In the Church of the Love of the World: A Dialogue with Poet Grace Wells

A dialogue with the poet Grace Wells, in relation to her latest book of poetry, The Church of the Love of the World (https://www.dedaluspress.com/). Grace is an award-winning eco-poet and nature writer living on the West Coast of Ireland. Nature, spirit-of-place and environmental concern are the large themes of her writing. She is an organic gardener and orchard-planter who hosts The Little Sanctuary a small retreat space for human, plant and creaturely species, and she regularly volunteers with Hometree a native woodland charity, which looks after biodiversity and encourages the reforestation of large landscape areas.We speak about wonder, grief, the sacredness of the world, the fierceness of love, and the mysteries of grasses. A few references from our dialogue:Grace refers to the name the Irish call themselves: Tuath Dé. Long before the publication of her book, Grace and I spoke about this name, and I elaborated it briefly in an essay—an elaboration Grace enjoyed very much, so here it is:---As the poet Grace Wells recently reminded me, the indigenous Irish called themselves Tuath Dé—one of the most wonderful things a human people have ever called themselves, for the word “Tuath” signifies both people and place, and “Dé” signifies the goddess. Therefore, in a gesture of intimacy, in a gesture of wisdom, love, and beauty, they called themselves “the people of the goddess” and simultaneously called themselves “the place of the goddess”. They wonderstood power and place, wonderstood rootedness in place and intimacy with the vast Cosmos. They wonderstood that Sophia abides as landscapes, as ecologies, as the sacred powers and inconceivable causes flowing as “power-and-place,” and they wonderstood that when we attune with sacredness and with living places, Sophia abides in us, through us, as us. Meanwhile, the dominant culture seems characterized by, as Underhill put it for us, those who “stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have never truly known.”---https://dangerouswisdom.org/dw-blog/who-is-sophiaThe fuller contemplation of, “Who is Sophia?” may resonate with you.We also discuss Dōgen and his insights into, and pointings toward, the teachings of the world—all beings, including supposedly “insentient” beings—and the essence of meditation. These insights and pointings appear in Keisei Sanshoku—Velley Sounds, Mountain Forms—and Jisho Zanmai. That latter term resists translation, signifying something like Self-Experience or Self-Verifying of Well-Put-Togetherness, or, Well-Put-Togetherness of Self-Experience or Self-Verifying. It is like the meditative state of self-arising experience, not dependent on subject or object, or the self-verification of the mystery of the cosmos by means of intimacy—the mystery verifying or experiencing itself.The following essay discusses this meditative state in relation to other themes of the dialogue between philosopher and poet, including the seductions of Indo-European languages and worldviews, and the need for all of us to reindigenize:https://dangerouswisdom.org/dw-blog/hologram-ecogram-mandala-part-iv-drawing-closer-to-visionary-lovewisdomDōgen offered related lessons that we can work with as an elaboration of, and invitation into, the special meditative mind that allows us to fully receive the teachings of the world, and receive the magic and medicine of the world as well. Dōgen there refers to the properly well-put-together mind as 自受用三昧, which has to do with the well-put-togetherness of our true mind. 自...