perhaps your tide is out
{REST series} on Ebb and Creativity :: guest post from Clare Mulvany
Hello friends,
I’ve gained so much personally from this gorgeous mini-series of guest posts on REST over the last few weeks. I’m delighted to share this final gift of a post from with you today. Clare and I were chatting about ideas around creative ebb and flow and how important EBB is to our creative practice. The resulting piece she has written is so resonant for me personally, I hope you all also enjoy. Do share your thoughts in the comments below. Plus - below are easy links to catch up on week one with on what rest actually is, and week two with on how Human Design can help us to be more at home in ourselves.
I’ll be back to normal service next week with lots to share - more on the Sitting in the Dark Sessions, the next round of Element Sessions (WOOD), and my All Fours chats with
and , plus I’m excited to share about my writers residency, about my relationship with money, and about how I managed to get myself an agent … plus some other ideas I’m mulling over still for my paid community, but will share soon….ANYHOO, that’s enough from me for now … over to you and your wise wonderful words! {and if you can listen as well as read, please do, there’s extra gifts from Clare in the audio, too :-) }
Ebb Times & Lessons for our Creative Tides
I watch the tide shift and turn. Waves are heartbeats. The systolic pulse of the earth’s waters, threaded to the moon. At my feet each wave is a reminder: that to let go is also to let come; that tucked behind the rhythm of flow, is the sure tug of ebb. The cycle is continuous: from time immemorial, right at my toes, an eternal beat of retrieval, then release.
I have been living on the West Coast of Ireland for almost eight years now. It had been a dream of mine, a simple one: to live by the sea, not retire to the sea, or die by the sea, but to live by the sea. Now, all these years on, it’s what I’m trying to do, to really live by the sea. From my upstairs desk I watch the harbour breathing, then time myself against the tides. High tide swims are my favourite; the full immersion experience, and full moon swims particularly so. Living in cycles, time as a heartbeat, as a moon, as a tide, as a season; change is the one constant. It’s the daily incantation of ‘this too shall pass’. Each wave always breaks at some point, only to be reconstituted as ocean. Outside my window, the sea is teaching me: there are other ways to move through the world, we just need to remember.
In always on, push, and linear trajectories of growth, it is easy to forget that the process of recession, of deceleration, is integral not just to a pace of growth that is sustainable, but to the type of growth which honours life itself. Rest and withdrawal, in that sense, is a generative act, itself swimming against the tide of an upstream current of more is more. How about rest is more; pause is more. It unravels a string of questions. What might it be if we build reciprocity into our systems, with regeneration its central pivot? What kind of economies might we have then? And institutions? How might we spend our days, our money, our time? When we centre the ebb in the very same core as flow, our wholes are bound to metrics of scale which affords the time that our earth needs to recuperate. There is winter for a reason.
Lessons from the sea, of course, are lessons for the page, or pen, or any creative act which requires some kind of change within ourselves; which is to say, all creative acts. In thinking about ebb as a teacher we are pointed towards ebb as a site of replenishment too. Within the eddies and the ebb, the tide of our energy, ideas, and creative force can gather surge, to quicken at its own pace, then flow and unleash, until it’s time to retreat again. And so the creative cycle spins.
When it comes to creating work, I think I am more wave than rock. I tend to create in bursts. I give it all in a mad sprint, working solidly and sometimes as unrelenting as a West Cork storm. It’s electric and energising and I can feel a great current of ideas and power surging through me. I have been learning to go with it, knowing by now, that the pace will change. The rest is coming, necessarily so.
Balance is a misnomer here too. There is nothing static about a pulse, and to seek to achieve absolute balance is to be chasing a fallacy. Stand on one leg and you will soon realise. The muscles are continually twitching, re-adjusting, making micro-movements to help us find our centre and stay upright. I create like a one legged tree pose, externally composed, but just below the surface, frantically making adjustments, until it is time to release again. The beat demands it. Stepping away from my creative work, I sometimes sense to take even more. I usually need some distance of at least a few days to hear its true rhythm. If it is writing, I read the work aloud, then again, then again. The work needs some space to breathe. I do too.
I’m not such a believer in creative blocks. I think sometimes it is just that the tide is out, and we mistakenly label the slow as procrastination, or worse still, we label ourselves as lazy or, even more tragically, convince ourselves that we are intrinsically incapable of producing anything worthwhile. Lots of people step away for good right about now; haunted, perhaps in addition, by old voices of ‘you are not good enough’ or ‘your art/words/ creativity/ ideas won’t amount to anything’. It is a nagging voice which follows many of even the most assured writers, creators and activists I know. I don’t think it’s pushing that will spur us through. I think it is something more radical: reframing our narratives around our need for rest. In any case, I think our work is always in a state of becoming, even if it is out of sight for a while. Instead of blaming and shaming ourselves, what if we celebrated taking the time we need, in order to inhabit our own tides of time and return. For our work, our art, our voice, it will return, if we let it. In sea I trust.
I write all this knowing full well I have a third draft of a novel waiting, and another in development. Over the last month, I have stepped back a while. I sometimes wonder what my characters get up to when I am away. Other times, I take them on walks with me, we skim stones on the beach, and I ask that they sit down beside me on the rocks, listening to the deep churn of what seems to make us all tick. When I return to the edit, I see the work more clearly. I’ll whittle, pare, parse to the constituents. I see the intentional gaps- the spaces where the imagination has been given room to roam, and perhaps give my characters some more room too. And, with fresh eyes, I also see the spaces which are demanding more presence. This character is asking for a gleaming detail - a faded hat, a bent little finger, a flower behind his ear: something to make the whole story sing (he told me by the shore). Or this location needs me to take up a stronger position- like a photographer or a painter would, and describe the scene from this particular angle, in this particular light. So I hunch the narrator low, eye to the ground, and can see now the way the character’s feet shuffle, and the way the light is falling aslant from a tiny crack in a hidden doorway. He knocks, and the whole world opens. Yes, it’s the way back in. With fresh eyes, beginners mind, the world of the novel, the image, the idea, opens up and speaks. Only sometimes it take the space of the sea and the shore to help me notice. And time. Beautiful time.
Creative life takes time. It is its own particular form of labour. Our quiet, our retreat, our own ebb is the fuel which can in turn fuel art, and art is the thing that can fuel revolutions. We are here for evolutions too, of systems and metrics and the economies of what it takes to keep lifecycles turning. So, please, give me the pulse of the shore, give me the time of the moon, let the tide sweep over me. I’m emerging, carrying worlds. What is that phrase again? Here, I’ll reframe it: Never underestimate the power of a well-rested woman. From my upstairs room, I can hear the tide more clearly now, and, yes, it is just about to turn.
Below paywall for paid subscribers are some thoughtful reflection prompts, as well as an audio recording of the piece read by Clare.
About Clare:
is an educator, facilitator and author living in West Cork, Ireland. A graduate in International Education from Oxford University, she has been leading transformational learning programmes for over 20 years across the globe, weaving the strands of creative practice, service leadership and social justice. She is the author of One Wild Life- A Journey to Discover People Who Change the World, and her writing and documentary photography has appeared in places like On Being and The Irish Times.A Social Entrepreneurs Ireland Awardee, she was a founding member of the leading education NGO, Suas; a co-founder of the cultural agency, The Trailblazery, and is the founder of Thrive School and The Wild Edge. She is a guest lecturer and facilitator in University College Dublin’s Innovation Academy, and Portal, Trinity College Dublin's Innovation centre. A qualified coach and mentor, Clare has supported hundreds of individuals and teams to bring their creative visions to life through values based leadership and creative entrepreneurship.
Aside from everything else, the sea and her dog bring her infinite joy.
She can be found at claremulvany.ie, thriveschool.ie, The Wild Edge on Substack and on Instagram @onewildlife.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to beauty & bone to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
 | A guest post by
|