Failte/Welcome

in which the mad poet introduces himself

Welcome, many new people have stumbled upon this Substack in recent weeks, due largely to the poetry that has been flowing through me. Lately poetry has been the only thing that makes sense to me.

In many ways poetry is my first language. Though I was born an English-speaking household in Massachusetts, little of what was spoken in my world made sense to my wildly neurodivergent and uncannily Otherworldly mind and heart. When I stumbled on the work of Yeats when I was very, very young, I began to find in his words (and soon after in Tolkien’s) a way of speaking that made sense to me. I have always had to make modern American English do unusual things in order to convey my meanings. John Moriarty wrote that "To learn to speak is to learn to say 'our river has its source in an Otherworld well,' and anything we say about the hills and anything we say about the stars is a way of saying 'A Hazel grows over the otherworld well our river has its source in.'“ That is the only way I really now how to speak or write or live.

I am also an herbalist, one who views the molecular language of plants as my friend and inspiration Stephen Buhner did — as living poetry. I weave together encounters between people and the medicines of the plants that have something to say to their beings. And often connect them with some of their human animist ancestors and the occasional god or saint along the way. Sunday nights I teach online classes that weave together herbalism, mythology, history, ecology, animism, and magick.

Earlier in life I was a political organizer and a freelance journalist — before I realized these were not the best professions for someone not at home in the culture. The insights and experiences and analysis from that phase of life weave in to my work as well.

Though lately this Substack has mostly been a place where my poetry is making it out into the world, it also sometimes features essays on plants, psychedelics, heretical views of old Irish gods, politics, neurodiversity, and life as an Autistic herbalist/poet/teacher/father in these times. I have a few new prose pieces brewing: an eco-anarchist celebration of kingship and a riff on David Graeber’s statement that “money has no essence” among them.

And though I do believe that money has no essence, and consider most wealth magick to be a Pagan iteration of prosperity theology that I eschew in favor of a Pagan liberation theology, at this particular moment in this collapsing culture, money is essential to meet my family’s material needs. I rarely paywall articles here, and am unlikely to start doing so with any frequency, and all are welcome to the free material here for free. But if you have a little money to redistribute, your spending a little bit of it on a paid subscription or on a class or consultation with me would be greatly appreciated — especially in a time when more and more of those my work does connect with cannot afford to. (I am in the same boat myself, having recently had to pause all the wonderful Substack subscriptions I was paying for myself.)

And, it seems only right that I end this with a new poem:

I come from a line
of drowning men
but before them
the shape shifting one

whose Bear soul remembered 
his Salmon form 
and dove down
into the waters
of the deepest well

to remember the secrets 
that hum now 
in my blood and flesh and bone 

louder than the winds
or the crashing waves,

teaching the way
of Eagle wings
that fly above the storm.