Grief and Grace

about starting over... the genesis of 'Weather Report'

The focus of today’s post is on the background to my book, ‘Weather Report’, a book that took me by surprise. I am (and had been) writing a novel! But I woke up one morning in the early days of 2022 with the casual insight that the Beaufort Wind Scale would make a very useful scaffolding for reflection. The speed with which it became an actual book (first a 14-day booklet) still astonishes me. There are many very special people in the story of Weather Report… read on to learn more.

ON GRIEF AND GRACE¹

It was the month of March, 2022. The cherry blossom continued to hold on to its pale pink presence outside the library building. ‘M’ arrived, elegant in her lilac coat, apologetic and in a rush from her work. The other participants and the creative team were already seated in a semi-circle in front of me. I had laid out a gold cloth in the centre of the circle and had lit Eileen’s blue candle. This was a gathering that needed extra special care. Death separated us and at the same time united us. The six participants had each lost their life partner during the Covid pandemic. Many decades earlier, when I was twelve, my own mother had died during a lengthy secondary school teacher’s strike. A death, especially the death of someone so fundamentally important to you, marks you out as different, it feels as though a chasm has opened between you and the rest of humanity. Although death, dying, grief is happening every day, to all people, it is always a unique experience for the individual.

I placed some small objects on the gold cloth, one by one, as if I was doing a ceremony, which in a way I was: a pair of knitting needles in a ball of grey wool; a small tin of baking powder; a gift bag; a crumpled piece of purple tissue paper; a DVD of the film UP; an ouncel; a small gift box with a lid; a purple weight from a birthday balloon. I laid each one down with care, aware of all eyes following my movements as I bent low over the golden cloth. I had earlier given each person a lap tray and some sheets of paper and a pen and jokingly added that the trays had magical properties – that no one who had used them over the many years of my writing workshops had failed to write.

I knew that when these six people had somehow found their way to us, to this project, TOSÚ ARÍS, that they hadn’t anticipated being asked to write creatively, hadn’t expected to be sitting in a circle with pen in hand. This is where I placed all my trust in the work of Pat Schneider² as I invited them to take a few moments to consider the objects there before them, then to allow one to trigger some memory, some experience and to begin to write and then to follow wherever that might lead. To trust the pen.

It’s about writing, but it’s always about more than writing

This was the second of my workshops for the four week TOSÚ ARÍS³ project [pron approx 'thus-oo ar-eesh] with those who had been bereaved, suffered the loss of a life partner, at any time since 2019. The previous week I had introduced my 14-day booklet, ‘Weather Report’, with its illustrations of the Beaufort Wind Scale, and worked through how everyone might use their copy. We finished with everyone illustrating the blank back cover of their copy, making it their own, making their mark.

My own hand-illustrated back cover, dated 30th March 2022

The observable difference in the body language of the participants as they arrived for this second writing workshop, and third night of the programme, was striking. ‘L’, who had told us at the information meeting a few short weeks ago that she didn’t go out any more, fear of the virus was the reason given but I got a real sense of a person just closing in on herself. Everything about her demeanour then was quiet, small. However last night she took her seat and spontaneously shared with everyone that she had spent the morning taking down all the upstairs curtains and cleaning the windows. A real metaphor for letting in the light if ever I heard it. She beamed around at us all.

I had placed a copy of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Don’t Hesitate”, on everyone’s chair and began the workshop by reading it to the group. I drew attention to the eclectic selection of small objects I had placed on the gold, silk fabric in the centre of the floor and invited everyone to allow an object to prompt an image, perhaps a spark of memory and to begin to write and allow it to take them wherever it might go.

Again, ‘L’ was the first to want to share her writing. As she shared a piece about her mother baking bread the room seemed to fill with that smell. Just astonishing to witness how she has found her voice. Another woman, ‘A’, pointed at one of the objects and checked if it was an ‘ouncel’ - yes, it was! Not many people would have recognised it but it brought her to write a wonderful piece about newborn babies, born at home, being weighed using this tool, siblings looking on in wide-eyed wonder. Then, before it was returned to the district nurse, the ‘ouncel’ was used to weigh a salmon caught in the river by one of her brothers. Cue lots of laughter.

On it went around the circle, ‘S’ writing about learning to knit as a small girl and singing the little knitting teaching rhyme that she still remembers. ‘K’, writing about the birthday cake baked by his wife for their daughter. But because one of the side-effects of his wife’s chemo treatment was that she had little feeling in her hands, she dropped the cake tin as she took it from the oven and the cake smashed. But she told ‘K’ to make himself scarce, then made a second one and their daughter never knew of the earlier disaster.

We learned of ‘L’s trunk of memories, how ‘E’ hadn’t hesitated when she first met the man who would be her husband. On it went around the circle, with voices joining voices, some nods of recognition, laughter. We told each writer what we heard that was strong and vivid in their writing.

As a closing activity I invited them to trace the shape of their hand on a blank sheet of paper, as many of us have done with small children. Then I showed them how to add some curves and transform it into a bird, and I passed around small bags with lots of colouring pencils and markers so that they could make their bird as exotic as they wished. Any time I glanced up from my own colouring I could see that everyone had become totally absorbed in ‘their’ bird as they added colourful flourishes. Each an individual, each a wonder. I pointed out that the night was about sharing, about offering the gifts of ourselves to the group and the final action was to gift our bird to the person to our right.

‘Joy’ by Linda Fahy, director of the project, and gifted to me on that night

If it’s about writing but also about more than writing, and I believe it is, what is the ‘more’? In a group setting, it is for me about an increase in empathy, for sure. When empathy develops we become connected to each other at a deep level. And there too, is beauty, rippling out; there too are the seeds of love beginning to germinate in hospitable ground.

Marion Milner, the psychoanalyst and artist, wrote in the 1930s of seeking out her ‘daily catch of happiness’. She learned through observing herself, how important it was to go out ‘fishing’ for happiness. This is a wonderfully active way of being in the world and my own experience, of writing in Weather Report each day, of deliberately noticing beauty has been revelatory in terms of its positive effect on how I experience my ‘ordinary’ days. As Milner writes:

Writing down my experiences … seemed to be a creative act which continually lit up new possibilities in what I had seen… with a shock of delight.⁴

You can seed your own daily beauty in my 90-day journal, ‘Weather Report’, with its invitation to write or draw something you found beautiful in your day; your very own ‘shocks of delight’. In addition, the Beaufort Wind Scale is an aid to noticing and reflecting on both outer and inner weather and helps to subtly train our powers of noticing specific and particular details in the outer world (an added boon for writers and artists), while honing an ability to come back to ourselves, even momentarily. There are times when, for Inner Weather, I simply write, ‘I breathe’, and my noticing of that basic process of a breath in and a breath out is enough to bring me out of my head and into my physical being. I don’t need to strain after anything, solve anything, just be where I am.

The origins of ‘Weather Report’ are in the Tosú Arís project, and the people mentioned above were the first to use the prototype in its iteration as a 14-day booklet.⁵

A user’s guide to my book, Weather Report: A 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale.

1. This is a brief account of a writing workshop that formed part of the Bealtaine 2022 project, TOSÚ ARÍS, in Carrick-on-Suir and are examples of the writing approach and method developed by Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers and Artists. The TOSÚ ARÍS project was directed by Linda Fahy of The Tudor Artisan Hub and the creative team was comprised of Eileen Acheson, Eileen Heneghan, Sheila Wood, myself Margaret O’Brien and Pete Smith.

2. See Amherst Writers & Artists for more details on the work of Pat Schneider.

3. An Irish phrase which translates as ‘Starting Over’, a key concept that helped us as we worked with people who showed such courage in starting over in circumstances that were very challenging and in times that were extraordinary. Our task was to trust the creative arts to do the work of connection on so many levels. Thank you to the six participants of the TOSÚ ARÍS project: Alice, Brian, June, Kevin, Lily, and Madeleine for coming forward to take part in what was a very special healing initiative. You showed me what love and courage could be, what true connection can achieve.

4. Marion Milner in, A Life of One’s Own

5. My deep appreciation to my fellow members of the creative team on the Tosú Arís project: Eileen Acheson, Eileen Heneghan, Pete Smith, Sheila Wood; it has always been a joy to work with you but especially during the early months of 2022 when we brought this complex and sensitive project from concept to fruition. In addition to your generous and beautiful contribution to Tosú Arís, your responses and generous guidance as you completed your own copy of Weather Report during the project, helped me to further refine and polish it. You each shine a bright and generous light in the world, which spills out and makes everything even more beautiful. Thank you all.