photo: Lucy Cooper

Canada: A Bird Never Flew On One Wing evenings

Connla’s Well, the North American school is now FULL, but these separate evenings are happening:

Oct 8 - Cowichan, Performing Arts Centre

Oct 13 - Vancouver, Banyen Books short talk and signing

Oct 15 - Vancouver, York Theatre

Georgia: The Handmade Life event

Oct 16 - Georgia, Ralston College, The Handmade Life

Boston: Lifting The Veil

Then finally up to Boston to be part of the Lifting The Veil conference that’s emerging there for my friend Malcolm Guite.

Oct 23/24 - Boston: Lifting the Veil

I have a few days in Boston ahead of time. I won’t be able to get out of town, but what should I visit in town?

Dreaming Up A Storied Isle

I’m sitting at my little school desk with a blank mind. Often a good place to start. I’ve had coffee and slouched around the cobbled yard breathing in some pungent hint-of-autumn scent. I’ve surveyed a winter’s wood for the fire and have a boozy lamb stew frozen and stowed away for November days deep in writing when I need nourishment but don’t have time to cook from scratch. Kids are about to go back to school. It’s always about now I start thinking about the road. I don’t know why I'm so unconvinced by summer. Please don’t take that personally.

I have a yearning for a proper England, Wales, Scotland storytelling tour. 2027 or '28. Something that begins at John O’ Groats (or one of the Scottish islands) and concludes at Land’s End. Something to get a fire-in-the-head going, something with a bit of intention and glee in it. Something with a bit of magic in it, that gets the listener deep into this most archaic of technologies. To be so far north you’d be in a place that, as Octavio Paz would say, ‘the wind mangles eagles’ and you locate ‘the pulse-beat, insisting, a surge of wet syllables’. Yum. I’m opening the windows of my mind for a bit of an airing.

I’d need a real, does-it-for-a-living tour manager, it would be a proper project. I have decades of kind folks organising things here and there, but this needs an infrastructure and professional robustness that I can lie back into and concentrate on the work. Clean sheets and a hot meal kind of thing.

I can’t kip in any more attics, outhouses, pig runs or half constructed yurts.

Did it, loved it, no more.

If you have such well-earned chops then drop us a line at tina@schoolofmyth.com.

Little Wisps Of Things

Today I’m thinking about Fables. Not myths, folk or fairy tale, not saga or epic, but fable. Funky little things that just take a minute to tell. Wisps of reality really. I went strolling yesterday and bought an armful of antlers for 50p a bone, and Fables of La Fontaine, a handsome volume it was too. Unlike most of the stories I tell, there’s usually a clear allegory to pick up and wonder on. Some of them start explaining themselves before they’ve even finished.

Here’s one:

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Hello dear Parish!, there’s a fresh and unheard audio of Blind Tobit and other goodies that are gifted merely by joining the waitlist over at: jawbonestories.com

Christians spotted in the wild! This is post vigil, just.

Notes From A Fire We Couldn’t Light

And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
William Blake, Jerusalem

Mr Blake I think the answer is YES.

And in our time too. Just these last few days as well, out in the bush.

Jesus is most definitely out and about.

Because it’s not exactly that sleeping under canvas in an English forest is a young one’s game, but you’d be forgiven for the thought occasionally crossing my mind. After thirty years of the endeavour, I don’t spring forth from a night’s kip with quite the energy of the young gazelle I used to be. Give it time though: I can still summon the rosy thought of Robin and Marion, Friar Tuck and their merry gang once I have some dark roast coffee in my mug. But with the fire ban we currently have (drought), it’s a little harder for the essential coziness of a base camp to assemble.

I’m delighted to say all the pilgrims returned, with tales to tell and slowly unpack. It’s not always an easy experience – the lack of food sometimes being the least of it – but I think it’s fair to say everyone felt they’d experienced God’s hand out there somewhere: in the stars or dreams or movement of an animal. The hugeness of nature but then the particular intimacy of an encounter with the aforementioned can expand and contract the psyche, almost at the same time. These things really take time to be absorbed.

I’ve had a few messages saying that I should have retired from leading vigils, that they are not ‘Christian’ apparently, so let me assure everyone: it’s not a seance in the woods going on, or trying to become a magician, or dance with the Goblins. It’s not a New Age thing, it’s an Old Age Christian thing. There’s no summoning of anything dodgy.

God can speak powerfully to us when we retreat into his creation. When we put away the distractions, submit to some vulnerability and listen to the story announcing itself. It’s really that simple. However, the woods are a powerful, transformative place, and I acknowledge that can evoke some trepidation.

I’ve been working on this scene for the new book:

It was a long night in the depths of the mountain.

Jesus prayed.

His prayers murmured through the time when the birds are settling their feathers and the prowlers are starting to prowl. On and on, right into the stillest, darkest of hours he prayed, no human eyes on him. His father’s creation breathed all around him in its friendly antiquity. How deep can a Jesus prayer go? Is there some fiery globe at the core of this earth resistant to his words? Some pale star, invisible to the eye, that can rebuff it? I don’t think so.

As we sleep, Jesus prays.

There is a light that never goes out.

When he came down from the mountain he came to a plain which swiftly became filled with people. This was no elite group but surging with the desperate, the possessed, the woefully sick. The great swirling bustle of request and attack, the pain-riven cacophony hurled around the ears of Yeshua. Power surged from him and peace descended on foaming mouth and bloodshot eye.

Work in progress, author.

Four days waiting for folk gives us guides at basecamp a little time to do our own thing. We natter away, but as already mentioned, the lack of fire to poke, brew tea on, stick some rashers in the frying pan, well, it makes us all a little sad. We tried placing a night light in its centre but it somehow appeared even more pathetic.

In the small hours of the last morning of the fast it is finally, after sixty days, started to rain. I wake and hear it gently but persistently on my tent roof. I think of the intrepid six out there praying in the dark and whisper away a little on their behalf myself.

Five days in, my late lamented friend Glen visits me in a dream and I would have given that week of my time entirely for those few moments.

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The Word-Wonder

From a beak of pen juts beetle-dark ink.
A hand aches from long-houred scribing.

Ink like green-skinned holly streams wisdom
From the neatness of my fingers.

Artful men will feel the gain from my quill,
A wonder of words spring from my wearied fist.

Old Irish, worked into new version at basecamp this very August.

This is just a little note to say an ENORMOUS thank you for your support for the upcoming documentary My Heart Ate Light. Thanks to YOU we’ve managed to have the documentary team up in the very Dartmoor forest where I do much of my wilderness work. If you’ve read BARDSKULL, this is the place. In fact, as you read this that’s where I’ll be. There’s about a week left of the Crowdfunding campaign and the link’s here:

My Heart Ate Light

We have hopes to get filming through some of my wider travels, and I’d love to hear a glorious soundscape threaded throughout the emerging story, so every penny counts.

It feels like the right moment to be making the film, and also quite the leap of faith for me. I’m a fairly private man despite the publicness of my life, so this is all a rather new experience. The man you see on stage is the same fella who drinks his coffee and writes to you on a Sunday. This time there’s a camera capturing all those moments. Most of all I hope it’s a film to maybe inspire and give a good wallop of strength to others, wherever you may be in your life.

Mid a spontaneous telling of Finn and the Old Man’s Hut. I first heard that story from Robin Williamson years ago, and my version is still something of a homage to the great man.

We went right back to the roots in this conversation. To calling my friend Gavin from a red London phone box in the mid 1990’s and him telling me about a vigil taking place in the wilds of Snowdonia. “Want to do something that will change your life?” he said. With all the naivety a 23 year-old can have, I was all in.

In the background vigil guide David Stevenson quietly ignores it all and cooks up his breakfast.

(note: due to the heat, we’re not lighting any more fires till it’s safe.)

Here’s the trailer for INTO THE UNDERWORLD online course, more at:

jawbonestories.com

There’s a few lovely things arriving for those on the waitlist. There’ll be a live component as well as the previously filmed sessions, I’m looking forward to this!

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WINTER SCHOOL
Feb 8th –12th Dartmoor, England

Winter school is all about the long stories: the sagas and epics. Irish, Scandinavian, Arthurian and a few Dumnonian slipped in around the sides. Get your big, bardic imagination moving. Conviviality and dreams by the fire. Final places here:

School of Myth, Winter School

Please note Winter School is held in a big old house with food and company and roaring fire. Sometimes people get it confused with the kind of thing described in today’s post. That’s a wilderness vigil and very different.

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AND: On The Odyssey, Underworld, Resurrection, and Glen Hansard

New conversation with my friend Jonathan Pageau – likely my favourite of our talks.

Shall we go?

Songs From The Wood

So this week is not at the desk but the woods: that would seem a pretty good trade. The Peregrini Sit has come round again, and it’s time to take the dusty track up into the old growth forest and make camp for a week. Six intrepid souls will, after preparation and counselling, make their way to a quiet place and fast for four days and nights, returning on the fifth morning. We lead two other wilderness vigils earlier in the year, but this is the one I lead, and the one with an explicitly Christian emphasis. The bones are basically the same – fasting in the natural world – but there’s a kind of religious ear for what may be announcing itself through the process.

The first two days often take care of themselves, but those last two, oh boy. Time expands almost beyond all understanding. An hour can become a day and a day a year. And the emphasis is always the same: surrender. The vigil is not something to be overcome but submitted to. Its deepest elements require a quietening not a swagger. Hand in the bushcraft skills for the still small voice.

Peregrini Sit 2023

Saint stories and lives of the early Christians are filled with such listenings. A glade, a blackbird, a white deer, even an angel may have information for you. All may have a gospel simmering in their shape. Slowing down and staying curious is a great way to encounter their story.

By the time you read this we will be about half way through. It will have been ragingly hot yet again. Relentless sun is never ideal for an entire vigil – though of course the Desert Fathers and Mothers made it work for them. A little cloud, a little rain can deepen things considerably. You go inwards.

This marks my thirtieth year with the wilderness vigil, sometimes called the Vision Quest. I quietly changed the phrase in my own work as I wanted to lower expectations a little! It’s often a rather tough, occasionally boring experience mixed with peak moments of absolute joy and blind terror. Rather like our everyday lives I suppose. But also not at all like them.

Basecamp is an interesting place while we wait for fasters, a little further out in the woods. Sometimes people expect us also not to be eating, but that would make no sense. We need to be solid as a rock while they are out there in the bush. Fairly frequently a faster will need a tick removing, or more water, or a chat, so we need to be robust and alert.

So for four days we have the fire slowly rumbling along – sometimes just embers – and we guides ruminate and make jokes and go quiet and tell stories to pass the time. It’s easy to slip into a slightly altered consciousness yourself, so we pass the chocolate and keep the tea strong and fairly constant. There’s a fierce blast of energy needed when the fasters return, so we can’t be getting too drifty.

The call to the vigil always reminds me of the arrival of the Green Knight at Camelot that Christmas in the myth time. Remember it? In the midst of a feast arrives a Green Knight who challenges those at the Round Table to lose their head to find their head. Young Gawain takes up the challenge and has to locate the knight a year later, at his Green Chapel. He wanders into any number of troubles along the way, of both physical peril and sensual temptation, and becomes an appalled witness to his own frailty and shortcomings. But in the end, that very self-knowledge, that rueful awareness of his limits is a deeper gift than the glamour of court.

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INTO THE UNDERWORLD: Tales Of Spiritual Initiation - Brand New Online Course

Hello my friends, before the heft of today’s post, something I'm excited about.

Into the Underworld: Tales of Spiritual Initiation launches in early September. It’s the most ambitious online course yet, venturing into new territory: stories from the Bible and the lives of the Saints.

The course includes more than 6 hours of recorded teaching from a live workshop, plus a limited number of seats for an intimate series of live lectures and interaction over Zoom. So you’ll get sessions live and recorded.

Enrollment will be open for a limited time and space for live sessions is scarce — sign up for the waitlist at JAWBONESTORIES.COM to get early access to Enrollment. Also, get a special surprise just for joining the waitlist.

In this course, I tell and teach on: Joseph in the Underworld, Jacob and Esau, Ruth and Naomi, Blind Tobit, The Voyage of Brendan, St. Patrick’s Bell and other saint stories. I’ll even been reading a little from my new book-in-progress.

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My Heart Ate Light Documentary Update

Also! – a little clip from the documentary that I'm pleased to say is now in progress. Please consider having a look at the Crowdfunder page as we come to the end of that campaign:

My Heart Ate Light

And big, big thanks again for your generosity.

A Journey, Not A Route

I arrive in Dublin in the dark and don’t know where the river is. That’s never happened before.

In the morning I wake to the sound of gulls and that makes a child of me, growing up in a seaside town as I did. Before I’d slept I’d talked to someone grieving Glen, big eyed and exhausted, who’d slipped into church with their sadness and got all tangled up in words that seemed abstract and ceremonies that seemed so husked they could almost crumble in your hands.

Grief is the great leveller, and should banish all lofty theory. Much suddenly becomes nonsense in your jaw. Amazing how that happens. Truth announces.

Christian tradition is sometimes hard to talk about in such moments, but Jesus isn’t. There’s no suffering he can’t absorb along with you. Tuck your boat in behind him, nest in him, braid your life to his. I give as little concept as I can and hope that something, for a moment at least, helps.

Many of us have had to deal with deaths with long runways, but the suddenness of Glen Hansard killed by coming off his bike, that takes us all down at the knees. His dear wife Maire, the young lad Christy, there’s nothing redemptive at all to be made of it. It’s ghastly, unreal, information you carry in your pocket but can’t absorb or even properly believe. I keep falling asleep. Even if my mind can’t digest, my body knows it’s in the presence of a catastrophic event.

He used to pick me up at the airport, dogs in the car, stereo raging, chucking a sweater or coat at me as a gift. The grin. We could never believe our luck. Then straight onto a gig we’d be playing or someone I just had to meet. It was always going to be a long and often rather glorious night with Glen.

He owned Yeats’s brass bed – believe it or not – and that became where I always slept, down a long corridor that felt like it had the pronounced touch of a spook in it. Late night he’d cook a chicken and could produce excellent coffee when we finally surfaced somewhere before noon to head out to the next night of singing and story and do it all again. Off to Tipperary or West Cork or a nearer Kilkenny.

No Glen this time.

Uber and a way into town I’ve never been driven before. It was a route but not a journey. Got there in half the time but with half the craic. Silence.

Glen would always be pointing out where he once pushed a broken down car at midnight with Bono, or was encouraged as a young musician by a towering Phil Lynott outside the chip shop. And most of the stories were nothing at all to do with the famous, but part of the granular history of a town he gave his whole life to. It wasn’t all to do with the razzle dazzle.

Agh Glenny

Down On The Street

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Late addition not on audio: Rough week. My beloved friend the musician Glen Hansard was killed coming off his motorbike early Weds morning, outskirts of Dublin. I loved the fella. In the below post I talk about going to Samos to teach myth but that’s not happening now. I’m going to get myself to Ireland and grieve with my friends.

It’s like being right in the middle of the most brilliant conversation and your mate just nips out for a second. You have to sit in the dark for a long time before you realise they’re not coming back.

I wrote ‘Working With What Comes To Hand’ as a title for this week’s piece with no way of knowing what was hours away from happening. And now I find myself doing just that. No doubt I’ll have more to say about that next week. He was a loyal member of the Beasts & Vines parish.

Tales of our previous adventures can be found here:

You may want to give this a listen: knowing him, this, 100%, is what he would wish for your life.

Tension & Release in a Craic-less Odyssey

So I saw The Odyssey and it wasn’t for me, simple as that. Please don’t take this personally. It clearly delivered for lots of folk in the enormous cinema. I found it visually sumptuous but I couldn’t feel a jot of any kind of emotion. I don’t bemoan Nolan his editing choices, all storytellers have to do that.

Making something that feels even vaguely fresh out of such a well-known story is a Herculean (deliberate choice of words) task, and I really loved the lack of CGI. Fabulous soundscape as well. But I do like a decent script and the continual election of big visual event over characterful intimacy just wore me out in the end. His cuts were surprising, but I was open to seeing it in a new way.

But the ‘new way’ just didn’t have enough gods, romp, grief, poetry and general dream-time to keep me in any way hooked.

If you’re changing the story to that degree, why not really open up the characters of Circe, Calypso, etc.? There’s been astute reviews that go through this in forensic detail so I don’t have to. There was no craic in it (rather like what they did with The Green Knight) and I promise you there’s plenty of pluck and yes, humour, in Homer’s poem. When the film begins with the blurb: a ‘time of apparent magic’ it all started to feel a little cold blooded. Shamanic energy replaced by Vegas theatre tricks.

I’m not sure why everyone’s so deathly afraid of humour in these mythic remakes, it’s an essential staple for deepening into the storyteller’s world. When you laugh your body begins to relax, and that can open you for greater pathos.

Tension and release lads, come on. Rule No 1.

There was no appearance of Hermes on the path to Circe’s hut (without which Odysseus would also have become a piggy wiggy like the rest), all furtive appearances of the gods seem to be Matt Damon basically wrestling his conscience. ‘Gods beware, you are decorations in their poems,’ says Friedrich Hölderlin. They were barely that. English actors using American accents in a film about Ancient Greece was also a little teeth-whistling.

Anyway, enough bah humbug.

If it spoke to you, then that’s what matters.

I’m flying to Samos tomorrow, so I'm in a Hellenic frame of mind right. I’m re-reading Hesiod’s Theogony to give a little creation-story magic before a two-night telling of Psyche & Eros, right down by the sea waves. You may remember the story from a couple of months ago (Psyche & Eros: Spirit, Soul and the Business of Love).

I’ve been re-reading the huge book of Bible stories I’m working on, and it needs to rest for a minute. As usual you realise the last four pages of the book are probably what need to be the first four pages.

I was up in the woods yesterday, scoping out basecamp for the Peregrine Sit – the four-day-and-night fast in a Dartmoor forest. Likely there’s one or two of you reading this who’ll be joining me up there. Bring some electrolytes! And a camping seat if you can. For wider readers, don’t worry they have an extensive list to check. I’m excited to be back out there under the oaks.

As part of the documentary that so many of you have supported – God bless you and keep you forever – we did a little filming. I had an in-depth conversation with my brother Tom, and then the guides David Stevenson and Lucy Cooper took him up to where we hold our basecamp. It was great to have a very loved family member in this most profound of landscapes.

It’s a little cooler but the heat has basically been banging on for about ten weeks, and England’s becoming a dust bowl. I returned from Womad and the Wildfires festivals, and the hire car looked like it had been auditioning for Mad Max. Unless it’s especially significant this is likely my last summer talking at festivals, it’s hard on my tinnitus, and takes way too much time from the desk.

Ok, onwards.

I thought I’d tell a lesser-known story from the Bible today. It’s short and odd and a little violent, just so I've flagged it. It concerns two women, Deborah and Jael.

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Embarking on the story, Crete, 2016

Look After Your Own Imagining

We seem to have entered a rather mythic kind of summer: raised temperatures, the month-long fever dream that was the World Cup, and now literally everywhere I turn is Christopher Nolan’s new version of The Odyssey.

Have I seen it? No, not yet, but there’s a kind of crushing inevitability to sloping into an IMAX cinema and surrendering.

Reports of the movie seem all over the shop. I read a Christian reviewer saying it was a disaster because (funnily enough) they’d taken all the inherent paganness out of the story, and much of its mythic sensuality. Odysseus rather cleaned up and flattened out. Lost his mojo (Odysseus without an idea is barely Odysseus). And not enough gods! and where’s Nausicaa and Queen Arete?

I have no idea as I haven’t seen it, so don’t shoot the messenger. Do let me know what you think if you’ve seen it.

So why do I say surrender?

Well, there’s a hard-earned version of that story that’s been living in my imagination and on my tongue for over a decade now. A version that took many months to learn and found its debut over a five-day telling on the island of Crete back in 2016. It lives in me, not in the widescreen panorama of whatever is waiting in that Plymouth cinema, but in a furtive, exploratory journey into one of the greatest stories we have. When you’ve been through that strange initiation you want to protect its bespokeness. I’m sure you have similar examples in your own life.

It began on long drives from Devon to Norfolk listening to lectures on the story with my then ten-year-old daughter. We both got swept up in the liveliness of the tale, and its twists and turns. It was a point in our lives we were both feeling pretty shipwrecked, so without ever mentioning it there would have been a few mirrors being held up.

We both had a Nostos, a kind of profound longing for home, for our rocky Ithaca. It was common for friends to be dismissive of Odysseus, but we always felt he was fighting for his life and needed every bit of wiliness at his disposal. Every time Odysseus seemed to get near Ithaca, or us home, a wind would come and blow us back out to sea.

I started with drawings: chalk on blackboard

The Odyssey didn’t provoke a hard journey in my own life, didn’t somehow ‘create’ it, but it was an extraordinary companion for a life experience that came of its own, hellbent volition. That story gave us something to travel in together. It gave us a language for some very hard things. We knew when we’d spent too long with the lotus eaters, when life had turned us to pigs, when we were stuck between a serpent and a whirlpool. But it also gave us hope, humour, doggedness. We loved Nausicaa, and Elpenor, Argus, and all sorts of lesser known characters.

Years later I’d share a stage and teach a class with Madeline Miller and her bestseller Circe. But that was all far away. Right now it was the two of us driving through the rain, holding onto a bit of timber as the sea swirled. Dulcie went onto to study Classics and knows the story far better than I do. When I watched her graduate from film school in Bristol a couple of weeks ago I thought my heart was just about going to burst.

Learning A Story That Big and Well Known

The Hard Yards Of Memorising

Imagining is precious. It takes a certain kind of work. Even if it’s just stick-people rustling around your head like a kid’s sketch it’s worth taking seriously. I don’t quite ‘know’ what King Arthur or the Red Bead Woman look like exactly, but I can feel their general shape and character. It would be disastrous if I described them too vividly in a storytelling. That’s the invitation for your imagination to meet mine in the meadow of the story. That’s how all this began. We gathered round a fire and someone started talking and we all started dream-thinking into their words.

With The Odyssey I had to change the structure of the poem. I began before even The Iliad (briefly) and then evolved into a more A-Z type narrative than the lovely bounding about Homer does. It proved complex enough without beginning two thirds of the way through. Once I had done all the reading, all the study, all the memorising of names, at some point I just had to give myself up to how the story was opening up in my storytelling head.

Homer had given me the matter of the story, but the sense of the tale, that’s where the storyteller displays their wit and pathos.

It takes a while before a story can really stand up and walk. You tentatively weave one scene next to another and the whole thing collapses. The Odyssey is just so long you just have to set out and hope for the best. Only in the telling is there sufficient adrenalin for your imagination to start realising what it wants to say about any particular episode. You run the terrible risk of just reporting rather stiffly what happened next: ‘They came to an island.’ You have to make some executive decisions about which island to describe and which not.

By the time Odysseus comes to the Cyclops, he and his man are wealthy, they can trade rather than attack. When I listened to a recording of myself telling the scene, I described them as if they were wandering around wanting to practice their new manners and looking to buy some artisan cheese from the charming one-eyed giant. This makeover doesn’t last for long. All that humour only occurred in the moment of delivery, it wouldn’t have occurred to me ahead of time.

On the recording I can hear the use of humour to get us through the more episodic and highly mythological chapters. It disarms the sense that we’ve heard it all before. It breaks up any sense of plod. Those lively spirits fall away as we journey further, and the really profound area of feeling is mostly waiting when Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca. Not as a conquering hero but disguised as a kind of derelict. The pathos gathers, soul replaces spirit, and we enter the incredible, chess-game reunion of Penelope and her decades-absent husband.

I walked countless miles of Dartmoor speaking the story, slept with it tucked under my wing, took any opportunity anywhere to tell it in small morsels to hungry beaks. At some point I was properly dream-thinking it (or thought by it) and then and only then was I ready to travel to Crete.

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Hello friends! You find me mid-Summer School and a minuscule dip in the roasting temperatures we’ve been enduring. If you glance at the hay-coloured ground over sixty of us are gathered on, please note that’s usually lush green. We’ve been having a splendid, deep time. There’s been stories and ideas both old and new and today’s offering is the last big story we explored, a fairy tale called The Earth Gnome (author’s note: in the end I pivoted and did something different). It’s quite fantastic, but I only seem to tell it every three years or so. I will read my version here, so do make sure you listen to the audio, and I’ll either add some commentary, or include it below. If I put both story and commentary here it would drift on and on.

LONG COMMENTARY ON THE EARTH GNOME (Story on audio)

The story actually begins with a dragon. In the first few lines we are taken straight to the heart of the matter, as fairy tales frequently do. The king is ailing, and a once generous spirit has become mean and grasping. He has become a hoarder, and his proclamation about the apples is issued with a fiery breath.

At the same moment, we are made aware that he longs for death, to be reunited with his wife. The centre of cultural life in the kingdom literally has a death wish. Something that once worked for everyone is working no longer. He wants to move on and yet he can’t let go.

Weirdly, his macabre protestation about the apples is––in the long and difficult run––the one thing that will actually ultimately free the kingdom. But the route will be grievous and complex, with no one assuming it could lead to anything but trouble. But then again, trouble is the hot currency of most of these stories.

Like the old king, have you ever truly obsessed over something, or somebody?

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Young me, looking to break the ice and bucket the pond

(Last week I talking about the history of Robert Bly’s life and my initial resistance to reading Iron John: Where The Wild Things Are)

So I pick Iron John up. In fact, I didn't buy it from a store but withdrew it from a library, possibly the last book I ever did so.

I’m much younger than the target audience for Iron John (about twenty-four), but suitably miserable, so somehow the years don’t matter. This was the first stand out line for me: “The Wild Man, who has examined his wound, resembles a Zen priest, a shaman, or a woodsman more than a savage,” (Bly 1990 p.x). Countless writers – including myself – have written words of that sentiment since, but at the moment in Twickenham library, on that Tuesday afternoon, I’d never read anything like it.

I knew nothing of Zen, shamans or woodsmen, but I knew I was in an awful lot of pain and somehow that one slim sentence had just thrown me a key. I hurried home to the men’s hostel I was living in and commenced to reading. Somewhere over the next few hours I glanced up from what had been a prison cell and found I was in a hermit’s hut. A few books, a rug, a kettle and a Rembrandt sketch of a lion tacked onto the wall.

I was astounded by what I was reading.

Bly gave religious weight to exactly the kind of story I’d devoured since childhood. Not only that, he was claiming that there was a kind of Jacob’s ladder out of the sorrow and chaos that my life had become. That if I was to attend to the conditions of my life through a poetic and patient lens, then everything would deepen. I didn’t say ‘make sense’ or ‘fix everything’, but deepen. These tales weren’t about changing the story necessarily, they were about understanding the story. That was the first step.

The woman I loved never came back, I continued to dwell amongst desperate men in the hostel, but I had this one lifeline, I had this book.

I used to examine Robert’s face on the back cover. He seemed a strange looking fellow. He’s in the trousers and striped shirt of an accountant but has a Guatemalan vest over the top and a burgundy scarf. He’s grinning broadly at the camera. It’s like he managed to get out of school early or something. He seemed free.

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The Selkie Skin: A Teaser from My Heart Ate Light, Southwark Cathedral

Hello my friends, It’s early Sunday morning - after midnight - and I’m back from the London train and an extraordinary evening with Rowan Williams and Mark Rylance. We were talking grief, story, longing, improvisation, all sorts. Rylance was sparkling with the honesty of sorrow; Rowan rugged with his decades-long engagement with the many tough spots of religious life. It was unbelievably nourishing to be with my friends for these few hours, and this emerging focus. No one was pushing a polemic, more listening and responding. Somehow a bird had slipped into the cathedral and circled high above our heads, occasionally dropping feathers.

The whole game was raised by whatever the last one of us had mused. I’d dare to suggest we all became a little more inspired by the last turn of thought, story, poem or song, I know I was.

Storytellers

It was glorious to meet a few of the parish there (you know who you are!) and yet again it caused me to reflect on how precious these Sunday meetings are for me and my life. I feel lucky to be in the world the same time as you. After the book signing, Mark, the effervescent Lucy Cooper, John Mitchinson, Matthew Burton and a few of us slipped off for a Guinness in nearby Borough market. The evening was rounded off with picking up some fried chicken just opposite the hotel. These are wonderful, wonderful moments. I clink all your glasses.

I’m extremely glad to report that because of you donating to the documentary, we had the funds to get the evening filmed, and sections of it will go into the final movie. THANK YOU. If you can help, or know someone who can, please consider having a look at: My Heart Ate Light

Call Three Times:

Iron John! Iron John! Iron John!

So, I’ve started a big bit of work.

Not big in terms of word count but in terms of significance. I’ve been asked to write the foreword to the re-release of Robert Bly’s million-selling Iron John. I think it’s likely I’ll be doing the audiobook too. Forgive me for not having a Minnesotan accent, bending my sentences down at the end, as Robert did so well.

This task is forcing me to think more deeply about my relationship to that book, its legacy, and wider feelings about what has come to be called Men’s Work.

I realise my feelings are fairly complex.

Bly’s dismayed and enthralled me in almost equal measure, and created enough pressure and opportunity to enable me a life doing what I love. Such is his cultural impact I sometimes want to be a hundred miles from his patch of earth – all artists go through something like this – but wisdom is wisdom, and it’s churlish not to pass it on, and reprehensible if you don’t name the old growth tree you once sheltered under.

Three ways to think about Iron John.

It’s:

A grief manifesto for a culture ill equipped to catch up with their own sorrow.

A call to freeing up the eccentricity of knowing what story you’re actually in.

A legacy to the irrationality of conscience.

All mean: be awake.

Robert Bly’s story could begin twenty different ways.

But let’s begin with Eisy Eisenstein.

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Want to hear yet more of my dulcet tones? (Don’t answer that.) You can locate more here: Liturgies on Dwell

Or the Merrie Lecture at Temenos?

Want to read thoughts about the Sun? Mythologists Fear Heatwaves

The above conversation was last week in Eastbourne. Some of it you’ve heard thematically before on the Liturgies campaign trail, but there’s some new things budding up here and there, I promise.

Run To The Hills

Traveller, thou art approaching Cortona! …Thou mayst have wandered far and wide through Italy – nothing hast thou seen more venerable than Cortona. Ere the days of Hector and Achilles, ere Troy itself arose – Cortona was. On that bare and lofty height, whose towered crest holds communion with the cloud, dwelt the heaven-born Dardanus, ere he left Italy to found the Trojan race; and on that mount reigned his father Corythus, and there he was laid in the tomb…Away with doubts – pay thy full tribute of homage – Hast thou respect to fallen greatness? – Yon solemn city was once the proudest and the mightiest in the land, the metropolis of Etruria, and now – but enter its gates and look around…

George Dennis, 1845

It’s not unusual to journey to Tuscany to escape the English weather, but it’s highly odd when the weather you are escaping is even hotter! England is dripping to a standstill. I confess it’s roasting here – and unusually hot for June, as any resident of Cortona will tell you – so you have to be highly tactical as to when to wander the cobbles. The walls of this hill town seem to subdue the worst of the heat, but it’s still quite something. I’m delighted to be here with my daughter Dulcie, just blinking and out the other side of her film degree at Bristol university. Wherever I am with Dulcie is simply the best place to be. Our guide into the town and its mythos is Selena Garefino, a friend of my school and a woman with a real gift for friendship and conviviality. Everybody knows and loves her. She’s generous with her time and offers an experience we never could have had without her. She makes a town become a village.

Cortona’s a world of genial eccentrics and raconteurs, of hushed churches and the clink of a Negroni glass, of determined old ladies with slim, dark sticks climbing the lanes to light candles for the venerable dead. The secret to this long life (according to Selena) may be tons of good quality Italian olive oil, the aforementioned steps, and having a good red with every meal after breakfast, no slacking. However, no wine without food. So now we know. “Wine’s not a grape it’s a territory,” says the Wine Man Marco, “each bottle tastes different every five minutes, filled with wind, earth, stones, volcanic ash and even the distant tang of the sea.” There’s a couple of serious cases being shipped home. Just beforehand I’m happily wrangling over a tapestry.

The bartering: the sellers’ charm offensive, then the snarling bear-pit, then the meeting in the middle.

Early morning I have a little espresso and wander to the city walls before it gets too hot. As I stand, a little agog, heart-rending scents erupt from the flowers and tree bark that I haven’t smelt since a summer painting in Rome almost twenty-five years ago. Incredible thing, scent. Transformative, immediate. I close my eyes so the scents come closer.

My child snoozes on, as young people are meant to do, but I prowl about. There’ll be a nap for a solid block of the afternoon. First night I sleep under soaking wet towels, but after a day the air conditioning establishes its superlative function.

I’m here to keep an eye out for St Francis and some other Italian saints of the rural variety, but before that we’re heading back a little further into history, back to the Etruscans.

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Photo: Ruth Medjber

CONNLA’S WELL:

A two year, four gathering programme on the west coast of Canada.

Around Connla’s Well there are nine sacred hazel trees. Sometimes the trees drop hazel nuts into the well, where, in its depths, salmon wait to consume such nuts. Over the years these salmon acquire beautiful spots on their back. Each nut is said to contain a story, and each marking is slightly different according to the tale. These spots are eruptions of beauty. It’s how storytellers get made. Waiting patiently for wisdom to fall upon them.

Official blurb:

In this two year programme, Dr Martin Shaw brings some of the greatest stories we have to study, wrestle and absorb. Currently visiting fellow at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, England, Shaw has a lifetime of experience with quite what these incredible stories can unfold. These are not arid lectures, but vivacious encounters with both the oral and literary strands of ancient story. They are the mythic ground you stand upon. You will both learn shorter stories to carry in your pocket and apprehend how the longer myth cycles are revealing themselves in your own life.

Parzival Live Recordings

All details at link below, ALSO available and just released is audio links to the several day, long and windy telling of Parzival that Martin undertook on his Canadian trip of May 2025:

Connla’s Well – two year programme, Canada

WILD CHRIST: A Christmas Adventure in Devon, England

This unique weekend, taking place from December 11th to 13th 2026, will be a deep dive into Biblical and saint stories, against the backdrop of a gorgeous old manor house on the edge of Dartmoor (UK). Martin will also be working for the first time from his new, unpublished manuscript, asking the question: What if God is still talking to us? Could we even recognise an angel as a prompt from our conscience? Expect a thrilling safari into the mythopoetics of Christianity: vivid storytelling with profound spiritual dimensions. Details here - there’s been a rush on places:

Wild Christ, School of Myth

Please note: the UK School of Myth immersive programme will be returning retuned and ready to go later in 2027, alongside another exciting development soon to be announced.

Reunited with the ebullient Tommy Tiernan at St Ethelburga’s, London last Sunday

The Wanderer Wanders

I’m writing to you from a Premier Inn in the rain splattered streets of Eastbourne in Sussex, I’ve been gadding about again. I walked the sea front last night and gazed out at France a little distance a way. Reminded me a bit of Torquay where I was born. I’d had a lovely few hours talking in an upstairs room at The Square and Compass, or The Seven Bells or The Pigs’ Nose – I can’t at this second remember the name of the pub. It was pub-like anyway. I have a long, rather complex relationship to Sussex, so my memory banks get jiggered and poked when I pull out of Victoria station and wind down into the chalky county. Yet another chapter of my life that seems both tattered round the edges but dreamily vivid. I text my old pal Andreas in Brighton, and we gossip outrageously for a few minutes.

It was great to catch up with my friend Tommy Tiernan in London last week. We both led sessions then had a chat and responded to questions. He was in nimble form, slightly alarming and hugely imaginative all in one unique bundle. I got back late but early the next morning had the old quill at the ready and the dark roast coffee on the go, cats peering over from the sofa.

It’s a stage in the writing that involves an enormous amount of research, so the pace is incremental. It’s not quite time for the tuning up of the language, but just making sure the vessel is not letting in too much water. Sunken ships have their charm, but I’d like this one to float. I’m always happiest when I’m working on a book. I think it’s rather like why some people enjoy crosswords, it’s a puzzle I keep turning around and around. The book will end up as about 48% what I intended, and 52% what actually ends up happening.

I’ve had a break from the reading about quite what happened on Easter Saturday (Harrowing of Hell), and have surfaced to meet new people and tell some stories. So I’ve been back on the train endlessly pootling past the white horses and red bulls and endless soggy foliage of the west of England (I glimpsed the Long Man of Wilmington from a Sussex train window on the way home.)

And Upon the Ancient Hill There Opened A Door

Drip, drip, drip go the fields and hedges, swoop, swoop, swoop go the red-tailed hawks. In the last few miles before Newton Abbot the train rides right alongside the sea, it’s absolutely thrilling. I feel – as is literally the case – that I am being absolutely enclosed in the land of my birth at that moment. I am coming home, that deepest of phrases. My shoulders relax. The deep red ochre of the towering cliffs, the swishing grey green lurch of the waves. The spongy tumps of Dartmoor in the distance. I’d swear you can smell the salt through the window. I’ve been enjoying the sight for over fifty years. It stays the same and then I catch the reflection of some beardy old guy with sleepy eyes peering out at the sea and realise I have haven’t.

I pack so lightly these days I’ve practically disappeared.

And I wanted to bring a lively story into our midst this morning, a tale from the North Caucasus, and a myth cycle called the Nart Sagas. I’ve loved these stories for years and years and God willing will one day do a shaggy little collection of my favourites. They are bold and brilliant and little known. I wrote a book that includes this story a few years ago, all about the wilderness vigil, it lives here: Wolf Milk.

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The Tempering of Shoshlan

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Giving an embryonic Bardskull (part one) to the Liffey, back in Oct 2019
photo: Lucy Cooper

This Was Wednesday Morning

Hello Parish - well, I’ve finally done something sensible and am about to take myself to Dublin. It’s still a romantic word to me.

In a few hours my old friend steely-eyed Dave Stevenson will pick me up and kindly take me to the diminutive but loved Exeter airport and a minute later I should be in that wonderful old city. Tonight I will bring a soporific pint of Guinness to my grateful and cherubic lips.

There’s been absolutely no Guinness recently as I’ve been on antibiotics. And to mark my recovery it has to be the Dublin pint. C’mon. Really does taste different.

Actually, because this is all slightly in the past by the time you read this I’ll be in London with Tommy Tiernan for the gathering at St. Ethelburga’s: Spiritual Ecology Festival.

Anyone coming? It’s this afternoon, maybe there’s still time.

I’m currently bathing in the redemptive light of not being in constant needle-scraping pain. If anyone came to see me at the Temenos Academy they may remember me saying I had a savagely sore throat: that turned out to be quite the abscess, hence the meds. The infection has finally left me after a pretty rough week. Pain is absorbing.

So, Dublin.

I’ve hit the 100k mark on the draft of the new book and it’s time to step away from the writing for a few days, let it percolate. I need some kind of restraining order to ensure I buy no hats, knitwear, or tweed whilst I’m there, I truly have enough (editor’s note: Dr Shaw fell into temptation). Dublin is a place of much happiness for me, of Ulysses rare book shop, of Lilliput Press who put out my Moriarty reader, and most of all some abiding friendships.

The first night I was in Dublin proper, years back, a whale was spotted in the Liffey. A few hours later me, Lucy and Tim (anyone who’s worked with me in England will likely know them) were in Pipers Corner pub eating much-needed ham and cheese toasties and enjoying porter with a fine Red Breast chaser. Later, as the bar was winding down, the great Irish singer Liam O’Maonlai strolled in and just started singing. The whole room stopped, and it’s far to say, there wasn’t much winding down after that. I think the three of us have been caught up in his singing ever since.

I had a long, glorious, free wheeling chat with my old friend. This week he walked me down some inner-city streets and gently opened up all the stories of the old libraries, dance halls for the country folk, dips and dives and tragedies and glories of the place. We squeezed into his tiny van packed full of organs, harps, drums, Moroccan carpets, fan letters, penny whistles, passed James Joyce’s house, passed where Bob Marley played and out to the airport. The conversation reared up again like a snorting pony when we realised there was an hour or two before the flight. “A bird never flew on one wing,” he grinned as we enjoyed a glorious second pint. I slept like an angel on a cloud over England’s green fields and into the capital city.

The lads at Dublin Airport, last Friday

This is Saturday Morning, a Hotel in Central London

And now I am in the far end of Tottenham Court Road, but well insulated from the buzz.

Dublin didn’t disappoint. I needed to slip into its grand old bars: the polished bronze and deep burgundies of such places, their snugs and hidden corners. Just watch life passing and soak up the history of this writers city.

Talking of life passing, I think the most extraordinary thing happened about an hour after getting off the plane.

So I’m in a newsagent and let a young lad in the line in front of me, I have plenty of time. He promptly wins half a million euro on a scratch card. I saw it happen. The whole shop goes shimmery for a moment as we all take in the reality that this wee fella’s life has just changed. It scrambled everyone’s head. Anyway, God be good to him and the decisions he now makes. I’m not a ‘scratcher’ myself, but it was a moment. He wasn’t quite living on the street, but maybe not a million miles off.

You could call it luck, you could call it providence, what happened to the fellow. Sometimes I’ve heard luck being associated with the Devil, but etymologically at least, Luck and Lucifer don’t have connections. Luck arises from German words around happiness, Lucifer is Latin, ‘Light-Bringer’. I’d like to think the moment was divinely prompted certainly, let’s hope it can stay a good energy in his life.

I’ve won many half-million quids spiritually so I feel filled with kind fortune. I didn’t begrudge him in the least. The opposite, just a pang of concern.

What have been our ‘scratch card’ moments? They could be the subtlest of things.

Later I’ll write a little about an animal that people see mostly as fortunate, the Hare. It’s certainly been a totem for me.

Live action at the Cobblestone on recent said excursion. This doesn’t do justice to the sheer guzzling buzz of the room

THANK YOU

I’m filled with gratitude at the support you’ve shown for this documentary. I got misty eyed, I can tell you. The director Pip Piper had made contact a few months back and started talking about creating a piece of work that caught some of the joy and depth of what’s been happening over these last few years (House of Beasts & Vines would be a fantastic example). The ideas, friendships, adventures that are emerging. I cherish films of people whose work I’ve enjoyed, so I’m grateful to be part of something that hopefully is useful for a few others.

So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for the help. We are steadily raising enough to do it. Come join the adventure! If you know anyone else with similarly deep pockets, please consider letting them know:

My Heart Ate Light crowdfunder

I’ve been keeping up the daily walks, mostly with another old friend, Johnny. Known Johnny since he was five. Getting up from the desk and going to meet him on the lanes, usually about 6pm, is like coming up from very deep water. The poor man sometimes encounters me as if I have The Bends, with a jaw full of Bronze Age ideas, but he bears with me. You can read about him somewhere in the first few chapters of Liturgies if you keep your eyes open. He was absolutely essential in getting the School of Myth started, and clearly remains a beloved friend.

Scholars compose: School of Myth a few years back

Hare

Young Hare, Albrecht Dürer

A couple of days back we came across a field positively writhing with rabbits. What I know about those critters is you won’t find a Hare generally in a Rabbits field (saw a Hare recently, on the way to Walsingham). It took me back to a meeting with a Hare a decade or so back, that you can find in my book Scatterlings, and I’ll read it to you here. It has something of the 12 secret names idea I’ve talked about since I was first living outside, years and years ago. That things deserve greater, often kinder, attention. So, here it is.

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My Heart Ate Light: Trailer for New Documentary

Hello Parish! I'm delighted to be collaborating on a new documentary, My Heart Ate Light. There's a sense of adventure and unfolding here, rather than relentless promotion of one polemic or another. We're interested in a kind of a spiritual adventure that arises simply by paying attention to the conditions of your life. With friends and family along the way, we'll be digging into myth, landscape, storytelling and the bumps and glories of the Christian journey.

As the description on the link says: We travel with Martin as he traverses the land reminding us of the myths and stories that have in part formed all our lives. We will meet his family, friends and co-conspirators on the journey. We will travel with him to some of the extraordinary encounters and opportunities unfolding around his life and work.

In an age of profound change, the film explores the resurgence of the mythopoetic in Christian thought, expression and practice.

The film will fuse beautiful imagery and music with fly-on-the-wall documentary, unseen archive and live storytelling. A pulling-back of the veil on one of the world’s most revered modern storytellers.

Please consider helping us get it made! (and sharing the clip). This is how:

My Heart Ate Light

Cooling Notes

Mercifully, the weather’s broken in Devon. The rain bucketed down yesterday and the plants in my yard rejoiced. The Christmas Tree that is still thriving in its pot out on the cobbles has sprung new furry eruptions. The cats come in through the flap and triumphantly shake their sodden fur.

I kept the back door open for the rain pattering and lit a small fire, just a log or so. I’m back at the new book, and don’t intend to leave the parish for a week or so. To really write I barely do much else. The beating of the bounds, the clink of a glass with friends, but the ideas and images always hovering. Has to be that way right now. I’ve covered a fair bit of ground, but now I circle back with the finest of fine toothed-combs to locate the less trammelled ideas that are gingerly picking their head up. You can’t be too rough with them.

I found myself saying at an event a few weeks ago that I felt in no way saintly, no way or how. I wasn’t proud of the fact, but it was simply my reality. The deeper I go into Christianity the more my waywardness is rather relentlessly revealed. I say this not with a shrug of the shoulders, or a weird counter-intuitive pride, or even despair, I just steadily note it and attempt, with wildly varying success, to work on it. My small consolation is at least I’ve clocked it.

And today, somehow related, we’re going to come back to the story of Samson, and the issues of talent vs. character surface – using the term gifts and fruit.

A Few Samson Reminders: a Judge (i.e. Chief) of Israel at a very low point in their fortune. Samson has grown up with a Nazarite vow to not cut hair, drink wine or handle the dead, but he basically does what he wants. He kills a lion with his bare hands and strangely honey grows from the carcass. This could be seen as the strange way in which Maker works sometimes. Samson makes a riddle from the encounter, that ends with many dead. Occasionally he has time alone in a cave, but never seems to acquire the sagacity those realms can offer. We recall in the end Samson’s hair is cut and he’s blinded, before one last blast of strength as he brings down the temple on the heads of his enemies. Whilst not filling out the whole story, I’ll add a few simple reflections today.

Longer Samson story here:

The Trouble With Samson

Listen to the audio of this week’s post here:

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It’s early morning in the Welsh hills above the Hay on Wye Literary festival. It’s not even 8am and the heat is slow-simmering on what will prove to be one of the hottest days I can ever remember enduring in England. But that hasn’t happened yet. Right now I can see for endless, rapacious miles. A photo couldn’t do justice to the sheer sensorial power of the seemingly forever fields, copses, lanes and blue-tent sky I witness in front of me.

Christ’s Green Mantle is furred and sweet with the May flower. The minstrels of the hedges are in fulsome voice, the sap pouring heavy and happy from their chirrups. Chestnut bulls snort and tail-flick under the confirming shade of the birch. There is no Gethsemane darkness at this moment, or swirled and barnacled prayer from the desperate mouth of Jonah. There is just now, the archaic present. It is jaw-droppingly wonderful.

I can hear the spring cuckoo and for a moment it is First Bird, a slip of Eden out into our time. Or maybe I’m in a slightly different type of time altogether. On a morning like this I feel I can see all the way to Galilee.

The BBC tent at Hay, with Dr Sian Williams

Later is the town, and now the heat feels almost dangerous. I’m so disorientated I don’t even want to buy books, which is a lifetime first. I shuffle from shadow to shadow, eyes scouring for a deck chair. I half close my eyes and imagine Butty Bach beer pouring down from the hillside streams into this bustling town. There’s just nowhere to shelter, and everyone’s struggling, no one’s digging it. Crying kids with damp curly hair freaking out from their hot little skulls.

Book Town the Gypsies have sometimes called Hay, a relative of Oxford’s Scholars Town. There’s so many book shops. I wonder if the books tumble down from the fields every morning, ship-shape and carrying a little hedgerow erudition, assembling smartly outside the shop doors.

But which of those books really have a bang of wisdom to them? I remember Wisdom talking in the Bible, and her rejoicing:

I am first of God’s creations, I emerged from primordial antiquity: before rugged mountain and curling waves, before horizon line and heavenly brocade. I was there with Maker, delighting in it all. When he made the pale stars I was there, when he cast his circle on the face of the deep I was there. Before there was wind over the hills I was present, rejoicing and assisting. The Good World so abundant and charmed.

There’s some of those mountains about here today, and last night it got aboriginal quiet in these hills, really ancient quiet. A bat flew merrily about, then there was the magic-rattle that announced the sound of the dragon fly. All the chirrups of the day gradually settled into spirit-silence, and a yellow half-coin of moon slid up over the oak trees.

Thirty years ago I first fasted on a Welsh hillside, and a little door opens in me back to that experience. Where has the time gone? Suddenly I’m here. A raised daughter and a splendid life. A job of work that I can never wait to get to. Thank you Maker. Those four days opened me up, twenty five years later the 101 day vigil somehow gathered me in and put me back together, book ends. Sometimes we need expanding, sometimes confirming.

On the way up we’d stopped at Tintern Abbey, so beloved of Wordsworth. Never, ever go on a Bank Holiday. In record breaking heat. Whilst the photo indicates it was deserted, had the camera pointed the other way, a veritable river of cars – broken down or not – and ant-like armies of tourists writhed into every conceivable car park. It was NOT pretty.

However, (at the gift shop) I find myself picking up a kids edition of the Mabinogion, and immediately turn to one of my favourite stories, Pywll and Rhiannon. So in amongst the rugby scrum of tourists, there is at least one thing procured from that woeful detour. A story, a section of which I now give to you, dear parish.

It’s Behind You

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Crows Blinking, Bristol Parkway, last Sunday

Sun’s out.

You don’t hear that from me every day. I think we’re going to get about a week of the stuff now. I can’t say as I’m not grateful. The nightly beating of the bounds is revealing hedges ecstatic with wild flowers and florid scents suddenly and mysteriously on the breeze. It’s just glorious. Washing on the line is drying in two hours, that kind of thing.

I’ve been to Norfolk and back for the wonderful Sacred Landscapes Conference in Walsingham. It was a relief to see Paul Kingsnorth (gently) back on his feet and meet such a glorious bunch of artists, academics. musicians, family-makers and more. Rowan Williams was in great fettle, and an unexpected joy was giving him a lift back to Bristol on the way home (thanks Duncan for heroic driving) and nattering unrelentingly for the whole way.

Mariamni Plested of Walsingham can confirm the sun is out and the Merrie abounds

You can find Mariamni at: carnelianseeker

At Walsingham I croaked out a version of what will be my next talk of the Merrie which will be at the Temenos Academy next Friday. I hope you are coming, (I said I hope NOT on audio as momentarily befuddled by too much sunlight), which I’m sorry-not-sorry has sold out. I will get a recording for here.

Talking of croaking, I find myself still daily surrounded by good-natured corvids at every turn, so this week’s story is to honour their lively presence.

Let’s take a jump into Elijah. Not every detail of his story is here, but hopefully enough to provoke some thinking.

Ravens, Nat Morley

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Ravens Meat

Listen to the audio here:

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The Crow’s Nest, Cockington Church, Torquay, Devon

Audio of below, above!

It’s always the scent first: a chill, incense-heavy air. Then eyes adjusting to the semi-darkness, and the flickering prayer candles to the left and the right. You drop a few steps as you enter Cockington church, then the secret is made known to you. The secret? The legend is that the pulpit was once the Crow’s Nest of a Spanish galleon washed up on Devon shores.

I sit and think about this for some minutes.

There’s a theme emerging to the day.

Earlier on a great murder of crows had amiably surrounded me on the briny steps at Abbey Sands. They boldly took on the seagulls to nibble a few little tit-bits from my sandwiches.

There were some pretty road-tested characters I can tell you. Feathers akimbo, dragging wings, missing eyes. But oddly jovial, filled with chat and strutting boldly about. Just as I was thinking this was going to be my new life with my crow friends forever and ever, one flew by with a baby songbird in its claws and I was soberly reminded of the edgy nuance of life in the wild.

And now, less than an hour later, I’m in a church where the priest speaks from the Crow’s Nest to the congregation.

Let’s think about that for a minute. What views have been seen from that Corvidian pulpit? That vertiginous dreaming seat?

Mountain ranges and distant mosques, acres of changeable sea and Norwegian coastlines, bristling with forests. Star scattered night skies that would make even Moses fall to his knees. The imagination of the pirate-priest opened wider and wider in their visionary amazement. The anti-Ahab, telling Cockington parishioners of the bigness and the beauty, recalibrating the heart, not counselling distrust and fear of the Other. (Ahab from Moby Dick that is.)

I’m on the slow road to The Conference of British Saints at Walsingham, and treating the journey as a pilgrimage through odd, greening pockets of England’s chapel and far fields. Just trusting that there’s something that wants beholding everyday. Things to tell me about the Merrie – which is the theme of the lecture I’ll be giving. I’m re-composing it as I go.

Stage invasion by some much loved nieces and nephews, Walsingham

Later I sit at dusk in a Dartmoor valley, overwhelmed by the great swirl of the Maying going on around me. As dear Dylan Thomas would say, the Goose-skin winter is finally over, and a spinneyed moon is surfacing. The bees are churning the flowers, there’s a sweet wind coming down from the Grey Wether stones and all colludes in the satisfied purr of an earth engorged. It’s so absolutely, utterly wonderful I am speechless. One old crow flies directly past to remind me that he and his coal-dark brethren are part of it all too – raven conk – Don’t forget us, you Elijahs! Our Raven brothers and sisters brought you meat and bread when you most needed it. A man once told me that crows aren’t born smart, but life makes them, especially, wise.

I would hope the Merrie would speak from the Crow’s Nest. Wise as serpent or crow, as innocent as dove. Prophetic, pastoral, epic, lyric. It may be a lovely thing to climb into the old nest and say nothing, beamingly, at all. I can’t quite say why if feels so outrageously alive, this Crow’s Nest in the centre of a church, but I’m utterly struck by it.

Oh, Jonah clamber sea-weeded up into the old nest and tell us of Jasconius’s dreaming belly, or Deborah speaking wisdom from under her palm tree, or Julian growing vast in her tiny Norfolk cell. What say you? What urge you?

A day later I’m in the jaw-droppingly lovely North Bovey at the church of St John the Baptist. This place used to have a minstrels gallery! Imagine that lit by candles on Christmas Eve, trudging through Devonian snow. It’s teeming with Green Men, and Three-Hares-A-Bounding. Later I will drink chewy red beer in The Ring of Bells and eat Cornish fish in honour of John.

John’s charmingly carved with a scallop shell as a work of Christian imagination. Tradition imagined he would have used such a thing to gently scoop Jordan water onto the head of the Chryst.

Jordan my head oh John,

Jordan my head,

In this mad month of blissed Maying.

Could such churches still swell from the earth much as the Tors erupted as volcanic outcrops when this was the sea bed? Great devotional upsurges? Unstoppable, joyous, creaturely expressions? Green chapels all. These are places where we could actually allow ourselves to be changed. Arise the Green Chapels! Hail the God you cannot summon!

Vixen Tor

I will keep winding my way to Walsingham, and the Merrie. Past the chalking giants and the vaunting curlews, past even that cracked grey ribbon of concrete round old Londinium.

Ok, a different world now.

The other, lengthy dish for today is the other end of Psyche & Eros. This is a strange, slow-working story, that doesn’t work well when rushed. It may suit to read/listen to today’s rather long post on separate occasions, you’ll know best. I don’t wish indigestion on any of us. There are some brief notes if you make it to the end! Thank you for your perseverance.

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What’ll It Be?: photo by Jim Wileman

Hello all, incrementally I’m having little moments away from the desk: I snuck off to Oxford to be with Iain McGilchrist and others, and was part of a Devon festival the next day, including an appearance at the above Field System gallery in Ashburton. I’m informed they are doing a brisk business on the drawings, but there’s still a few left: Field System. I got drenched on the way back to the car from the Oxford event and have the lurgy.

To dry out I thought we’d head off to Greece for an early summer holiday for the next few weeks with a telling of one of C.S. Lewis’s favourites, Psyche and Eros. I must have written my version about fifteen years ago – in the last gasps of my thirties – and I want to see how it lands all this time later. There’s a floridity to the language that surfaces less these days, but I’ve been enjoying another rummage under the Hellenistic hood.

It’s a sumptuous tale and surprisingly current. It’s all about the Underworld initiations of love and how the furnace of amor can bake the bread suitable to serve up at a wedding worthy of the name.

I’ve never written a full commentary but will leave a few reflections at the bottom to respond to in your own musings. My mind is still a little wayward with cold, so please forgive anything excessively random. I would suggest clicking the audio link just below, rather than just reading the text solo.

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Come to the above! Mid June in London. My friend Tommy Tiernan will be there also, and all sorts of interesting folks. All the details here: Spiritual Ecology Festival

I’m keeping up the walking. Some days I even make two stretches round the lanes. I’ve even encountered one or two of you on your own peregrinations! Sun comes, then goes. I’m week five at the desk now, doing the inevitable yards that are the only way books get made.

I limit (not ignore) what I hear from the outside world as the stories seem so endlessly sour and broken and power mad. Furious people hopping from foot to foot. Thankfully those aren’t the stories I encounter on the lanes.

I’m pleased to report that the sun still seems to be rising in the east, there’s a magnificent blossom in the far field, the lambs are scampering, and The Bay Horse is still producing a magnificent pint of Jail Ale. Counterweight. Don’t forget the endless grace that’s waving across the fence. As Bachelard says, ‘The world seeks to be admired by you.’ This isn’t escapism, it’s balance. For God’s sake, let’s not praise the Devil with our lack of attention.

Grail (Jail) Ale, photograph lovingly curated by author

We need stories – sometimes subtle, gentle things – that restore in us a sense of goodness. Not just jagged bitterness frothing at the mouth or bonkers political hijacking of deep religious themes. I have lively and caring relationships with a small group of men and women and I’m pleased to say that is allowed to qualify for much of my bandwidth.

And A Story Came Forth

When I approach the monsters of the current moment I never gaze directly or risk losing my eyes, rather peer at their reflection on a shield that is also, of course, a story. A story that always speaks deeper truths than the so-called ‘facts of the matter’. The Devil loves nothing better than division and suspicion.

I’ve been back at the story of Joseph. I won’t tell the thing – I’m sure I did an embryonic version here a couple of years ago – but I will give us the prompt of a synopsis.

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New drawings at Field System Gallery

I’m in conversation on all things Liturgies with the effervescent Lucy Cooper a week today in Ashburton Arts Centre, Devon. Immediately afterwards I’ll be in the Field System gallery next door signing books and with a group of new drawings exhibited. If you are interested in buying a drawing but far away you can always contact the gallery direct: info@fieldsystem.co.uk

Tickets: Dartmoor Tors Festival: Reshaping Our Stories

Field System Gallery: Dartmoor Mythographies: Meet the Artist

I’m just now writing my new lecture on The Merrie: Adventures in Christian Mythopoetics, in anticipation of the Temenos Academy lecture on Friday 29th May.

Hello friends from my resident position ensconced at the Dartmoor writing desk. Day 26, spirits good!

Night Wages Tour: Santa Monica 2019 with The Doors’ John Densmore and beloved Conch.

I’m taking a little break from my Merrie lecture and digging into 2019’s The Night Wages and a Siberian folk tale contained within called What Mayaki Heard At The Smoke Hole. It’s been a few years since I peered into it. I wrote the book mostly in a hut in winter in the deserts of New Mexico and it always pummels my heart a bit to pick it up. That doesn’t mean I don’t love it, but it’s words from the centre of some life-altering sorrows.

So – Mayaki’s story has got me thinking about mentorship. Where do we receive that?Over the years it’s often been the stories themselves that provide it for me.

I live in the gunk and glory of myth. The fuzzy weird bits, the holy moments, the terrifying gallops through midnight forests, the confirming warmth of the hearth fire and a pint placed in your muddy paw. I tell stories of women who become foxes with seven glorious brush tales (rather like today’s story), of men who wander into dreamy Devon hills and discover the sleeping king of all Britain. Three decades has seen me telling these stories in caves, theatre halls, lecture rooms, cathedrals, back rooms of taverns, at least one Hollywood nightclub, some of the great universities of the world. It is a glorious and restorative work.

But what about when you get schooled in a very different way?

There’s any number of false tutors, wicked siblings and fraudulent sovereigns in the fairytales, and this time what struck me was the notion of dark mentorship: when you learn how not to behave by a rather grievous example. Have you ever received such a strange education? I am reminded of Joseph’s words, “though you intended evil, God intended something good.” We have an enormous amount of unpleasant examples currently to choose from. But if I counted my lessons only from kindly examples the major part of my learnings would be going unacknowledged.

It’s a story about overhearing the perfect thing, even when it doesn’t sound like it.

This isn’t an obvious story to latch onto, but that’s the point. It leads us somewhere very fresh.

As part of telling this story I support charities like these:

Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North

Indigenous Works

Audio of story is BELOW.

What Mayaki Heard At The Smoke Hole

A Siberian Folk Tale

Out on the Taiga there was a bad man with two wives, his name being Canda. The women were called Gayula and his favourite, Ayaula. How he adored Ayaula. Ayaula’s only labour was to daily comb her husband’s hair, so it glistened sleek and magnificent in the firelight. But for Gayula it was different; she lived in a ramshackle hut some distance away, with a grinding litany of tasks – cooking, sewing, feeding the ravenous dogs that howled all day and night.

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