They say it takes 3.5%

You can listen to me read this below:

3.5%

They say it takes 3.5%
to change a regime.

3.5%. How many grandmothers
is that? How many sisters?
Or brothers? How many aunts?
How many you’s?
How many me’s?

3.5% of flag, march, sail, sing.
Of boycott. Of sanctioning.
How many lives saved is that?
How many grandmothers?
How many children’s children?
How many olive branches is that?

3.5%. That’s what they say.
There are busloads already.
There are men, women,
walking to borders,
reaching out with their
olive branches.

3.5%. What percentage is a busload?
Or a single pair of feet?

Getting there.
It is getting us there.

- Clare Mulvany, June 14, 2025

---

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

With Eyes on The Future

You can listen to this piece below:

I love the pull of the days, either end, like a lever arcing towards the light. The hedgerows are ebullient in their growth, foxgloves now the flag-bearers with their purple-pink singing heads. The chorus fills with elderflower and ox-eyes daisies, flocks of white bloom, murmurating.

I hold it all with awe and tenderness, for where there is beauty, so too fragility. The song of it all hangs on a fine thread of balance, never to be taken for granted. To really witness the bloom, is also to advocate for its protection.

I see, of course, what is unfolding in our fine-threaded world. Along its fractures and faultlines — the injustices, the inhumanities. It is so hard to hold most days.

I am buoyed by witness; the advocates, the protectors, some on land, some on sea, murmurating. It’s about Palestine, and wider conflicts, of climate and our bio-diversity crisis; the eco-systems of our humanity held up against the lens.

I find myself reflecting on my years as a photographer. In schools, in hospitals, in waste facilities, along polluted river beds, on death beds, listening, mostly to the mothers. In Uganda, India, Bosnia, Cambodia, Ireland, and elsewhere, it was the women, mostly, who would look into the lens, with eyes both bright and remorseful. See me, really see me, and you’ll see what we can also be. For in those eyes, I would see mother-love strength: to hold, to care for the lives of their children, and their children’s children, and what they might become. Those eyes were on the future. Please educate, please see our resilience, please, please hold onto hope.

Hope, as advocate, as witness, I learned in those eyes, is a duty of care.

I still see those eyes. They are seared into my pen. And now, as I lay down in the grasses, my camera turned towards those purple singing heads, I notice the ox-eyed daisies winking back. A passage from Terry Tempest Williams sings in my lens.

‘The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle…’

My prayer these days is in my words, these words, and my images, and the stories I am trying to write. For story, I have also come to know, is both lens and lever. Stories can shift the dial on culture, they can alter our perception, help make the invisible visible, help us make sense, and even better, come to our senses. For under the lens of story we are asked to kneel beside the mothers, the fathers, the bloom, and we are taken inside their eyes, their hearts, their hopes.

See what I see.

Feel what I feel.

No policy document can do that. But story can.

My ink is also a camera is also a lens is also an eye on the future: saying, praying, may be see beyond our own time.

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have all the perspectives. But I can see the witnesses, the advocates, the protectors, the blossom, the flag-bearers. Now, there is a story with eyes on the future. Look this way. Be the duty of care. Our eyes have ink in them. Our hands can hold the flags.

---

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

I want to write about Gaza but I don’t know how to write about Gaza.

You can listen to this piece below:

Trigger warning: This is raw and emotional, speaking about the genocide in Gaza and is not intended for young ears. If you have children listening, please save this for another time.

I want to write about Gaza, but I don’t know how to write about Gaza. ‘About’ is already too distant. Because to write about is to already remove oneself. But writing is what I have.

So I pick up the nearest thing. It is a pencil and there is a feather stuck to its tip.

Go with wings.

So I want to tell you that I can’t fathom what is happening. I can’t fathom how many mothers are burying their children, how many fathers are burying their children, how many children are burying their mothers, their fathers.

I can’t fathom how food is being used as a weapon of war, how civilians are being seen as collateral in that war.

I want to tell you that I am looking at the news, but the thing is, incredibly, it’s not making the news, and when it does, I see three children’s shrouds being swaddled by their mother and I can’t look. I can’t keep looking and yet I need to keep looking because if we aren’t looking, the news will go away and soon we’ll be told that the news of the day is about how tariffs are on or off or on again, and even that is making me dizzy. So I switch to something about puppies, literally puppies, but when I am in that half-dream/ half-awake place, all I can see is a mother holding three shapes which once were her children.

So I want to write about Gaza, but there have been so many words already. So many words. Still I take up my pen and instead of words, I begin to make marks. One, two, nine thousand and fifty seven, eleven thousand three hundred and seventy two, fourteen thousand. And counting.

Last week, these dots were the lives of children at risk of starvation. This week, nothing really has changed.

I want to say: I know there are histories, different sides, but what I really want to say is, future history does not have to tell this history.

I add three more dots, and think of that mother.

So, you can see, it is hard to write about Gaza, because Gaza is the worst of humanity, of how we can look and not look, of how we can turn away, of how we dare or not dare.

And the truth is, I don’t know what to do. I do know that Gaza is also elsewhere. Gaza is Yemen is Sudan is the populations we other is the refugee crisis is the climate crisis is the meta crisis.

Puppies are suddenly more appealing again.

But then there are even more dots and more counting and more shapes.

I want to write about Gaza, but I don’t know how to write about Gaza. But on my pencil, there is a feather, which once was an implement of flight. I think about where the bird came from and where the bird has gone. I think about how it can do a miraculous thing.

I want to still believe in the miraculous.

---

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