a culture of giving

This little piece I put out here some months back, but I've had a deal of folks asking about it, especially new scholars at the hedge school developing their own practice. So here it is. In a weeks time some of us will be taking to the forest for WILD LAND DREAMING - the wilderness vigil - so again, this is good preparation.

THE MANY WAYS THINGS HAVE OF BEING WHAT THEY ARE

I’ve always loved copses, and defiant little grubs of hedge and tree that sprout unbidden from the backs of council estates. I grew up playing in one, and it had been there as a kid I had first heard the sound of ghosts. That low sound in beech trees, when an elegant, late summer wind moves through the slender branches. You just know that’s the sound of the dead. I knew, even as a five year old, that some part of my story was being told through that sound. That I’ll hear it again someday.

Later, a little older, I would gaze at the dark bow of trees leaning over our brick wall at the back of the house, dropping succulent looking, possibly dangerous red berries onto the uncut grass. It wasn’t exactly sinister, it was magnificent. I knew every berry was a story from the forest.

So, as a young man, I took myself out to a little stretch of old growth wood, mostly oak and elder, and dug in. If myth really was the power of a place speaking, then I had to bend my head daily to its murmurs.

The vast majority of time I spent over those years outdoors was not in full voice but in listening. A kind of tenderising of the heart. A shaggy equilibrium painfully wrought, where I felt - and could maintain the sensation - of being flooded by a place. Not an emptying, but a filling.

And as weeks would unfold, this roving ecosystem gradually settled its shape somewhat; out of the ravenous floods cascading through my frame, things calmed and the few same birds, animals and insects would start to show up, and, occasionally, certain regal energies that stand alongside them.

The time for this work was usually dusk, I would wait for a frittering of delicate lights to lace the air, and they would denote whether it was time to settle back on my goatskins, or to cross the rickety bridge and back up the hill to my tent. This kind of vagabond sit took place hundreds of times over those years. I was in the presence of mighty things, and, in their way, they presented me with the Big Thoughts. Over and over again.

This is weft and the weave of story for me. The endless lyrical emerging of the earths tremendous thinking, and the humbling required to simply bear witness to it. And the extraordinary day, where for an hour or so, you realise that you too are being witnessed. You are part of the big sound. You have pushed the coats aside and walked through the back of the wardrobe.

When my mouth had chewed on enough silence, and my body had located its fragility in the face of winter, when darkness and sorrow had bruised up against solitude, I began to taste, fully, the price of my labour, and slowly I began to speak. And what came what praise.

Inventive speech appears to be a kind of catnip to the living world. Especially prized was the capacity to name, abundantly and gracefully, dozens or even hundreds of secret names for beings you had spent your whole life strutting past, and muttering; “willow” “holly” “bat” “dog-rose”. They are not their names. Not really.

So the first big move was not one of taking anything at all - I’d done that quite successfully my whole life - but actually re-organising the detritus of my speech to formulate clear and subtle praise for the denizen I beheld in front of me. Not “The Goddess of the River”, but “River Goddess”. The moment I squeezed “of the” into the mix, thereby hovered an abstraction, and the fox woman fled the hunters hut.

Green Curve
Udder of the Silver Waters
The Hundred Glittering Teeth
Small Sister, Dawning Foam
On the Old Lime Bank.

This wasn’t even particularly imaginative. It wasn’t flattery. And most of all, it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t comparing myself. It was simply describing, acutely, what I witnessed in front of me. Some things I realised I was never going to behold clearly. I wouldn’t have language for butterfly, birch, ivy and clay. There it is, they remained indistinct. Admired, but indistinct. But, grindingly slowly, some beings made themselves known to me, became a lintel overhead, a den in which I could claim a degree of kinship. Not what I would choose, but what chose me.

So the first part of my apprenticeship to story began in a tiny stretch of woodland glade - a corral of about twenty foot - tenderising my own nature until the beings that wished stepped forward, and gave me the slow and halting opportunity to name just a few of the hundred secret ways they have of being themselves. Maybe four thousand years ago they weren't so secret.

It was apprenticeship to the swaying unfolding of the earth’s imagination, an endless permutation of Psyche touching the fire-tips of Eros’s fingers and creating life. The interior was everywhere! Concerned friends would worry that I had travelled too deeply into the tangles of myself, that I wouldn’t find a way out. I would laugh and gesture out towards the valley. That was where I was. I was already out.

I went looking for stories in dark places. In caves, hundreds of feet into the base of Welsh hills, the immensity of tree root and stone suspended above my fragile head. I learnt slow words down there. Words flushed deep with water and boulder-vast. I took myself to dreaming places, forgotten places, places deserving of shrines. I built small shelters in ancient, solitary haunts and sealed myself into the dark for days and nights. It was in those places I learnt many holy names for time. Time as malleable as a concertina, as robust as Irish cattle, as slippery as the trout escaping the hook. Each of the secret words was true wealth for my parched tongue. They required payment in full and I was not sad to give it.

It was in the ebony world that luminosity came. Great stretches of images from a future I was yet to have. Of people, and estuary maps, and animals, of beings we rarely have the names for anymore. It was in that place that I was shown a discarded set of antlers, that I was soon to find in clock-time at a local rubbish dump. Those bone wands were big story for me, and formed the centre of many negotiations and ceremonies with the soulful world. And yet, one day I would have to give them away.

I went looking for stories in the palace of the birds. The pastoral murmur of the wood pigeon, the thrilling blue call of the tawny owl in their midnight kingdoms. I learnt feathered words up there. Sounds that whittled a new and fragrant shape to my jaw. For a little while, I was a boy of the moonlight, cloaked and rooted by the base of great trees. It is no great brag to say that a part of me is still there.

If I’d believed the propaganda of our times, I would have seen England as too farmed, too crushed-tight with humans and their history, soil too poisoned, forest too hurt and impoverished for such an education - better to turn to the vastness of Siberia or some other pristine wilderness. Thank god I didn’t. The eye of the needle is everywhere, abiding patiently for you to quilt your life to the Otherworld, which is really our deeply natural function anyway. Small pockets of absolute aliveness, greeness, riven-deep mystery are all over our strange and bullishly magnificent isle.

So my first move towards story was to give one up. The slow move from a society of take to a culture of giving.

The living world was not there for my temporary edification, or a transitory back drop for my ‘healing’, it was home. A home that scared me, rattled me, soothed me, shaped me. Without the investment of time and focus, the words I longed to speak would simply be phony on my tongue. The worst aspect of storytelling is when you hear the words spoke but you know the teller never took the journey to get them. They just squatted by the well and stole them when one that did crawled out of the Underworld. Well, I sure wasn’t much of a teller at that point, but I knew I had river-mud on my boots and green vines in the wine of my blood.

Later in this book we will touch upon just how a storyteller could sift through the unbridled rawness of such experiences, and find stories both broad and wily enough to carry them. If you try them too often as ‘I’ statements, they will, in the end, get just too straight up lonesome and wander off to die somewhere. There’s a greater vehicle waiting for them. They need those ancestors peering in, leaning on their staffs, not quite cheering you on, not quite telling you to stop.

copyright Martin Shaw 2015

this weekend: stories of the deep drop

approaching otherness

a thousand little Persian horses slept

The sun beats its unutterably beautiful cadence down onto the wriggling and delighted wild things of olde Devon. I am gathering: goatskins, peculiar essays on rarely-glimpsed green skinned deer of remote forests, tortoise shells, clothes for a feast, rugs for a hearthside, smoky wine, and a gathering of stories so potent they make flames become flowers that spark loose and lively from the wayward clang of hammer and anvil in the unconsecrated dark of our secret souls. Tomorrow we gather on the moor again, the little school, my secret darling - holding up its part of the world in the way that it does. See you soon scholars.

So, i must be swift. Lots of news coming, of trips to Sweden and Canada, encounters with National Theatres and distant islands on the pacific-north west, and a collaboration with the magnificent MARK RYLANCE (Wolf Hall, Jerusalem) and PAUL KINGSNORTH (The Wake, Dark Mountain Project); entitled LOST GODS on Sat 22nd August as part of the Edinburgh Book Festival - google for details i'm sure. Tickets will go fast if not immediately i think. I'll also be teaching and telling in the wondrous confines of a Yurt on the side of the Thames for the Crick Crack Club on July 31st: COMBING THE DRAGONS HAIR. I will give this all more stately run through soon. I've also got to submit to the requests to come one day to Australia: i really will start to think about it. A good advocate of the country (literally) emerged out of a hedge near my hut this morning and reiterated it, so the runes are gathering their emphasis.

Some Lorca lines straight from that very shepherds hut: especially dedicated to anyone that recently attended the astonishing Great Mother Conference in Maine. What a time.


No one could comprehend
the perfume of the
dark magnolia of your belly,

No one knew you martyred
love’s hummingbird amongst
your teeth.

A thousand little Persian horses slept
on the moonlit square of your brow,
Whilst i, for four nights swept close
your waist, great enemy of the snow.

Somewhere between gesso and jasmine,
Your gaze was a pale branch of seeds,
i roamed through my heart to offer you
those ivory words which say:
always.

***

Man, that is panache.


Manana (Morning)
7th August 1918 (Fuente Vaqueros, Granada)
To Fernando Marchesi

Waters song
can’t die.

It’s the erotic sap
which ripen the fields,
It’s the blood of poets
who’s souls got lost
in the paths of nature.

Harmonies spill
from her welling crag,
sweet rhythms
she abandons
to us.

In bright morning
the hearth smokes,
and its plumes are arms
Lifting up the mist.

Listen to love affairs
erupt in the water
of the poplar grove,
wingless birds
abandoned in the grasses!

The serenading trees
with their snapping and cracking -
the rough plains becoming
mountains of serenity -
they change;
but waters song
won’t quit.

It’s a song that curls
with light,
loose with dreams
firm and soft,
one moment tame,
then full of sky.

In the rosy bliss
of dawn
she is mist;
the moons honey
flowing from
buried stars.

Is the holiness
of baptism
not god become water?
Glinting our heads
with the blood of grace?

There’s a reason
Christ confirmed himself
in her.

It’s the reason
stars rest in her depths,
the reason
why ample Venus
engendered herself in her breast.

We drink love
when we drink water.

This love
streams both
tame and divine,

it’s the story of the
whole world,
the wily old tale
of her soul.

She’s large with secrets -
from human mouths,
let’s be honest; we all kiss her
and she quenches our thirst.

She’s a casket
of kisses
from the mouths of the dead,
captivated forever
with the sisters heart.

Christ could have been
more direct with us:
confess yourself with water
told us to turn in
our fears - all that pain
and meaness,

who better, brothers
to hand in our trouble
than to her who rises to the sky
draped in
sheaths of white.

When we drink water
we become kids again,
and that’s no bad thing,
it’s a pure moment:

our sorrows drift before us
in rose garlands,
our eyes consumed
by acres of gold.

No one can ignore their destiny.
It’s the sweet water in which
we drench our souls.

Nothing compares
with your sacred shores
if deep grief
has given us its wings.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2015

still here

hare and the madrigal

If it feels like an age since I last wrote, that's because it has been. Life has not been easy of late, a harrowing winter and a few body blows with the arrival of the apple-blossom too. Grief to chew on. Just didn't feel like putting pen to paper. But time is a flying arrow, and the season is in its turning, so i'm glad to offer a little something today. Something on a very holy animal for me, the Hare, and some of the Lorca i've been slowly translating in the Shepherds Hut with my spanish speaking, Cante Hondo guitar playing co-worker to all divine things, Stephan Harding. More sooner, promise.

Hare

Who is queen of Dartmoor?
how does the salmon or white doe fare?
Who is the one to ask for?
lay your gifts at solitary hare

I’d seen her first from the window of the shepherds hut. And then sometimes a glimpse when I was outside throwing coffee granules onto the soil.

Late autumn, a sleeting rain, and, bold as brass, hare in the long grasses. Bounding, darting, lying low like a small earthy tump. Hairy, toothy, wet backed, utterly wild. An emissary from an entirely different century, or even outside time altogether.

By spring there’d be rabbits on the grass, and she’d be gone. But, for a little while, hare was in my life. Come March I’d search but wouldn’t spot those long ears in the scrub, those great jugs of sound. But I remember her jubilance in the rain. I remember.

It’s a mild afternoon, the very first snow drops flower by my boots, the sun like a dulled bronze coin behind a slightly glowing flank of grey cloud. I enter the wood behind the hut. I bow under the first gateway of holly, then oak, then into that always unexpected grove of redwood trees. I never quite get used to them.

Today the wind is like foam breakers crashing on a distant beach. Immense, protracted roars up in those high branches. I stretch my neck to see if there’s any fishing boats wrapped round the timber. I pass a smearing of bloody magpie feathers enmeshed in wire fencing. There’s been a scrap of some kind. Magpie did not dust itself off. Crow continues to drill-the-road overhead, and underneath there are little clusters of songbirds.

Today I love hare like I love pirate ships, old maps of Scotland, and pipe smoke in autumn. A kind of love without thought. Just a great, affectionate lurch of the body towards what claims it. So in the absence of my teacher, I give praise to air that it may carry these words to those vast, twitching ears.

Hare.

Taken into battle and used as divination by Queen Boudicca. Erupting from the folds of her skirt, the way it leapt gave sacred information to the Iceni. Takes a woman to understand hares powers: as long as you expect it to behave as a swaggering hero you will be disappointed. But let it be its nature and you are in the presence of wisdom.

Hare.

A body suffused unusually and liberally with blood. A royal dish. The people of the fields prefer rabbit to the bucket-blood, dark flesh and strong stink of its meat. For the rich this can all be negotiated by servants in far away kitchens. Then, magically, it becomes highly desirable. But Robert Burton in Anatomy of Melancholy warns against it: ‘Hare is a black meat, melancholy and hard of digestion; it breeds Incubus often eaten, and causeth fearful dreams…’

Hare.

The leaper. The hare-brained swift who’s time is spring: of buddings,
and sudden emerging’s, there’s no plod with this one. The Algonquin have knowledge for us moor-people: they say hare is Michabo, Great Hare, maker of sun, moon, earth. Hare is ruler of the winds: the reason Dartmoor is so filled with chills is because of the daily coming and goings of tribute laid at hares feet.

Hare - here are some of your far-away names.

Lord Hare, Lord of the Day, Manabozho, Hiawatha, Manabosho, Manabush, Manibozho, Nanabozho, Winabozho, Great Hare, Minabozha, Nanaboojoo, Nanabush, Abnaki Gluskap, Iroquois Ioskeha, Menominee Manabush, Montagnais Messou, Messibizi, Messon, Missabos, Missiwabun, Wan

Hare - here are some of your close-up names. These I whisper.

Old Turpin, Puss, Light Bringer, Hidden Quiet of the Byre, Long-Flank, Tremble Heart, The One They Track With Silver, The Way-Beater, The Stag of the Stubble, Get-Up-Quickly, Flincher, Dew-Beater, The Furze-Cat, Lurker, Squatter in the Hedge, The Swift As Wind, Shagger, The Fellow in the Rain, Wide-Eyed One That Lurks in Broom, The Low Creeper, One Who Turns To The Hills

and a tribute to the coming summer:


Summer Madrigal
August 1920 (Vega de Zujaira)

Estrella, you gypsy.
Crush your
red mouth
onto mine.
Below noon’s
bright gold,
i will bite that apple.

In the greeness of
the olive grove,
high on the hill,
there is an ancient
Moorish tower.
The colour of your
peasant flesh
your peasant flesh,
which tastes of honey
and the dawn.

You offer me in
your sunburnt body
divine food which
flowers the river bed,
and gives stars to the wind.

Brown light -
why do you give me
full of love,
your lillied womanhood,
and the murmur of your breasts?

Is it because of my body
full of sadness?
(oh my fumbling steps)
Did my song withered life
touch you with pity?

How can it be that
you have settled for my laments
over the sweaty thighs
of a peasant Saint Christopher,
handsome, and slow in love?

You are with me, Diana of pleasure.
You are Goddess of the Forest.
Your kisses smell of wheat
parched in summer sun.

Confound my eyes
with your song,
let your hair fall down
solemn, like a
cloak of shadow
on the meadow.

From your bloodied mouth,
Spit me a sky of love,
a dark star of pain
in its fleshy depths.

My Andalucian horse -
my Pegasus,
is captured by your eyes;
his flight will be of desolation
when their light dims.

I know you never loved me.
But i loved you -
for your
serious gaze,
like the lark loves a new day
if only for the dew.

Estrella, you gypsy.
Bite your red mouth to mine.
Under a clear noon
let me ravage
that apple.

copyright Shaw (and Harding) 2015