Seeds from the Wild Verge: Myth, Nature, and Theology in the Border Stream of Celtic Wisdom
Synopsis "Seeds from the Wild Verge: Myth, Nature, and Theology in the Border Stream of Celtic Wisdom"
Where have we gone wrong in dominant Western culture and religion? How have we landed in a place of such profound disconnection from the rest of the natural world, such pronounced isolation and anxiety? And how might we begin to correct our destructive psychological, socio-cultural, and metaphysical patterns, to steer ourselves down a road of restoration, resacralization, and reconnection in the great communion of Nature? Such are the foundational questions of this inventive and poetic exploration of Western thought, mythology, and religious practice. Advocating radical shifts in ideology, narrative, discourse, ritual, and lifestyle, Brendan Ellis Williams leads the reader on an expressionistic, erudite, and sometimes dreamlike journey toward 're-humation' in the wisdom of the living Earth. This collection of lyric essays, articles, and stories stands as an open invitation to return to an ancient, challenging, and beautifully bright animistic world in which the reclamation and savoring of deep rooted but long forgotten ancestral lifeways feels like a tangible and attainable promise, rather than an object of mere anachronism or fantasy. These reflective writings carry in their visionary and shamanistic songlines the signature of that world of archaic experience, like an unexpected letter from an ancient ancestral caretaker. They also bring that world into dialogue with contemporary discourse in religion, progressive theology, cultural anthropology, and Celtic studies. With particular reference to his own Celtic cultural inheritance, the author weaves a tapestry of meditations, folktales, poetic utterances, historical and mythological explorations to afford the watchful reader a glimpse through the veil of worlds, and to illumine the thesis that it is only in reclaiming the deepest structures of human culture and our primal access-points to the numinous that we can map a way forward to a planet that is once more balanced, sane, and whole.
