With Eyes on The Future

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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.

They say it takes 3.5%

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

Clare Mulvany