grief Archives - The ClearOut

What’s So Great About It? – The Dubious Value of Nostalgia – Episode 169

For the second time in the show’s history, Dara is considering the questionable value of nostalgia. While allowing that there are wellness benefits to understanding the connection between nostalgia and loss, and the stark reality of nostalgia’s relationship to ageing, there is something offensive about a particular brand of generalised nostalgia that regularly raises its unoriginal head on social media.

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What Is a Man, Anyway? Part 3 – Episode 157

Leave a Comment / Podcast / Dara Clear

In this lachrymose episode and further exploration of masculinity, Dara is talking about the benefits of crying. He confesses to being a crier anyway, easily shedding tears over any number of things, but goes on to share an extremely recent loss that knocked him sideways with the tears it provoked. He argues that there is a ranking system that qualifies the when and how much of crying.

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Collective Heartbreak and Tears of a Clown, or How I Baptised my Baby Daughter – Episode 126

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In this pendulum swing of an episode, Dara is dancing between joy and pain. It is a journey that takes him from Ireland’s expulsion from the Rugby World Cup last week to the birth of his daughter 10 years ago.

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The Voice of Truth and Anguish – Saying Farewell to Sinead O’Connor – Episode 115

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In this episode, Dara takes his time to say goodbye to Sinead O’Connor and speaks of her relevance to him from the early days of her career right up to more recent times when life presented her with a terrible burden to bear. He includes a clip from Ep 34 of the show when he spoke about the death by suicide of her son in January 2022.

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Notes From a Funeral, or The Power of the Collective Experience – Episode 86

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In this episode Dara shares his experience of a recent family funeral that seemed to succeed in channelling a profound communal expression of love and grief. Because of his role in the service, he had to wait to express his own feelings.

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The Trickiness of Tone, or Do You Ever Put a Knob of Butter in Your Porridge? – Episode 79

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In this episode Dara discusses the importance of tone. Considering tone as the ultimate mood setter, he looks at it in the context of movies, public ceremonies and vocations. He also considers tone in the auditory sense, recognising it as a vibration, and recalls how thrilled he was as a child to hear and feel the rumble of the engine of the car ferry that he travelled on several times on journeys to London.

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Who’s afraid of the dark?

2 Comments / Advice for the Young and Impressionable / Dara Clear

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” ― C.G. Jung Darkness and light. A dichotomy of great purity and simplicity through which humanity examines

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Hilary

3 Comments / Short Story / Dara Clear

Hilary He felt the spade bite under his boot and promptly applied extra weight to get greater depth out of his effort. He withdrew and entered again at right angles. Thrust, push, bite, deepen, withdraw. And again at the other end. Flip the sod. Move along the line. Repeat the process. The metronome clicked in

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Good grief!

15 Comments / Advice for the Young and Impressionable / Dara Clear

Has there ever been a Miss World candidate who hasn’t declared her wish for world peace? How admirable, how marvellous, to behold the nobility and compassion of the bikini-clad, doe-eyed tiara-aspirant! Such ambition! Such gravitas! Such shiny teeth! But imagine the ripples through the universe of beauty pageantry if one of these paragons of female

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grief

What’s So Great About It? – The Dubious Value of Nostalgia – Episode 169

What Is a Man, Anyway? Part 3 – Episode 157

Collective Heartbreak and Tears of a Clown, or How I Baptised my Baby Daughter – Episode 126

Notes From a Funeral, or The Power of the Collective Experience – Episode 86

The Trickiness of Tone, or Do You Ever Put a Knob of Butter in Your Porridge? – Episode 79

Who’s afraid of the dark?

Hilary

Good grief!

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