BEARSKIN (Part Two)
Orthodoxy As The Old Idea
Hello friends, I’ve been looking forward to jumping back into Part Two of the fairy tale Bearskin with you this week. As you read this I will have been on the road to Dublin after a day celebrating John Moriarty down at Kells Priory near Kilkenny.
Last night at Kells Priory. Sheltering under Moriarty’s Lakota Star Blanket. The very heat of life had drifted out of the turf by that point in the evening. Thank you dear blanket for keeping the storyteller warm.
Also – a note that I’m in Cornwall this Tuesday on the live Blindboy podcast, in Truro. Final tickets, if there are any, here: The Blindboy Podcast Live
Blindboy is a very interesting Irish thinker. An atheist, but with a great love of myth and folklore, it should be a good meet I think.
Bearskin (Part Two)
We remember Bearskin (Part One) returned from a war and was not allowed back into the village. He encounters an old initiator who tells him not to cut his hair or wipe the tears from his eyes for seven years. The lad fights a bear then wears his fur, with gold always in the pockets of a green coat the old fella gave him.
For the first few years Bearskin seemed a rather odd-looking fellow, but that was about it. But after four years wandering, and with all that hair growing and all those tears pouring he was someone people tended to avoid. Still, he stuck to the mandate, and spent most of the gold in his pocket giving it away to other people. The poor, heartbroken and lost. They were his people. The last in the queue. No one told him to do this, the Old Man had never suggested it, it came to him to do so as his journeying continued. Sometimes he would pass old soldiers on the road and they would nod, as if in some strange way they understood what he was doing.