Myth Matters: A Brand New Course
And Story, Sarcasm & the Road to Emmaus
Green Knight course trailer: please consider sharing
I am delighted to announce a brand new online course! The Green Knight: Myth, Memory & the Road of Fidelity. Over five hours of live stories – both old and new to me – with supporting commentary and lots of study prompts. Recorded in my very library with the Jawbone team, it’s a strange masterclass of improvisation and tradition. I chose five powerful stories – some I know well, some almost not at all – and did a deep dive. I loved this experience. This is likely my very favourite filmed teaching, it really captures something essential. There’s also live Q&A sessions for the first 100 folk, in groups no bigger than twenty-five each. Of course, dear Parish you are the very first to hear of it, and with an added bonus:
Sign up at jawbonestories.com and receive a 10% discount code for paying subscribers to House of Beasts and Vines. Find the code at the bottom of the post.
Wanderer part two will be back next week.
Story, Sarcasm & The Road To Emmaus
The Hopi word for wild, tumpqa, means hard to approach, hard to get hold of.
Robert Bringhurst
I got sick and tired of all that purity! I wanted to tell stories.
Philip Guston
I have the gift for being occasionally able to put myself in the past and see what’s happening.
Robert Graves
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We are all walking to Emmaus. We all have to take turns to let Jesus speak through us. When the road is gloomy, when doubt heavy in your friends, it may be your moment. Don’t let a chance like this go by.
Myth has saved my proverbial bacon. I’ve written over a million words on the subject, but I’m going start there. It’s been a spiritual course-corrective, a baptism of my imagination (as C.S. Lewis would say), and has anchored me in the most turbulent of times. How so? The characters within the stories. What they get up to. Their decisions. Sacrifice, grit, kindness, hopeless naivety on occasion. The breadth of intelligence given to animals. A world righteously enchanted by its creator. Dells, byres, mountain tops, even cobbled streets filled with things that we can see and sometimes we can’t.
I was absolutely on the skids in a men’s hostel in my early twenties when it all shuddered back into my nervous system. All the walks with Dad as he told me of King Arthur, all the stories Mum read to me at bedtime. Far from nostalgia, the myths – in a moment of peril – erupted into disclosures of far greater weight than my childhood joys. I gripped those tales like a pirate grips a floating plank and held on as if my life depended on it. It did. Thirty years later, I am still here, shouting and happily splashing about. Big ferries glide by but I’m not sure if they’re AI or not.
Over those thirty years you can’t help but specify. My particular passion is for where the delicacy of spiritual epiphany meets the robustness of everyday life. How can we live in the tension of both? This is what I’ve often called the tension of the Forest and the Village. All the wilderness rites of passage work bears this out (living in Keats’s negative capability): coming back from a woodland fast and trying to figure out quite what that means in modernity. It was my own pressing issue thirty years ago, and has never quite left me. The shape of my life now is the response to that tension, the legacy of where I elected to put my time and energies. For me, the grooviest most edifying way to talk about all this is through myth. The most elegant, the most useful, the most gracious to the imagination of others.
My sensitivities have remained, but as a Christian there may be a cohesion now that wasn’t there before. I wasn’t interested in wholeness, I thought it was corny. I was interested in event, psychic drama of a kind. As a kid I sat fasting on a Welsh hillside and was appropriately blown apart by it. As a man, twenty-five years later, I sat on a Dartmoor hillside and was put back together. There was no intention for either to happen, but the Big Doctor got involved and that was that. It wasn’t just plants, trees, and ancestors speaking to me, it was the Creator of those things speaking to me. Last time he spoke through them, now it was even more particular.
So this is the kind of thing that makes you a storyteller.
But what about that twisty little word, myth?