Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the concept of Meitheal and its significance?
Picking up on something else that we discussed with Mary there, the idea of the mehal. There are, it strikes me, two kinds of people in the world. There are those who think that there is wisdom in mehal, paying into the bank of communal labour because you know not the hour nor the day when you're going to need to call on the help of neighbours.
And then there are those who think that it's just a licence to freeload. To those two types, let's add a third type. One of our regular postcard writers, Keith Brennan on Hawthorne Hill Farm in Roscommon, happened by complete chance to call me an hour or two after I'd had that conversation with Mary Robinson.
He'd been processing some difficult news and he found that putting his back into a shared job of work on a neighbour's land was very helpful.
I went to a mehal in Cavan six weeks ago, called by a couple with a hill they want made into a flat garden. The car roars down grass-striped roads, ribboning round gable ends of houses, old pumps and the softnesses of fields. And there, crammed into a 30 by 15 space, a small tribe of people dig.
Chapter 2: How do different people perceive the value of communal labor?
I draw tools from the boot, it's hot and the sky holds rain. We work, spades dipping in between the blades of shovels. Joe sinks a six-foot spud bar where dark brown loam splits to metal yellow boulder clay, levers up an immense stone. Spades are shoved in to help, and three of us shuckle the thing out of the socket suck of clay. I'm here, too, to punish a thing out of the frame of me.
Burn in my shoulders, ragged flame in my haunches as I push domed barrows through claggy soil. To stop her the voice of a pain I cannot say. With pain my body can understand and speak. The work breaks. I ask.
Chapter 3: What personal experiences illustrate the power of Meitheal?
What does a mehal mean to you? Three answer. It's the perfect introverted way to socialise. to show respect to people and to have others pour love into your own place, to teach children community. Joe says later, you came to be by yourself with a spade.
I watch a father working, fetching a pick into the earth at his far reach, son, hip high, held underneath the curl of him close, breaking up the broken clay with a spade. Father to son, we are the groundbreakers, each one treasuring the other as they work. I sing to my mother as I leave, body drained by work and pain, love flows in. On Raglan Road of an autumn's day, I saw her first.
I knew that her dark hair would weave a snare that I might someday ruin.
Chapter 4: What does a Meitheal experience look like in practice?
I saw the danger and I passed along the enchanted way and I said let grief be a fallen leaf At the dawning of the day. Two weeks later, my mother died. The gravediggers leave shovels by the pile of earth. I hew the drum-tight skin of it, spade it into the grave. My muscles sing. Others grab the second spade. Once more, spade blades dipping in between each other.
Shoulders and the forearms strain, then burn, and the curve of me curling to the work as I dig to pour the clay that will hold my mother. I pour in clay brought from my own farm to hold her too.
Chapter 5: How does the act of communal work relate to personal loss and memory?
I gather the last of her to me as I work, her memory, life, words, love. And as I work I cry, and as I work I sing.
Keith Brennan there with a reflection on the value of mehal.