Making Slow

This is a cross posting, with The Wild Edge, my Substack, to give you a flavour of the writing there. Subscribe for weekly creative reflections, seasonal recourses, creative co-working sessions and monthly tickets to salons.

Winter wore her coat buttoned. A long, heavy coat, which pressed down on the land with dark threaded seams. It has already been a season of slow beginnings. I have watched the days lengthen, only to be swallowed by mists again. I’ve swum in a glinting harbour, only to find the cloud wink out the light. What’s arriving is not a steady current of presence, but of departure too; a pull back, an edge forwards, motion, I am thinking, much like breath. Perhaps this is the natural rhythm of arrival; hesitancy before passage; timidity preceding being known. Perhaps I just need to remember to make my way with slow. I turn to the land, and take note.

It has been a week of the slow uncurl. Earlier, walking in the woods, I noticed how the young fern began its awakening tucked in a tight spiral, as if bowing to its heart before revealing itself to the world. Its gradual arrival is the unravelling of the spiral, shaped in the way of curve and waves and cosmic folds. A shy, timid, opening, before turning to face the light. The world awakens gently in the pace of fern.

Meanwhile, on the bushes, from hawthorn to bramble, the week has witnessed the gathering plumage of bloom. It’s been a gentle rattle in the land, as if the earth is airing her new sheets and spreading them on the branches. Swatches of bright yellow gorse, like hand printed Indian block cloth, laid alongside the white linen of blackthorn. As the mists clear, the hills are whitewashed again, and the season is opening her hand with her offerings. Her generosity never fails to amaze me; how ever garment of bloom came from that buttoned winter coat; slowing slipping off to reveal the next layer; treasures the darkness kept hidden until the world was ready to welcome.

As the light lengthens now, slowly I am being taught to trust in my own unravelling, to lay the winter layer down. The darkness has served a remedy, and Spring is now taking the reins. The seasons are a splice of time, but they also offer us a language of invitation. What might it be to unburden ourselves of coats which served in one season of our lives, but not the next? What might it be to welcome our own arrival at the pace of fern, a gradual opening to our own possible? The spiral is a patten of arrival from the centre of our being, departure again, before returning; the centre the site of orientation from which the movement comes. To hold our centre in the mist of change. Isn’t this so much of the work of this time. The spiral is also a key.

As I think about the invitation of the spiral, I am also feeling into its pace too, and how far removed from the centre we have become when moving at the pace of fern seems so counter-cultural. So much of the external world is hooked on fast. Fast fashion. Fast acting. Fast food. Fast paced. The algorithms scroll us to the next, leaving us unsatiated. Fed on their hunger for more, it’s so easy to be sucked into their definitions of success, where more is more is more. There is no time for the unfurl, for the departure, for the gradual arrival, for the shy reveal, for craft or skill and the time it takes to truly transform through the process of becoming. Slow has always felt counter cultural but I think it is where the real revolution might be taking place. It certainly will not be televised.

Perhaps it is a function of getting older, but as the seasons pass and the years speed by, my need for slow is quickening. Only in the gentle, am I learning that I can hear my true words. Only in the gradual spiralling of arrival to myself —coming closer, turning away, coming closer again —can I discern the truth of my being. Holding the proximity to centre, like a wave of breath in motion, like another season always on the way in, offers a different form of patterning. I need the slow to listen. In the quite places I am learning to discern the ever whispering invitations. The inner life is a cosmos. I bow my head. The spiral takes me inwards.

Very soon I realise what I have been pushing back against. Fast has been holding the noise of what burdens, weighs me down with doubt and uncertainly, clutters my mind with the debris of the algorithmic hunger for more. I have been craving the certainly of my centre. I hunger for the love which I find there, and the vastness. When I bow my head, I am met not with estrangement, but a welcome. It is warm, and kind and wise. It is set with bloom. Inside are all the answers I will ever need. Inside us all is our own universe, ready to speak.

So I turn off my phone and I go to the woods, where the fern uncouples itself from fear and unloosens itself to the awakening of Spring. The wild garlic brush off my legs, and I am walking now in the scent of awakening. Low to the ground, delicate yellow primrose, blush colour on the soil. There is grace to this pace of arrival.

By what measure, I ask myself, have I been judging my own arrival. By extrinsic deadlines or definitions, or an intrinsic knowing from my own soil, my own soul, from which the spring in me matures.

As I walk in the woods, I am a student of the spiral. Fern is a wise teacher. Slow is too. I am learning to trust in the pace of Clare.

Every person is a cycle, with our seasons of arrival, proximity, distance, return. Yours will be different to mine. There is no right way, or wrong way. You are not late. You have not missed out. We are each our own becoming, ever arriving to ourselves. But what I know is it can not be forced. Just like the fern finds its own shape. Just like the wave breaks within its own beat, our arrival is ours alone. We have our winters. We have our spring, and when we listen inwards towards the universe of our being, we’ll each get the nudge when the time is right: to unbutton our coats, lay the layer down, and arrive the way of our own unfolding spiral, as the breath does, and the seasons. We can always bow to our centre, and begin.

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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 transformative power of words, place and story. I hope my work offers nourishment for mind and soul. Thank you for being here. Clare x

Trusting in a Return

I keep watching the sky for the swallow’s return. ‘Have you see any yet?’, I ask a local villager. No sightings here, but in other parts of the country, one. The slow return. I need to know the cycle is not broken; that the miracle of these tiny remarkable beings making their way across a continent — across mountains and desert, borders and seas — have made it to their other home, this island on the edge of a continent, offering haven.

The swallow’s return is one of those rhythms in the year I’ve come to rely upon as a marker of continuance. Mid-April I search the sky for darts of forked, swooping brilliance. After wintering, its signalling a summering, with the energy of bloom and birth. It reminds me of cycles and the mystery baked into it all. I take such reassurance in the return.

As in nature, so in life: to trust in the return. It’s been a wintering patch in this tiny corner of my creative life, not the wintering of darkness, but wintering of another kind, of composting. Lettings things fall, allowing time to decompose the constituents. To sense into what wants to be reconstituted is a fecund kind of darkness, too easily overlooked or mistaken as absence. Without the detritus of the harvest, the soil from which new growth emerges can not be sustained.

I am being, perhaps, metaphorically abstract. What do I mean by that in practice, the trusting in the return. Basically, it’s been a quiet patch, in work, in words. Most of the time I have tried to share anything, I’ve had a ‘rabbit in the headlights’ moment, set against what the world is facing and moving through, at times so destructively so. As someone who has relied on words to help them navigate complexity and has taken on an identity as someone capable of articulating responses, my words have felt muted, inadequate and radically falling short. They are only words, after all, and I am only one. I’ve shown up at marches, vigils, protests, but I find myself totally wrung out with tears. What use are tears, I tell myself, feeling somewhat ashamed. Social media too has felt like a minefield, and frequently, not a safe space to share, not just a response to the horrors, but creative output too. I know I am not alone in this.

I see the ‘rabbit in the headlights’ mode in every classroom and teaching space I’ve been in or hosted in the last year. ‘I am only one, and what use are tears/ words/ sadness/ shock’. For some, I see the sense of outrage combusting in anger which has no direction, or snap judgements; students operating on high voltage energy, not knowing how to direct it, or themselves. For others, like myself, there is a desire to retreat. As a response, in learning spaces, I bring in more reflective time, and breathing practices, and I try to create space for meaning making, then afterwards, I need to withdraw too.

I saw this coming in me months ago, and gosh, do I resist. Who am I without the platform/ identity/ role- small as they are, but clearly I am not immune to hitching my identity to the sways of productivity culture and staying relevant.  And yet, continual output just hasn’t been an option for me and I realised my activism needs to show up in different ways right now. The introvert in me did some cartwheels when I took my foot off the pedal a bit. The detritus can fall, it was saying, and part of you can too. Time to compost. I just did not expect there to be so much.

And so, over the last year, I’ve intentionally tired to embrace the space, and the silence, which as freelancer who never quite knows when the next ‘gig’ is coming from, is excruciating. My newsletter became more sporadic, my social sharing too. I haven’t wanted to make the full move over to substack yet. I definitely have not wanted to be on X, and defiantly not tiktok. Then, in the midst of all this, one of my dearest soul friends and creative mentors died. Her death so premature filled me with a grief so strong it was as if an equally powerful wave of love moved through me. It is amazing what happens when we allow ourselves to be composted by love. Words started returning, ideas, energy.   

Jennifer was someone to whom the creative life was one of the greatest mysteries and miracles, to which she dutifully served. She’d literally put on a pair of working overalls, and headed to her studio each to mine the creative wells for source material. A filmmaker and creative visionary (although she’d hate for me to have called her that — but to me she was), she taught me, among many things, the power of creative cycles and needing to listen to the dream, then follow it. The dream — the creative idea which won’t go away, the calling, the stirring, the story which keeps tugging, the imagination’s tide. Her own film ideas had seeded themselves in literal dreams, then he showed up to her creative practice with devotee levels of steadfastness. The first in her ‘cycle’ of three film, She Sings to the Stars, is completed, and the script for the second film which she had been working on for the precious few years I knew her, was in its final stages of completion. Now that she is not here to complete it, I am not sure that film will ever be made, but in one way it also is —because she listened, brought the story to the page, gave life to the dream. That was Jennifer Corcoran.

After her death, I had a ‘now or never’ moment. A story which had been following me, was tapping, loudly. A bonkers, beauty, wildly erratic story. Now or never, I told myself. And in I  went. In the imaginational realm, I’ve found worlds and characters so real to me they feel like companions. In there, is a dangerously beautiful place, which expands my sense of what is real, and possible, of this world too. I know what I’m working on is my own ‘cycle’ of stories. Book one is in a semi-decent draft phase, and daily I am trying to coax it into shape. Book two and three are emerging, slowly. It was this story that took me recently to Mexico, and this story which is leading into places I never thought I’d venture. It’s terrifying. It’s beautiful. I’m listening. Perhaps the silence is only ever an invitation into what really wants to happen.

I am about to go for a walk with Milly. The sky is open, clear. I’ll look up and ask I’ll myself ‘Today?’ Perhaps I’ll see a swallow. But it not today, then soon. Soon. I am trusting in a return.

Writing Prompts:

Perhaps the silence is only ever an invitation into what really wants to happen.
What is your relationship to silence? What is silence inviting you into?

Your now or never.
Write about a ‘now or never’ project you have brewing. Is there a book in you? Or a creative dream? What does it look like? What is holding you back?

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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

Mexican Wanders

There were miracles everywhere. The trees looked autumnal, flanked not with falling leaves, but beating wings, the flames of Monarch butterflies, in their hundreds of thousands, giving rise to something closer to awe I could not name. How do the Monarch’s make the 3000km journey from Canada to arrive, four generations on, to the same Oyamel forests in Michochan, Mexico from which their great-grandparents took flight on their own epic journey north? It was raining wing and mystery in those hills. My heart is pulsing differently now.

Then there was the flight of a flock of pink flamingos overhead, traveling in a perfect V, their necks elongated in elegance, traveling down the Rio Celestun on which our little kayak prevailed, just, in the deceptively strong current, granting us the privilege of witness. We paddled until we met a flock of about 60 of these long-legged wonders feeding on crustaceans from which their colour derives.

Then were was the sea waters, azul, clear, and the waters of the caves- crystalline. A terrain of limestone, much like the Burren of the West of Ireland, which, given its propensity for porosity and erosion creates the conditions for over 6000 cenotes, or sink holes, sacred watering grounds, seven of which my body felt like it pilgrimed into. Submerging, there was a sinking in, held by mother and nature, and the ever renewing force of water. Surfacing my world and understanding of magic was rebirthed.

It was a month of travels populated with such explosive beauty but not without witnessing explosive tragedy too. The Maya Train, a project of the current president, designed to bring more tourists, and therefore pesos/ dollars/ euros/ yuan to the Yucatan peninsula, a land so rich in biodiversity, and so primed for migratory species, that to do anything but preserve and restore is a devastation. But, sadly, shockingly, the railway project is ploughing through virgin forest, its wildlife scattering for cover, its people’s voice going unheard, and countless trees being felled in the name of ‘progress’. It is a scar on the landscape, not just of the region, but in our own collective efforts to preserve and reserve. I’m still reeling, and so angry, and aware of my own complicity- my presence there counted as another tick in the tourist numbers. Justification. But the wrong kind of just.

And it was in this month I encountered protest, as thousands of women took to the streets against the waves of femicide and violence against women in Mexico. There was an anger, at times rage, being lashed in graffiti against walls and monuments; a visceral aggravation to attest to the larger social fabric which at times feels like at war with the feminine. To be in that power, and that anger, felt daring and electric, which still simmers in my veins wondering where next to move.

I think the best kind of travel is as much an inward journey as an outward one, taking us to new aspects of ourselves, questions perhaps, or capacities and even challenges. Here, in meeting the wider world we encounter ourselves so we can return altered in some way, and renewed. And so, as my month of travels still churn, with colour, taste, smells, learning, I am still trying to unpack it all, giving space and shape for the words and experience to land. My hope is that it continues to shake, with wonder and repulsion, spurring me onwards, onwards, onwards, in words and in story and in action.

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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