Today marks the launch of a new feature for Hiraeth Press — the Ripples blog series. From time to time throughout the year we will be presenting you with a themed conversation of sorts, over which our family of authors, as well as special guest contributors, will offer you their perspective on a topic chosen by our circle of editors. We will be posting each contribution on our website for you to enjoy. This is our way of giving our readership a little more content during those brief lulls in-between book releases.
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.
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.[1]
This river bears a little less weight, perhaps. But it, like those great rivers, bears the memory of ancestors. The River Teifi, like the Ganges and the Nile, finds less space for birds and fish amid the chemicals and garbage that crowd it. Indeed, the River Teifi struggles to be the ecology of fish and wetland and bird as well as it struggles to be the ecology of imagination to inspire today’s poet, as our minds are crowded out with other forms of pollution. At least it is not dammed — damned to become a mere trickle, stopped up like the clogged veins of the modern, polluted body.
Why do we build dams?
Why do we fear the flow of life?
In the blood
In the river
Of life?[2]
Is this even the same river? I wonder.
Maybe not, but I find some memories there, I think. As river meets sea, I find something that my ancestors found: I am at the edge.
The imagination that will take me into the great sea is not unlike the river. Like the fish swimming downstream, like a candle lit in the Himalayan foothills hoping to make it to the sea, I am yearning, longing to be birthed into the ocean. But there is another kind of longing, a confluence of longing and belonging — like the river, at once eternal and ephemeral — a longing to remember the old songs, the old stories.
These are the stories of my grandfathers, told on the banks of the river Teifi.
_______________________________________________________________
[1] Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
[2] From “The Dam”. Originally published in Handprints on the Womb.
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