A Thousand Fires

Finding Luminous Ground

LAST NIGHT: end of Puck’s speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Connemara

Get Lit

To tramp long miles in wind and rain, to stand wet to the skin and hungry and footsore…such must have been the daily fate of many amongst the humbler minstrels at least.
Sir Edwin Chambers

Well, I’m mercifully not footsore or soaking wet, rather warm-bedded and refreshed, but I would have known a fair bit about the position of the ‘humbler minstrel’ on and off over these last three decades. Back in the last century, when I realised I wished to swoon into the old stories of these North Atlantic islands I took myself off to live in a tent for four years. I’ve likely rabbited about this.

Over those years I would have lit a thousand fires, and by each fire I sat and absorbed stories. Few distractions: a cat on the bed, the bed being a single mattress on two pallets. Rain on canvas, a stew slow-cooking on the burner for a couple of days. Living in a circle. I had my Stonehenge-piled collection of books and the door open a slip so I could see the wind ruffle the heads of the trees in the valley below. There was no latch on my door, just a thick wrap of felt, and a discreet cough on the path from the occasional announcing visitor. The stories slipped in and out, like horses over the hill.

This is all in me when I stand up and start walking the myth-worlds. We all have events tattooed into us – events that can be made present simply be summoning them. Some a dread horror, which may require banishment of a kind, but others, like these, are a sustaining candle in the darkness of things.

The best I have to say is writ-large in the Backalong of my stories. The best I have to say is in tucking my boat in behind Christ. Wherever I am in the world, at night I fall into the shape of prayer as I fall asleep. Fall into the ancient Christian Mynde, fall into the garden, take the rock from Cain’s fist, dismantle Babel, let the flood be a flood of beautiful story not catastrophe, walk like Ruth and Naomi back out of the Underworld.

All the monsters of now – we are adrift in them – are trailed and negotiated in these tangle of tales that spill out of my blossomed but most imperfect jaw each night here in Ireland. It’s a teary privilege to carry them. I follow my storytelling God out onto the hillsides, stages, taverns and lecture halls and try to tell as much of the truth as I can stand, maybe a little more.

Can I gently suggest you light your thousand fires? Hopefully you already have.

These are vicious times, that need Star-Blanketing. It’s not unnatural to seek depth.

Sit with a story over the winter and learn it. Be gentle with yourself for at least an hour a day. Check up on a friend. Do something humanised and human-sized in the monstrous-sized calamities we hear about daily. That’s my advice. All of that can be a kind of praying. Vocalise beauty, manifest care.

This is all about mythic ground.