Seánfhocail:
Words for Once and Future Worlds
Ní seanfhocail iad seo, ar siad Seánfhocail.
All my life, I have searched for ways to express my experience of the world as alive, knowing that all of life depends on our species remembering this fundamental truth.
From a very young age, I was drawn to the voices of other times, Otherworlds, and other species that gave context to the thoughts, feelings, perspectives, and perceptions that I was having that did not fit within the unspoken but all-pervading cosmology, epistemology, and ontology of the culture I was born into. Poetry became a way of bending a language shaped by those assumptions into forms that could give expression to my own experiences.
Seanfhocail is an Irish word for proverbs and folk wisdom — it literally means “old words.” While I have learned much from the traditions of my Irish ancestors, I am not embedded in the folkways of a living culture. Rather, I am an Autistic herbalist and poet and priest living across an ocean from, but along the same granite spine as, the people I am descended from, who is slowly integrating the language my great-grandparents spoke one word at a time, and finding what new meanings they take on in the context of my life. So, these words are not old words, they are my words, they are not seanfhocail, they are Seánfhocail.
And yet . . . my intellectual roots in the seemingly antithetical realms of post-structuralist critical theory and Deep Ecology tell me my words are never solely mine alone. My body, my life, my experiences are the terrain through which a wild river of consciousness flows. It is a river with many tributaries: the memories and understandings and voices of my ancestors of blood and spirit, of human and wild kindred, of the living spirits of the land I inhabit and of my ancestral homelands, of people and plants and fungi and animals and stones and stars and gods who have touched my heart. The rhythm and syntax of my words are shaped by the echoes of poems and songs and conversations, only some of them coming from humans. And all of it is filtered through the sensations, perceptions, and fractal-pattern making ways of my Autistic biology.
Such are the words you will find here. On the surface level the topics will be varied: herbalism, history, magic(k), science, politics, poetry, and myth, to name a few. But all will be different expressions of the flow of that same living river through my being, outward into the world.
I hope to share them each Tuesday — and whenever else they surge forth.
