Things I’ve loved...
A round up of books, films, places and learning resources- the best of 23.
It’s been a big year, and like every year, it brings its twists and turns, challenges and delights. On the delight end of the line, here are a round-up of some of the books, films, places and learning spaces which I’ve loved in 2023.
Schull Library
Libraries are treasuries, and librarians are treasure keepers. We are so very fortunate to have the most wonderful librarian in our local Schull library, Alan, who is a guardian of mind and hearts, recommending books to idea wanderers in need of nourishment. (I also promised I'd put him top of my list, and I now hope he is suitably embarrassed/ chuffed!. You are brilliant Alan, and thank you for all you do for the community)
Books
I dove into the magical world of Children's Books this year, and gravitated towards authors whose words straddle age categories, and genres.
Katherine Rundell has proven to be a stellar delight, catering to the child in all of us. Impossible Creatures was both mythic and wondrous. I also I particularly loved The Golden Mole- a series of short pieces by impossibly wondrous creatures too, written for an older audience. Back in the kids worlds, The Wolf Rider's wolves and lead character of Fedora have also stayed travelling in my imagination, while Vita from The Good Thieves’ feisty spirit and verve added dimension to how young girls are characterised in fiction. I’m now looking forward to reading her book, Super Infinite, about the life of John Donne. Short Note: I am a big Rundell fan.
Another delightful discovery this year was the work of Kiran Millwood Hargrave. I relished the world of The Girl of Ink and Stars, while her two collaborations with her artist husband, Tom de Freston blew me away. Julia and The Shark and Leila and the Blue Fox, and the gothic descriptions in The Secrets of Bird and Bone. Her adult fiction book, The Mercies, is on my to be read list.
Philip Pullman's words have been filling my world with the possibilities of imaginal realms. I did not read his books growing up, and so am only coming to them now, which, while regretally late, is a gift to the imagination itself. I traversed the world of His Dark Materials, and, in audio versions, have been captivated by Michael Sheen's readings of The Book of Dust and my current listen, The Secret Commonwealth.
And Wow. Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Road was hauntingly beautiful.
Other books which stood out for me this year included Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone by the impeccably talented artist and writer Jackie Morris. It came at a time when I needed soul solace, and it snuck in under the covers of my darkness, offering balm and light.
Jay Griffiths is both rebel and sage. A Love Letter from a Stray Moon was the poetic prose which straddles both, with the life of Freida Kahlo as the medium. Why Rebel is a powerful manifesto for protest.
Anna Jones, A Modern Way to Eat and One: Pot, Pan, Planet. I was in need of some new veggie inspiration, but these have been a total revelation. I even have a new found love of cauliflower.
Anna Swir's poetry, Talking to My Body spoke to the mystery in ways other words have never reached.
Rich Rubin's The Creative Act, offered ways into the creative process, which opened it up to both the sacred and the beautifully ordinary, with a twist of zen.
Music
Allison Russell has been on repeat (and I can't wait for her gig in Dublin in January)
And Aukai offered a sonic backdrop much of my writing this year.
Film
Watching An Cailín Ciúin, The Quiet Girl on Cape Clear Island as part of the Fastnet Film Festival was a definite year highlight let alone a film highlight.
American Symphony, a documentary which carries us into the exquisite and raw love shared between Jon Baptiste and Suleika Jaouad shows how even the hardest possibilities of love makes us expand.
Swimming
I have spent many hours this year in, on and around water - as ever a place of enlivenment. A huge shout out to Sarah McKnight, swim coach (@sarahseaswimming (who literally takes a village to the water) @westcorksauna has also been a huge asset to our West Cork watery world.
Thrive School
Over at Thrive School, it has been a year of much facilitation, teaching, collaboration and learning. Grateful to having some brilliant co-conspirators in particular, The Brave Lab, Stand/ Suas, and Global Action Plan International, and for my work in Trinity College Tangent, UCD Innovation Academy, Dublin City Council, Jigsaw- The National Centre for Youth Mental Health, and The European Commission.
Travels
Over in Oxford I was impressed with how The Pitt Rivers Museum is examining its colonial legacy and making more transparent efforts to narrate a more nuanced history of how their collection of archaeological artefacts have come to be.
While over in Amsterdam I loved the sensory explorations and interminglings of their 'Everything is Connected' exhibition
Also cycling in Amsterdam! A city which does bike infrastructure properly (please take note Dublin, and Cork, and... )
Learning Spaces
I found myself both hosting and participating in many various and powerful learning spaces this year.
The Wolf Willow's Imaginarium, hosted by Vanessa Reid and co, highlighted new ways to navigate complexity through engaging with our intuitive and sensory selves. And Kaos Pilot and L&S Shakers, offered insight into using facilitative tools for progressive dialogue. I loved the panels Kerri Ni Dochartaigh curated for Climate Action Day in Dun Laoighre.
Grateful also to the team and my classmates at Kingstown College, Dublin, where I completed a Professional Diploma in Coaching and Mentoring.
In my own hosting, the Poetry Salon, continued to shape, inspire and nurture offering a poetic sanctuary in a turbulent world. The Intentional Year cohort, offered a rhythmic way to check in with our deeper selves, while Writing Wild, brought us the wild edged in ourselves, and the natural world. Looking forward to lots more in 2024
Friendships- human and more than human.
I have listed many resources in this post, but perhaps the ones I have loved the most is the network of friends, human and more than human, that circle and enrich my life many folds over. From the little robin who visited my front door daily for months on end, to the four-legged woof whose companionship is bordering obsessive, to the many wise, funny and supportive friends, near and far, who inspire me, guide me, pick me up, and travel this creative - if sometime circuitous- road, I want to say, thank you, thank you, thank you.
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
Coming Up…
A Special Winter Solstice Salon, coming up in December 21st.
Grief is another word for love.
I do not know what it is to lose a child, but I know what it is to grieve. In the social media squares I share a quote, or a headline, or more numbers of the dead. But what I am really trying to say is: my heart is breaking.
The children’s bloody and tear stained faces scroll by on the screens. The numbers go up. Around them there are justifications, pontifications, the weighing of sides.
What would happen if we really let our hearts break, allowed those numbers in, gave them their names back, their lives, their loves? What would happen if we collectively allowed ourselves to crack open and grieve what we have become?
You can listen to this piece here (4 mins)
I do not know what it is to lose a child, but I know what it is to grieve. In the social media squares I share a quote, or a headline, or more numbers of the dead. But what I am really trying to say is: my heart is breaking.
The children’s bloody and tear stained faces scroll by on the screens. The numbers go up. Around them there are justifications, pontifications, the weighing of sides.
What would happen if we really let our hearts break, allowed those numbers in, gave them their names back, their lives, their loves? What would happen if we collectively allowed ourselves to crack open and grieve what we have become?
I spent the week working on a children’s book I am writing. It is about wildness and connection and the imaginal realm. It is about wonder, and joy, and figuring out how to solve problems systemically, collectively, human and animal kin alike. It is about not having a singular hero or narrative. It is about love. The children in this war, any war, will never read this book. Nor any other. They will never be able to let the wonder in, or let themselves imagine what they want to be when they grow up. For war is a denier of the best of what we can be. For we, humanity, we are engineers, imagineers, pioneers. We, humanity, we are filmmakers, firefighters, farmers. We are scientists and song-writers, poets, philosophers, educators, homemakers. We are parents, daughters, sisters, lovers. And once we were all children with hopes and dreams. Some of us are lucky to still have them.
So, no, I do not know what it is to lose a child, or be in a siege, or have my future denied because of a rampage or a bomb. But I do know how to grieve, to lose a loved one, to cry with a loss that it aches to breathe. I do know what it is to live in a world which denies itself the possibility of its own flourishing, its own becoming, all because it insists on bombs and blood and sides and the justifications of taking lives in the name of protection or vindication.
The numbers rise and my heart breaks that bit more. My heart breaks to grieve, to cry, to hold the worst humanity has to offer, and to try to coax it back to love, to believing again.
I am writing a children’s book for the future, because I have to believe in the future. I am putting my grief in there. I am putting my love and my broken heart in there. Because I want children to know what it is to wonder, and what it is to dream. Because sometimes we have to imagine the beautifully impossible to believe in the beautifully possible. And I am hoping my heart still has room to break, so I can let some more grief in. Because I know that a broken open heart is a birthplace for the possible. Because I know that grief is another word for love.
#ceasefire
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
Instructions for Creative Unblocking
Instructions for Creative Unblocking and Learning from the Creative Process.
As I embark into some new writing projects this summer, the following list contains my learnings about the creative process I want to my future self to remember. Like the application of the earning, this list is a work in progress. So, for the times I am feeling stuck, blocked, fearful or small, dear Clare, please remember…
Creativity is like lifeblood, always flowing with its own pulse and rhythm. Even when you can’t see or recognise it, trust that below the surface it is forever in motion. And just like with a heartbeat or pulse, you can tune into that rhythm with consciousness, attention and pause. Creating is an act of surrender to a deeper beat.
Remember: You create because it is something which brings you most alive to the hidden undercurrents of connection, ideas and relationship. It brings meaning to the ordinary in ways which render everything extraordinary. Life is better in creativity mode.
The beginning of each writing/ creativity session is the hardest part. Make the beginning easy. Lower your expectations and allow yourself to enter slowly. Let kindness be your guide.
Keep booking creative meetings in your calendar, blocks of unmovable time. Even if you don’t write/ paint/ make immediately, keep showing up. Something always gets impatient and shows up eventually too!
If one tool feels blocked, use another. If you can’t write, then paint. If you can’t do that, then dance. If not that, then move. Move in whatever way feels nourishing. The movement begets movement, so everything else can flow.
Remember: your job is not to make ‘good’ work. Your job is to make the best work that only you can make. Whether others think it is good, or not, has nothing to do with your creativity. What matters is that you keep seeking to make your best work yet. Then repeat again and again and again.
Trust the strange imaginings. Trust the voices in your head. Trust how characters show up in the middle of the night to whisper details and twists. No matter how mad it all seems, these are the gems which makes the work all the more distinctive, and mysterious too.
You don’t write poems, you walk into them. Your task is to be ready to catch them at any moment. Then the craft of shaping them can begin.
Remember: creativity is a co-creative process. It’s between you and the source of life itself. When you commit, life shows up too. May the dance always be about to begin.
You are never going to get ‘there’. That’s the point. ‘There’ is an aspiration, designed to keep you learning, growing, changing, exploring, evolving. ‘There’ will always move depending on your capacity. Remaining proximate to ‘there’ is a better destination.
Poetry is the place to figure out the silences. Listen. Then, listen to the silence below the silence, and write from that place.
If you haven’t reached the chaos, you haven’t gone deep or far enough. Chaos is an indicator of the wild life within a project. There are tools to help carry your through. Use them.
Every book, every poem, every photo has an original essence. The craft is to reveal that essence in as light and beautiful way as possible. There will be many attempts to reach it, and each draft can bring your closer. But mostly the essence keeps some of itself hidden- that’s the mystery, which is also the beauty. Keep working your way through the layers.
Time is not linear. What happens in flow can defy natural order. Sometimes you only need five minutes for your best work to happen. And you always have five minutes.
Leave room for the blanks.
Photography is ‘drawing with light’. What gets exposed is a matter of choice, and craft. Light is both an instrument of revelation and restraint. Less is often more. As with images, so too with words.
When in doubt, swim. When still in doubt, walk. If all else fails, just keep showing up to the blank page. It is an ocean and a mountain too. Keep moving.
Nothing will ever be fully finished. At some point you need to decide to stop so new work can arrive in too. Be willing to gift your creativity to the world, knowing there is more to come.
Making your creative work is a love letter to your deepest, most tender self. Keep making. The love letter isn’t finished yet.
To be continued….
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
New Writing Wild Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in Schull, West Cork.
New date announced: July 23rd and August 27th. Bookings via Arran Street East.
Moments to Remember
Falling in love with photography again, one beauty at a time.
Falling in love with my camera again, and what it helps me to see….
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
New Writing Wild Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in Schull, West Cork.
New date announced: July 23rd and August 27th. Bookings via Arran Street East.
The Island at the End of my Road
A short trip to Long Island, West Cork.
A short trip to Long Island, West Cork, the island at the bottom of my road. I am so grateful to the Clare who decided to move to such a beautiful place, and to all the inhabitants- human and more than human kin- who make it all possible and serve with a dash of wonder.
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
New Writing Wild Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in Schull, West Cork.
New date announced: July 23rd and August 27th. Bookings via Arran Street East.
No Now May
In honour of No Mow May, long grass, scattering seeds, biodiversity, rewilding and wrens, a little poem for the occasion. Find out more about the All Ireland Pollinator Plan.
In honour of No Mow May, long grass, scattering seeds, biodiversity, rewilding and wrens, a little poem for the occasion.
No Mow May
I don’t want a lawn,
something tamed and severed
from its own potential.
I want daisies.
I want cuckoo flowers that sing
a capella with the wind.
I want to fall down on my knees
in the hunt for rare bee orchids.
I want bees.
I want the way my legs
disappear among
the long, wet grasses.
I want the rush of it all,
the swoosh of it, seeds scattered
to the sky on each passing footfall
of my breath.
I want to explain the sun, moon and stars
of every exploding dandelion.
I want what the wren wants:
the possibility to shelter,
then to soar.
Find out more about the All Ireland Pollinator Plan and No Mo May
@allirelandpollinatorplan #NoMowMay #biodiversity#rewilding #nature #poetry #poem #pollinators
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
New Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in West Cork.
Live a New Story (May 27th) and Writing Wild (June 24th) are coming to Schull! Bookings via Arran Street East.
The Secret Worlds of Writing
Writing happens in the confluence of secret worlds. The first is the world of our head, where memory, language, images and experience, together with the internal cadences and rhythms of our inner voice, collide. There is a solitude to this world which, when we allow ourselves the time and space to explore, we find is as vast and rich as any landscape. We speak differently to how we write- how we tell our story on paper, as opposed to telling our story with voice, is a layered, textured encounter. Before utterance, there is the invitation to explore the spaces and places which comprise our inner landscape, and in doing so, expand it. This expansion alone warrants the writing, whether or not we choose to share or even develop what gets written.
You can listen to this piece below- 5 minutes.
The Secret Worlds of Writing.
Writing happens in the confluence of secret worlds. The first is the world of our head, where memory, language, images and experience, together with the internal cadences and rhythms of our inner voice, collide. There is a solitude to this world which, when we allow ourselves the time and space to explore, we find is as vast and rich as any landscape. We speak differently to how we write- how we tell our story on paper, as opposed to telling our story with voice, is a layered, textured encounter. Before utterance, there is the invitation to explore the spaces and places which comprise our inner landscape, and in doing so, expand it. This expansion alone warrants the writing, whether or not we choose to share or even develop what gets written.
From this inner world, ink is a conduit. On paper, as words make our way to our hands, the speed of the written forms, the pace in which the letters land on the page, seem to provide pause enough for new articulations and ideas to form. I’ll forever be an advocate of handwriting for this very reason. The hand-brain connection seems to reach into that private world of the imagination and access ideas from an embodied, often more emotionally nuanced or charged place. A blank page is where the first discharge of this electrical connection of body and mind is made manifest, and those initial drafts often capture the energy of a first encounter. The first kiss of ink to page holds an erotic tension, which can birth worlds. But first, we must we willing to come closer, to make the first move, to offer part of ourselves to the page.
Once we encounter the page, craft also enters. We learn how to be playful with how we place images, and then to re-arrange them. We realise it is all a wild experiment; here we get to conjure elements out of our secret world of the mind, combine with words, and figure out what ones to amplify and what to discard. Through these twin currents of assembly and disassembly, what we choose to keep and what we select to jettison, we are emboldened with a sense of agency. We are both the breakers and the makers, and, as we create these worlds, we too are made. Here is another expansion, which again, whether we choose to share the writing or not, the very act of writing is warranted.
Writing as opposed to speaking has always given me access to ways of thinking, seeing and perhaps most importantly, connecting, which the oral tradition does not. Here, on the page, my world is formed with detail and colour; where past and present converge in an emergent conversation. On the page, even the imaginal world evidences as a tangible, seen world. The pages start to fill. The ink runs low. There is something to hold. Letters as bricks. Sentences as bridges. Words as organic matter.
Then, beyond the first secret world, there is the second secret world: the world of the reader. From page to eye to mind and heart, words are transported in a sacred covenant between writer and reader; an invisible thread that can extend beyond boundaries, time, borders, eras, ideologies, definitions, selfhood. As a writer, what a privilege it is to have ones words carried into the body of another. As a reader, what a magic it is to have access to another's inner landscape. Not all stories have to be shared, or deserve to be shared, for that matter, but the ones that are, become alive again in the reader. Some of those words even get to live on, as mirrors to the reader’s own lives, or maps or counter-maps saying ‘go this way’, or ‘definitely not that way’. Our stories, when offered to another, take up a new residence beyond which we have any control. To share our story is also to birth the potential for new ways of being, for ourselves, for the reader, and perhaps, just perhaps for the places and spaces between. Which is also to say: to write our story, and then to share our story is to birth new secret worlds.
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
New Writing Workshops
One Day workshops in West Cork.
Live a New Story (May 27th) and Writing Wild (June 24th) are coming to Schull! Bookings via Arran Street East.
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 
Letters from Clare
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