THE HOUSE OF BEASTS & VINES
AN INTRODUCTION
Hi there. From January 2022 onwards I begin The House of Beasts & Vines, my Substack newsletter. It’ll be part care package, part spiritual provocation. There’s going to be fresh essays and lots of new audio. Imagine we’re sitting in my study with good coffee and rain against the window. Time to stretch out and enter a treasury of stories and deep ideas. I’ll also keep you up to date with what I’m reading and why. Composed and recorded here at my desk or roaming the forest and moors. I imagine a fortnightly letter and audio.
If you want to enjoy earliest what’s cooking, please subscribe to The House of Beasts & Vines to get that seat by the fire.
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As some of you may know, a couple of years ago I spent 101 days visiting a Dartmoor forest, primarily to listen. After a final all-night vigil I was left, very unexpectedly, with nine words – Inhabit the Time and Genesis of your Original Home. Those words have proved both a puzzle and sustenance to me over the last two years. I’ve been dreaming, wondering and living myself into them. The House of Beasts & Vines is me writing myself into them.
Some of what I write I hope will provide shelter in a mad time, other elements may stir up and even provoke, it’s all to play for. There’s lots of good writing out there concerning the visible textures of our age, but it’s the invisible textures I’m compelled by. What’s going on in the belly of the castle?
I’m excited that I can roam a darkening copse or sit quietly in a Westcountry chapel and you have a recording in your inbox eight hours later. I’m stimulated that an idea I have at midnight could be with you by breakfast. There’s an immediacy that is fitting to the urgency of our times. My ground has long been myth, fairy tales, wilderness and poetics, but I will also be digging into fresh areas. My ‘original home’ was the vineyard of stories emanating from wild Yeshua and his immense mother, so their perfume will be directly entering my writing for the first time. I’m excited about this because I don’t know what will happen.
I hope you’ll consider coming with me for the adventure. In some spiritual traditions there’s something called the Third Watch of the Night. At fifty – if I’m lucky – I’m in it. That’s the time you speak directly into the darkness what’s on your heart, no pussyfooting.
I only recently discovered Martin Shaw's works, in Aug. 2020...an unexpected and serendipitous consequence of the Pandemic... I've been reading and feeding my Soul on his books since...as if I've finally, at long last, found the words I've searched for, delivered through another's pen... A startling and thoroughly exhilarating experience.
The Third Watch of the Night - there is a meridian of midwives developing... who can see that an aspect of the post they hold includes integrating 1700 years of ancestral heritage, and then both forks... the prophet ancestors, and the bardic ones, too. There is something to be said about being "francophone"... the very lack of severance that may have blushed us and caused us to turn away, is turning out to be a very deep gift. And the act of stepping into this post of unknowing is an act that mirrors the reconciling of all things. Denn da ist keine Stelle die dich nicht sieht, Du mußt dein Leben ändern.