Ripples Blog Series | J.K. McDowell

A few weeks ago we launched our Ripples Blog Series. It is a themed con­ver­sa­tion of sorts, over which our authors, as well as spe­cial guest con­trib­u­tors, offer you their per­spec­tive on a topic chosen by our circle of edi­tors.

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://​night​mys​teryan​d​light​.word​press​.com/