Sunday, 10 February 2013
Collaborations: Coleman Barks and David Abram
News of collaborations - This Friday at the eye wateringly grand Memorial Church at Stanford University in Northern California with Coleman Barks (see flyer above) - two travellers tell of their dreams - poetry, stories, reflections, music, jokes. This event is FREE, so please spread the word and bring friends. Coleman's new poetry (as well as his Rumi translations) is deep, playful and very brilliant, so take to this opportunity to see a master at work. I would hope to see us in Devon later this year, so hold out UK compadres.
I'm deep into leading the Oral Traditions program at Stanford, and also excited about some upcoming work in March on the Depth Psychology M.A. at Sonoma State - they are doing great things there. Apologies if i have not responded to emails, each day brings some new kind of challenge (mostly good), that happily keeps me away from the computer screen! Underneath the Schumacher note is part of the epilogue to SNOWY TOWER, the upcoming new book on Parzival - this is to with place, story, and the arising of value. For such a book lover as myself, please don't confuse this as a diatribe against literature, it is more to do with shaking loose the habit for some storytellers of learning stories line by line from the page. That has its elegance to be sure, but i suspect the land itself is trying to tell us something if we can get our furry, winged ear down to its emanations. Which brings me to:
A Wild Land Dreaming: Living Language and the Erotics of Place
1-7 July 2013
SCHUMACHER COLLEGE, DEVON, U.K.
With David Abram and Martin Shaw
This course is open for bookings.
Reality shapeshifts. Underneath our definitions, prior to all our ready explanations, the world disclosed by our animal senses is a breathing cosmos — tranced, animate and trickster-struck. David Abram
This is the earthy fulcrum where stories of a place emerge – about that cave, that estuary, that Rowan tree. Not in the clipped tempo of a written sentence, but a galloping, roaming, rampant language that tears into the soul like the vivid colors of a jungle bird. Martin Shaw
Join renowned geophilosopher David Abram and master storyteller Martin Shaw for a venture into the heart of the ecological imagination.
Says David: “We’ll awaken our creaturely senses from their screen-dazzled slumber, calling upon the powers of story and word magic to stir the ancient eros between the human animal and the animate earth. And we’ll engage, too, the wordless silence of real encounter – listening close to the elemental energies surging around us and even through us, to the thudding of wings as they paddle the wind, to the gushing waters and the lichen-encrusted rocks”.
Over the course of a week, working both indoors and out in the many-voiced terrain, David and Martin promise to “delve deep into the forgotten intimacy between language and land, between oral poetics and the powers of place. We’ll explore our intense conviction that the psyche is not inside us, but rather that we live within the psyche; indeed that we dwell within a broad intelligence that is not ours, but is rather the earth’s. We’ll explore the conviction that our lives and our actions unfold in the depths of a material imagination that far exceeds all our human designs, and that with sufficient time and attention, an enchanted rapport can arise between one’s body and the breathing terrain — between a person and a place — such that we find ourselves in the grip of what tribal and bardic cultures might call a ‘wild land dreaming’.”
“This is hardly a new practice; for many millennia humans understood that it was necessary, now and then, to seek a fresh exchange with the living cosmos, and to craft from that exchange something so beautiful it feeds the stars and coaxes the hunkered moon up through the tangle of branches to launch itself across the pool of night.”
“In our own time, it’s the biosphere itself that needs the nourishment of both our fierce longing and our tawny panache. Modern humankind’s long estrangement from the land has brought forth monsters, and many still more dangerous are a’borning. The gathering storm staggers our imagination: reason alone will not get us out of this morass. But a keen sense for the shadowed magic that’s afoot – a story-sense tuned to the difficult wonder of the real – is a mighty useful compass for finding our way through, and a powerful tool for metamorphosis.”
Place and the Arising of Value
We could pull ourselves back from the page (or the computer screen) into the immediacy of where we actually live. Re- consecrate a relationship to the living landscape in front of us. You may want to give this boundaries for awhile. Say five miles. Anyone can find wild nature within five miles of their door if they are prepared to go small as well as big – probably five yards.
Maybe decide you are going to be like the archaic Seannachai, that you are going to be a cultural historian for the mythologies of place. Be like young Parzival, or Finn, or Mimmi le Blanc the wild girl, and sit under trees and by ghostly stretches of water and listen and watch. Get up close and personal again – face to face encounters, don’t rely on any book, including this one, to be a substitute.
When you start to absorb these revealing images – these stories of the waterhole, elder tree or visiting jay – don’t write them down. If you need to remember, walk them into your body, chant them in, dance them in. If a pencil hits paper then use it to draw the story, not to write it. Make a map of events. At small gatherings tell them, and remember, those gatherings don’t have to be for humans. Some of the most joyous tellings can be for hedgehog, wind or swamp.
As soon as the ink hits the line you have altered your relationship to the story. When you tell it you could end up groping for the memory of the linear arrangement of ink on paper rather than the bodily impulses of a truly impacted story. Another esoteric detail – use green ink for the map. Lorca claimed that black scares the little spirit-animals that want to burst through onto the page.
If you are another kind of animal then how does that get communicated in the telling of a story? Is that voice of yours a generous gurgle or thin and sharp like a buzzard's beak? Do you lope like a jackal or stay very still like a cat in a sun spot? Follow the energies of your own body in that regard, stay authentic.
As a wide-eyed romantic little kid, I liked nothing more than to follow my dad around on one of his long walks. He’s a big walker. So, much of my education in understanding stories relationship to place come from these walks. In a way we were beating the boundaries, establishing that five mile radius I’m talking about. He would show me an old stone archway, or a particular stretch of lonely beech trees or occasionally, with a long finger, point at far off Dartmoor.
To this day I could walk you the same route down tiny Devonshire lanes, and point out haunted Victorian lamposts, old tribal settlements beneath car parks, hidden trails down to the sea at Babbacombe and the very bench he and my mother sat on when he proposed marriage. There was an assemblage of the mythic and the anecdotal on these walks that were appropriately intermingled. It was a good mix up between wild nature and the intricacies of human culture.
Now as a father, I walk with my little daughter through the ancient stannery town of Ashburton to the river Ashburn. We drop coins under the bridge for the spirit Kutty Dyer who lives in its most shadowed recess. Or, as a family we hike up behind the town to the bottom of the south moor. As we gaze up at a pattern of fields and then open moor, stories race down to meet us. All the tapestry of local folklore encircle – women riding in bone carriages, snowy hoof prints way up on the roof of Widdicombe church, elves scaring away property developers.
We arch out and see the rutted tracks that monks took between the four abbeys, the ewes on the lower hills birthing lambs under sullen yellow clouds, honey suckle on the banks of the summering lanes, the tractor sweating hard and pulling trailers mad with hay, fist-freezing snow across a corrugated iron shelter filled with mud flecked goats. And underneath it all, the great animal Dartmoor dreams, and sends us its muscled stories. We, gazing from behind the farmer's gate, glimpse our inheritance and are silenced.
So something like that waits for all of us - Blake found it in the east end of London. Get into walking. For my first year outdoors, I would often cover ten to twelve miles a day. It was always interesting. Being unable to drive really helped. Beat your boundary lines, offer your libations. Imagine that we are all going to turn up at your door sometime soon. Take us for a walk, show us the inner-story of the place you live in. All myth tellers know that there will come a point in an evening of celebration and story when the hosts will turn to the stranger and ask them to sing a song from their home place. For the English this can provoke an embarrassed rendition of Monty Python's “always look on the bright side of life”. We turn the loss into a joke. But what is soaked in the labour of stewarding your place – the ploughing, thatching, crofting, ferrier songs? The songs of the fishermen, leaving before dawn from Brixham harbor? That could be a rich grounding.
Where is all this leading? Ultimately, slowly, it may set us in a very authentic set of values. Not enforced by government or chapel, but by a revolution of the heart. The heart opens through investment – through tender feeling and hard work brought into relationship with a landscape of story and place entwined.
A little warning. To take all this on can initially create a rather worthy type of character. Wandering around in a jacket made of nettles, shirts dyed in vats of their own urine and muttering songs about Widdicombe fair to passing cars. A little unreal. It doesn’t have to be that way. That gets polished down over time.
So let’s not give up ambition, or that nutty part of us which loves the smile of another human's eyes. A little conflict is sexy. But, as Gary Snyder says, be famous for five miles. Be famous to thin stretches of grass between abandoned buildings, be famous to that nest of starlings just over the hill. That’s a kind of feathery heroism, and is a sweet gesture to our desire to be witnessed in this world.
There is no quick route into any of this, and few clear steps. It’s a job for life however, and in times like these how often do you hear that? As the elders say: “If you haven’t been fed become bread”.
Sometimes this rooting in place has to be less physical and more imaginative. Some places are the last place we should be. Life is often rough. If that’s the case, then look for the “hidden country” – the dream time. This is a place of snowy tundra, Irish fishing villages and turbaned magicians, dark eyed girls living in hollow trees, chanting leopards, and Tibetan astrologers wandering the dragon lines of an ancient Scottish glen. Till you find your physical ground, then abide there when you can. I lived there for years and years.
In the old country they say that next to this earth is the Land of the Sidhe – the fairy. To get there you will have to cross clay. Beyond that is the Many-Colored Land. There you cross water. Next is the Land of Wonder, for this fire. But beyond all of those is the Land of Promise. To get there you travel on the sweet breath of story. I will meet you there.
copyright martin shaw 2013
I'm deep into leading the Oral Traditions program at Stanford, and also excited about some upcoming work in March on the Depth Psychology M.A. at Sonoma State - they are doing great things there. Apologies if i have not responded to emails, each day brings some new kind of challenge (mostly good), that happily keeps me away from the computer screen! Underneath the Schumacher note is part of the epilogue to SNOWY TOWER, the upcoming new book on Parzival - this is to with place, story, and the arising of value. For such a book lover as myself, please don't confuse this as a diatribe against literature, it is more to do with shaking loose the habit for some storytellers of learning stories line by line from the page. That has its elegance to be sure, but i suspect the land itself is trying to tell us something if we can get our furry, winged ear down to its emanations. Which brings me to:
A Wild Land Dreaming: Living Language and the Erotics of Place
1-7 July 2013
SCHUMACHER COLLEGE, DEVON, U.K.
With David Abram and Martin Shaw
This course is open for bookings.
Reality shapeshifts. Underneath our definitions, prior to all our ready explanations, the world disclosed by our animal senses is a breathing cosmos — tranced, animate and trickster-struck. David Abram
This is the earthy fulcrum where stories of a place emerge – about that cave, that estuary, that Rowan tree. Not in the clipped tempo of a written sentence, but a galloping, roaming, rampant language that tears into the soul like the vivid colors of a jungle bird. Martin Shaw
Join renowned geophilosopher David Abram and master storyteller Martin Shaw for a venture into the heart of the ecological imagination.
Says David: “We’ll awaken our creaturely senses from their screen-dazzled slumber, calling upon the powers of story and word magic to stir the ancient eros between the human animal and the animate earth. And we’ll engage, too, the wordless silence of real encounter – listening close to the elemental energies surging around us and even through us, to the thudding of wings as they paddle the wind, to the gushing waters and the lichen-encrusted rocks”.
Over the course of a week, working both indoors and out in the many-voiced terrain, David and Martin promise to “delve deep into the forgotten intimacy between language and land, between oral poetics and the powers of place. We’ll explore our intense conviction that the psyche is not inside us, but rather that we live within the psyche; indeed that we dwell within a broad intelligence that is not ours, but is rather the earth’s. We’ll explore the conviction that our lives and our actions unfold in the depths of a material imagination that far exceeds all our human designs, and that with sufficient time and attention, an enchanted rapport can arise between one’s body and the breathing terrain — between a person and a place — such that we find ourselves in the grip of what tribal and bardic cultures might call a ‘wild land dreaming’.”
“This is hardly a new practice; for many millennia humans understood that it was necessary, now and then, to seek a fresh exchange with the living cosmos, and to craft from that exchange something so beautiful it feeds the stars and coaxes the hunkered moon up through the tangle of branches to launch itself across the pool of night.”
“In our own time, it’s the biosphere itself that needs the nourishment of both our fierce longing and our tawny panache. Modern humankind’s long estrangement from the land has brought forth monsters, and many still more dangerous are a’borning. The gathering storm staggers our imagination: reason alone will not get us out of this morass. But a keen sense for the shadowed magic that’s afoot – a story-sense tuned to the difficult wonder of the real – is a mighty useful compass for finding our way through, and a powerful tool for metamorphosis.”
Place and the Arising of Value
We could pull ourselves back from the page (or the computer screen) into the immediacy of where we actually live. Re- consecrate a relationship to the living landscape in front of us. You may want to give this boundaries for awhile. Say five miles. Anyone can find wild nature within five miles of their door if they are prepared to go small as well as big – probably five yards.
Maybe decide you are going to be like the archaic Seannachai, that you are going to be a cultural historian for the mythologies of place. Be like young Parzival, or Finn, or Mimmi le Blanc the wild girl, and sit under trees and by ghostly stretches of water and listen and watch. Get up close and personal again – face to face encounters, don’t rely on any book, including this one, to be a substitute.
When you start to absorb these revealing images – these stories of the waterhole, elder tree or visiting jay – don’t write them down. If you need to remember, walk them into your body, chant them in, dance them in. If a pencil hits paper then use it to draw the story, not to write it. Make a map of events. At small gatherings tell them, and remember, those gatherings don’t have to be for humans. Some of the most joyous tellings can be for hedgehog, wind or swamp.
As soon as the ink hits the line you have altered your relationship to the story. When you tell it you could end up groping for the memory of the linear arrangement of ink on paper rather than the bodily impulses of a truly impacted story. Another esoteric detail – use green ink for the map. Lorca claimed that black scares the little spirit-animals that want to burst through onto the page.
If you are another kind of animal then how does that get communicated in the telling of a story? Is that voice of yours a generous gurgle or thin and sharp like a buzzard's beak? Do you lope like a jackal or stay very still like a cat in a sun spot? Follow the energies of your own body in that regard, stay authentic.
As a wide-eyed romantic little kid, I liked nothing more than to follow my dad around on one of his long walks. He’s a big walker. So, much of my education in understanding stories relationship to place come from these walks. In a way we were beating the boundaries, establishing that five mile radius I’m talking about. He would show me an old stone archway, or a particular stretch of lonely beech trees or occasionally, with a long finger, point at far off Dartmoor.
To this day I could walk you the same route down tiny Devonshire lanes, and point out haunted Victorian lamposts, old tribal settlements beneath car parks, hidden trails down to the sea at Babbacombe and the very bench he and my mother sat on when he proposed marriage. There was an assemblage of the mythic and the anecdotal on these walks that were appropriately intermingled. It was a good mix up between wild nature and the intricacies of human culture.
Now as a father, I walk with my little daughter through the ancient stannery town of Ashburton to the river Ashburn. We drop coins under the bridge for the spirit Kutty Dyer who lives in its most shadowed recess. Or, as a family we hike up behind the town to the bottom of the south moor. As we gaze up at a pattern of fields and then open moor, stories race down to meet us. All the tapestry of local folklore encircle – women riding in bone carriages, snowy hoof prints way up on the roof of Widdicombe church, elves scaring away property developers.
We arch out and see the rutted tracks that monks took between the four abbeys, the ewes on the lower hills birthing lambs under sullen yellow clouds, honey suckle on the banks of the summering lanes, the tractor sweating hard and pulling trailers mad with hay, fist-freezing snow across a corrugated iron shelter filled with mud flecked goats. And underneath it all, the great animal Dartmoor dreams, and sends us its muscled stories. We, gazing from behind the farmer's gate, glimpse our inheritance and are silenced.
So something like that waits for all of us - Blake found it in the east end of London. Get into walking. For my first year outdoors, I would often cover ten to twelve miles a day. It was always interesting. Being unable to drive really helped. Beat your boundary lines, offer your libations. Imagine that we are all going to turn up at your door sometime soon. Take us for a walk, show us the inner-story of the place you live in. All myth tellers know that there will come a point in an evening of celebration and story when the hosts will turn to the stranger and ask them to sing a song from their home place. For the English this can provoke an embarrassed rendition of Monty Python's “always look on the bright side of life”. We turn the loss into a joke. But what is soaked in the labour of stewarding your place – the ploughing, thatching, crofting, ferrier songs? The songs of the fishermen, leaving before dawn from Brixham harbor? That could be a rich grounding.
Where is all this leading? Ultimately, slowly, it may set us in a very authentic set of values. Not enforced by government or chapel, but by a revolution of the heart. The heart opens through investment – through tender feeling and hard work brought into relationship with a landscape of story and place entwined.
A little warning. To take all this on can initially create a rather worthy type of character. Wandering around in a jacket made of nettles, shirts dyed in vats of their own urine and muttering songs about Widdicombe fair to passing cars. A little unreal. It doesn’t have to be that way. That gets polished down over time.
So let’s not give up ambition, or that nutty part of us which loves the smile of another human's eyes. A little conflict is sexy. But, as Gary Snyder says, be famous for five miles. Be famous to thin stretches of grass between abandoned buildings, be famous to that nest of starlings just over the hill. That’s a kind of feathery heroism, and is a sweet gesture to our desire to be witnessed in this world.
There is no quick route into any of this, and few clear steps. It’s a job for life however, and in times like these how often do you hear that? As the elders say: “If you haven’t been fed become bread”.
Sometimes this rooting in place has to be less physical and more imaginative. Some places are the last place we should be. Life is often rough. If that’s the case, then look for the “hidden country” – the dream time. This is a place of snowy tundra, Irish fishing villages and turbaned magicians, dark eyed girls living in hollow trees, chanting leopards, and Tibetan astrologers wandering the dragon lines of an ancient Scottish glen. Till you find your physical ground, then abide there when you can. I lived there for years and years.
In the old country they say that next to this earth is the Land of the Sidhe – the fairy. To get there you will have to cross clay. Beyond that is the Many-Colored Land. There you cross water. Next is the Land of Wonder, for this fire. But beyond all of those is the Land of Promise. To get there you travel on the sweet breath of story. I will meet you there.
copyright martin shaw 2013
Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Saturday, 19 January 2013
The Healing Ground
Still settling into life in Northern California. One of the coldest winters the local folks can remember - for sure i have noticed a chill in the morning - that has had me at the thrift store digging scarves out of $3 boxes. Still, i can't help but feel wistful seeing when i see the white carpet down in the west country of England at the moment. Sledges and hot chocolate!
A suggestion and a poem. I am very much enjoying "Entering the Healing Ground" by the writer Francis Weller, and include my endorsement below - so my suggestion is to check it out! There's good eatin' in there - much truth and valuable glints of how to work into the fertile ground of grief - how it can become an offering to something vaster than ourselves. A great deal of joy is threaded through the prose.
"This book rings a shivering bell of hope: that, when lifted by ritual and fellowship, the moist ground of grief actually contains a treasury of gifts that are our ancestral birthright. In other words we start to become a real human being. We are no longer rigid islands of self sufficiency, but open to the soulful wonders that the animate world offers. Insightfully written, warm and with a wonderful poetic sensibility, the deep experience of Weller shines through. The work has honed something clear and valuable in his own character, and a delightful wisdom illuminates every page of “Entering the Healing Ground”.
Being amongst all this vitamin D infused sunlight in the depths of winter is a new experience, and of course, immediately turns me back towards the inner-weather we all carry regardless of whether we walk on sand, tundra or moss. Here is a strange old Irish story - The Horned Women - that i think carries some positively archaic residue in its saddle-bags. I'm enjoying working these old stories into something like the below - all the details are the same, there's just some playful turns of language embedded in the mix.
The Horned Women
Irish
In the storm
the heavy house is resting,
places girth over migration,
resists invasion from the gailing heave,
robust with creaking,
but staying its compass,
sullen and slumbered in the epileptic rain.
Above, Orion lopes about in his black-jungled heaven,
his triple starred belt, his hunter charms
fast moving over the weather, the house, the people.
But this is not his story.
Below, children are curled pink in blankets, servants doze with their thin hounds
by the twinkling peat.
Only the Big Woman of the house is awake,
working by candle -
nailed fast to her evening task, the carding of wool *.
*‘carding’ wool is the separating of wool fibers in preparation for spinning.
She is in the hut of herself.
Something haunches through sleet to the old door,
issuing a strident clamor -
part voice, part knock - a commingling of energies - brick fisted and gallop-jawed:
“Open! Open!”
Big Woman calls; “who is there?”
Comes grizzled croak, tindered with soot;
“I am the Witch of the One Horn”
Suspecting a villagers trick, no more than that,
the mistress groans open the oak,
and the weird being enters, parading a pair of wool carders in her left hand,
and truly a horn, bone-white from her forehead, as if still in growth.
She slow-hoofs to the hearthside and starts carding the wool,
granite knuckled but finger nimble.
More battery on the door, another voice, silvered with water this time
“I am the Witch of the Two Horns”
This elegant wraith enters, with a wheel for spinning, a hand sparrow-quick for the task,
double horned a-glow from her skull.
Through the juddering dark
twelve women glide in,
the last with twelve horns jutting
her brow, ornate and terrible,
Like the jaw of an Irish shark
a glinting Underworld crown.
Saying nothing to the Big Woman
they settle to their spinning and open to
a moon-vast language - a singing -
a dozen acres of cold speech
like frozen lumps cut from an icy lake
smelling of no color we could understand
anymore.
each tongue-sound lubricating the human air
into new shape, sluicing the known burrs and warmth
of speech with tributaries of startling cold star-streams.
This keening
drains the mistress,
makes tender the divide between here and
the Other Place,
keeps her giddy, weak, silent.
The Witches caw for food,
for cake. They love cake.
The Big Woman
takes the black air, making her way to the well to collect water for the mixing.
Alone, in terror, groping her white arm into the well,
all she has is a sieve to collect, which of course cannot hold the water.
Her tears drop into that ancient granary of silver.
A voice speaks from the shimmering hole;
“Yellow clay and moss will bind the sieve like plaster.” So she does.
She delivers the mix to the witches, who send her outside to stand in the dark,
like a child failing in class.
They wander corridors and small rooms,
gather blood from every living thing
in the house and cherry the cake
with their findings.
All sleep on,
dank crusted with dreams.
***
Out by the well -
Again, the voice of the clear waters;
“When you come to the north face of the house, bellow out three times
“the mountain of the Fennian women - the Horned women - the Irish women,
and the sky over it is all on fire”.
At the northern point,
she brays hard three times the message.
From the door they burst, amok,
in terror, smeared with licks of wool
floating merry in the loose, cold air
around them, like soft sparks of light.
They flee.
Active now, awakened,
the Spirit of Well
offers the Big Woman instruction
from the her ghost-hole,
the glimmered-pit,
this gaped slit that reaches down,
down past slippery tree roots,
the spiked pits of faithless lovers, a shingle of dragon scales,
crumbling ritual gear of the Celts,
to that smoky conscience that grinds in the very heart
of the earth.
“These are ancient, ancient forces
you have allowed into your house.
You need to re-enter right away, this moment.
You need to carry a bold shoulder of power
to block the crackling flank of their magics.
Sprinkle on the threshold the water in which you have
washed your kiddies feet - the feet-water.
Take crumbs of the cake the Horned ones made,
with blood from your dreamed family,
Break the cake and place crumbs in their sleeping mouths,
this will break evil and restore them.
Two final hexes:
take their cloth and place it half in and half out
of a chest you then bind and lock tight.
Place a great cross beam across the doors,
that no pagan muscle can shift.”
***
Surely the baleful coven return.
Not immediate - but just when the Big Woman is moving to forgetting.
A batter-thrash on the door, the gurgling shriek, the twelve gathered,
crow circled in the iron piss rain, cocked horns glinting and steamed,
bullies a chant with their demands.
The foot-water speaks;
“no entry for you. None.
I am scattered across this threshold. I have the power of
the loch, the river, the clouds, the dew, a women a-weep.
I will block such queer folk as you.”
The door speaks;
“a beam like iron strides my storied oak. I am a collision for
you wintery spirits with hearthfire power. I will outlast you
with this simple twig.”
The twelve send a thin keen
to the spirit of the blood bread,
their greatest power in the house.
“open this door, break beam and water,
spirit that holds the familied blood.”
“i cannot. My round shape has been brutalized,
crumbled, fed into the mouths of the children. Turning widdershins
your spell-cant, making your powers cockless.”
The shrieking ensemble
flail impudent in their bad news,
do not immediately leave the scene,
try strange persuasions,
but this island of the strong door,
carries the cut-truth of a Sligo Boars tusks,
A Dingle waves salty defiance,
and they can do nothing.
At some slow point before dawn they slip away.
In the yellowed light of morning comes safety.
the Big Woman leaves the house and twitches her nose
in the bruise-fresh air.
There is a mantle left
in the thick ruts of muddy hoofed departure -
no witching this time, just haste.
For five hundred years now the mantle has hung
on a rusty nail in the Old Place. As a reminder
of what we let in
when the house sleeps
and rain sleets the glass
and we stay anchored to our one, great task.
copyright Martin Shaw 2012
A suggestion and a poem. I am very much enjoying "Entering the Healing Ground" by the writer Francis Weller, and include my endorsement below - so my suggestion is to check it out! There's good eatin' in there - much truth and valuable glints of how to work into the fertile ground of grief - how it can become an offering to something vaster than ourselves. A great deal of joy is threaded through the prose.
"This book rings a shivering bell of hope: that, when lifted by ritual and fellowship, the moist ground of grief actually contains a treasury of gifts that are our ancestral birthright. In other words we start to become a real human being. We are no longer rigid islands of self sufficiency, but open to the soulful wonders that the animate world offers. Insightfully written, warm and with a wonderful poetic sensibility, the deep experience of Weller shines through. The work has honed something clear and valuable in his own character, and a delightful wisdom illuminates every page of “Entering the Healing Ground”.
Being amongst all this vitamin D infused sunlight in the depths of winter is a new experience, and of course, immediately turns me back towards the inner-weather we all carry regardless of whether we walk on sand, tundra or moss. Here is a strange old Irish story - The Horned Women - that i think carries some positively archaic residue in its saddle-bags. I'm enjoying working these old stories into something like the below - all the details are the same, there's just some playful turns of language embedded in the mix.
The Horned Women
Irish
In the storm
the heavy house is resting,
places girth over migration,
resists invasion from the gailing heave,
robust with creaking,
but staying its compass,
sullen and slumbered in the epileptic rain.
Above, Orion lopes about in his black-jungled heaven,
his triple starred belt, his hunter charms
fast moving over the weather, the house, the people.
But this is not his story.
Below, children are curled pink in blankets, servants doze with their thin hounds
by the twinkling peat.
Only the Big Woman of the house is awake,
working by candle -
nailed fast to her evening task, the carding of wool *.
*‘carding’ wool is the separating of wool fibers in preparation for spinning.
She is in the hut of herself.
Something haunches through sleet to the old door,
issuing a strident clamor -
part voice, part knock - a commingling of energies - brick fisted and gallop-jawed:
“Open! Open!”
Big Woman calls; “who is there?”
Comes grizzled croak, tindered with soot;
“I am the Witch of the One Horn”
Suspecting a villagers trick, no more than that,
the mistress groans open the oak,
and the weird being enters, parading a pair of wool carders in her left hand,
and truly a horn, bone-white from her forehead, as if still in growth.
She slow-hoofs to the hearthside and starts carding the wool,
granite knuckled but finger nimble.
More battery on the door, another voice, silvered with water this time
“I am the Witch of the Two Horns”
This elegant wraith enters, with a wheel for spinning, a hand sparrow-quick for the task,
double horned a-glow from her skull.
Through the juddering dark
twelve women glide in,
the last with twelve horns jutting
her brow, ornate and terrible,
Like the jaw of an Irish shark
a glinting Underworld crown.
Saying nothing to the Big Woman
they settle to their spinning and open to
a moon-vast language - a singing -
a dozen acres of cold speech
like frozen lumps cut from an icy lake
smelling of no color we could understand
anymore.
each tongue-sound lubricating the human air
into new shape, sluicing the known burrs and warmth
of speech with tributaries of startling cold star-streams.
This keening
drains the mistress,
makes tender the divide between here and
the Other Place,
keeps her giddy, weak, silent.
The Witches caw for food,
for cake. They love cake.
The Big Woman
takes the black air, making her way to the well to collect water for the mixing.
Alone, in terror, groping her white arm into the well,
all she has is a sieve to collect, which of course cannot hold the water.
Her tears drop into that ancient granary of silver.
A voice speaks from the shimmering hole;
“Yellow clay and moss will bind the sieve like plaster.” So she does.
She delivers the mix to the witches, who send her outside to stand in the dark,
like a child failing in class.
They wander corridors and small rooms,
gather blood from every living thing
in the house and cherry the cake
with their findings.
All sleep on,
dank crusted with dreams.
***
Out by the well -
Again, the voice of the clear waters;
“When you come to the north face of the house, bellow out three times
“the mountain of the Fennian women - the Horned women - the Irish women,
and the sky over it is all on fire”.
At the northern point,
she brays hard three times the message.
From the door they burst, amok,
in terror, smeared with licks of wool
floating merry in the loose, cold air
around them, like soft sparks of light.
They flee.
Active now, awakened,
the Spirit of Well
offers the Big Woman instruction
from the her ghost-hole,
the glimmered-pit,
this gaped slit that reaches down,
down past slippery tree roots,
the spiked pits of faithless lovers, a shingle of dragon scales,
crumbling ritual gear of the Celts,
to that smoky conscience that grinds in the very heart
of the earth.
“These are ancient, ancient forces
you have allowed into your house.
You need to re-enter right away, this moment.
You need to carry a bold shoulder of power
to block the crackling flank of their magics.
Sprinkle on the threshold the water in which you have
washed your kiddies feet - the feet-water.
Take crumbs of the cake the Horned ones made,
with blood from your dreamed family,
Break the cake and place crumbs in their sleeping mouths,
this will break evil and restore them.
Two final hexes:
take their cloth and place it half in and half out
of a chest you then bind and lock tight.
Place a great cross beam across the doors,
that no pagan muscle can shift.”
***
Surely the baleful coven return.
Not immediate - but just when the Big Woman is moving to forgetting.
A batter-thrash on the door, the gurgling shriek, the twelve gathered,
crow circled in the iron piss rain, cocked horns glinting and steamed,
bullies a chant with their demands.
The foot-water speaks;
“no entry for you. None.
I am scattered across this threshold. I have the power of
the loch, the river, the clouds, the dew, a women a-weep.
I will block such queer folk as you.”
The door speaks;
“a beam like iron strides my storied oak. I am a collision for
you wintery spirits with hearthfire power. I will outlast you
with this simple twig.”
The twelve send a thin keen
to the spirit of the blood bread,
their greatest power in the house.
“open this door, break beam and water,
spirit that holds the familied blood.”
“i cannot. My round shape has been brutalized,
crumbled, fed into the mouths of the children. Turning widdershins
your spell-cant, making your powers cockless.”
The shrieking ensemble
flail impudent in their bad news,
do not immediately leave the scene,
try strange persuasions,
but this island of the strong door,
carries the cut-truth of a Sligo Boars tusks,
A Dingle waves salty defiance,
and they can do nothing.
At some slow point before dawn they slip away.
In the yellowed light of morning comes safety.
the Big Woman leaves the house and twitches her nose
in the bruise-fresh air.
There is a mantle left
in the thick ruts of muddy hoofed departure -
no witching this time, just haste.
For five hundred years now the mantle has hung
on a rusty nail in the Old Place. As a reminder
of what we let in
when the house sleeps
and rain sleets the glass
and we stay anchored to our one, great task.
copyright Martin Shaw 2012
Thursday, 3 January 2013
Raven
Greetings and a very happy and peaceful new year!
I am just settling into life up near Point Reyes, Northern California. To my surprise it is actually chillier here than in Devon, in the UK - although usually by mid day the sky is that wonderful, vast blue i associate with this part of the world. I look forward to leading the Oral Culture and Mythology program at Stanford from next week - i will also be doing working with myth, ideas and the living world up in Marin.
So here's a little something (i put some of this up early last year) in deference to some of my new neighbors, the mighty Raven. Please eat this and not me!
Something more coherent when i have finished unpacking, recovering from colds, opening bank account, finding a set of wheels etc.
Black-Mouthed Raven
Raven carries fear under its wings, and is not afraid to drop handfuls here and there to get what it wants. It's preponderance for the flesh of the dead, and its willingness to gobble scat, make it an edgier presence in our heads to that of the rabbit or budgerigar. Its ink-black plumage, elongated Roman beak and patterning of honks and ghostly croaks make it a bird with a rep.
Beloved of the Norseman, the natives of the pacific north west, and the Greeks, it has surprising associations with the sun, rather than endless gloom and corpse-picking. As the story states - there is the old native Trickster tale of Raven actually bringing light to the world in a small box stolen from a big man of the Otherworld so humans could hunt fish and collect berries. Odin bent his great ear daily to the litany of genius gossip that Hugin and Mugin (his raven companions) would report to him of the world's occurring.
We know that an alpha-raven’s mouth turns black on the inside when taking a position of leadership (always by force) within a community, and that the followers' mouths tend to stay pink, unless making a bid for dominance. There seems to be no way round this black-mouth leadership, even in our most refined universities. Knowledge can quickly become a form of intimidation to bruise your way to tenure. This way physicality is no longer so crucial, even the solitary can think their way to stature rather than swing a fist or kick a football.
Initiation has always placed emphasis on colour. Black is always one with knowledge of the Underworld, of failure, of stuckness, or depression, fatality, listlessness. Whilst having endured all that, they have somehow turned it into a great song. The colour red is more showy, more to do with the young warrior, than the patient depth of black. This mouth colouring reveals much about relationship; that too much subservience around the leader cripples development to an individual.
Remember the painter Willem De Kooning's refusal to work in Arshille Gorky’s studio?, “nothing grows around big trees.” he said. Depends what kind of tree i would suggest. For animals, pack living often greatly assists survival, and they know well that leadership will require constant display, strategy, barracking, and generally large behaviour. It’s exhausting. But for initiated tribes people, much of the West is a pink-mouthed society, a society that runs from much of what initiation offers in the raising of an adult – becoming kin to nature, facing the Underworld, staying connected and debted to a cosmos. When we stay distant, protected, coddled, ironic, our mouths stay resolutely pink. We have not taken responsibility for the shaping of our lives, we are not in service.
Animals have always been magical to ancient peoples. Unless you specifically traced one, who is to say that the raven that honks above the ancestral bone-yard is not a perennial constant, present, unchanging forever? (referring to story not seen in this blog) They disappear into the lonely tree line, and maybe in and out of other worlds entirely.
The seemingly modern notion of a raven, or snake, or parrot, as inner-figures that also dig away at our logical, up standing mind, is not so modern. Recall the third century Origen (Origen 1982 :115):
“understand that you have within you herds of cattle, flocks of sheep…and that the birds of the air are all within you…You see that you have all those things that the world has.” This has been a vital step from them as a mere meal on legs or being a resource only for labour and feast. We also realise that there is plenty of order, logic and up standingness in the animal world. All kinds of habits and cautions. Real animal nature is not just a byword for sweaty exuberance.
The trouble with this animal association is that too rigid an interiorising robs the animal of its independent vitality, we risk degradation in too many attempts to assimilate something that we recognise, but that should in some ways remain ‘other’. Raven is a spiritus rector, a guardian deity, not as a mere symbol ‘representing’ my mysterious side. We have the task of losing some vanity. The living world is very skilled at providing that.
Although enjoying a kind of solitary ambience, ravens are effective team-players when hunting. Terry McEneaney, an ornithologist from Yellowstone Park, reports seeing a raven landing on the rim of an opsrey nest and stealing a fish. Whilst the osprey was agitated, another raven working in tandem sneaked in and stole an egg. There are hundreds of such accounts.
This seems to indicate some kind of forward thinking on behalf of the ravens. Professor Dieter Wallenschlager witnessed a raven feigning injury – dragging a wing – to incite a swan to attack, whilst again its mate rushed the nest and stole an egg. Whilst opinion ranges on how much forethought is required to pull this off, what is clear is mutual dependence from both birds on the anticipated outcome.
The Tower of London still clips the wings of its ravens because of an old superstition that if the ravens leave, then England will fall. It is a bird close to wolf-mind: it will deliberately lead wolves to prey and then it will guzzle the greasy left overs. It was said they did the same thing for old west country hunters: they would be left the guts when the deer was killed.
They have also saved human lives: Ginny Hannum tells the story of being stalked by a cougar and only by the repeated, attention grabbing behaviour of a raven just overhead, did she glance up, see the cougar and rapidly retreat.
But let us not be too caught in the complete rehabilitation of the terror-birds; let us not place them comfortably within a human relational range of behaviour. They are mystifying, smart, aggressive and strictly hierarchical; they don’t sit round on bean bags in talking circles - they have black-mouthed leaders who intimidate to get themselves to the top of the pile until they themselves are toppled. Ravens are into power. The raven expert Bernd Heinrich tells the story of watching a particular dead beech tree for some time, and noticing that a succession of dominant ravens in the group would all choose a specific perch when their time came as top-bird. There were many others to choose from, equally plush, but somewhere in the wider raven-mind of that group it became established that that was the power-perch and so that was it. After years of careful and sometimes painful observation, Heinrich also noted that leadership amongst ravens came with a cost. All leaders have large bodies which require more feeding, all leaders have to constantly display their grandiosity, which requires many battles, much blood on the snow. You can’t relax, there is no one for you to follow, you lead, always.
Raven carries the Nigredo black of the alchemist on its wings, beak, body. It is like some charcoal stain on the optimist's blue horizon. Fifty thousand years of gobbling scat and flesh, a constant at the battlefield, make it a companion to putrefaction. Black is strong medicine, even when denied that it is a colour at all. It is the robe of choice for any decent occultist; the black of night is the cover for illicit liaison; to be ‘in the dark’ is to be wandering, confused, un-settled; it is a hint of what could await at the moment of death.
At the same time, archaeology tells us that black is the place to go. It’s long been known in England that any place name with the word black in it – Black Meadow, Black Woods, Blackingstone Rocks – is a place worthy of digging. The reason? The darker coloured soil will indicate an old settlement – generations of fire ash, food remains, and general use.
To a certain eye, black means to dig deeper. To a certain eye, it offers reward.
Raven carries this rattle-bag of contrary wisdoms, invokes a cautionary wave or grimace as it sweeps over the jolly street party. We know who would be first to pluck out an eye if we were we to slip one rainy night on the step. And yet, some memory remains of this bird and a box of light and a pinprick hole to the Otherworld (ref to ancient notion from Pacific North-West that Raven brought light to the world). They certainly stirs up mixed emotions. Duende, duende.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
I am just settling into life up near Point Reyes, Northern California. To my surprise it is actually chillier here than in Devon, in the UK - although usually by mid day the sky is that wonderful, vast blue i associate with this part of the world. I look forward to leading the Oral Culture and Mythology program at Stanford from next week - i will also be doing working with myth, ideas and the living world up in Marin.
So here's a little something (i put some of this up early last year) in deference to some of my new neighbors, the mighty Raven. Please eat this and not me!
Something more coherent when i have finished unpacking, recovering from colds, opening bank account, finding a set of wheels etc.
Black-Mouthed Raven
Raven carries fear under its wings, and is not afraid to drop handfuls here and there to get what it wants. It's preponderance for the flesh of the dead, and its willingness to gobble scat, make it an edgier presence in our heads to that of the rabbit or budgerigar. Its ink-black plumage, elongated Roman beak and patterning of honks and ghostly croaks make it a bird with a rep.
Beloved of the Norseman, the natives of the pacific north west, and the Greeks, it has surprising associations with the sun, rather than endless gloom and corpse-picking. As the story states - there is the old native Trickster tale of Raven actually bringing light to the world in a small box stolen from a big man of the Otherworld so humans could hunt fish and collect berries. Odin bent his great ear daily to the litany of genius gossip that Hugin and Mugin (his raven companions) would report to him of the world's occurring.
We know that an alpha-raven’s mouth turns black on the inside when taking a position of leadership (always by force) within a community, and that the followers' mouths tend to stay pink, unless making a bid for dominance. There seems to be no way round this black-mouth leadership, even in our most refined universities. Knowledge can quickly become a form of intimidation to bruise your way to tenure. This way physicality is no longer so crucial, even the solitary can think their way to stature rather than swing a fist or kick a football.
Initiation has always placed emphasis on colour. Black is always one with knowledge of the Underworld, of failure, of stuckness, or depression, fatality, listlessness. Whilst having endured all that, they have somehow turned it into a great song. The colour red is more showy, more to do with the young warrior, than the patient depth of black. This mouth colouring reveals much about relationship; that too much subservience around the leader cripples development to an individual.
Remember the painter Willem De Kooning's refusal to work in Arshille Gorky’s studio?, “nothing grows around big trees.” he said. Depends what kind of tree i would suggest. For animals, pack living often greatly assists survival, and they know well that leadership will require constant display, strategy, barracking, and generally large behaviour. It’s exhausting. But for initiated tribes people, much of the West is a pink-mouthed society, a society that runs from much of what initiation offers in the raising of an adult – becoming kin to nature, facing the Underworld, staying connected and debted to a cosmos. When we stay distant, protected, coddled, ironic, our mouths stay resolutely pink. We have not taken responsibility for the shaping of our lives, we are not in service.
Animals have always been magical to ancient peoples. Unless you specifically traced one, who is to say that the raven that honks above the ancestral bone-yard is not a perennial constant, present, unchanging forever? (referring to story not seen in this blog) They disappear into the lonely tree line, and maybe in and out of other worlds entirely.
The seemingly modern notion of a raven, or snake, or parrot, as inner-figures that also dig away at our logical, up standing mind, is not so modern. Recall the third century Origen (Origen 1982 :115):
“understand that you have within you herds of cattle, flocks of sheep…and that the birds of the air are all within you…You see that you have all those things that the world has.” This has been a vital step from them as a mere meal on legs or being a resource only for labour and feast. We also realise that there is plenty of order, logic and up standingness in the animal world. All kinds of habits and cautions. Real animal nature is not just a byword for sweaty exuberance.
The trouble with this animal association is that too rigid an interiorising robs the animal of its independent vitality, we risk degradation in too many attempts to assimilate something that we recognise, but that should in some ways remain ‘other’. Raven is a spiritus rector, a guardian deity, not as a mere symbol ‘representing’ my mysterious side. We have the task of losing some vanity. The living world is very skilled at providing that.
Although enjoying a kind of solitary ambience, ravens are effective team-players when hunting. Terry McEneaney, an ornithologist from Yellowstone Park, reports seeing a raven landing on the rim of an opsrey nest and stealing a fish. Whilst the osprey was agitated, another raven working in tandem sneaked in and stole an egg. There are hundreds of such accounts.
This seems to indicate some kind of forward thinking on behalf of the ravens. Professor Dieter Wallenschlager witnessed a raven feigning injury – dragging a wing – to incite a swan to attack, whilst again its mate rushed the nest and stole an egg. Whilst opinion ranges on how much forethought is required to pull this off, what is clear is mutual dependence from both birds on the anticipated outcome.
The Tower of London still clips the wings of its ravens because of an old superstition that if the ravens leave, then England will fall. It is a bird close to wolf-mind: it will deliberately lead wolves to prey and then it will guzzle the greasy left overs. It was said they did the same thing for old west country hunters: they would be left the guts when the deer was killed.
They have also saved human lives: Ginny Hannum tells the story of being stalked by a cougar and only by the repeated, attention grabbing behaviour of a raven just overhead, did she glance up, see the cougar and rapidly retreat.
But let us not be too caught in the complete rehabilitation of the terror-birds; let us not place them comfortably within a human relational range of behaviour. They are mystifying, smart, aggressive and strictly hierarchical; they don’t sit round on bean bags in talking circles - they have black-mouthed leaders who intimidate to get themselves to the top of the pile until they themselves are toppled. Ravens are into power. The raven expert Bernd Heinrich tells the story of watching a particular dead beech tree for some time, and noticing that a succession of dominant ravens in the group would all choose a specific perch when their time came as top-bird. There were many others to choose from, equally plush, but somewhere in the wider raven-mind of that group it became established that that was the power-perch and so that was it. After years of careful and sometimes painful observation, Heinrich also noted that leadership amongst ravens came with a cost. All leaders have large bodies which require more feeding, all leaders have to constantly display their grandiosity, which requires many battles, much blood on the snow. You can’t relax, there is no one for you to follow, you lead, always.
Raven carries the Nigredo black of the alchemist on its wings, beak, body. It is like some charcoal stain on the optimist's blue horizon. Fifty thousand years of gobbling scat and flesh, a constant at the battlefield, make it a companion to putrefaction. Black is strong medicine, even when denied that it is a colour at all. It is the robe of choice for any decent occultist; the black of night is the cover for illicit liaison; to be ‘in the dark’ is to be wandering, confused, un-settled; it is a hint of what could await at the moment of death.
At the same time, archaeology tells us that black is the place to go. It’s long been known in England that any place name with the word black in it – Black Meadow, Black Woods, Blackingstone Rocks – is a place worthy of digging. The reason? The darker coloured soil will indicate an old settlement – generations of fire ash, food remains, and general use.
To a certain eye, black means to dig deeper. To a certain eye, it offers reward.
Raven carries this rattle-bag of contrary wisdoms, invokes a cautionary wave or grimace as it sweeps over the jolly street party. We know who would be first to pluck out an eye if we were we to slip one rainy night on the step. And yet, some memory remains of this bird and a box of light and a pinprick hole to the Otherworld (ref to ancient notion from Pacific North-West that Raven brought light to the world). They certainly stirs up mixed emotions. Duende, duende.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
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