Came across this interesting page about the Gaelic wisdom tradition and the importance of poetry. The Wise Ones were known by the natural poetry that flowed through them from the Well of Wisdom deep inside. Of course, they were speaking about the Absolute, the Source, the Unified Field of All Possibilities. Enjoy!
Mara Freeman is the author and below is an excerpt and a link to the original article:
http://www.chalicecentre.net/salmon.htm
... Celtic Nature poets evoke a participation with life where all the senses are involved. We who have banished ourselves from the rich banquet of the natural world, preferring the empty calories of "virtual" realities and consumer items, can sense how it must have felt to our ancestors to be satisfied by the natural abundance of things:
Ale with herbs, a dish of strawberries
Of good taste and colour,
Haws berries of the juniper,
Sloes, nuts.
When brilliant summer-time spreads its coloured mantle,
Sweet-tasting fragrance!
Pignuts, wild marjoram, green leeks,
Verdant pureness.
Swarms of bees and chafers, the little musicians of the world,
A gentle chorus:
Wild geese and ducks, shortly before summer's end,
The music of the dark torrent.
The vividness of the imagery recalls Blake's famous phrase: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite." And indeed, in the pagan Celtic wisdom tradition, poetry was regarded as a central skill of the [true] seer and mystic.
According to the old tales, the poet-seer received divine illumination by eating a sacred substance from Earth's body: most often the Salmon of Wisdom that come from the well at the heart of the Otherworld. When Finn mac Cumaill, the famous warrior-seer, eats of the Salmon by the banks of the River Boyne and becomes enlightened, the first words he utters are a paean of praise to the month of May, as if the taking-in of the magical fish has opened his eyes to the wonder of the world:
May-time, fair season, perfect is its aspect then; blackbirds sing a full song...
In every poem, the poet's relationship with the natural world is specific and intimate. In the 20th century we tend to talk about trees, not to them, or we may expand our consciousness so far as to "hug a tree." But in the following poem, the poet addresses individual animals, plants and trees revealing an authentic I-Thou relationship with each:
Little antlered one, little belling one, melodious little bleater, sweet I think the lowing that you make in the glen...
Blackthorn, little thorny one, black little sloe-bush; watercress, little green-topped one, on the brink of the blackbird's well....
Apple-tree, little apple-tree, violently everyone shakes you; rowan, little berried one, lovely is your bloom....
The personal life of the poet is hardly mentioned in these poems. Only occasionally do we get a touching glimpse of a few domestic details, and then only in the poems about winter when the poet is confined inside:
"Cosy is our pot on its hook," begins one verse of a poem known as Winter Cold, but this line is only put in to contrast with the plight of wild animals:
The wolves of Cuan Wood get
Neither rest nor sleep in their lair,
The little wren cannot find
Shelter in her nest on the slope of Lon.
The scarcity of details of the individual life highlight its relative insignificance compared to the huge drama being enacted outside. The poet makes himself transparent so that he can relate to Nature from a deeper level. The German poet Novalis called this place "the seat of the soul" which he located as "where the inner world and the outer world meet, and where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap." ...
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