Enchanting Cello & Poetry: Embrace Serenity with Clíodhna Ní Aodáin

April 6, 2026·22 min·2 clips

Irish cellist Cleona Niedon launches a global project using music to plant 10,000 trees.

The host opens by introducing Clíodhna Ní Aodáin as an award-winning Irish cellist, composer, and environmental advocate. Her previous albums, The Celtic Cello and Celtic Rituals, are mentioned as context for her musical style. The episode's centerpiece project is the single Full Circle: Cellos for Trees, which invites cellists from around the world to contribute to a virtual forest of cellos and trees, with a goal of planting 10,000 real trees. The project was co-initiated with Brenda Nies, founder of the Cello Museum, and the single was released on Earth Day 2023. The host frames Clíodhna's music as drawing on both classical and improvised traditions, creating a genre that evokes the atmosphere of another world. The early Celtic peoples' sacred reverence for nature is cited as an influence displaced in modern culture that Clíodhna's work seeks to renew. Listeners are invited to close their eyes and let her voice and music transport them. Clíodhna introduces herself in her own voice and reads W.B. Yeats' 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree,' a poem about longing for a peaceful retreat on an Irish island. She follows with 'Take Care' by Michael D. Higgins, the current President of Ireland, which uses a tree's deepening roots as a metaphor for resilience through hardship. A traditional Celtic blessing of light is recited, with images of sunlight warming the heart like a peat fire and eyes shining like a candle in a window to welcome strangers from a storm. A rain blessing follows, asking that soft rains let flowers spring up and great rains wash the spirit clean. Thomas Moore's 'Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms' is read next, making the case that true love holds even as beauty fades, using the sunflower image as its closing figure. A second Celtic blessing centered on the soul is then recited, asking that work bring healing and renewal, that the listener never become lost in bland absences, and that evening find them gracious and fulfilled. The host closes by encouraging listeners to explore the Full Circle: Cellos for Trees project and directing them to show notes.

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