Druid's Utterance | Interview

The following interview was conducted by James Liter of the now-defunct Druid’s Utterance website.

DrUtt: Your new book, The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality is set to be released on 1 November. Other than what the title implies, can you tell us briefly what the book is about?

JK: I was inspired early on in the writing process by a quote from the late cosmologist Thomas Berry. He wrote that “The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human—at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience.” I spend much of the book subtly unpacking that statement. I’m attempting to forge a new understanding of Irish mythology and cosmology, which is relevant during the current phase of the Earth process, in such a way that can aid readers in becoming initiated into the universe story.

I wrote this book because despite some of the many great books written about modern Celtic and druidic traditions, I felt there was something missing. I was interested in reading a book on Celtic spirituality which approached it from a new and more interdisciplinary angle, which took into account our modern world, and which fully embraced wild nature—not merely Romantically, but ecologically and cosmologically. I once read in a critique of poetry that it takes more than words to place an image in a poem. It isn’t enough to say “mountain” and expect there to be a mountain in a poem or for that matter any other piece of writing. For the mountain to really be there as an image it has to be acted on. I feel somewhat similarly about the place of nature in a lot of the books I’ve encountered about Celtic spirituality. They talk about nature and spirits of nature, but I’m not convinced that nature is really there, really a part of the spiritual tradition.

Ecology is the primary referent in my book. To discover one’s soul is not an individual or inner process; it is to find one’s place in the ecosystem, within the Earth community, within the Milky Way galaxy. We’re becoming aware of things which our ancestors did not know. They hadn’t seen the primordial light from the origin of the universe as we now literally have. They didn’t necessarily know the larger global and cosmic story that they were participating in.

The book I really wanted to read myself didn’t exist. I wanted a book which somehow managed to integrate what the Celtic people did know and the stories they were living in into the larger universe story we are now discovering ourselves in, and in the words of Thomas Berry, that the universe is discovering itself in. That’s what I’ve tried to do with this book. I hope I’ve succeeded, at least somewhat. At the very least I think I offer some new perspectives on old Irish stories which might breathe new life into them in this ecological age.

DrUtt:  “…attempting to forge a new understanding of Irish mythology…” Since the DrUtt is a site mainly about Celtic mythology, what part exactly does mythology play in your book? Where does mythology fit into the ecology of Celtic spirituality?

JK:  It’s all about stories! Chapter One opens with the line, “We need stories to live.” I mean that, at least in the sense of truly living and not simply existing. One of the things which seems integral to human identity and consciousness is our ability and proclivity to organize ourselves and articulate the meaning we discover in the world by way of stories. In the same way that stories enliven our participation in the cosmos, they also locate us in a specific place—not just in a location. The Irish word dinnseanchas refers to the place name stories in Ireland. These are myths which confer onto each place a participatory identity in the human imagination. Stories are the way we relate to phenomena and contact its own interiority and agency.

Related to mythology is ritual. Ritual is the enactment of mythology through symbolic gesture—it initiates us directly into the myth being enacted thereby enacting the myth on us. As such I see the current ecological crisis as a ritual of initiation into the mythic dimensions of the Earth process. My book is an attempt to chart this initiation, to guide readers toward their own participation in it, and to give language to a culturally specific gateway through the re-telling of Irish mythology in context.

DrUtt: One of the early working titles of the book was The Otherworld Well: Initiation into Nature and the Celtic Soul. Can you tell us a bit how the book developed as you were working on it and how you came to the final title and version?

JK: It developed for about five or six years and went through a few incarnations. The first idea was to write a more straight-forward book about Celtic spirituality from an initiatory perspective. It was still quite influenced by ecopsychology. I got a couple chapters into that before setting it aside for a couple years, letting it gestate. When I came back to it I scrapped everything I had written and started over. I wrote a new outline that would have been long enough to fill two volumes which tried to balance a more objective survey of both ancient and modern Celtic traditions with a contemplative practice distilled from that.

By the time I was ready to sit down and write it was obvious that this outline was going to be too much to juggle and I also wasn’t sure anymore that I really wanted to write a book about Celtic spirituality. My life was moving in other directions, moving toward a place where I wasn’t so much interested in boxing myself into a single tradition.  The book still has this quality; although it’s organized around Irish stories and cosmology, I pulled a good deal from Eastern thought, various ecological philosophies, Jungian psychology, and a dash of integral theory.  I had to set it aside though because I was about to graduate from Naropa University and it was time to write my thesis. I wrote it on “the human-nature relationship in the Irish Druidic tradition” and got myself excited again about an interesting approach that I could take with the book. In the beginning of 2008 I took my old outline, trimmed it down and reorganized it around my thesis.

I got two or three chapters in before I found myself compelled to take time off in order to complete work on a new book of poetry I had been writing simultaneously, The Ballad of the Sea-Sweet Moon and Other Poems. In August I started writing again full time. The book developed a life of its own and the end product was a bit different than I really could have anticipated when I set out. Writing a book, the book takes on a life of its own and I think its in the best interest of the author to follow that.

I wanted a title which refers to Connla’s Well, which although doesn’t come into the book until late, is really the central image on which the rest turns. The Otherworld Well didn’t quite have the right sound to it so I changed it to The Salmon in the Spring because it contained the same idea and because it had a nice alliterative quality. I also wanted to communicate in the subtitle that it is primarily a book about ecology, which I use in a wider sense than just the empirical study of natural systems.

DrUtt: So if your idea of ecology goes beyond the prevailing mainstream idea of studying and/or caring for nature, what is the “glue” that brings it all into a Celtic spirituality?

JK: I’m interested in an integral ecology and for me that means that there are spiritual, psychological, and cultural dimensions to ecology in addition to the natural sciences. The Earth community—and this implicitly includes humans—has a dreamtime. In order to truly understand a place and our place we need to come into conversation with the Earth-dream. The Earth is dreaming ecosystems, it’s dreaming wrens and foxes, it’s dreaming mountains and rivers—it’s also dreaming us and dreaming our cultures. Culture isn’t something which just happens in human society, it’s actually a dimension of the Earth itself.

It is participation in this Celtic dreamtime which I think makes my work Celtic. A lot of people have their own sense of what makes something Celtic. For some it is participation in a historical lineage, something I have done my best to respect and be true to in the book while not being beholden to the past. I have no interest in reconstructing ancient Celtic religion so I don’t have any investment in passing off what I’ve written as representing the “authentic” historical tradition in any way. I do feel though, or at the very least hope, that what I’ve written is true to the Celtic dreamtime. It’s a Celtic ecology or spirituality because it is in communion and conversation with specific landscapes and stories.

DrUtt: Brian Swimme has talked about the concept of a new story. It would appear then that in a certain sense, The Salmon in the Spring shows one possible way that we can enter into, co-create even, that new story without recklessly abandoning the relevant parts of the old story?

JK: That’s the hope. The new story, simply put, is our new understanding that we live not just in a cosmos but in a cosmogenesis—a “universe story” as Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry put it. We live in a universe which is creating itself, which is fundamentally alive and infused with meaning and subjective depths. It’s inherently sacred. I use the term old story in two senses. On the one hand we have the old story we’re currently living in: industrial society upheld by a positivist-reductionistic materialism which says that universe is just dead matter randomly arranged in such a way that humans and ladybugs just happened to pop out. That’s the dangerous story that has allowed us to destroy the Earth. We might then talk about a deeper subset of the old story, an ancient story, which has some important similarities with the new story. There are important truths which must be recovered from it. There are, to be sure, important truths in the old story too—we couldn’t have made many of the discoveries which have made the new story possible without it.

When I started writing I asked myself a guiding question: Can the old stories find a home within the new story? If they cannot, if in their collision something must be stripped away (as is always the case in cataclysmic events, whether a paradigm shift or a supernova), which should take priority in preservation; the old story or the new? My answer is that the new story takes priority because it represents the more expansive and deeper perspective of reality.

I do this in order to invoke not a Celtic renaissance, but as John Moriarty might put it, a Celtic naissance. Something newly creative is happening in the human species and I think that must be reflected in our stories and cosmologies. We don’t know what the old Celtic ecology might have been but we do know that their environmental practices deforested a majority of Ireland. The Iron Age in Europe wasn’t exactly a time of ecological or social harmony.  There were headhunters, slaves, and patriarchy. There was also animism, a sensitivity to the subjective impulses and spirits of the land, an awareness of the need for reciprocity between the human and more-than-human communities.  There wasn’t an awareness that we live enveloped in the biosphere of a planet, in a Solar System, in the Milky Way galaxy, amidst a community of billions of stars in an expanding universe which seems to have as its basic aim an increase in complex creativity and consciousness. They very likely weren’t aware on the same planetary level that there was an Earth to degrade to the point of cataclysmic instability.

They were a local people, not a global people. The integration of this old story with the new story is an integration of this local place-centered animistic consciousness with a global ecological and cosmogenetic consciousness which initiates us into a deeper drama of the Earth’s unfolding and our place in that story.

DrUtt: In his book Invoking Ireland, the late Irish philosopher and writer John Moriarty retells the story of the Voyage of Bran and introduces the reader to the idea of “silver branch perception.” You also explore this concept into your book. Can you tell us how you understand silver branch perception and if and how that differs from Moriarty’s?

JK:  In Moriarty’s writing silver branch perception is used to describe a way of seeing the world that is “paradise regained.” The silver branch is what invites and ushers mythic figures into the Otherworld, the realm of soul, of divine ground—a realm, which Moriarty explains, is actually an immaculate dimension of this world. It is opposite and antidote to the Fomorian way of seeing. I think that in both of our writings we refer to the same mode of perception with the term, though I think perhaps I added some twists of my own, or at least described it more concretely than he.

Silver branch perception is essentially nondual perception. Through it the Otherworld discloses itself as This World perceived more deeply. Buddhists would describe it as not only emptiness or shunyata but dharmakaya as well. This is another way of saying that the world, seen through silver branch perception, is both empty and full at the same time. It is empty in the sense that it is empty of objective and conceptual identity. In our normal mode of perception we see a mountain and immediately recognize that it is a mountain, and we have feelings about that mountain, and thoughts about that mountain—all of which we mistake as the actual phenomenon. Silver branch perception, in Goethian terms, recognizes the percept without mistaking it for the concept. It is right seeing, direct and participatory in the arising phenomenon. But it is also full in the sense that it isn’t just empty and thus meaningless—it is deeply luminous, pregnant with possibilities and potential, and continually arising, fresh in each moment.

The duality we normally live in is transcended within silver branch perception and this I suggest as a new mode of being human. Moriarty, similarly, would suggest that it is in silver branch perception that humans become an evolutionary success on Earth.

DrUtt: You have published a few books of poetry, and now The Salmon in the Spring. What’s next?

JK:  For a while I’ll be focusing most of my energy on getting this book into the hands of readers. I’m in the process of scheduling some workshops and speaking engagements for 2010. With the exception of a few essays I have in the furnace, I’ll be taking a break from prose to finish another poetry book I’ve been casually writing. That may take another year or so by which time I think the idea I have for a second book will be well enough conceived to start lifting the pen. I’d like to integrate what I’ve learned from both poetry and prose and write a book with a lot of intellectual ground but which is embodied and exists within a living landscape—it will probably be a more narrative (non-fiction) book, centered on the theme of place, story, and nature. It won’t necessarily be Celtic though surely it will be informed by that reality. For this I’ll go off to have some adventures and write from the place where my mind and the landscape meet.

DrUtt: Following on the idea from earlier that stories locate us in a specific place – you have spent a fair amount of time in Ireland, studying and visiting the sacred places there, so if your book was one of those many places, which would it be and why?

JK:  It would be the Hill of Tara. I describe the Hill of Tara in my book as being a mandala, in the Jungian sense of the word. It has a center and it has four directions in relationship to that center. In order to occupy that center one must be whole, possess an “art” or dán, and integrate the masculine and feminine. I’ve arranged the book as a kind of mosaic of myths which provide an initiatory journey toward this center, into a sense of psychic and ecological royalty.