Thank you Sinéad

on being a conduit for beauty and truth

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” - JOHN KEATS, Ode on a Grecian Urn

The loss of Sinéad O’Connor overnight has left me heartbroken in a way I wasn’t expecting.

For most of her life she spoke truth to power in the face of immense hatred while making the most sublimely visceral music with guts and heart. She took on the patriarchy and Catholicism giving voice to her own personal trauma and the collective trauma of Irish women, and women worldwide.

I’d never heard of the patriarchy when I saw her perform in Dublin 30 years ago.

She was wild and untamed, beautiful and angry and vulnerable. She was a whole woman. I’d left home and travelled half way around the world in search of a place where I could be myself and here she was cracking me open and bringing me home.

“The artist’s role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That’s how I see it. Otherwise, I don’t know why you do it.” - AMIRI BARAKA

In amongst the beer, she brought forth an anger and grief and joy in me, whose origins I know now ran far deeper and beyond that moment and my personal experience.

That night, and her entire life, Sinéad surrendered to being a conduit for beauty and truth, and to the discomfort and downright painful alchemical forces beyond the self that leave both the channeller and the audience forever changed.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. - JAMES BALDWIN, ‘Sonny’s Blues’

She wrapped words around the grief and anger I already felt as a woman in her early 20s in a man’s world, and as a woman who felt alienated by the type of woman society expected me to be.

Through her presence, power and ability to hold the pain of her own experience and also the vastness beyond herself, she touched the well of unprocessed grief from my paternal Irish grandmothers’ colonisation and forced migration and my mother’s mothers lineage of women cut off from their personal power, ostracised and silenced, or written off as crazy.

She opened me up to my story and to the much bigger stories I live inside and that also live inside me.

It is not easy being a conduit for so much collective pain, to surrender to it’s truth telling and it’s potentially destructive power. It’s hard on the body and the soul. Sinéad O’Connor, like any woman who dares to challenge the status quo, should have been supported and celebrated, instead she was ostracised, condemned and ultimately she paid far too high a price.

You may shoot me with your words, 
You may cut me with your eyes, 
You may kill me with your hatefulness, 
But still, like air, I’ll rise.  

from Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

Each and every one of us has the intrinsic ability to be a conduit for beauty and truth and the mysterious but so often our cultural conditioning and our shoulds, shame and hunger get in the way.

So how can we clear the channel and find the courage to hold the vastness of the mystery in the container of our everyday lives and our mortal body?

In my experience, pain and loss cracks me open and blasts the channel clear (the obstacle becomes the way I think the saying goes) but we can also consciously choose to open ourselves up to greater forces and our greatest magnitude. We can tend the ground through presence.

Either way, becoming a conduit for beauty and truth is always in service of our personal and collective freedom.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” - ALBERT EINSTEIN

Sinéad, in being a whole woman and fully herself, showed the way. Some folks say she was before her time. I don’t think so. It was her time. Her influence is everywhere now, in music, in me. She made it easier for all of us and she continues to do so, now that’s she’s gone.

I will forever be grateful for her courage and her open heart.

Yesterday my teenage daughter came home raving and raging after seeing the Barbie movie. It too touched the well of collective grief of being a woman in a long line of women in the patriarchy. Of all the things that might have enabled that, I never would have dreamed it would be Barbie! Maybe Sinéad even had a hand in that too.

In these necessary times, we all need to find ways to embody beauty and truth. To just be here, in this middle aged grey haired body, remembering how to be a whole woman is rebellion against a culture that sees and celebrates a sliver of womanhood.

Beautiful fierce Sinéad, you deserved better. May you know all that you’ve done for us. May you rest in peace and in power now Queen.

If you wanted to, how might you make yourself bigger or expand your capacity to hold a bigger story? To be a conduit of beauty and truth in service of your own and our collective freedom?

What bigger stories are you are part of by virtue of your personal identities and lineages?

Until next week, take good care and if you know someone that would also love being here with us, please share this letter, spreading the word really supports me and my work.

If you feel the impulse to support my work financially, you can join the Appetite for Living paid membership here and access the full Archive of letters and audio series, including our most recent series Alchemy in Between, on holding the tension of the mystery and the mundane and infusing everyday life with sacredness.

With love, x Amanda

P.S...

• You can listen to Sinéad’s rendition of Foggy Dew with The Chieftons, and one of my other favorites of hers Troy, on the Appetite for Living Uprisings playlist on Spotify.

• This 2022 documentary Nothing Compares cracked me open when I watched it earlier this year. Highly recommend.

• In last week’s letter, I mentioned Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, a powerful, haunting drama of a book. In its 110 pages you get a glimpse into ‘the heart of darkness that was the Magdelene laundry system’, where Sinéad spent time as a 14 year old girl. You can read a synopsis HERE on the Booker Prize website.