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Hiraeth

 by Ian Marshall

Hiraeth: “longing”; “homesickness.” To long for something means that it is not present; to be homesick means you are away from home. The notion puts us in the position of Odysseus, the hero whose name has become synonymous with wandering—all in the name of trying to get back home. We have a bit of a fetish for home, don’t we? Especially those of us who care about the natural world. We want to restore landscapes, return them to the way they once were. We speak of the natural world as our home, the setting in which, for which, our senses, our whole beings have evolved. I think of a project I did with a class this past semester, where we read Henry Thoreau’s Walden and as an experiment in experiential learned built a replica of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. And what is a cabin but a home and a symbol of a grounded life?

But I wonder if the wandering isn’t just as much a part of our genetic make-up as the desire to be settled and at home is. Our ancestors, prior to the Agricultural Revolution, were likely nomadic, wandering from place to place, following the migrations, heading out for the spot where they knew the berries were ripening, or where the water source was reliable during a dry season.

The truth is we like to wander just as much as we like to return home. The exercise of the muscles as you walk along the path, the rhythms of the road, the excitement of encountering the unfamiliar—we respond to that. And doesn’t the accompanying longing for home add a certain poignancy to the travelling? That element of something absent—the knowledge that at the end of the road lie the comforts of home—doesn’t that add some emotional depth to the journey?

Ah, but here’s the rub—the blister on the hiker’s heel. We can’t do both at once, can we? We can’t be at home and on the road at the same time. We can yearn for home when we’re on the road, and we can feel the itch to be on the road again when we’re at home—but we can never have it all. There’s a law of nature inherent in all this—maybe it’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which says that in the realm of subatomic particles we can measure the position of a particle, and we can measure its velocity, but when we find one we lose the other.

Maybe now I’m leaving the realm of science and entering the realm of philosophy—specifically Buddhist thought, with its sense that existence is marked by suffering, dissatisfaction, and desire. Always, it seems, there is the longing for where you are not at the moment. Is it too quirky to believe that there is something to savor in the longing for that which is absent? Part of the joy of a journey is the planning beforehand (when you’re still at home), the reflection afterward (when you’ve gotten back home), just as part of the thrill of the road comes from the anticipation of the return home.

Our nomadic ancestors, it occurs to me now, may not have been much angst-ridden while they were out wandering. For while they may well have travelled a great deal, they likely did so in circuits repeated annually—a trip to the seacoast for salt, a trip to the mountains for berries, to a sheltered valley for the winter. It was all home, and every long, longing step was a return.

 We will be starting up the series again later on in the year with a fresh theme and new perspectives. Until then, we would love to hear your feedback on the series and perhaps suggestions for the next theme. Tell us your thoughts by clicking here »

Each year Hiraeth Press donates 1% of its annual profits to an eco-charity of our choice. This year, in honor of Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall, we have chosen the IAT (International Appalachian Trail) as the 2012 recipient.

   

We are passionate about creativity as a means of transforming consciousness, both individually and socially.  We hope to participate in a revolution to return poetry to the public discourse and a place in the world which matters.  Of the many important issues of our times we feel that our relationship to the environment is of the most fundamental concern.  Our publications reflect the ideal that falling in love with the earth is nothing short of revolutionary and that through our relationship to nature we can birth a more enlightened vision of life for the future.  We believe that art and poetry are the universal language of the human experience and are thus most capable of transforming our vision of self and world.

Hiraeth is a  word of Welsh origin. Loosely it translates as a “longing” or “home­sick­ness” or “a longing for some­thing our soul once knew.” Drawing from his love of verse and landscape, Jason reflects on poetry as a form of longing—be it to connect with the beauty of earth or to a deeper part of ourselves.

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The Ecology of Longing

Jason Kirkey

Poetry longs to break free from the confines of words. It wants to be something more than sound and syllables. Precisely what it wants to be is as diverse as the poets—whether they are mammal, plant, or fungus—who write it or speak it. My poetry longs to be water over stones and the feathers of heron and crow—it longs to speak in “the common tongue of mushroom and moss, sorrel and sprout.” So too, I think, these wild voices long for deep communion with the myriad of other polyphonic voices which make up this wild earth. Just as I cannot understand the bullfrog or wren, they cannot understand me in the way another human can—yet their utterances are beautiful and evocative, change me in the hearing, and influence my own articulations. Though I do not speak the language of herons and they do not speak English—we each speak the language of beauty and through it find communion.

Beauty speaks to us through longing. Poetry goes beyond understanding to the mutual enlivening of the whole earth community through the reciprocity of our longings. Any lover of poetry—or indeed any art, in the broadest sense of the word—knows that it can bring healing and wholeness to areas of the psyche which were fragmented and dis-eased. Whenever I collapse into a sense of suffering I routinely read Rumi—not to make myself feel better but to remind myself of those deeper currents of life in which everything is already perfectly good and beautiful. Through Rumi I am able to bring those currents to the surface and bring about a change in my condition or at least my perception of my condition.

Poetry is one of the great medicines for the psyche. This is equally true not only of the poetry of humans but of that inscribed by rain and rivers and leaves. My concern is whether this is true only for human minds or if it also true for the mind which is an ecosystem. Does poetry make a difference in the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest or the salt marshes of the Northeast? If the poetry of trout and sorrel can touch and affect a human being—independent of our ability to understand what they mean (I do not understand fully the behavior of deer or the poems of Yeats and yet both a beautiful and meaningful to me)—then why should our own poetry not also have some effect on the ecology in which it is embedded?

The longing of the ecosystem is not merely metaphor or poetry but an ecological reality. Longing is simply the word we use to point to a human emotion. In ecology we might call it succession. In the early part of the 20^th century an ecologist by the name of Frederic Clements put forth his ideas on the succession of plant communities toward a climax state. In brief, he argued that ecosystems develop along predictable stages toward a discreet climax which represents the ideal order of the system. In poetic terms, Clements was arguing for the longing of the ecosystem toward its own fulfillment.

This concept was held that there supported by a philosophy of the “balance of nature,” which attracted many early ecologists. The balance of nature suggests that there is an inherent balance and order to ecosystems—an ideal distribution and configuration of species in predictable relationships. The change and development—even instability—of ecosystems, much like in discreet organisms, was seen as a mark of immaturity or disturbance. Once the mature stage of climax was reached things would level off into their ideal order until an outside disturbance, like humans, came to disrupt the system. The problem with all of this is that such climax states are never reached because of the frequency of disturbance and because the climate changes at a faster rate than the ecosystem.

In opposition to the Clementsian view of succession was another plant ecologist named Henry Gleason. Although Gleason states his case too strongly when he argues against any holistic order in ecology, he provides an invaluable insight into the nature of ecosystems: complexity. Gleason’s argument, contrary to Clements’ idea that the particular plant formations associated with each successional stage are fixed, is that they are actually quite random. According to Gleason the character of plant associations is determined by the random dispersal of seeds which are viable enough to survive in a new environment. These qualities are not fixed but depend on a number of variables that are far too complex to model or to pigeonhole into a deterministic set of successional stages and plant associations. It is the “coincidental” nature of this process which leads to the structural diversity of ecosystems.

This process—of longing, of succession, of evolution—is best described as being stochastic. This simply means that there is a selection—by the whole—of random elements. Evolution by natural selection, for example, is stochastic because those traits which are most fit (as in, most integral with the rest of the ecological community) to survive are selected because they are consonant with the ecosystem’s dao—its Way. They may not fit at all in other communities—they are not universally “better” but rather contextually fit. Creativity works in much the same way by taking the random events of a life and driving them toward beauty.

The longing of the soul which constitutes our deepest self is similarly not fixed but fluctuating in conversation with the whole community of life in which we are situated. Geography—both of the landscape and of the psyche—matters. This order arises out of complexity, fluctuating with the ebbing and flowing of ecological energy, and will one day dissolve back into it. Heraclitus said that you can never step into the same river twice. And so it is with longing and the soul. It’s a different river running through us every time, in every moment, with every breath.

This, I believe, is what the Buddhists mean when they say there is no self. There is no permanent structure that we can grasp onto and declare as the definitive or ideal version of the self. It rises and falls with the rest of the trophic energy that flows through the food web. Longing is food which liberates the creative energy of beauty into form. In its resonant beauty, the ecosystem is constantly evoking and feeding us with longing, creating new structures of identity through which we in turn can feed the world with whatever beauty we create, whatever longing from the earth that we inspire—the poems of longing that connect us.

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Read past contributions to the Ripples Series by Theodore Richards, Jamie K. Reaser and J.K. McDowell. Next week we will be presenting you with a piece penned by Ian Marshall, author of the forthcoming book: Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail {Coming February 24, 2012}

On February 24^th Hiraeth Press will be releasing its first title of 2012, Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail  by Ian Marshall. This book follows Ian Marshall on his journey over the International Appalachian Trail, which runs from Mt. Katahdin in Maine up through New Brunswick and out to the tip of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. Countless books have been done to chronicle humanity’s communion with nature, from the classics written by naturalists such as Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, to the more contemporary offerings such as Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; however Border Crossings stands out as unique among its fellows. Composed of Haiku and contemplative prose Border Crossings is book of braided styles: poetry, prose and travel writing. This style, as the author explains, is akin to that of haibun—a style of writing made popular by such Japanese poets as Matsuo Bashō that merges poetic and meditative prose, literary criticism and cultural meditation.

Ian Marshall is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona and a former president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Border Crossings is Mr. Marshall’s fourth book. He is the author of Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail published in 1998, Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need published in 2003, and Walden by Haiku published in 2009.

Ian: Probably the first moment I heard of it, which was sometime around the turn of the century. I had finished hiking the Appalachian Trail as a section hiker in 1998, and I was looking for another sort of long-term hiking project—to give me something to look forward to each summer. That, and a reason to get in shape at least once a year. My partner Megan and I could only get away for two weeks at a time each summer, so we did the trail in pieces over six consecutive summers. That’s not a bad way to hike a long trail, since it’s a part of your life for a long time, and every year the afterglow from one year’s hike flows into the anticipation and excitement of planning and preparation for the next stretch.

Ian: Because I had done a book on the Appalachian Trail that combined my hiking experiences with my reading pleasures, called Story Line, I had the book in mind from the start. The plan to hike the IAT was taking shape just when I was starting to learn about haiku, and reading about the history and practice of haiku, so the plan took shape early—to combine the two experiences, hiking the trail and along the way learning about haiku. Something to keep both body and mind busy!

Ian: In my scholarly writing I have long been a practitioner of what’s called “narrative scholarship” or “autobiographical criticism,” which means to incorporate your own stories and personal experiences with your scholarly grappling with the text. I chose to do that because it made the writing more personal and engaging and accessible to readers who weren’t necessarily scholars. Plus it was more fun to write. In scholarly circles that sort of hybrid writing is considered daring, but when I started learning about haiku I found that narrative scholars like me were really reinventing the wheel. Haibun, as practiced most famously by Bashō in Narrow Road to the Deep North, is also a hybrid of genres, blending haiku with prose. Often that prose is poetically charged, but at times it’s travel writing, and at times Bashō comments on his poetic predecessors and the art of haiku—so it’s literary criticism of sorts as well. The book is called Border Crossings, then, not only because it crosses a national border from the US to Canada and a linguistic and cultural border from English to French, but genre borders as well.

Ian: Thoreau has always been a particular hero of mine, and it seems that in my writing I keep coming back to Thoreau. I tell my students that Walden is a life-changing book, and I illustrate that with my own experience—from not really getting it at first read in high school, to valuing it as a manifesto challenging conformity when I was in college, to appreciating it as nature writing when I carried it in my backpack while I was hiking the AT, to seeing how Thoreau challenges us to think about what our life is about when I was working at an unfulfilling job. Thoreau tells us to “live the life we have imagined” and build “castles in the air”—but also to put good foundations under those castles in the air. When I was working retail many years ago, I’d come home at night and read that stuff and just know that I wasn’t doing work that was spiritually or intellectually satisfying. I wanted to find a job where I could get paid to do the things that mattered to me—that would be hiking and reading books—and I figured the foundation under that dream, at least the reading books part, would be graduate school. That started me on my career path. So Thoreau has long been part of my life. Then a few years back a colleague asked me to present a conference paper on the topic of Thoreau and metaphor, and at first I begged off by saying, nah, these days I’m thinking about haiku. But while I was thinking about haiku, I started leafing through Walden and noticing all these images that could be converted into haiku. I did the conference paper, and then it grew into a book, Walden by Haiku. In the course of looking at what’s haiku-like about Thoreau’s writing and life philosophy, I inevitably started making comparisons to Bashō, whose most famous haiku is about a transformative moment of perception at an old pond. Sounds just like Henry, living on the shores of Walden Pond. In Border Crossings I make a joke at one point that even though my journey on the IAT is an imitation of Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, I’m not under any illusions that I’m another Bashō—because I think I’m Henry Thoreau! That’s a joke, of course. But I’ve sure been influenced by him.

Ian: There were so many high points, from the first day when we crossed the Katahdin Knife Edge on a spectacular day, to the last day in Parc Forillon, when we could look to our right and see whales in the bay, and in the forest to our left we saw a moose. There was a day on Mont Albert when there was mist swirling around the tableland on top, and we saw a couple of caribou when the mist lifted. There were lots of quiet moments of just plain satisfaction sitting around a campfire after a hard day’s walking. But if I had to pick just one moment, it might be the evening at Lac Tombereau in the Matane Wildlife Reserve. A subtext of our hike had become a quest to see a moose—and we’d been disappointed for a long while even though we saw plenty of sign through Maine and New Brunswick and Quebec. But at Lac Tombereau we finally saw one—several actually—which made us giddy with excitement. That night we saw a black-crowned night heron at sunset, and we heard a serenade of coyotes. There were plenty of lovely quiet moments—making biscuits on our camp stove at dinner, pumping water by rushing streams. Oh, and gobbling handfuls of trailside raspberries in the Matepedia Valley! And in terms of spectacular hiking the whole of the Chic-Choc Mountains in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula were a revelation. I guess I didn’t do a very good job picking just one moment in answer to your question, did I? There were a lot of best and most impactful moments.

Ian: There were some frustrating moments—or hours, actually—where logging crews had thoroughly torn up the trail and we couldn’t find our way. Those were times when I thought maybe we should postpone this whole trip till the trail is better established. On another day the trail had been relocated away from a lake where we were planning to stop for lunch and water; we ended up running out of water and getting pretty badly dehydrated—and very cranky—that day. But the worst was the day when my hiking partner (and now my wife) Megan and I got separated. I had thought she was right behind me, and when she never caught up I retraced steps all the way back up a mountain—no sign of her. I couldn’t figure out what could have happened and was imagining all sorts of horrible things. Then on the way back down the mountain I heard her emergency whistle as she was backtracking to find me; there had been a side trail also marked with IAT signs, and she had gone one way and I had gone the other. Actually, that was the same day we ended up at Lac Tombereau and saw the moose, so it turned out, after that panicky hour or so, to be a great day.

Ian: Probably the biggest realization is that Megan and I are a really good team, which is why we’re now married! But anything that’s hard, like a long hike or the ongoing attempt to learn how to write a decent haiku, is also a lesson in humility. There’s no one step that’s going to get you to the end of the trail all by itself, and there’s no one magic incantation that will suddenly make you a wonderful poet—or a wonderful anything, for that matter. It’s a matter of just keep plugging away, a step at a time, and with patience maybe you’ll get there. And if the path turns out to be steep and not very well-marked, well, there’s no sense getting angry about it—just do your best and during the tough sections realize that tomorrow is bound to be a better day.

I suppose I also learned that I really like the rhythms of combining physical exertion with the contemplative work (or play) of reading and writing. When you’re hiking, all the clutter of your life and your mind falls away, because on the uphill you really have to focus your energies on the task at hand (or foot), and the rest of the time you’re just caught up in this soothing rhythm and noticing what’s going on all around you. And then your mind seems more receptive to fresh ways of seeing things or of putting words together. I’d notice something along the trail—the slant of light through balsam fir, the boldness of a spruce grouse, the taste of a berry—and I’d chew on it all for a while, placing images and words together in my mind, then pause to scribble something down. It wasn’t really emptying the mind—just focusing it and reducing the clutter. It wasn’t quite the Zen state of no-mind, but at least it was narrowing it all down to one thing at a time.

Ultimately, then, the spiritually-satisfying part of the hike was not so much any sort of self-realization as it was absorption in the world around us. Haiku is really good at cultivating that, because it’s about looking outward rather than inward at the soul or psyche. Actually, there’s another sort of border crossing involved in all that, trying to get beyond that dividing line between self and world.

Ian: I just finished a project with a class at my college, where we built a replica of Henry Thoreau’s cabin—that kept me busy through last semester. I do have some writing projects underway, but I don’t think I want to talk about them until I get further along—some sort of weird superstition, I suppose, where I don’t want to jinx things. Or maybe it’s that I don’t want to put a label on it until it’s taken more definitive shape! But I’m always looking for ways to make my work and my play merge, so maybe I should find a writing project that incorporates biking, canoeing, learning guitar, and drinking good craft beer.

L.M. Browning grew up in a small fishing vil­lage in Connecticut where she began writing at the age of 15. A long­time stu­dent of Religion, Nature and Philosophy these themes per­meate her work. Browning is a two-​​time Pushcart Prize nom­i­nated author. In 2010 she penned a three-​​title con­tem­pla­tive poetry series: Oak Wise: Poetry Exploring an Ecological Faith, Ruminations at Twilight: Poetry Exploring the Sacred and The Barren Plain: Poetry Exploring the Reality of the Modern Wasteland. In late 2011 she cel­e­brated the release of her first full-​​length novel: The Nameless Man, which was co-​​authored by Marianne Browning. Browning is a partner at Hiraeth Press. She is an Associate Editor of the bi-​​annual e-​​publication, Written River: A Journal of Eco-​​Poetics. She is Founder of Homebound — an imprint of Hiraeth Press devoted to fic­tion. Balancing her love of writing with her love of learning, she is cur­rently working for a degree in Philosophy through The University of London External Programme and writing her next book — a young adult novel ten­ta­tively sched­uled for release in early spring 2013.

In honor of our press, the first topic chosen for the series was: hiraeth. As some of you may know, hiraeth is a  word of Welsh origin. Loosely the word trans­lates as a “longing” or “home­sick­ness” or “a longing for some­thing our soul once knew.” Using this as inspi­ra­tion we asked our authors to com­pose a short piece on what comes to mind when they ponder hiraeth.

Each Sunday leading up to the release of our next title: Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail  by Ian Marshall on February 24th, we will release another installment of the series.  This latest contribution is penned by J.K. McDowell, author of Night, Mystery & Light. In it he shares his thoughts on hiraeth gleaned from the maelstrom of longing and reflection.

...my steps
By J. K. McDowell

So much sadness pours over me and now this body
Is broken.  Some pieces of my Soul left years ago
And the spaces filled with greed instead of yearning.

Fountain pen ink is no match for the rain.
“I can never see you again.” The writing flees
In illegible smears. The train is leaving the station.

How does this end, this grief?  Tiny – Deep – These hidden
Punctures sometimes do not bleed at all, even
Those to the Heart, but always the suffering.

Hiraeth?  Are those the words of longing that flood this
Modern complacency? Grief leads us to touch madness,
Then art.  Then the road splits:  more art or more madness?

These wounded missteps in this meandering
Mystery lead to trailblazing for others but
They cannot bring you Home.  Follow your yearning Heart.

Something has happened, help me remember.
Jim, Beginning no longer has any meaning.
I have lost my way, even retracing my steps.

...my steps, in the maelstrom called hiraeth.

No surprise that my contribution to Ripples would be a poem.  As I draped this cloak of hiraeth around me, I glimpsed the source of these deep feelings of yearning and longing to be a result of soul loss. Most know the phrase from Thoreau: “… lives of quiet desperation.”  Across the breath of more than a century and a half that “desperation” remains.  No longer quaint and quiet seas, soul loss now stirs us into an escalating and expanding maelstrom. On the crests of these high seas, deathbed confessions tell us of lives not truly lived, regrets deep and profound.  All too often we are self-medicating on the latest craze, switching gears faster and faster, mainstreaming but not healthy.   The journey to recovery from soul loss takes a fair amount of courage.   I take seriously the Hiraeth Press mission statement about being “…passionate about creativity as a means of transforming consciousness, both individually and socially.”  This is a shared burden of transformation, to honor the creative, both in ourselves and in others.  The artist and the poet feed us along this precarious path and help us see the beautiful distance in the recovery of these pieces of our soul.  The creative arts work in both directions, pushing us to seek the authentic and attracting those parts of our soul that are secluded elsewhere. Like so much in modern life, our paths can become pathology, truths amplified along the wrong perspectives. There is no easy way, no guarantee of ultimate success yet we must cross these seas.  All that we do in this creative crusade may still lead us crashing on the rocks.  Despite the shipwreck, there are always treasures to be discovered and recovered. Blessed, cloaked in Hiraeth, we take these steps together.

– J.K. McDowell

J. K. McDowell is an artist, poet and mystic, an Ohioan expat living in Cajun country. Always immersed in poetry, raised in Buckeye country by a mother who told of Sam I Am, Danny Deaver and Annabel Lee and a father who quoted Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam. In the last decade a deepened study of poetry and shamanism and nature has inspired a regular practice of writing poetry that blossomed into the works presented in this collection. Lately, mixing Lorca and Lovecraft, McDowell lives twenty miles north of the Gulf Coast with his soul mate who also happens to be his wife and their two beautiful companion parrots. Visit his poetry blog at: http://nightmysteryandlight.wordpress.com/

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In just a few weeks, on February 24th, we will be celebrating our first release of 2012, Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail  by Ian Marshall. This book follows Ian on his journey over the International Appalachian Trail, which runs from Mt. Katahdin in Maine up through New Brunswick and out to the tip of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula.  Composed of Haiku and contemplative prose Border Crossings is a book of braided styles: poetry, prose and travel writing. It includes travel writing focused on a hike of the International Appalachian Trail, haiku that emerge from the journey, and critical inquiry into the aesthetics of haiku!

Ian Marshall is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona and a former president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. He is the author of Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail published in 1998, Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need [2003,] and Walden by Haiku [2009.]

Over the spring we will be rather quiet—working hard and trying to enjoy the nice hiking weather when we can. But come June, as summer returns, it will bring with it the latest issue of Written River and our next title: Living in the Nature Poem by Mary Harwell Sayler. This collection offers an alternative to thinking of ourselves as separate from the people, plants, and animals around us. Rather than seeking synthetic solutions or artificial means of enhancing our minds and bodies, the free verse, prose poems, and traditional poetry in this book give us a vision of ourselves as part of the earth, the environment, and the complexities of nature, which include the ups and down of human nature too.

A newcomer to the press, Mary Harwell Sayler began writing poems as a child but, as an adult, wrote almost everything except poetry. Her traditionally published works include 25 books of fiction and nonfiction for mainstream, educational, and religious markets and over 200 poems in journals, anthologies, and e-zines. She critiques poems and children’s picture books by other poets and writers through The Poetry Editor website and maintains several blogs on poetry and various aspects of writing. Away from her desk, Mary and her husband might be found restoring their cozy century-old home on a small lake in NE Florida or taking woodsy walks on unpaved roads where the only honking traffic comes from sandhill cranes.

In Mid-August, as summer dwindles and we savor the last weeks of sun-filled days, we will release the much-anticipated poetry collection, Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life, from seasoned Hiraeth Press author Jamie K. Reaser to see you into autumn.

The essence of ‘ayni’ is sacred reciprocity. Ayni emerges out of a universal perspective in which importance is placed on the relational flow of energy as a process of establishing and maintaining balance.  Ayni can be seen as a code of conduct–a sacred agreement to engage in a balanced exchange between self and other.  What is given may not be anywhere near as important as how it is given. In ayni, it is the heart that counts. Ayni can be established among people, between humans and all other beings, and between all beings and the animate Cosmos.

Sacred Reciprocity  is a poetic reflection of Jamie’s daily practice of embodying anyi as a core life principle. Each poem arises out of a conversation between her soul and something greater than her Self. She listens, processes, replies, and begins listening again. In this book, the poems themselves represent a ‘giving back’ to Nature and the greater Cosmos for their inspiration, teachings, and life force.

Jamie K. Reaser has a deep fondness for the wild, intimate, and unnamable.  She received a BS in Field Biology and Studio Art from the College of William and Mary and her doctorate in Biology from Stanford University.  She has worked around the world as a biologist, international policy negotiator, environmental educator, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide. She is also a practitioner and teacher of eco-psychology, nature-based spirituality, and various approaches to expanding human consciousness, as well as a poet, writer, artist, and homesteader-in-progress. Jamie has a passion for bringing people into their hearts, inspiring the heartbeat of community, and, ultimately, empowering people to live with a heart-felt dedication to Mother Earth. She is the editor of the Courting the Wild Series and author of Huntley Meadows: A Naturalist’s Journal in Verse and Note to Self: Poems for Changing the World from the Inside Out. She makes her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Visit her Talking Waters poetry blog.

Finally, in Mid-October just in time for the Celtic festival of Samhain, we will be releasing a poetry collection by Erynn Rowan Laurie entitled: Fireflies at Absolute Zero. This unique collection is a map of a life, written in location and longing, its calligraphy following the surreal moments between dream and waking. The poems are shaped by myth, the Gaelic poetic tradition, dream worlds, personal history, and the grey-green landscape of the Salish Sea.  From snowfall in the Hoh rainforest to the sensuality of a lover’s touch, the poems span decades of a life in motion, finally finding a home between the mountains and waters of the Pacific Northwest.

Also new to the Hiraeth Press circle, Erynn Rowan Laurie is a writer, poet, and professional madwoman living on the shores of the Salish Sea. Author of Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom, she is inspired by the early Irish poetic tradition and the place of the geilt, the mad poet, in Irish myth and literature. Born in New England, she joined the Navy and traveled to Hawaii and the west coast, where she fell in love with western Washington and has spent the last three decades getting to know the land, the waters, and the dreamscape of her chosen home.

So, as you can see we have quite a year ahead of us. In addition to our four books planned for this year, we recently launched our Ripples Blog Series and the Wild Earth Poetry Prize, which is now open for submissions. Homebound—the imprint of Hiraeth Press devoted to fiction—will be releasing a novel by Theodore Richards come April. Head on over to Homebound’s homepage to find out more.

Make room on your bookshelf and be sure to check back for updates!

We hope you enjoy our offerings over the coming year. Thank you all for your support.

- The Hiraeth Press Staff

Border Crossings centers on a personal narrative of a hike on the recently developed International Appalachian Trail, which runs from Mt. Katahdin in Maine up through New Brunswick and out to the tip of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. It includes travel writing focused on a hike of the International Appalachian Trail, haiku that emerge from that journey, and critical inquiry into the aesthetics of haiku!

As our first preview, we thought we would give you an excerpt from the introduction—let you start down the path of this journey a little early rather than make you wait until February. We hope you enjoy!

Introduction

Consulting the Map, Finding the Path

There comes a moment on a backpacking trip—not on the first day, but maybe on the second or third—when, for just a moment, the weight on your back disappears. You start out walking fully aware of the pack at every step and your internal monologue fully preoccupied with it and other similarly weighty matters. Geez, that’s heavy, you think—what do I have in there? Anything I don’t need? Ought to loosen the shoulder strap some, so it doesn’t pull so hard. How far have I gone? How much farther to go? Geez, that’s heavy. But eventually there comes that moment when you’ve found a rhythm beyond the litany of complaint, when you’ve been gliding along, taking in whatever lies along the trail—a nameless flower blooming and not seeming to miss the name—the intricate pattern of bark on a pine—a cloud sliding out from behind a tree, as if the tree’s canopy had detached and drifted away—another one of those flowers—and you are caught up in the rhythm of the walk, unaware not only of the weight of the pack on your back or the thud of each step on the trail but of any conscious thought at all. In that moment the boundaries between self and world dissolve. The cloud and the flower, and your movement and the cloud’s are all part of the same flow. We call it oneness, but it could just as easily be called nothingness for there is suddenly no you that exists separate from the world around you. Maybe it’s everythingness.

That is the moment of what I call “packlessness.” Of course, as soon as you realize that it has arrived, as soon as you say to yourself, hey, for a moment there I forgot about the weight of the pack, I forgot about everything in fact, even about me, myself, and I . . . well, in that moment the weight is back.

And you walk on. You walk on thinking about the metaphoric implications of the pack, that it is all the things that weigh you down, an unfinished task at work, an unsatisfying exchange with a colleague, the things you should have said but didn’t, the things you did say but shouldn’t have. Deadlines. Things to do. And then in the middle of thinking of all that, there’s another one of those flowers, five petals, yellow, darker yellow in the middle, you’ll have to look it up later in the field guide, and then the weight is gone again, but then you realize it’s gone so it’s back.  And you walk on.

◊

In the spring of 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō set out, pack on his back, notebook in his pack, on a hike of Japan’s northern provinces. Starting from Edo (now Tokyo), he traveled for five months, covering over twelve hundred miles. He crossed mountains, followed the northern coastline, and visited sites of literary and historical significance. Bashō’s account of the journey, Oku no Hosomichi, was published five years later, the year he died. Its various titles in translation—Narrow Road to Oku, Narrow Road to the Deep North, Narrow Road to the Interior—together suggest that his journey was to a place remote, wild, and little known, and at the same time was a spiritual quest. Featuring fifty hokku, a term which usually refers to the starting verse of a linked-poem form called renga, and written in a colloquial style called haikai no renga (the term “haiku” would not exist for another two hundred years), Bashō’s Narrow Road has no narrative center or unifying perspective or continuous plot line other than the journey itself. It remains one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature, combining travel journal with haiku (as we now call the form), poetic and meditative prose, literary criticism and cultural meditation all melded together in a blended form called haibun.

The journey I describe in the pages that follow is in part an imitation of Bashō as I conduct my own exploration into northern provinces. My path lies along the IAT, the International Appalachian Trail (or, en francais, the SIA, Le Sentier Internationale des Appalaches), a newly developed trail that picks up where the AT, the Appalachian Trail, leaves off, at the top of Maine’s Mt. Katahdin. The “long green tunnel” of the AT follows the crest of the Appalachians some two thousand miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia, and ends on Katahdin. But the Appalachians themselves do not end there. The IAT continues to follow the mountains north through Baxter State Park, east across Maine to the New Brunswick border, north along the border cut for a day’s walk, then heads northeast through New Brunswick along the Aroostook and Tobique Rivers, to Mts. Carleton, Head, and Sagamore, west to the town of Kedgwick River, then northeast again along (or on) the Restigouche River to Quebec. There the IAT runs northward through the Matapedia Valley and east into the rugged Chic-Choc Mountains, through the Matane Wildlife Reserve and Parc de la Gaspésie up to the coast, along the northern edge of the Gaspé Peninsula where it juts into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and out to land’s end at Cap Gaspé. There the Appalachian Mountains, after their long northeasterly rise, descend to sea level. The IAT is a spectacular trail, utterly gorgeous, and in places (the Chic-Chocs) offers more wild country than you are likely to find anywhere else in eastern North America.

When Bashō set out on his journey to the north, he was already a veteran traveler of trips that had led to his books Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones, Sarashina Travelogue, and Knapsack Notes. I too have turned my travels into prose—my own set of foot prints of sorts, or at least a few lengthy foot notes. My first book, Story Line, followed the Appalachian Trail north to Katahdin, considering what we can learn about places along the way from the literary works set there—Henry Thoreau’s essay “Ktaadn,” for instance. My second book, Peak Experiences, was about mountains, and how literature can serve as guidebooks to show us the way upslope to psychological satisfaction in the natural world. My third book, Walden by Haiku, was my first venture into learning how to haiku, as I converted some of Thoreau’s more imagistic prose in Walden into haiku form and explored the parallels between haiku aesthetics and Thoreau’s writing and lifestyle.

On his travels, Bashō was accompanied by Sora, a friend and fellow poet and traveler. I too had a companion, M (the first letter of both her given name and Mooseless, her trail name), colleague, partner, fellow traveler, scholar, poet, and significant other. Bashō had to say goodbye to Sora partway through his journey, but M and I made it together all the way from Katahdin to Cap Gaspé. Our travels, though, unlike Bashō and Sora’s, were not contiguous. Given the demands of teaching and parenting schedules, we were unable to get away for two or three months straight, and we had to content ourselves with a series of two-week trips over the course of six summers.

Bashō’s Narrow Road is organized in journal form, in the Japanese tradition of literary diaries known as nikki bungaku—a form not altogether alien to readers of the North American nature writing tradition, given the examples of Thoreau’s journals and nature writing classics like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. I have followed suit, offering daily trail notes and contemplations, but I have broken the narrative into six parts, reflecting the six different trips we took. The piecemeal approach to the trail had its advantages, mainly that we could do a lot of reading between trips, and we could make the anticipation of planning and the contentment of reminiscence last that much longer. We also deviated from Bashō in our means of locomotion. Besides using a car to get to the trailhead each year, we didn’t always walk the trail. Since the IAT is new, there are stretches, mainly through eastern Maine and New Brunswick, that follow roads and rail trails. We didn’t look forward to lugging backpacks along roadsides, so we arranged to cover that part of the trail on bikes. In northern New Brunswick, we opted to canoe sixty miles on the Restigouche River, which is considered a valid alternate route for the IAT. Our version of Bashō’s “Narrow Road,” then, was not always a hiking path.

Shared wandering aside, I am well aware that I am no Bashō. (My friends and colleagues can attest that I don’t imagine that I’m another Bashō. Far from it—I think I’m Henry Thoreau!) But I turn to Bashō and the way of haiku because I believe we in our time and place, so far from Bashō’s, stand to learn something from haiku and haibun. Something about those moments of packlessness, perhaps, which are akin to haiku moments. Haiku is the attempt to hold on to those moments of egoless belonging to the world, to catch part of the flow, and an attempt to describe those moments and make them available for contemplation. We can learn from haiku something about a right relationship with the natural world, about selflessness and the integration of self and world. And so I mean to proselytize here, helping to spread the word about haiku. (OK, it’ll be more than one word, but they’ll be simple ones, and mostly adding up to something less than seventeen syllables.) In haiku we find a literary model for ecocentric thought, moving beyond a solely human perspective in order to see clearly the “more-than-human world” (as David Abram calls it) on its own terms—but without erasing the human perceiver that is part of that world.

♦

Buoyancy

by Jamie K. Reaser

My mother had been a life guard in her teens. She taught all three daughters how to swim. Most attentively, she taught all three daughters how to float. I can still feel her cradling my head in the palm of her right hand, her left hand firmly at the small of my back. “Relax,” she directs as she releases my body to the mercy of the sunshine and pool and lets her hands descend into the tepid water.

Mom said that floating could save our lives someday. I wake up from nightmares having been saved from sure demise by floating.

Buoyancy is the property of floating on the surface of a liquid or in a fluid.  The science of buoyancy was discovered in the bath room; specifically, in the bath of Greek mathematician, physicist, and inventor Archimedes. At the time, Archimedes was, among other things, contemplating methods for determining the weight of the gold in the king’s crown. So excited was he, so the story goes, that Archimedes leapt from the tub and ran naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!”

Fantastic.

Archimedes’ principle holds that the buoyant or lifting force of an object submerged in a fluid is equal to the weight of the fluid, as measured by the volume of fluid displaced.

Bobbers don’t displace much water. They float easily – red above, white below the waterline – and keep the wriggling bait at just the right depth for piscine allurement. When I was five years old I caught a five-and-a-half pound largemouth bass on a big stick and long line. He pulled the bobber all the way under and I had to hold on tight to get him in. I fell in love with that fish. He was sleek, mottled green-brown, and had big golden eyes. I visited him several times over the course of the day; my father had placed him on a stringer at the end of the dock, next to the ten pound bass he had caught on a real fishing pole. When the cool of evening came, I skipped down the planks to say “goodnight” to my friend.  Both fish were gone.

My mother served bass for dinner that night. I stared at the plate in horror.  Stared in disbelief. My father had let his fish go, and murdered mine. I imagined the terror and excruciating pain my fish experienced as his head was being severed from his body. I felt horribly guilty...no, ashamed…for having caught him – for having pulled him gleefully from his grand watery home with a sense of childish pride and accomplishment. I cried hard, refused to eat, and lost a piece of my soul.

Is buoyancy of spirit something all beings are born with? From my window I’ve watched a doe introduce twin fawns to water. At the edge of a large grassy meadow there is a medium-sized, murky pond.  One end of the pond shallows into a muskrat thoroughfare and spring-fed pool. It is here that the brave wood frogs breed in late winter and here that the gentle deer come in spring through summer.

The doe casually wandered down the ferny bank and into the muskrat thoroughfare, water just reaching her knobby knees. The fawns looked at her quizzically, cocking their heads. Then each, in turn, stepped in with a single forehoof, then the other. And then, there was pure riotous joy. Water and mud took to the air and nearby vegetation as the fawns jumped and pranced and skipped into the pond and back out again, kicking up their heels. Again and again they pounced and sprang. Until, finally, they had thoroughly exhausted their dappled selves. I smiled and laughed. What sprightly innocence.

The doe looked my way and our eyes met. I’m sure she asked me, “Do you remember?”

Not everyone holds on to cheerfulness as an optical lens. On May 23, 1885, the S.S. Wisconsin was steaming across the Atlantic from Liverpool, England to the United States amidst a field of majestic icebergs – some floating as much as 70 feet high and spanning 200 feet long. Immigrant Percy Groom wrote in his journal, “One large pile of ice had as a passenger a polar bear. This boy was no doubt beyond his depths, as when the iceberg melted, which it surely would do, then the bear would be without a footing and while very clever in water, they have to come up for breathing, and eventually the poor bear would become a victim of its own thoughtlessness.”

There are times when we lose our insightful footing and need help to stay afloat. In such moments, Buddhist nun and wisewoman Pema Chödrön suggests that we simply “abandon hope.” A defeatist she is not. “If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated,” she says, “then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path.” The path is one of heart and mind consciousness. It’s a path of becoming comfortable with uncertainty and befriending fear.  It’s the principle of floating while fully acknowledging the rough seas on which we are bobbing.

“Relax,” my mother had directed.

A few deep breaths usually help. To be buoyant is to recover quickly from adversity. It is to be resilient. Resilience is a word you need to know. It is a concept that should be swimming around in your consciousness at this time, fervently. “What capacity do humans and other forms of life on Earth have for resilience in the face of rapid environmental and socio-economic change?” Scientists are asking this question. So are policy makers. I’ve been told that a few insightful parents have started to ponder it as well.

Interestingly enough, polar bears may have developed some resilience to warming temperatures by inter-breeding with Irish brown bears during a previous period of climatic stress. According to a study released in July of 2011, all polar bears living today may be able to trace their maternal ancestry back through 20,000 to 50,000 years-worth of grandmothers to a single female brown bear who roamed in or near the vicinity of Ireland. This gives some people hope, but not Steven Amstrup of Polar Bears International. The warmest global mean temperatures that polar bears likely experienced were about one degree Celsius warmer than current temperatures, and climate models suggest we will exceed those conditions within this century.  “Crossbreeding or not” says Amstrup, “polar bears will not be able to undo 150,000 years of evolution, or even 20,000, in 50 years.”

I know only two generations of my material line. I ‘floated’ in amniotic fluid of my mother’s womb for approximately nine months, and she did the same in her mother’s womb. My grandmother’s mother would be my great-grandmother, the first of a long line of ancestral woman who I never met, but who I do know ‘floated’ in their mother’s wombs before coming into this world.

We become human while in a state of ‘floating.’  Do you remember?

At times I find it somewhat odd that I’ve spent so much of my life learning how to be buoyant. We humans are supposed to be terrestrial creatures. But somewhere deep inside me there is a memory of being immersed in tepid waters, and too of a knowing that all that was required of me was to relax and be.

I wonder if this is the basis of all longing.

Mom, wherever you are, I want you to know that you were right. Floating, on most days, saves my life.

____________________________________________

© 2012/Jamie K. Reaser

Jamie K. Reaser has a deep fondness for the wild, intimate, and unnamable. She received a BS in Field Biology and Studio Art from the College of William and Mary and her doctorate in Biology from Stanford University. She has worked around the world as a biologist, international policy negotiator, environmental educator, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide. She is also a practitioner and teacher of eco-psychology, nature-based spirituality, and various approaches to expanding human consciousness, as well as a poet, writer, artist, and homesteader-in-progress. Jamie has a passion for bringing people into their hearts, inspiring the heartbeat of community, and, ultimately, empowering people to live with a heart-felt dedication to Mother Earth. She is the editor of the Courting the Wild Series and author of Huntley Meadows: A Naturalist’s Journal in Verse and Note to Self: Poems for Changing the World from the Inside Out. She makes her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Visit her Talking Waters poetry blog.

In honor of our press, the first theme we have chosen for the series is hiraeth. As some of you may know hiraeth is a  word of Welsh origin. Loosely the word translates as a “longing” or “homesickness” or “a longing for something our soul once knew.” Using this as inspiration we asked our authors to compose a short piece on what comes to mind when they ponder hiraeth.

Each Sunday for the next six weeks leading up to the release of our next title: Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall we will release another installment of the series.  This first contribution is penned by Theodore Richards author of Cosmosophia and Handprints on the Womb. 

Two rivers meet here
One, the river of belonging, flows from our past
Reminding us of who we are
That we have been birthed in love
Reminding us that we need to look nowhere to find it
Another, the river of longing, flows from this moment
Into the possibility of the future
The ever-not-quite-ness of now.
Here, in the heart,
At the confluence of longing and belonging,
At the chaotic matrix of each moment,
Awe-some and Awe-ful,
Terrific and Terrible,
Love is born.

“At the Confluence of Longing and Belonging”
Originally published in Handprints on the Womb, Theodore Richards, 2009

Hiraeth: Longing for Belonging on the Banks of the River Teifi

In the memory of my grandfather, Rev Thomas Richards

&

My great-grandfather, Rev T. Teifian Richards

On the banks of the River Teifi, just before river meets sea, there is a small town called St. Dogmael’s. The ruins of a small abbey make something like a town square, but there is little more to speak of in the town.

I take a picture of the abbey and send a postcard home to my grandfather.

I follow the banks of the river a downstream. Little British houses become at once more sparse and spare until all that remains is rock and water and heath. This is a place for the birds and the fishes to comingle. The human has always been a visitor here, a wayfarer, or, at best, a participant.  It was here, among the mists and wetlands, at the very edge of the Old World, my ancestors learned to be preachers and poets.

I have come to Wales to remember.

I have taken the long road here. This was the only way. My ancestors had reached the edge of their world, the Old World, and leapt off into the sea to find a new one. Some things remain: we still know how to use words. We make worlds with words. This is all we have left, now that we live in paved-over spaces, now that the screen is there instead of the River Teifi to listen to us, to teach us.

There are some places that cannot be reached by plane. I have taken the long road to the River Teifi: A bike ride along from Fishguard along the rugged Pembrokeshire coastline; the train from London to the very end of the line in Fishguard; then, before that, a journey from America to Asia, across that vast continent, through the jungles of Southeast Asia, the chaotic welter of China, the empty highlands of Tibet, the smells of the subcontinent and the deserts and rhythms of the Islamic world. I have reached the River Teifi by going the opposite direction.

I have reached the River Teifi of my ancestors, finding my future through the past, longing for belonging to place.

When I finally return to America, my grandfather is smiling. This little house, he tells me, pointing to the postcard I’d sent from St Dogmael’s, is where his father was born.

As I stand on the banks of the River Teifi, I wonder if it is possible to return to the river of my ancestors. I remember other rivers I’ve seen on my journeys: The Nile, wide and slow and heavy with ancient memory and symbol; The Ganges, crowded with dead bodies and wish-bearing candles and garbage, all headed to the deep and empty sea to be fulfilled.

 

 

Theodore Richards, PhD, is a poet, writer, and religious philosopher. He is a long time student of the Taoist martial art of Bagua and hatha yoga and has traveled, worked or studied in 25 different countries, including the South Pacific, the Far East, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Theodore has received degrees from the University of Chicago, The California Institute of Integral Studies, Wisdom University, and the New Seminary where he was ordained. He has worked with inner city youth on the South Side of Chicago, Harlem, the South Bronx, and Oakland, where he was the director of YELLAWE, an innovative program for teens in Oakland created by Matthew Fox. He is the author of Handprints on the Womb, a collection of poetry; Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism, and the Birth of a New Myth, recipient of the Independent Publisher Awards Gold Medal in religion; and the forthcoming novel, The Crucifixion. Theodore Richards is the founder and executive director of The Chicago Wisdom Project and a dean and lecturer on world religions at The New Seminary.