. Like others, I found myself asking; ‘Where are all the women?’,’Where are the indigenous voices? Where are those who will advocate for voices of the future, human and more-than-human, not just the profits of the future? Then quickly, my own internal critic chimed in, ‘And where are you Clare. What are do actually doing’? It is a voice that frequently rattles me. And rattles me loud. Am I making the right choices? Am I doing enough?’ 

I was asked to run for local political office once. My ego toyed with the idea for a while, but it was a brief while, because a part in me knew myself well enough- that active political office would be running against my own tide too. It is easy to mistake public profile with importance, with success. The lure is real, but at what cost? To our own callings be true.

Real too is our need to express our ideas, our own marks to make, to honour our own particular gifts in our own particular ways. For some, importantly so, that means running for office, for some it is setting up schools or teaching in them, for others it is holding a child’s hand and helping them to grow into their particular gifts. Notice I am deliberately using the plural here- callings, gifts, longings. We are plural beings, layered with complexity, multiplicities, shadows, and equally with gifts, talents, capacities. We are constellations, and when we allow ourselves, we too can be bright lights in dark times, for dark times indeed need their north stars. 

I’m looking into the future now, the not too distant future, seeing the ways humanity needs to adapt and respond to the times we are in. This is monumental change on scales we have never experienced before. The need for us to bring our gifts, our unique contribution, is real too. And as vital as breath is. We need the engineers, scientists, political negotiators, mediators, meditators. We need accountants and financial planners, city planners, marine stewards, stewards in general. We need the nurturers, the storytellers, the media makers, the healers. Space-makers, movers and shakers. We need every gift and talent there is, yours, mine. The table is large, and we can create even more space for everyone. I want to pull up more chairs. 

The dominant narrative, of course, is counter to this. It is of fear, apocalypse, permacrisis. But that’s part of the problem- the dominance of this narrative, the singularity of it, when, in reality, in parallel to the dominance, there is always plurality, there are other possibilities taking shape, already taking shape. I look around as see these new stories growing in momentum. Some are organisations doing such interesting and important work. I am inspired by The Presencing Institute, initiating and co-creating transformative educational models across the globe. Or The Bio-Leadership Project, offering alternative business models and networks. Some are movements, a rising up of a new narrative, as the women in Iran have, cutting their hair in acts of symbolic resistance to the hegemonic norms of expectations and control. I turn to writers like Robin Wall Kimmerer, or Robert McFarlane, who are sharing their exquisite craft of language to write new landscapes of awareness and possibility into being. I am enthralled with artists such as Jackie Morris, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake, who, through visual and auditory expression bring the voices of the natural world into the hearts and minds of thousands. From that one woman on a protest march in Iran, to the millions and millions of others around the world who are working on regenerative energy projects, new architectural designs, sustainable policy work, circular economy business operations, and on and on. Yes, there is so so much work to do, which also means there is so much possibility, for all of us. I think of all these people, each expressing their gifts, each part of an evolving narrative, each offering their own light in these dark and troubled times. Suddenly November is constellated. 

I’m up late again, drawing. A little Wren has arrived, a tiny tiny creature, so small and so seemingly insignificant. But only a few hours ago, that drawing didn’t exist, and now the world has expanded in the tiniest of ways. Yes, tiny, but even that is expansion, part of the unfolding, and it makes the light in my own heart shine that little bit brighter. I’m turning inwards for the season now, into my own creative cave, seeking what stories I can find there, and offering them to the wider narrative, hoping to join other lights there, yours, theirs. I too am constellating. The dark may not be that dark after all. 

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On Stumbles with Patti Smith and The Fragments.

 You can listen to this post here (6 mins)I’ve started writing this piece to you many times. Each time the words begin to crumble, then fade. The words seem to be resisting the hold of an idea, and the form of what I hope may be useful to you right now- something tangible- is eluding. I have noticed my own frustration and confusion rising as a result. I’ve torn up pages and deleted many words.It’s scary when the crumbling happens and the blanks seem to lengthen. For someone who hangs so much on words, it is frightening when the lines don’t seem to arrange themselves in coherent, cogent forms. I begin to question if they will ever come back. Then I begin to question everything. Instead of wholeness, I find fragments. Instead of coherency, I find tangents. It is a moment which tests, utterly. I’m grateful for the power of practice in these times. I’ve learned through the years that the only way through is to move with honesty into what is happening, what’s real and alive in front of me. When I don’t, I’m just resisting the resistance and everything calcifies. So I begin writing, sensing the fragmentary nature of the beginning. I start to write around those fragments- seeing what ideas want to gather. I give myself permission to write something, anything, even if it is scattered, for in the scattering I can at least feel motion. I read some poetry. I go for a walk.  I tear up some more pages. Then I watch a little clip of Patti Smith, and I exhale. I think I may have found the exact bit of humanity I needed, right in the nick of time. She is at the 2016 Nobel Laureate Prize giving. The auditorium is full of black tie and Kings and Queens. She is there to perform a song to honour Bob Dylan. She can feel the privilege, and the weight of it. She is wearing a tailored black jacket and a white shirt with a pristine, angular collar. I notice how contained she seems, how compact almost. There are thousands of formal eyes upon her. Then she begins, until she doesn’t. Around the second verse, her voice goes blank, and there is a freeze, then a stumble, and then, ‘I’m sorry.. I apologise, I’m so nervous’. The audience breaks into applause in what seems like an act of recognition. This is humanity and humility both at work. So she begins the second section again and I think I love her all the more now, all the deeper. Her insistence on continuance. She sings as best as she can, in that moment, with all her nerves, and she gives it everything, even if she feels that her everything is not quite enough. Patti wrote a piece in the New Yorker about her experience. She took her ‘public struggle’, and told us, ‘This strange phenomenon did not diminish or pass but stayed cruelly with me. I was obliged to stop and ask pardon and then attempt again while in this state and sang with all my being, yet still stumbling. It was not lost on me that the narrative of the song begins with the words “I stumbled alongside of twelve misty mountains,” and ends with the line “And I’ll know my song well before I start singing.” As I took my seat, I felt the humiliating sting of failure, but also the strange realisation that I had somehow entered and truly lived the world of the lyrics’.I get it. Sometimes we feel we are giving our everything, but it feels like it is not quite enough, not as good as it can be. But, in that moment, it is what we have to offer. Even the imperfect fragments, even the stumbles.So I stumble through my notebooks, gathering the fragments, the broken shells, the ill-formed and the unhatched, and I take a moment to look at what is there. As I zoom away, I begin to see something. It wasn’t an essay I was writing at all. Poetry happens in the most unlikely of places, and especially in the cracks.  The Loam WomanStuck to a place of no traction, I am finally ready to fall. From the residue of rejections, the unknowns, looming large, ask me: What is the gift of this dire uncertainty?  A woman with an old voice, and hair as white as loamgallops into my eyes.  She is evidence of continuance:  Advance with an openness, to what is present, she says, let humility be your gait, You must sing yourself into the lyrics of your own song, to truly enter. Later, as the moon is halved, and the stars are veiled in the sea-mist, I think of what is behind the real darkness and can feel only the hand of this old woman, coaxing me out into the great nightsaying, here, this is your stomping ground, now go, write yourself there.  Now, as I raise my pen to the sky, I feel her hands on the cusp my head, as if she is stroking the back of a stunned mare, kicking and singing, rearing her hooves into the inky strands of the pageentering into the long long night both of us falling deeper into our great unknown song. ..  May we write our ways into our own song, stumbles and fragments, half-moons and all. Until soon, with love Clare. x  

R I T U A L

 The blank page. One of the most inviting, most intriguing and scariest places I know. Here is where I face myself- the layers of self, the multiplicities, and write myself forward.It is the place I go to find a pocket of communion with the inner world- the access point to the creative stream, the clarity before intentional action, the place from which the future can grow. It is a re-wiring and re-writing of the story I'm living out. The place of re-invention, of renewal.When I don't know where to begin, I ask the page, 'Who am I today', and the page responds with the unfolding.It's a question I offer to you too. If you are stuck, if you want to begin a journalling practice, or if the blank page is beckoning, you can ask, 'Who am I today'? And see where the words take you. Then tomorrow, ask again. And the next day, and the next...As we practice, so we become.

Why Write?

 Why write? It is this strange thing really: letters falling onto blank pages, making words, to make meaning, to communicate this human experience.Do we find ourselves in the sentences? Or in the pause between sentences?Do we discover each other there too, not just the outsides of each other, but the inner workings and the tickings of another mind?Why write?This for one: the stories we choose to shape, and the stories we choose to share. I think they have a potential beyond the sum of their parts. More than words alone, more than mere sentences, what we can find there is the connective tissue of our humanity; the things that bind us and the things which make our hearts yield to the possibilities in each other. When you share yours, it gives me permission to share mine.Then there are the daily evocations of our moving through the world. Story is where my ordinary —the making of the coffee, the folding of the sheets, the mending of a torn friendship, the sowing of some seeds — meets your ordinary, but also our extraordinary— that glimmer in an eye, that constellation of experience which makes you who you are. It is where our common humanity rubs shoulders; where I can find out what it is like for you to laugh, or cry, or have your heart broken. But then it is also a way to realise that in your broken is also my open, in your speaking of forgiving is my way to understand forgiveness, and in the telling of your grief, I can take some steps on my own path of healing. Of course, you might also tell a story of a love so great it nearly blows us both apart, then plants us back in hope. I think, ultimately that is the power of stories: when we really let them into the marrow of us, they are redemptive and alchemical, changing the very mould of our beings. We are like rubber bands that way, once expanded there is no going back to our original shape.So, yes, I write to make sense of things, but I read and listen so as to step outside my own world for a while, and expand my boundaries of understanding. It helps me realise there is always another way of seeing things, and that each story is a pathway deeper into the well of our being here together on this little blue dot called earth, and then a bridge to another life, or another land. Perhaps story is just our fastest way of travelling from here to there. Why else?Well, there is always the beyond. I write as a way of staying in connection to a creative capacity which seems to live just outside the known of me. It is a way to keep that river of undiscovered self in flow and force. Sometimes it feels magical. Sometimes it feels alive. Those sometimes keep me going too.We all write for our own reasons. The writing itself reveals them to us. That is the beauty of the creative process. It is not the end result which is the gold, it is the engagement in the process itself. It is generative, it is affirmative and it is one of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves: the gift of honouring our own intrinsic creativity which in turn gives life to who we are to become.What if the world was fuelled by blank pages, words and the curiosity to see where our story wants to takes us next? And what if we realised our creativity was that very fuel.I think we’d sense it is time to stoke some fires, gather around, write some tales, then listen. I’m in. Are you?.............Write to Your Truth Coming to Lisbon- 18/ 19th May 2019.  I can’t wait to be heading to Lisbon to host a weekend ‘Write to Your Truth’ salon. We’ve found an elegant venue right in the heart of the city, there will be glorious food, I hear the weather in May is generally delightful, plus you'll get to dive into our stories, learn some creative skills, develop your writing practice, and experience the wonder of words. Here, Emily - my co-host and I- tell you more.

To book online head on over here.

On Wayfinding through Mud and Wetness

You can listen to this post here (5 mins)    There is a place I walk out to. A special place, which has a mix of solace and solidarity, out at the edge where wind meets the wild. I have been there many times. I go to write, to think, to sit, to be in conversation. It is a place beyond my definitions of beauty.But this gets me: each time I walk out, the path is different. It is never clear. It is full of thorns and brambles, and a thick, unforgiving sludge which is a mixture of mud and cow shit. I fell three times yesterday. I stabbed my hand on some barded wire. Milly turned the colour of sodden earth. My feet were so wet I could have rung them out. This is the path less trodden. Sometimes it is full of shit. Sometimes it is full of savour. Mostly it is both.As in life, so in life.I want to tell you this: there are times I think I should give up on this freelance life, this working way part-lived online, this walking on paths which are not paths at all. There are days which are shadowy, and days which are slippery. There are days in which I feel all the sludge. Somedays I feel lonely. Somedays I feel like I want to hurl expletives at the next person who claims to have a definitive solution to the complexity of life, or who offers a ten step guide to having your life sorted, as if life is this thing that can be boxed and bound.Then I remember the castle. Then I remember the path. Then I remember the choices. Then I remember the stories. Then I remember to sit in the mud and enjoy the silky coverings of sea-spray. Then I remember to phone a friend.We read poetry to each other. Rilke’s words:‘This is what the things can teach us:to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly. We sit in silence for awhile afterwards. It feels close to truth. So close. By listening to each other we reaffirm the power of flight. The listening is a way of saying: ‘I believe in you. Keep going’. The listening is an act of stirring up resilience, in us both.I think this is so much of the real work; the work of accompaniment, this act of dedicated attention to cultivate hope in the spirit of endurance and the creativity of tenacity. For each other, over and over, it is needed when we stop seeing the truth of ourselves. It is so we have each other to mirror back our strength, to help us find the next turn of the path, to remind us of our castles.I don’t want to give up friends. I don’t want you to give up either. But sometimes we have to realise that we can’t do it all alone. That we need to phone a friend who can help us to trust in the weight of our convictions and remind us of the longer arc of patience needed to take us there. Maybe sometimes that is all we have: our vision, and each other.Later, I take a shower, washing the mud from my fingernails and unknotting my hair. I give Milly a wash too, returning her to white. As the full moon rises, I read more Rilke. One line shimmers.‘Through the empty branches the sky remains’Then I throw some more fuel on the fire and feel the heat rise. As the flames light up the room, an email arrives from another friend. It says: ‘let’s do this’. I respond, simply ‘Yes, let’s’...So this is a note to all of you today who may be thinking of giving up. But instead of giving up maybe it is time to phone a friend, or walk out to the equivalence of your castle, or take a different route for a while. Sometimes it is not the vision that’s the problem, but how we are approaching it. Sometimes we just need to take a detour for a while, or a pause, and notice how the moon always rises across the arc of open skies.Sending you love, for wherever you find yourself today,Clare. x 

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Coming up...An Online Writing Circle Write to Your Truth, the online version starts soon. On March 2nd. It's eight weeks. It is a way for your to build your writing skill and craft some stories. It needs about two hours commitment per week. There are six beautiful live circles/ sessions in which we will write together. Find out more and register online today Want to coming to Lisbon? How about a weekend of writing and connection, learning and exploring in Lisbon.Write to Your Truth is heading to Lisbon in May. Come join Emily Avila and I as we team up to create this nourishing, supportive creative salon. Find out more and book online here.  Creative Mentoring Have a creative project you want to grow? Need some support to clarify your vision, values, next steps and communications? My mentoring process is a blend of design thinking, intuition and inner work, and strategic planning- tailored to your needs. Find out more.   ....Want to stay in touch? Sign up to my mailing list here. 

A letter to Mary Oliver

A Letter to Mary Oliver, with thanks. You have passed on, but your words have not. I think there is an extra chamber in my heart where they fully inhabit, pumping wonder and beauty into the places in my being which need them the most. I know your words circle in others peoples hearts too, lining them with awe, and grace, and now an infinite beat of gratitude. We have much to thank you for. You let your words rest on blank pages, arranged in configurations of strange symbols which we place together as consonants, then poems. But your configurations have a special quality, something rooted and ethereal at once. More constellation than star, more forest than seed. We could say your poems carry the touch of mystery, but I think you’d call it love instead; that your pen was a point of capture and your words a place of gathering, so we can see it more clearly, in the grass and the way light falls daily, or the way a cricket carries its song. You reminded us that it is all love really, this earthly presence of being, this wild and precious life. Little did you know it Mary, but for more than half my life, since I first read your poems, you have come everywhere with me. I’ve packed you in my backpack and we have travelled the world. I’ve taken you on bus journeys, planes journeys, ferry rides and long undulating walks. We’ve stayed up late at night with a torch under the bedcovers. Do you remember the time when we on a beach in Greece reading poems to the sea? Or the time when my little dog sat beside me and I read your dog poems aloud to her? Or the multiple nights on my yoga mat, when you’d tuck into position by my side, and tell me, over and over, to trust in the way of things. You’d let me cry tears if needed, whether of joy or sadness, and you’d always wipe them with beauty. You have been my companion in dark corners and tunnels which I thought would never end. Your words, the best of friends. Your poems, a lighthouse. ‘You do not have to be good’, you whispered to me in one particular dark patch’, ‘you only have to let the soft animal of your body loves what it loves’. That became my mantra, recalled with regularity and devotion.You have given instructions for living a life. ‘Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it’. In this, I can say, I am trying. And you have reminded me that the 'boxes of darkness can also be gifts'. I open them differently now. You have said the world offers itself to our imaginations, no matter who we are, no matter how lonely. So you have been training me to seek the imaginative possibility. Belong to this world, you suggested, and give yourself to it, ‘married to amazement’.  In this I can say I am wed, only my vows need to be renewed daily. Your poems take me there. You have spared me the worry of haste and urgency. ‘Don’t worry’, you say, ‘things take the time they take’. And then you offered me one question which thread so close that is has changed everything. ‘So, tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’. I wake up with those words on my lips and each day I long to live into them. It it the best kind of quest. Yours was wild, yours was precious, and you have made mine all richer through the gifting of your gift. I hope to thank you in the pay it forward kind of way, in a way I think you’d like, with the simple gestures of love, and a heart seeking always to speak to the wonder of it all. Rest in peace dear Mary Oliver. May your words work their infinite wonder in the hearts of many more, With love and eternal gratitude. Clare.xx  

A Lughnasa Ritual: Time to harvest your gifts.

  Hello all,For those who have been following along this year, you may remember we started the year with an invitation to set our intentions for the months ahead. Then, over the course of the year, I have been sharing rituals, inspired by the celtic calendar, to help us tune into the gifts of the season and stay close to our intentions.Tonight is Lughnasa in the Celtic Calendar- a time that signals the beginning of the harvest. And so, an offering and a gift from me to you- a short ritual for reflection on your own gifts, that you may honour them, embrace them and have the confidence to offer them outwards and onwards.You can access your seasonal ritual via my mailing list by signing up here. You'll be sent a download link directly.Below, the introduction to the guide, happy reading, and savouring, and harvesting of your wonderful and important gifts.Clare xx.. From the Lughnasa Ritual'The ripening is upon us. Along the roads the blackberries are changing their form, from tight knots to full of summer swell, their juicy bulbous domes are rising for the picking. The thought of blackberries also brings thoughts of poetry, their sight is so coupled with Seamus Heaney’s remembrances that his are also my own. Moving into the memories of when ‘briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots’, ‘Blackberry Picking’, the poem, is now synonymous with blackberry picking, the act.All year I’ve been collecting jars. What once was filled with pickle is soon to be filled with jam. I’m awaiting the days when the berries are at their best, perhaps a few weeks from now, when a day will be given over to the picking and jam-making. I’m thinking already of who I’d like to invite along and what pot I’ll use. I’m thinking of being able to give the jam-filled jars away, as gifts, and I’m thinking of the winter ahead, when a dollop of sweet jam will be added to warm porridge, to ride the winter tide with sweetness and let the gift of the harvest extend it’s time. For what is a harvest but a gathering of the gifts, in extension.As the blackberries turn, so to does the season. We have reached another turning point on the celtic calendar,moving into Lughnasa (pronounced Lu-na-sa), a time that signals the beginning of the annual harvest. Lughnasa, a cross-quarter celebration in the celtic wheel, rests mid-way between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox and is named after the sun God Lugh, of the Tuatha De Dannan. Lugh was said to be a God of many gifts and talents, a Master of the Arts and Culture, who yielded a cunning sword and a swopping presence which harnessed the light energy of the sun.The festival of Lughnasa (July 31- August 1) is a time to celebrate and give thanks and praise for the coming harvest, that which has been ripened by the sun, as if the dance and the joy will aid the final stages of growth and quicken the ripening. After months of tending barren soil, then tending seeds, the land now offers it’s fruits. In the offering is also the gift, and with any gift comes the invitation to rejoice. Yet how often do we see our gifts as offerings, as things to rejoice? How often do we really honour our own gifts so that they may be quickened?Thinking of Lugh today, we might say that he was ‘gifted’. However if Lugh claimed it for himself, if he declared his own giftedness, we’d perhaps call him egotistic, or obnoxious, or a little bit full of himself! In contemporary society to honour our own gift, to really own it and to declare it, requires a confidence and a defiance. So often we dismiss the gifts we have been given, for fear of being labelled too full of ourselves, or sure of ourselves. Instead, inside we hide, keeping our gifts close, and in keeping them close we don’t reap the opportunity to share them with others.So perhaps there are deeper lessons from the blackberries too: if they are not picked, shared and savoured- either by humans or animals, their fruit will go to rot, not serving their full potential. Similarly if we do not learn to harvest and share our own gifts, they too go underground, even to rot. And so in reclaiming the festival of Lughnasa we are also given this opportunity to reclaim and to declare our own gifts. It does not need to be a loud declaration, or even a public one, but an inward appreciation of the gifts given, from which we can share and serve, and seed the future we long to create.So this Lughnasa, let’s take some pause to harvest and to celebrate. Let’s take time to name our gifts, claim them, declare them, so we may move outwards again, with a knowing that our gifts are also our generosity; that our gifts are our offerings, in extension'...Sending love, onwards and outwards from my heart to yours,Clare. xSaveSave

In the Question is the Quest

 The more I sit still, the more I can really listen to what life is presenting to me- the opportunities, the love, the joy, the next steps. It helps me get out of my own way and presents me with images/ intuitions/ signs/ symbols and words which help to guide the way. Over the years I have practiced listening and acting on these images. They present me with questions, and in the question, is the QUEST. The questions have why, what, and where in then, not how and when. The how and when comes later. The learning is to listen to what is calling you, why you are drawn to it, what values you are honouring, what in you opens when you listen (Does your body come alive or shut down? Do you have feelings of stress or feelings of joy?). The aliveness, the joy- it is there to show you the way forward.  When we start with the ‘how’ (how do I build the next thing, or make the transition or the leap), it’s ripe ground for fear to enter too. Does an artist sit at an easel and ask, ‘How do I paint that tree, or that thing of beauty in front of me?’, or does a poet ask, ‘How do I write a poem?’ No- they listen first, they look and observe, they create the space for the work to flow, and then they show up to the creative, generative process inviting spirit, insight, action and intention to join them. Through the process and prototype they figure out the how.So often we approach our lives like strategic plans or business reports measuring ‘success’ by metrics not of our own. We worry so much about the how without listening for the why and the what. We forget to invite creativity and our innate wisdom into the equation.But what if we were to approach our lives like creative acts- an unfolding poem or an art work in progress? The art is in the living. What we create (jobs, businesses, networks, relationships, organisations, collaborations, new life paths) are then infused with this artful way- a work in progress, flexible and creating beauty in the world which serves the greater whole.This is what I mean when I speak of creative leadership. This is the only way I know that works.…Want to listen in to your intention, purpose and vision and learn to create aligned action and prototypes? Taking bookings now for one to one mentoring, vision mapping sessions and Wild Edge retreats (here in amazing West Cork) in which I share some of the tools, skills and practices for leading and creating your own one wild life...SaveSave