Making, not breaking

What do we cultivate, how can we flourish...

Read this post to learn about the genesis of ‘Weather Report’, the book.

The sky this morning, early on this first day of March, was visible, blue, and patterned by lovely high cirrus clouds. A sense of spring in the air. The mountain too was fully visible; tawny in places, dark blue in others. If I focussed I could pick out specks of white, the houses of Kilcash village on the lower slope. Above, a fat dispersing contrail across the high bowl of blue from east to west.

From east to west. What can I say? I watched ‘that’ disgraceful drama in the Oval Office on my phone last night before heading down to Brewery Lane Theatre to host the open mic Poetry Plus. In my view there was just one man in the Oval Office, just one. A real man, a real hero, a real leader. And he was wearing battle fatigues, as he always does. How he keeps going I will never know. As he wears fatigues, so he must be fatigued, physically and spiritually. Yet he carries on against what seems impossible odds. Make no mistake he was not humiliated yesterday (as I have heard reported on various news bulletins today). On the contrary he remained dignified as the office of one of the most powerful and influential global ‘democracies’ was violated, live on TV.

In the latter part of this morning I dropped in on a felt-making workshop upstairs in the Tudor Artisan Hub on the Main Street here. In the centre of the table was a colourful collection of balls of merino wool, like a multicoloured bundle of cumulus clouds. The instructor Liz Martin invited the participants to choose a ball and showed them how to pull the wool, to turn it from a ball (cumulus) into a wispy cirrus cloud. She held up her own to show a golden yellow cloud.¹

Wet-felting workshop with Liz Martin - photo by Linda Fahy of The Tudor Artisan Hub

At last night’s open mic, Poetry Plus, we had two special guest writers, Anna O’Laoghaire and Annette Condon, who shared a remarkable story of their uncovering of a family history they had unknowingly shared. One that generations ago, in 1919, put their families on opposing sides in the period of Ireland’s War of Independence. There was killing and bloodshed, families boycotted, long decades of bitterness.

But thanks to an innovative nationwide creative initiative, aimed at commemoration and reconciliation, they serendipitously met each other, were frank and courageous about their own stories and have become creative collaborators and now celebrate a lovely friendship.

Anna O’Laoghaire (left) and Annette Condon (right). Moi in the centre.

Last night the tearoom was packed and you could have heard a pin drop as Anna and Annette shared their stories, their poetry. It was a night where empathy and mutual understanding were cultivated, where more stories emerged from the audience and were shared, where hearts were touched.

This morning’s felting workshop was a gathering of people around a table, sharing skills and talents, connecting and learning under the guidance of Liz—making beauty².

If such things can be done in two tiny venues in a small rural town in Ireland it can be done (and is being done I know full well) anywhere and everywhere. Is it our work to create the conditions where empathy, fellow-feeling, love can be cultivated and then flourish? If it’s not then I don’t know why we are here.

1. Gavin Proctor-Pinney in his wonderful book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, writes of the Norse goddess of the atmosphere, Frigga, who ‘would sit with her jewelled spinning-wheel to weave long webs of cloud… Cirrus clouds look as if spun from the finest celestial silk’.

2. My earlier post on Elaine Scarry’s book, On Beauty and Being Just, would make a good companion read.