The Good World
Inhabiting Genesis
US Tour Update – Extra event in Fairfax, and Stanford University Announce:
Stories have always been medicinal. Some are potions, some poisons. The best of them become guiding narratives that we somehow sense are good for our health. Poetry too, a guiding star in tough times. Ancient myths often tell us that wholeness begins to be realised not by perfect health but by deeper understandings of the soul. In our incompleteness begins our authenticity.
Join us for an evening with the author and mythographer Martin Shaw to explore stories, poetry and conversation that circle the relationship between language and wholeness.
Tickets are free and space is limited. The link for ticket registration will be live on Stanford Events website by January 23rd.
Second event added at Point Reyes Books due to public demand: Martin Shaw, Myths That Make Us
Also: I have a trilogy of drawings just gone on sale, entitled Ancient of Days. It’s three works inspired by the writing I’m doing on the beginning of Genesis (see below). Contact the gallery if you’d like to know more: Field System.
These are originals (beautifully framed), not prints.
Recently I enjoyed an in-depth, wide-ranging conversation with Russell Moore of Christianity Today, you can watch and listen here: Martin Shaw on the Liturgy of Myth
And, freshly released on YouTube, footage from on the road in Alabama. We will have news of brand new course on Jawbone soon - Into The Underworld: Tales of Christian Initiation. This will be our most ambitious course yet, with live and filmed elements. Can’t wait.
Okay, enough of all of that busy beeness.
Wintering Out
I’m still walking the Devon lanes daily. I need it. Often in the afternoon, but honestly it seems whenever I’m setting out it’s starting to get dark. It’s not cold enough at the moment, so there’s a warm dampness to everything. Not charming, I much prefer it crisp, but there we go. I’m increasingly valuing companionship later in the day: a meal, a movie, a prayer. The black dog circles, but slopes back into the fields when I’m in movement. Now I’ve looked that dog square in the eye plenty of times, even thrown them a bone or two, but there’s no great imperative to slow my pace at the moment.
Days stretching on without human contact have lost any hermitical charm in the midst of this particular winter. I like to hear the latch being lifted, the scuffing of boots on the mat, the convivial hello! from down the hall. My wintered companions in surrounding hamlets all seem slightly mad themselves, but at least we can be nutty together. We shouldn’t all be rocking back and forth at the end of our beds in our isolated little huts. Courage to you dear reader if mastering the 24 hours is a little tricky at the moment. The light will return. You’re not alone. Remember to reach out: to God, friends, animals, the world.
I was stressed and alone recently. Walking right into the rain as the lane curved back towards the town. Early afternoon, grey sky, everything in the entire world drip, drip, drip. Without thinking I actually called out loud into the wind:
Are you there God?
That very second a blackbird started to sing out of a hedge. There hadn’t been a peep of anything but raindrops for half an hour. The bird told me that spring was going to come. At least that’s what the five seconds of beauty-cheep sounded like. A second later I saw a sign dripping water:
Honey Available
I like that sign.
As this new year begins, I want to start over. I want to go back to the beginning.
The Decision
I’ve made a decision. A big one. One that’s going to impact my life. I’m surprised I didn’t make it sooner. I’ve sort of flirted with it, but this is different. I feel compelled at last to take on something far mightier than myself, the Bible. To move line by line over its pages and start to re-tell its stories. It’s to do with properly bedding into them. The way I’m wired, I can’t fully access a dialogue with a story until I’m in dynamic relationship with it, which as a storyteller means, of course, re-telling them. Until I take that on they rather glide over me. I can become passive. I’m not a theologian or priest, but I am a storyteller.
The new regime is this. From about 8.30am to 1pm every weekday I sit at a small school desk with a low lamp and several biblical translations. One or two commentaries, not too much. I don’t draw on what I think I already know about the stories, I don’t tell them how to behave, I don’t spin them to disguise their frightening or profoundly mysterious dimensions, I just try and bear witness to what I’m experiencing and write it down.