Making mandalas on the windswept beaches of Co Mayo is not a usual pilgrimage through grief on the wild west coast, but for Dublin-born artist Anto O’Brien, it helped ease the deep sadness felt after the untimely death of his life partner Diana Pendlebury in May, 2023.Three years later, he has created a photographic and poetic book entitled, The Mayo Mandalas: A soul journey at the heart of the Wild Atlantic Way. It is a moving meditation on love and loss, where he juxtaposes “the stability of words and the fleeting beauty of the sand mandalas” to illustrate this journey which “as yet, has no ending”.Fundamentally, sand mandalas originate in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and symbolise the transitory nature of material life. Tibetan sand mandalas are usually constructed by monks and invoke sacred symbols of the tradition’s deities and the cosmos of consciousness.O’Brien is a lifelong practitioner of Vedic mantra mediation and met Pendlebury in India at Allahabad, on the banks of the Ganges. “We were both on a trip to the Mahakumbh Mela in 2001, organised by a mutual friend. She was from London and worked as an alternative medical healer, a homeopath, after 25 years working as a medical researcher in St Bartholomew’s Hospital,” O’Brien explains.It was love at first sight for him, he laughs, but Pendlebury, who wasn’t quite as impulsive, took a little more time.Diana and Anto. However, by 2006 they had purchased a cottage near Louisburgh, Co Mayo. He was very familiar with the place since his childhood excursions with his mother, the renowned landscape painter, Kitty Wilmer O’Brien.“To live here was Diana’s choice, as she wanted to be within walking distance of the sea and I wanted to be within walking distance of the village,” he tells The Irish Times.Both were separated, had adult children and agreed there was no need to marry again. “But we were ‘an item’ for 22 years and lived together for nearly 20 years,” he says. “She was very thoughtful, conservative, thorough and considered. Very English, in as much as she considered me very Irish and impulsive.”Over those two decades, their lives in Louisburgh followed a steady pattern, with Pendlebury a dedicated homeopathic practitioner and reiki teacher and Anto occupied as a potter and musician. Walks by the nearby rosary of resplendent beaches were also important, as well as lots of cups of tea, cuddling their cats and hosting guests.Anto, Diana, Katya and Blondie. “One day, in March 2023, as Diana paddled in the waters of the back beach at Oldhead, I was making a mandala, drawing a circle in the sand and inscribing the names of two departed friends and two beloved dogs,” he recalls. “I then surrounded this with six segments, each bearing a symbol from the Buddhist mantra of compassion, when I turned to Diana and remarked [that] one day our names would be within this circle.”Pendlebury died just a few days after her final diagnosis of colonic cancer. “She hadn’t been feeling well over the previous two months and an X-ray had shown a shadow on her pancreas, but she was not too concerned and dismissed it. She concluded that pancreatic cancer is usually fatal, so if it was that she would not go through chemo and it would be palliative care if it was the case and then life simply went on as normal.”However, the final diagnosis of colonic cancer came only three days before she died. Her legs had swelled up with edema and she suffered liver failure. “Thankfully, Diana’s death was unusually beautiful, surrounded by light. [It was] very serene, peaceful and tranquil. I attributed this peacefulness to morphine, but the palliative care nurse said Diana was on almost no medication or pain relief, that the peacefulness ‘was her’.”A year after Pendlebury death, British-Canadian travel writer Rory MacLean came to stay with O’Brien and each day the two of them would go to Oldhead beach.He writes in the preface to the book: “At low tide, I watched him pick up his artist’s pen – six screws set in a wooden block at the base of a walking stick – and draw. He worked quickly and in silence, absorbed by his spreading work and dwindling time, a spontaneous and free-flowing weave radiating outwards to suggest a spiral.”Old Head Beach, towards Croagh Patrick. When finished, he would step back, “and, in the shadow of sacred Croagh Patrick, we waited for the tide to come in and lap away his creation”.Of course, MacLean wasn’t the only beachgoer watching this solitary man make art. One person suggested he was under the direction of aliens who wanted to land their spacecraft on the spot. In the words of Anto O’Brien:I am just a wave,and you are a higher wave?But when the wind drops?The Reek’s stark white teethtear the soft underbellyof the storm-dark clouds.