Wednesday, 20 March 2013
The Golden Ticket: GREAT MOTHER CONFERENCE 2013
Spring is springing in Northern California, as the family and i begin to turn our attention to an imminent return to Devon (early next week in fact). It's been an amazingly rich trip: whale watching, early morning animal tracking across beaches, an endless array of great tasting and amazingly nourishing
This weekend is the last gathering of the MYTHTELLER INTENSIVE in Point Reyes - we are groaning above and beyond capacity and will be exploring PSYCHE AND EROS (which will shortly lead me to this blogs main point). Also- the night before we leave there will be one, final evening - a house concert no less - with just a few seats left, in Berkeley - organized by the writer and storyteller Leah Lamb. Every idea i haven't explored or story told will be in the mix for this final U.S. evening. If you are in the Bay Area next Tuesday why not try and score a ticket? Details at:
http://www.facebook.com/events/149387431891101/
Tomorrow morning, the film director Haydn Reiss makes his way with crew through the bay area fog up to Inverness (not the Scottish one), for my interview in his upcoming Robert Bly documentary - Details at:
http://www.facebook.com/RobertBlyFilm?fref=ts
Thinking about Bly always brings me back to the conference he founded way back in the seventies, and one i find myself deeply involved in now........
So, here is the main event, the golden fleece, the tremulous journey into a wild-flower underworld of story, poetry, body, singing and the wild, genius music and deep fellowship. The Great Mother Conference.
I don't always ask this, but please share this, forward it on as a link, bang a drum - this wine is too rich not to share. This extraordinary conference in Maine in the first week in June is almost 40 years young, but still deepening, still vibrant, still the only place to go. I've never been anywhere quite like this.
IF THERE'S ONE THING YOU DO THIS YEAR, DO THIS:
THE WOMAN WITH THE GOLD
BETWEEN HER TEETH
The Four Tasks of Desire
The Great Mother Conference June 1st-9th 2013
“Between my breasts there are quails, they must think I’m a tree. The swans think I’m a fountain, they all come down and drink when I talk”
Gloria Fuertes
Teachers: Coleman Barks, Alicia Ostriker, Michael Stoker, Gioia Timpanelli, Fran Quinn, Lisa Starr, Tony Hoagland, Martin Lowenthal, Marcus Wise and David Whetstone, Susan Littlefield, Jay Leeming, Doug Von Koss. Miguel Rivera, Tim Frantzich and more....also about a 100 others in the shape of beloved participants.
We live in an era frantic with news of scarcity – economic and emotional. That there is never enough of anything. This year we drive our horses in quite another direction – that we are in fact a cosmos. In many ancient cultures, a woman was clear that she was connected to the intelligence of a hawk or the bend in a river, a man just knew that he walked with bears. In Greece, legend persists that there is a series of tasks to experience before you encounter this level of awareness – what some call the inner-marriage. They require acute discipline. They are not easy. They are as diligent and quiet as they are ecstatic. But from these four tasks true culture is awoken – we experience ourselves as connected, and therefore of service.
The story? Eros and Psyche. A story of woman’s difficult awakening, a man’s deepening into love, and the four tasks required of Psyche to enter a deeper relationship to Eros.
We ask: like Psyche, what great tasks do we undergo that are clarifying our own desire, our own relationship to Eros? We could see that desire as what in us reaches out to the world, feels vital and awake.
What also of a damaged-eros? when a mythology of love falls, what is its replacement? Lack of eros is far more than erotic: it indicates lack of connection to the living world, the dis-location of pornography, decline of intimacy in the family.
A host of artists, poets, musicians and thinkers are gathering to explore the deepest implications of this story. Through our mutual art we will participate in a celebration of desire, and learn something of the labors that have led to its flowering. We will ask each participant to bring four tasks gathered from their own life – What labors have tested and confirmed and continue to provide an eros renewed?
Dare to see yourself as a kind of cultural historian of your
own life.
On arrival at the conference we will all find a partner to exchange these wisdom seeds with – at certain points over the wider week. Small groups will also be a vehicle for this. So this is a call out to all the boat builders, poets, gardeners, storytellers, mechanics, philosophers, dancers, hedgerow dreamers, quilt makers, secret nomads, introverted musicians, wise children, foolish grown ups,
and all we have momentarily forgotten to join us.
We leave at dusk. Bring your dancing shoes.
Over nine days we will gather by a lake in Maine and through poetry, discussion, storytelling, astrology, time outdoors, music, movement and private reflection we continue the work of nourishing the soul and lifting the spirit. For almost forty years this conference has seen some of the most agile minds of poetry, mythology and the wider arts pass through its doors, creating a robust container for a thriving community of artists, thinkers, ecologists, children, and passing animals.
Through its rich history the Conference has been honored to welcome such teachers as: Joseph Campbell, Marion Woodman, William Stafford, Jane Hirshfield, Galway Kinnell, Naomi Shihab Nye, Li Young Lee, James Hillman, Coleman Barks and many others.
It has long been speculated that the gathering is secretly a longship of gypsy-souled troublemakers dreaming of Persia pretending to be a conference. We can neither confirm nor deny. What we do say is:
Bring your dancing shoes, a revolution of the heart is afoot!
“We knew that gypsies were properly another race. They inhabited the land of Eros – as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something may get in or out”. Seamus Heaney
Reading List:
Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine. Erich Neumann
Alchemy of the Soul: The Eros and Psyche Myth as a Guide to Transformation. Martin Lowenthal
The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man. Marie-Louise Von Franz
The Myth of Analysis. James Hillman
The Moon and the Virgin. Nor Hall
Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic. Alicia Ostriker
Writing Like a Woman Alicia Ostriker
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. Robert Bly
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Year Course 2013: Just 3 places left
Early morning in California. Frost on the ground, but spring just over the hill. The heating in this old red-wood apartment has given up the ghost, so the woodburner has taken its rightful position of main heat source. As a brit i am astonished at the dryness of the logs - so different to the ingrained moisture that hangs willfully around in a good Devon log. So i sip French roast coffee and feed in the big fellas to the iron mouth of the burner.
We have but 3 places left till the School of Myth UK course is full - to the brim - no room for more. So here is probably the last shout out about it. Please send on to anyone you think is ready for such high adventure.
THE STUDY PROGRAMME
The Rattle-House of Sound, The Stag-Boned Hut that is a Poacher's Chapel, The Den of Smoky Language…
The weekends revolve around the telling and exploration of several myths. Implicit in these vivid expeditions is attention to the age old relationship with civilisation and the wild, animal-lore, philosophy, poetry and ritual practice. For 2013 onwards, Shaw is re-visioning much of the programme, with accompanying work on radical, wild-infused ideas through British history – from the Bardic schools, to medieval dream-poetry, to the Cunning Man and Woman to the ideas of the radical Leveller, Gerard Winstanley. These will be given as optional lectures late on the Saturday afternoon.
Writes Martin;
“ Myth in the way that I am thinking about it is
an echo location emanating from the earth itself ”
In the animal world, when a wild call collides with another being, it sends a subtle echo back to the caller, giving even an almost blind creature a sense of what is in their surrounding field. I think the earth has always done something similar.
It transmits certain pulses, coded information, arresting images, and then sits back, like the toothed whale, or the shrew, or the megachiroptera bat, to see what echo's return from its messaging. Occasionally a child, or a wandering tramp, or a woman sitting alone in garden at dusk will experience one of these sonorous emerging's. These pulses tell us something about how to live. Tribal cultures have been far more advanced at honouring this messaging, and gradually crafting art around it till it becomes a two-ways-looking form of mytho-natural beauty that creates deep relationship between wolf and caribou, granite and moss, gaudy rowan and demure willow. This mystical Morse code is the true underlying pattern of any myth deserving of the name. It is the sound of the earth and its inhabitants thinking about itself.
The school attracts a diverse set of students: from storytellers to surgeons to racing car drivers to artists. No one is too experienced or too new to myth to not find their way into this groundbreaking programme. All are assured a very warm welcome by Martin and the team. The success rate of the programme can be noted by the wonderfully diverse and idiosyncratic way that students of the school have taking their own way of relating and expressing the mythic imagination out into the wider world.
Most weekends are held in cosy residential centres on the moors-hot water, bed, wood burning stove, great company, wild story.
Although it is possible to join the course at any point, there is an understood commitment to attending the remaining weekends.
DATES £200 per weekend, £250 non refundable deposit for entire course.
April 26th to 28th 2013
June 28th to 30th 2013
August 2nd to 4th 2013
October 4th to 6th 2013
December 6th to 8th 2013
Leaving the Village Finding the Forest
April 26th - 28th
Initiation myths – how do they relate to bustling modernity? ‘The Return to Greece’ – Greek mythology and its relationship to European fairy tales. Over the weekend we will study and hear told epics from the Greek and Fairy worlds – ‘Psyche and Eros’, ‘The Gnome’ 'Tatterhood' and more. We will explore how certain splits have occurred in the Western psyche, and how myth, especially initiatory myths, speak to possible ways of re-aligning these two dragons – logos and mythos. There will also be solo time in the startling beauty of Dartmoor, “walking the stories” – reflecting, engaging and creating directly from the myths. This weekend is primarily about finding your mythic ground.
Coyote Man and the Fox Woman
June 28th - 30th
Trickster stories – How does myth engage with paradox? From tribal stories to Gypsy and Eastern European wonder tales, we enjoy tricky, shifty, snuffle-heavy, abrasive, oddly tender, hilarious stories that tell us much about the survival of soul in a world seemingly fragmented and lurching into ever deeper trouble. The psychologists say this is a ‘Proteus (shape-shifting) era, the artists say we have entered the ‘altermodern’– a time of rapid change, cultural diversity becoming globalisation, no clear centre. We suggest it is not a Zeus time, not a Goddess time, but a Trickster moment. But for Trickster to thrive, it needs boundaries and a strong sovereign centre to bump up against. Trickster needs relationship with other deities. So we ally ourselves with stories that are far from the Hollywood ending this weekend.
Tasting the Milk of Eagles
August 2nd - 4th
Stories that migrate. A weekend on stories from the dark Caucasus mountains: The Nart Sagas. These little known but brilliantly vibrant stories may hold all kinds of keys to the roots of the Arthurian canon. Over a weekends telling we explore how stories, like herds of animals, travel from place to place – making cultural claims of these no-author stories complicated to a modern mind. Many are nomads. We will hear of Lady Setenaya and her magical apples, or brave Wazermeg entranced by a black witch into a starving dog. These stories will seem both strange and oddly familiar, as if something is stirred, just underneath the conscious imagination. Most will never have been told in the United Kingdom before. Sometimes, but not always, the Seneca story 'The Listener' rides alongside.
Parzival
October 4th - 6th
The centre of Western mythology: the Grail Quest. We will tell this far-ranging epic over a full two and half days, paying particular attention to the role of Parzival’s Magpie Brother and Cundrie, the fierce-tusked Crone of the Woods, as crucial elements to him getting to the Grail castle after many years wandering in the wasteland. Accompanying the story is associative information: of the world of the Twelfth century Troubadour (and their little known female counterparts, the Troubaritz), the significance of Persian poetry on the story, it's Gnostic mysteries and the rise of a kind of divine feminine in the medieval era.
Myth as Migration, a Wild Land Dreaming
December 6th - 8th
After the migratory, the local. What would it be like to absorb and even tell stories from a radius of twenty five miles from your door? In the time of the bio-regional, of attention to local produce and business, we pay the same attention to the notion of local myth and folklore. Over this final weekend, we trace seven idiosyncratic Devon stories – from the arrival of Brutus of Troy, to a Wassailing story from the hamlet of Scoriton in the early twentieth century. These stories form a kind of myth-line across the mossy landscape of Dartmoor. On this weekend, we will walk the moors individually - stepping into both out own myth and the story of the wider place. The next day we will find ways to see the deeper significance in our solo time – the river underneath the river – and work into a personal myth line that can continue with deeper study.
Wednesday, 20 February 2013
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