Ripples Blog Series | Jason Kirkey

Four weeks ago we announced the launch of the Ripples Blog series. Continuing on our chosen theme of hiraeth, we offer this con­tri­bu­tion by Hiraeth Press Founder Jason Kirkey. Jason is the author of four vol­umes of poetry, most recently Estuaries. He is also the author of the award-​​winning non-​​fiction title, The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality.

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}