Welcome friends. It’s been restorative to begin to get to know some of you. Sunday Stories is something I’m dreaming up for the weeks between essays. It could be an old fairy story, comments on books, initiation, wilderness poetics, a deepening into a Christian mythology that we have almost forgotten. The last is an enormous and exhilarating body of work I’m starting on. When you go out into the forest, sometimes the mandate you receive is the last thing you expect.
Here and there I’ll tell stories of Mochae the Beautiful who spent 150 years listening to the song of a blackbird, or Muirgheis (Birth of the Sea) who lived in a sunny house under the sea – both woman and salmon – who horned deer carried across the waves to her beloved God. Or the Irish bees that take the body of the Galilee druid deep into their hive, a-bliss in honey and the hymn of their devotional buzzing. These are stories filled with fur and light. Absolutely alive and out where the buses don’t park. Stories both profoundly mystical and available to everyone. They rehydrate the imagination and our relationship to the earth. I can’t wait to share them. They are good for us, it’s that simple.
This end usually involves a little peaty single malt and possibly a cigar on the porch. It may be nettle tea or some really good coffee your side of the arrangement. All welcome. It’ll be an intimate and hopefully restorative thing. Why Sunday? Because I think something a little reflective is a good fit on such a day. That gets through the static. Hope to see you there.
Good cheer friends,
Martin
PS. The Horned Women is a strange and powerful story. I tell it here to make no kind of allegorical point, just to catch the perfume of something very old.
