Wind Phone Podcasts
Podcast Episodes Featuring My Wind Phone
Featuring Amy Dawson of My Wind Phone​
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Sending a message to someone we love on the wind using a Wind Phone is a beautiful way to express grief. Amy Dawson knows the power of being able to express grief and emotions. She’s a Master Grief Coach and manages the My Wind Phone website. Amy didn’t originate the Wind Phone, but she promotes the phones on her website. The first Wind Phone was created in Japan by Itaru Sasaki, using a phone booth and a rotary phone. The phones aren’t connected to any phone lines or modern wireless service. The person using the Wind Phone can talk into the phone, expressing their grief over a loss. It’s a dedicated space for grief, private and secure. Sasaki had created a way to continue communication after the death of a loved one.
Amy knows about grief, having experienced the loss of her daughter Emily from a terminal illness just after the start of the pandemic. Amy had read about Wind Phones, and felt drawn to the phones as a way of staying connected to Emily. Connecting people with the phones, and seeing the comfort they provide, gives Amy joy.
Here’s what Amy writes about her story: As of November 1, 2023, I have located and mapped over 165 Wind Phones, and new ones are added regularly. Exceptional, caring individuals inspired by Itaru have created and installed beautiful versions of a wind phone, sacred spaces for people to reflect and heal their grief. A place where those who grieve can continue and deepen their connection to the people they love on the other side. We often hear that when there is deep grief, there is great love; it is true. Creating this website and helping others ease their pain is where I choose to channel my grief. It is my way of making any sort of meaning from my beautiful daughter Emily dying. I believe it to be a calling that Emily guided me to, and I will live the rest of my life to make her proud.
#130 The Wind Phone Phenomenon - Grief, Connection, Art, & Service
In this episode, learn about “wind phones” — what they are, where they are, who is making them, and why. Created to share a continuing relationship with someone who has died, wind phones are in our communities in some surprising places. As Amy Dawson, curator of the website mywindphone.com, says, “The concept of sending messages on the wind isn’t new… It goes back to Greek mythology, and beyond. Gods sent messages on the wind.” Find out how you can send messages on the wind through this creative and widespread phenomenon.
Ep. 1: The Wind Phone Rings True for Believers
Visit Amy Dawson’s directory of wind phones at https://www.mywindphone.com
Read Doug Brown’s essay on his wind phone experience at https://medium.com/the-wind-phone/i-visited-a-wind-phone-near-me-today-38a71c65ceb9
Podcasts Episodes About Wind Phones
A universal desire to have just five more minutes to convey our love to those who we have lost has existed for as long as humans have. For most of time, those wishing to connect with the deceased relied on mediums, until two of history’s most brilliant minds added science to the equation in hopes of inventing a direct line to the other side.
The Phone of the Wind: Connecting with Those We Grieve with Dina Stander
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​My guest Dina Stander is an end-of-life navigator, funeral celebrant and burial shroud maker. She is also the founder of the Northeast Death Care Collaborative, an author and a propagator of phones of the wind, which she discusses today. Learn more at her website: https://www.dinastander.com/
When an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, 30ft (9.14m) waves obliterated coastal communities. The small town of Otsuchi lost everything, including 2000 residents.
One resident, Itaru Sasaki, was already grieving his cousin before the tsunami hit. He had the idea of nestling an old phone booth on the windy hill at the bottom of his garden, which overlooked the Pacific Ocean. This would be a place he could go to speak to his cousin - a place where his words could ‘be carried on the wind.’ The white, glass-paned booth holds an old, disconnected rotary phone. He called it his Wind Phone.
In the aftermath of the terrible tsunami, as word of the phone spread, it became a pilgrimage site for those who had lost loved ones. In the sanctuary of the booth they would dial old phone numbers and talk to their loved ones. Interpreter and journalist Miwako Ozawa visited Otsuchi in the weeks after the tsunami. In this programme she returns for the first time since 2011 to visit the phone and find out how it has helped people to cope with their grief.
We meet some of those who regularly visit the phone and we hear their stories and listen in to their phone calls. In many ways the wind phone typifies a very Japanese relationship with nature and death and with the invisible forces that connect us all. As the residents of Otsuchi face the slow progress of rebuilding their town and the frightening reality of future extreme weather, the wind phone is a reminder of those losses that won’t be forgotten.
Presenter: Miwako Ozawa
Producer: Sarah Cuddon
(Photo: The wind phone)
