Sunday Miscellany, RTÉ Radio 1
Broadcasting House, Radio 4
Summer solstice has passed.
The days are on the turn again… so do not waste these beautiful evenings. Go outside, bathe in the sun’s light, the beauty of a garden.
A friend sent me a recording from Grace Wells on RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany.
Grace lives in west Clare and makes a point of marking the summer solstice.
Hers is a hymn to the light and to Ireland – to the rugged Kerry mountains and to the Connemara Bens.
It’s a prayer to beauty – the “metallic glitter of the sun on waves”.
She celebrates both summer and winter solstice by visiting the Clare dolmen, Poulnabrone.
It’s the site of the most ancient rituals and its stones connect her with the natural world and to times very long past.
She makes a vow not to squander her days on earth, not to take the beauty of this world for granted.
Grace Wells’s writing is lyrical and magical – she touches something deep within us all about the meaning of life and the beauty of this world. She makes you want to rise for the dawn.
This is poetry really. Just listen, then step outside and breathe in deeply. Carry the memory in your heart when winter dark throws a black shawl over your soul.
And elsewhere, on the radio, there are moments that linger too.
Sunday’s Broadcasting House has a regular “slow radio” slot where listeners send in a sound recording – a slow moment in time to savour.
Following the recent death of Roger Payne, the man credited with playing a vital role in saving the whale, Nick Davies sent in a recording of the song of the humpback whales.
Roger would take a cello down into the bilge, rest it against the keel of the boat and play to the nearby whales, he said.
What we heard were weird, unearthly cries – sounds that are both surprisingly beautiful and other.
They seem to carry a lament for the whales’ plight – how they have been hunted down by man.
Payne released an LP, Songs of the Humpback Whale, in 1970 and left people enthralled. Other musicians took the strange music to their hearts.
Listening back to Grace Wells and to the song of the humpback whale is a lovely way to spend a warm midsummer’s evening.
