Saturday, 14 May 2011
Thursday, 12 May 2011
THE SCHOOL AND THE LAND
Todays contribution is something entirely new - part of a book to come somewhere down the road. If you glance to your right of this column you will see a link to the school face book page. On it are several videos of me talking about both the Lightning Tree book and the school. If you enjoy them i would ask that you pass the links onto other folks. We rely entirely on goodwill, so this would be a tremendous help as we spread the word.
Come late Sept/early Oct UK Year program begins again - HERE ARE DATES: Wildwise indicates camping, Blytheswood residential.
Oct 15-16th Wildwise
Dec 2-4 Blytheswood
Feb 3-5 Blytheswood
April 27-29 Blytheswood
June 27-29th Wildwise
Although you can join programme at any point, deposit for the whole year - 250 pounds is required. So the deposit takes fifty pounds off the price of each weekend - paid in advance. This way you could say join in February, and complete course by attending first two weekends of next year. For more details ring 01364 653723 or
tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com (try there first i would suggest)
It is odd that in the growing Western preoccupation with organic food, yoga and un-feisty thoughts we often neglect myth as another kind of food – a literal soul food. Maybe we sense that its full fat, often barbecued and calorific content would create too much disturbance in the den. But It could be a crafty way of getting some protein into your internal eco-system without risking heart disease.
It was awareness of this kind of soul-poverty, a cultural deprivation, even within all of the material abundance many of us possess, that led to the forming of a hedge – school down here in Devon. The idea with a hedge school is quite literal – an Irish idea that you assemble some kind of rough structure against the side of a hedge and begin to teach underneath it from whatever skills you have. It’s all very simple, and comes from a time of tremendous hardship.
Many friends suggested this wasn’t a good idea, or to wait for some kind of government funding, or possibly an arts council grant. I do not compute this kind of thinking. No pirate could stomach its cautious implications, its lilly-livered, half-wish of an idea. Even In a county positively overflowing with spiritual sorts – and packed programmes on bodywork, psychology and vegetarian cookery there seemed little hope for a wayward, no qualification at the end, headlong immersion into the nature of myth, wilderness and rites-of-passage. And the lure? the sweet centre to get folks to sign up? At its centre was four days with an empty belly, headache and nightmares, glued to the side of a ghostly Welsh mountain in the pouring rain.
Well, it appeared my friends may be right. For the first year the school had three students. I was partially catering as well as teaching, running back and forth with plates of food. Cara was the real engine room of the kitchen, eyes weeping from chopped onions (well, that’s what she tells me). The next year was a big step upward – we now had four students. Big time. Any profit amounted to a six pack of cold beer and a packet of fish’n’chips after everyone had left on the Sunday night. I clearly remember the first time I had enough money left over to buy a book on the Monday morning. I still keep it close by.
The early years were intense. We’d rise at dawn, grab towels and walk in silence through a mile of forest down from our raggedy tent till we got to a small river. We always began the course in the depths of winter, just to increase its edge. We would go down backwards into the water, float to the very bottom, get a good soak of icy rapture, before back to fire making, cups of hot tea, and the days unfolding curriculum. There was absolutely no time off: myth, ritual, poetry and a little food, hard at it between 6am and 11pm. Much of the time was spent traversing gnotted forest, jumping into the ocean with wild flowers, chocolate and poetry for Mannanan Mac lir, or deep in the clutches of some esoteric old story. It seemed quite wonderful to all of us. We were a strange Fianna, following the moon trail of the bone white stag.
Next time round we had thirty folks and a waiting list. Were I to tell you of what was required to move it so dramatically in numbers it would require another book. The truth is that we were never size-ist. Were that Hedge school still three in number, no doubt I would still be there, sheltering from the rain, telling indecent jokes, drinking tea and teaching as best I can.
We have blessed beyond measure by the folks that become immediate family – like something from the old stories. Remember Jonny Bloor? – not only was he the schools very first student, he went on to become a right hand man: leader of music, general encourager and apprentice poet. In fact all three of the first years – Scott, David and Jonny, went onto play vital roles within the emerging school. Chris Salisbury the outdoorsman and storyteller, brought a wealth of practical forest knowledge, experience of the performative side of storytelling and a calm eye. Tim Russell the pirate philosopher with his Nart sagas and troubling insights. The women started to roll in too – Sue, Sam, Tina, Reba, Maggie, Ronnie and beyond. What a gift, a continual deepening. Storytellers, organizers, poets, gardeners, artists, they brought it all. We are adrift with cooks that play the banjo, mechanics that tell the epic of Gilgamesh, surgeons that have remembered they are really bandit queens, grief counsellors that have not stopped laughing, life coaches that have not stopped weeping. We have been buffeted by weather, death, illness, financial scrapes, wayward leadership (ahem), but, for anyone dreaming of a more complicated, unwieldy life we are right there. Not an arts grant of funding application in sight. Why not come find us?
And what of Dartmoor, the seat of the school? Dartmoor has been submerged in ocean, a tropical island, a red wood forest, and over time, an interlaced consortium of wild and domestic interaction. Its surface is highly ridged with human impressions. Go down to Merrivale just before dawn in May and you’ll see a double row of stones near the road side. As it gets lighter you will see that the stones point devotionally to the star cluster of the Pleiades rising up from the east. These jagged eruptions guided the seeding and the harvesting of precious crop, five thousand years past.
It’s not hard to detect the remnants of corn-drying barns, longhouses, the banked up reaves which marked the fields, the cromlech tomb of Spinster’s Moor, the stone circles of Scorhill and Grey Wethers, the standing stone of Drizzlecombe, then down through the dreaming into the hillfort at Hembury, then Lydford and its Anglo-Saxon patterning that still lives under its street design today, the clapper bridges and stannery routes, or old Brentor church - wrenched and groaned into life atop a volcanic outcrop in the 12th century, caught on a ley line that stretches from Cornwall to East Anglia.
Most of the tors were originally people: Bowerman out hunting with his dogs, interrupted a coven of witches who promptly turned him and the hounds into stone. Vixiana the Witch was hurled into a swamp and the grandparents say that the grassy bristles sticking out are from her hairy chin, just feet beneath the surface.
There is barely a copse, stretch of lane, or fecund outcrop that lacks a name and a story. Three hundred and sixty five square miles of intrigue and layered myth. But even Dartmoor, seemingly so permanent, is a shape-shifter, just like the story’s are. The red-ochre soils we enjoy here today are the remnants of what was once a kind of desert sand, carried by flash floods down from the highest points of the moor. Our chalk is a reminder of when the moor was completely covered by sea and was covered in limestone.
It has been cultivated, abandoned, mined, regenerated, feared, shorn bald of its tree crest. From a human eye it has been both cramped and lonely, fertile and barren. It carries a word-hoard of story, is a vascular intermingling of animals intelligence’s. It is its own wild consciousness, it’s own fluid mythology, whatever shape a particular millennium places upon it. These are just temporary bumps along the way, little snippets of clock time pecking at its great, eternal tumps.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2011
Come late Sept/early Oct UK Year program begins again - HERE ARE DATES: Wildwise indicates camping, Blytheswood residential.
Oct 15-16th Wildwise
Dec 2-4 Blytheswood
Feb 3-5 Blytheswood
April 27-29 Blytheswood
June 27-29th Wildwise
Although you can join programme at any point, deposit for the whole year - 250 pounds is required. So the deposit takes fifty pounds off the price of each weekend - paid in advance. This way you could say join in February, and complete course by attending first two weekends of next year. For more details ring 01364 653723 or
tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com (try there first i would suggest)
It is odd that in the growing Western preoccupation with organic food, yoga and un-feisty thoughts we often neglect myth as another kind of food – a literal soul food. Maybe we sense that its full fat, often barbecued and calorific content would create too much disturbance in the den. But It could be a crafty way of getting some protein into your internal eco-system without risking heart disease.
It was awareness of this kind of soul-poverty, a cultural deprivation, even within all of the material abundance many of us possess, that led to the forming of a hedge – school down here in Devon. The idea with a hedge school is quite literal – an Irish idea that you assemble some kind of rough structure against the side of a hedge and begin to teach underneath it from whatever skills you have. It’s all very simple, and comes from a time of tremendous hardship.
Many friends suggested this wasn’t a good idea, or to wait for some kind of government funding, or possibly an arts council grant. I do not compute this kind of thinking. No pirate could stomach its cautious implications, its lilly-livered, half-wish of an idea. Even In a county positively overflowing with spiritual sorts – and packed programmes on bodywork, psychology and vegetarian cookery there seemed little hope for a wayward, no qualification at the end, headlong immersion into the nature of myth, wilderness and rites-of-passage. And the lure? the sweet centre to get folks to sign up? At its centre was four days with an empty belly, headache and nightmares, glued to the side of a ghostly Welsh mountain in the pouring rain.
Well, it appeared my friends may be right. For the first year the school had three students. I was partially catering as well as teaching, running back and forth with plates of food. Cara was the real engine room of the kitchen, eyes weeping from chopped onions (well, that’s what she tells me). The next year was a big step upward – we now had four students. Big time. Any profit amounted to a six pack of cold beer and a packet of fish’n’chips after everyone had left on the Sunday night. I clearly remember the first time I had enough money left over to buy a book on the Monday morning. I still keep it close by.
The early years were intense. We’d rise at dawn, grab towels and walk in silence through a mile of forest down from our raggedy tent till we got to a small river. We always began the course in the depths of winter, just to increase its edge. We would go down backwards into the water, float to the very bottom, get a good soak of icy rapture, before back to fire making, cups of hot tea, and the days unfolding curriculum. There was absolutely no time off: myth, ritual, poetry and a little food, hard at it between 6am and 11pm. Much of the time was spent traversing gnotted forest, jumping into the ocean with wild flowers, chocolate and poetry for Mannanan Mac lir, or deep in the clutches of some esoteric old story. It seemed quite wonderful to all of us. We were a strange Fianna, following the moon trail of the bone white stag.
Next time round we had thirty folks and a waiting list. Were I to tell you of what was required to move it so dramatically in numbers it would require another book. The truth is that we were never size-ist. Were that Hedge school still three in number, no doubt I would still be there, sheltering from the rain, telling indecent jokes, drinking tea and teaching as best I can.
We have blessed beyond measure by the folks that become immediate family – like something from the old stories. Remember Jonny Bloor? – not only was he the schools very first student, he went on to become a right hand man: leader of music, general encourager and apprentice poet. In fact all three of the first years – Scott, David and Jonny, went onto play vital roles within the emerging school. Chris Salisbury the outdoorsman and storyteller, brought a wealth of practical forest knowledge, experience of the performative side of storytelling and a calm eye. Tim Russell the pirate philosopher with his Nart sagas and troubling insights. The women started to roll in too – Sue, Sam, Tina, Reba, Maggie, Ronnie and beyond. What a gift, a continual deepening. Storytellers, organizers, poets, gardeners, artists, they brought it all. We are adrift with cooks that play the banjo, mechanics that tell the epic of Gilgamesh, surgeons that have remembered they are really bandit queens, grief counsellors that have not stopped laughing, life coaches that have not stopped weeping. We have been buffeted by weather, death, illness, financial scrapes, wayward leadership (ahem), but, for anyone dreaming of a more complicated, unwieldy life we are right there. Not an arts grant of funding application in sight. Why not come find us?
And what of Dartmoor, the seat of the school? Dartmoor has been submerged in ocean, a tropical island, a red wood forest, and over time, an interlaced consortium of wild and domestic interaction. Its surface is highly ridged with human impressions. Go down to Merrivale just before dawn in May and you’ll see a double row of stones near the road side. As it gets lighter you will see that the stones point devotionally to the star cluster of the Pleiades rising up from the east. These jagged eruptions guided the seeding and the harvesting of precious crop, five thousand years past.
It’s not hard to detect the remnants of corn-drying barns, longhouses, the banked up reaves which marked the fields, the cromlech tomb of Spinster’s Moor, the stone circles of Scorhill and Grey Wethers, the standing stone of Drizzlecombe, then down through the dreaming into the hillfort at Hembury, then Lydford and its Anglo-Saxon patterning that still lives under its street design today, the clapper bridges and stannery routes, or old Brentor church - wrenched and groaned into life atop a volcanic outcrop in the 12th century, caught on a ley line that stretches from Cornwall to East Anglia.
Most of the tors were originally people: Bowerman out hunting with his dogs, interrupted a coven of witches who promptly turned him and the hounds into stone. Vixiana the Witch was hurled into a swamp and the grandparents say that the grassy bristles sticking out are from her hairy chin, just feet beneath the surface.
There is barely a copse, stretch of lane, or fecund outcrop that lacks a name and a story. Three hundred and sixty five square miles of intrigue and layered myth. But even Dartmoor, seemingly so permanent, is a shape-shifter, just like the story’s are. The red-ochre soils we enjoy here today are the remnants of what was once a kind of desert sand, carried by flash floods down from the highest points of the moor. Our chalk is a reminder of when the moor was completely covered by sea and was covered in limestone.
It has been cultivated, abandoned, mined, regenerated, feared, shorn bald of its tree crest. From a human eye it has been both cramped and lonely, fertile and barren. It carries a word-hoard of story, is a vascular intermingling of animals intelligence’s. It is its own wild consciousness, it’s own fluid mythology, whatever shape a particular millennium places upon it. These are just temporary bumps along the way, little snippets of clock time pecking at its great, eternal tumps.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2011
Thursday, 5 May 2011
LIGHTNING TALK
Half way through the Tagorefest. Good night in the Great Hall on tuesday evening - packed, and lots of Rumi from Duncan MacIntosh and choral and ecstatic chants from Chloe Goodchild. I was telling stories - 'The She-Wolf in the Midnight Orchard' or as many call it, 'The Handless Maiden'. I can't tell you how much i loathe that title.This woman is a lupine surge of holy intensity. I missed and continue to miss Coleman but read a little Rumi on his behalf - he is recovering well and we hope to be on the road in Norway by the end of next month. Back there today for Andrew Motion and Simon Armitage - do you have his translation of Gawain and the Green Knight? Hope so.
Here's another bit of taster from 'A Branch From The Lightning Tree'. The context is some reflection from myself on some years i spent living outdoors and its relationship to the bigger wilderness fasts i was engaged with. Please surprise White Cloud Press by pre-ordering! They aim to have it on the streets in about three-four weeks.
# please note: when i talk about storytellers below i am not just referring to writers and tellers but a much wider, stranger group - a storycarrier, rather than just teller. We are all in this.
THANK YOU for words of encouragement re: doctorate and my general work.
After the Mountain: Four Years in the Black Tent
Once winter sets in, the wood-burning stove rarely goes out. In a climate as wet as Britain’s, mold can play havoc with damp canvas, and any tent dweller is constantly sourcing supplies of dry, seasoned wood to see them through the hard months till April. You become accustomed to continually scanning the surrounding hedgerows and copses for any kind of kindling to spark up life-giving heat. To re- turn before dusk with a cord of wood, to light the paraffin lamps, to brew up coffee and warm yourself by the stove are immense pleasures: Wild rabbit in the pot and potatoes in the embers, and reading Cold Mountain poems by the Chinese hermit Han Shan.
Any tent can take awhile to heat, so there’s often a bottle of Lagavulin whisky amongst the axes, billhooks, and rope to sip as the tent creaks into warmth. Weather is to be relished, sworn at, combated, and ultimately worked with. You quickly learn who has the upper hand, and you follow its directives respectfully.
The years in the tent were nomadic; I moved around, but the first location supplied plenty of fallen timber in the surrounding land. What came to my attention, in a field just past the stream, under the barbed wire fence, was a huge oak that had been struck by lightning. Lying on its side, perfectly seasoned by now, it would be, I knew, a very beautiful source of heat for the upcoming winter. Bow saw and rope in hand, I would make my way to the great beast, take what I needed and head back. I could never get too greedy on each trip, as the return journey required too much manoeuvring to carry more than an armful at a time. The wood itself was bleached by weather, almost like driftwood, and burned ferociously. Collecting it was like arriving at the lair of some prehistoric deity with muscled limbs in all directions, and a huge ancient trunk. My time with this tree went through heavy snows, baking summers, and endless British rain. Under a full moon it seemed to glow.
A fire from this source always felt sweeter, more precious. When I fed wood cut to size by the billhook into the hungry mouth of the iron burner, I would sit back and close my eyes, tracing the journey I’d just been on. Words came, mad poems, ornate drawings. After grappling the wood back over the stream and under the fence, some weird excitement would emerge and prowl across the energy of the written word, looking for nests.
Nomadic Voices
Early on I spent a week at a travelers’ camp up on the border between Wales and England. There on the highest field of a well-meaning farmer’s land were a grizzled assortment of Irish travelers, vagabond English, and a small group of traditional Albanian gypsies—a rare mix. The Gypsies, settled for a season or two, were planting the earth, repairing caravans, and traditional wagons, and, apart from berating me to get a haircut, were generally friendly. In the evening they would sit on buckets around an open fire, smoke, and play music, often switching languages as they did it. The stories they told were highly speculative and veered wildly between epic sagas and rough little street tales, packed with intelligence.
What I gained from this experience, in addition to the haircut, was a certain elegance in living outside and a sense of connection to ancestry. It felt precious even then; ten years on I doubt I could even find such a group in England again. As the Gypsies’ music pirouetted defiantly up toward low clouds and old gods, their sons and daughters were focusing their attention on getting an apartment in town or getting a job that paid more than minimum wage. It’s not my business to judge that, because I haven’t lived their life. So I continued wandering and looked for myth tellers, what the Gaelic peoples call the Seanchai—tellers of the deep words. I was lucky enough to meet a few of these people, whether they knew what they were or not.
Their stories were not simple allegories, they were like small bushes of flame. I might hear them up at base camp at Caer Idris, or on a smoke trail from a visiting Mayan, rarely from an “professional storyteller.” I was dazzled, edified and despairing at ever being able to catch some of that nourishing eloquence in my own small beak. I would stagger back to the black tent and watch the word magic bounce around the breathing canvas. Everything that came out of my mouth seemed stumpy, blunt, and factual. It was embarrassing. No wonder my wife had left!
I continued my own journey of listening to the living world. This time it involved being sealed into a small dark structure, like a miniscule sweat lodge, up in the forests of Wales, miles from anyone but my base camper, without food or water. Unable to see my hand in front of my face, or sit up, I was left in the pitch black, clutching three crow feathers and already thirsty. This time the journey was profoundly internal. Deprived of visual light, within a day or so images began to appear across the blackness, like waking dreams. The imagined straight line of time dissolved into something much more profound. The lodge filled with sparks of light and whiskery old voices, the structure itself shook violently. Whole chunks of my future, at that point seemingly unlived, passed by me that night. During the twilight of the second night (not that I could tell), immense storms rolled in from the Irish ocean and set about my tiny structure, assailing it for hours at a time.
When my vigil was done and David, my base camper and long suffering mentor, appeared, I found that trees had come down, the long grasses had flattened, and my tent was awash with water. We made the long and treacherous descent through the forests to David’s car. When we arrived, there was a note from a ranger, worried that the owner had gone out to commit suicide—a popular pastime in that part of Wales. Well, we were both alive in the literal sense, but truly, some part of me had gone up there to die. I remember talking to a Choctaw medicine man about a Lakota friend we had in common, when he said, “Do you
know why he gets so much love? When he walks into the pow wow everyone knows he has died, over and over again.”
As the months moved into years it became clear that the vision-language of tribal people was not just an anthropocentric invention, but arose from a continual openness to the still-latent energies hidden in brook, desert, and moor. I would return from my fasts to the black tent, the old cat, the lightning tree, the witches moon, and wonder.
The Land is a Huge, Dreaming Animal
Places long to speak: great polyphonic blasts of forest oratory or the thin keening of the hemlock. I tried to bathe my head in the golden chatter of holy places, and sometimes caught a word or two, sometimes silence, sometimes a whole stanza of some great epic, buried in the granite of a Dartmoor Tor. The earth’s rough harmonies are more than the metaphors of this writer, but the primordial, root relationship between us and the living world. I have begun to suspect that underneath the ancient caves, buried arrow heads, and mineral deposits, the continents of this world are huge, dreaming animals.
Any gatherings on Ecology may benefit from myth tellers from each country attending and sharing culturally specific stories, so the animals underneath the countries have a chance for the image-language to speak for them. I think these animals have quite different characters and desires.
We could say that earth is relaying a lot of information right now, and not all of it is accessible with statistics and logic. I believe it is a call to the prophetic within us—a big word. The pastoral-creative work designed to appeal and comfort mass civilisation completely lacks the receptivity for the task.
However, without a process similar to the one I am describing, it would be very difficult to engender the psychic readiness required. To be clear: to function in their deepest vocation, the storytellers/ teachers/ poets should stand in the ground of prophetic image, a scarecrow of words, pushed by invisible winds. There’s a great deal of grandeur in that statement, and all sorts of problems, but I’m sticking with it.
Here's another bit of taster from 'A Branch From The Lightning Tree'. The context is some reflection from myself on some years i spent living outdoors and its relationship to the bigger wilderness fasts i was engaged with. Please surprise White Cloud Press by pre-ordering! They aim to have it on the streets in about three-four weeks.
# please note: when i talk about storytellers below i am not just referring to writers and tellers but a much wider, stranger group - a storycarrier, rather than just teller. We are all in this.
THANK YOU for words of encouragement re: doctorate and my general work.
After the Mountain: Four Years in the Black Tent
Once winter sets in, the wood-burning stove rarely goes out. In a climate as wet as Britain’s, mold can play havoc with damp canvas, and any tent dweller is constantly sourcing supplies of dry, seasoned wood to see them through the hard months till April. You become accustomed to continually scanning the surrounding hedgerows and copses for any kind of kindling to spark up life-giving heat. To re- turn before dusk with a cord of wood, to light the paraffin lamps, to brew up coffee and warm yourself by the stove are immense pleasures: Wild rabbit in the pot and potatoes in the embers, and reading Cold Mountain poems by the Chinese hermit Han Shan.
Any tent can take awhile to heat, so there’s often a bottle of Lagavulin whisky amongst the axes, billhooks, and rope to sip as the tent creaks into warmth. Weather is to be relished, sworn at, combated, and ultimately worked with. You quickly learn who has the upper hand, and you follow its directives respectfully.
The years in the tent were nomadic; I moved around, but the first location supplied plenty of fallen timber in the surrounding land. What came to my attention, in a field just past the stream, under the barbed wire fence, was a huge oak that had been struck by lightning. Lying on its side, perfectly seasoned by now, it would be, I knew, a very beautiful source of heat for the upcoming winter. Bow saw and rope in hand, I would make my way to the great beast, take what I needed and head back. I could never get too greedy on each trip, as the return journey required too much manoeuvring to carry more than an armful at a time. The wood itself was bleached by weather, almost like driftwood, and burned ferociously. Collecting it was like arriving at the lair of some prehistoric deity with muscled limbs in all directions, and a huge ancient trunk. My time with this tree went through heavy snows, baking summers, and endless British rain. Under a full moon it seemed to glow.
A fire from this source always felt sweeter, more precious. When I fed wood cut to size by the billhook into the hungry mouth of the iron burner, I would sit back and close my eyes, tracing the journey I’d just been on. Words came, mad poems, ornate drawings. After grappling the wood back over the stream and under the fence, some weird excitement would emerge and prowl across the energy of the written word, looking for nests.
Nomadic Voices
Early on I spent a week at a travelers’ camp up on the border between Wales and England. There on the highest field of a well-meaning farmer’s land were a grizzled assortment of Irish travelers, vagabond English, and a small group of traditional Albanian gypsies—a rare mix. The Gypsies, settled for a season or two, were planting the earth, repairing caravans, and traditional wagons, and, apart from berating me to get a haircut, were generally friendly. In the evening they would sit on buckets around an open fire, smoke, and play music, often switching languages as they did it. The stories they told were highly speculative and veered wildly between epic sagas and rough little street tales, packed with intelligence.
What I gained from this experience, in addition to the haircut, was a certain elegance in living outside and a sense of connection to ancestry. It felt precious even then; ten years on I doubt I could even find such a group in England again. As the Gypsies’ music pirouetted defiantly up toward low clouds and old gods, their sons and daughters were focusing their attention on getting an apartment in town or getting a job that paid more than minimum wage. It’s not my business to judge that, because I haven’t lived their life. So I continued wandering and looked for myth tellers, what the Gaelic peoples call the Seanchai—tellers of the deep words. I was lucky enough to meet a few of these people, whether they knew what they were or not.
Their stories were not simple allegories, they were like small bushes of flame. I might hear them up at base camp at Caer Idris, or on a smoke trail from a visiting Mayan, rarely from an “professional storyteller.” I was dazzled, edified and despairing at ever being able to catch some of that nourishing eloquence in my own small beak. I would stagger back to the black tent and watch the word magic bounce around the breathing canvas. Everything that came out of my mouth seemed stumpy, blunt, and factual. It was embarrassing. No wonder my wife had left!
I continued my own journey of listening to the living world. This time it involved being sealed into a small dark structure, like a miniscule sweat lodge, up in the forests of Wales, miles from anyone but my base camper, without food or water. Unable to see my hand in front of my face, or sit up, I was left in the pitch black, clutching three crow feathers and already thirsty. This time the journey was profoundly internal. Deprived of visual light, within a day or so images began to appear across the blackness, like waking dreams. The imagined straight line of time dissolved into something much more profound. The lodge filled with sparks of light and whiskery old voices, the structure itself shook violently. Whole chunks of my future, at that point seemingly unlived, passed by me that night. During the twilight of the second night (not that I could tell), immense storms rolled in from the Irish ocean and set about my tiny structure, assailing it for hours at a time.
When my vigil was done and David, my base camper and long suffering mentor, appeared, I found that trees had come down, the long grasses had flattened, and my tent was awash with water. We made the long and treacherous descent through the forests to David’s car. When we arrived, there was a note from a ranger, worried that the owner had gone out to commit suicide—a popular pastime in that part of Wales. Well, we were both alive in the literal sense, but truly, some part of me had gone up there to die. I remember talking to a Choctaw medicine man about a Lakota friend we had in common, when he said, “Do you
know why he gets so much love? When he walks into the pow wow everyone knows he has died, over and over again.”
As the months moved into years it became clear that the vision-language of tribal people was not just an anthropocentric invention, but arose from a continual openness to the still-latent energies hidden in brook, desert, and moor. I would return from my fasts to the black tent, the old cat, the lightning tree, the witches moon, and wonder.
The Land is a Huge, Dreaming Animal
Places long to speak: great polyphonic blasts of forest oratory or the thin keening of the hemlock. I tried to bathe my head in the golden chatter of holy places, and sometimes caught a word or two, sometimes silence, sometimes a whole stanza of some great epic, buried in the granite of a Dartmoor Tor. The earth’s rough harmonies are more than the metaphors of this writer, but the primordial, root relationship between us and the living world. I have begun to suspect that underneath the ancient caves, buried arrow heads, and mineral deposits, the continents of this world are huge, dreaming animals.
Any gatherings on Ecology may benefit from myth tellers from each country attending and sharing culturally specific stories, so the animals underneath the countries have a chance for the image-language to speak for them. I think these animals have quite different characters and desires.
We could say that earth is relaying a lot of information right now, and not all of it is accessible with statistics and logic. I believe it is a call to the prophetic within us—a big word. The pastoral-creative work designed to appeal and comfort mass civilisation completely lacks the receptivity for the task.
However, without a process similar to the one I am describing, it would be very difficult to engender the psychic readiness required. To be clear: to function in their deepest vocation, the storytellers/ teachers/ poets should stand in the ground of prophetic image, a scarecrow of words, pushed by invisible winds. There’s a great deal of grandeur in that statement, and all sorts of problems, but I’m sticking with it.
Sunday, 1 May 2011
All the chains came off.
Happy May Day!
I have become a doctor since i last wrote, last thursday in fact. After a lively viva, six years and fourteen days of work was rather wonderfully confirmed and my PhD was set free, a galloping horse over hills of fiery words. I feel happy.
Don't expect a note of my odd thinking to change or get trimmed at all. Free at last.
Coming up: this tuesday i am chairing a lecture by the wonderful Dr. Leonard Lewishon, one of the world's leading scholars on Sufism on Hafez, Tagore and the Persian world. 2.30-3.30, Barn Theatre, Dartington Estate, Devon, UK. That evening i am part of a bash in the estates Great Hall on Rumi - i'll be telling fairy stories, rude Nasrudin jokes and a few handpicked Rumi poems direct from Coleman. Chloe Goodchild and Duncan McIntosh will also be adding lots to the mix.
More soon. Today is gardening: dark soil in hand, weeding, planting and enjoying the first hint of sweet rain in a long while.
Regards all,
Dr. Shaw x
ON THE WAY TO THE GARDEN
The garden is breathing out the air of Paradise today;
I sense this friend of heavenly
Nature, and myself, and the genius of the wine.
It's all right if the beggar claims to be a King
Today. His tent is a shadow thrown by a cloud;
The sown field is his room for receiving guests.
The meadow is composing a story of a spring day
In May; the person who knows lets the future
And its profits go and accepts the cash now.
Please don't imagine that your enemy will
Be faithful to you. The candle that stays lit
In the hermit's hut flickers out in the worldly church.
Make your soul strong then by letting it drink
The secret wine. You know that once we're dead,
This rotten world will press our dust into bricks.
My life is a black book. But don't rebuke
Me too much. No one can ever read
The words written on his own forehead.
When Hafez's coffin comes by, it'll be all right
To follow behind. Although he is
A captive of sin, he is on his way to the Garden.
— The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door
translated by Robert Bly & Leonard Lewisohn
HarperCollins, New York, 2008, pp. 31-32
Also: The Winged Energy of Delight, p. 397
I have become a doctor since i last wrote, last thursday in fact. After a lively viva, six years and fourteen days of work was rather wonderfully confirmed and my PhD was set free, a galloping horse over hills of fiery words. I feel happy.
Don't expect a note of my odd thinking to change or get trimmed at all. Free at last.
Coming up: this tuesday i am chairing a lecture by the wonderful Dr. Leonard Lewishon, one of the world's leading scholars on Sufism on Hafez, Tagore and the Persian world. 2.30-3.30, Barn Theatre, Dartington Estate, Devon, UK. That evening i am part of a bash in the estates Great Hall on Rumi - i'll be telling fairy stories, rude Nasrudin jokes and a few handpicked Rumi poems direct from Coleman. Chloe Goodchild and Duncan McIntosh will also be adding lots to the mix.
More soon. Today is gardening: dark soil in hand, weeding, planting and enjoying the first hint of sweet rain in a long while.
Regards all,
Dr. Shaw x
ON THE WAY TO THE GARDEN
The garden is breathing out the air of Paradise today;
I sense this friend of heavenly
Nature, and myself, and the genius of the wine.
It's all right if the beggar claims to be a King
Today. His tent is a shadow thrown by a cloud;
The sown field is his room for receiving guests.
The meadow is composing a story of a spring day
In May; the person who knows lets the future
And its profits go and accepts the cash now.
Please don't imagine that your enemy will
Be faithful to you. The candle that stays lit
In the hermit's hut flickers out in the worldly church.
Make your soul strong then by letting it drink
The secret wine. You know that once we're dead,
This rotten world will press our dust into bricks.
My life is a black book. But don't rebuke
Me too much. No one can ever read
The words written on his own forehead.
When Hafez's coffin comes by, it'll be all right
To follow behind. Although he is
A captive of sin, he is on his way to the Garden.
— The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door
translated by Robert Bly & Leonard Lewisohn
HarperCollins, New York, 2008, pp. 31-32
Also: The Winged Energy of Delight, p. 397
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)