Under Jacob's Fur
Risking Abundance
News: The Hexworthy Revels – a brand new series of drawings available from Field System Gallery, Ashburton. Scroll down the gallery page and there they are: The Hexworth Revels, Field System
And I’m delighted to be back with friends at the Temenos Academy on May 29th: The Merrie: Adventures in Christian Mythopoetics
Please do come if you can.
An imaginative review of Liturgies by Michael Warren Davis here:
Owl in the Ruins: The Mossy Face of Christ
I’ve been thinking about two different types of fur this week: goat and fox.
As the bombs drop I’ve been brought back to the story of Jacob stealing brother Esau’s blessing by covering himself in fur and pretending to actually be his sibling. I think we’ve all been under the skins once or twice. As I glance around I see whole societies crushed up against me in the dark. Are we so far from the Garden we feel we have to steal a blessing rather than trust in its arrival? Of course, the twist in the Bronze Age tale is that God wants Jacob to inherit, he told his mother so. His ways are not our ways.
When I feel unblessed I am adrift in the notion of personal poverty. When I feel unblessed my heart closes and I rub shoulders with Old Scratch. When I feel unblessed I will gobble the world’s affirmations in the perceived absence of God’s blessing. When I feel unblessed I have plenty of enemies. When I feel unblessed I may start to steal. If I but rubbed my eyes and awoke from my sleep I would see God’s kindly hand everywhere.
So that’s been with me the last few days. I woke up before dawn this morning and wrote the following, I appreciate it may not seem that clear:
Scarcity
I am under the stink of goat fur and so frightened I can barely speak. Must make my voice gruffer like my brother’s. I’ve matted dust into my curls. Dad’s hands are on me. I smell like the fields but do I sound like them? My brother has desert wind in his words, me just the gossip of the tents. I think Dad may know, even as gives the blessing. It makes my head spin but I am greedy for the words meant for Esau. They may not be mine, but I’m going to take them.
My shadowed father asks God to gift me the very dew of heaven, the fat of the land, a great heft of grain wine. Through words he sets forth the great wheel of blessing alive into his world and mine.
But it’s not my face he’s imagining, my milky eyed father, it’s sun tousled Esau.
These can’t be repeated, these things he’s saying. He can’t have another stab at it when my deception is revealed. He is cough-rattled and enfeebled, but that’s no mind to God’s ears. Maker catches the cheep of a baby raven, let alone the soul-blessing of a once mighty man.
And do I feel it? The dew of heaven, fat of the land? Not right now I don’t.
I am everything that is furtive, carrion, circumspect.
My mother says God told her he wants it this way but it feels like a whole lot of wrong to do some kind of good I am blinded to. But still I will smear the blessing-meant-for-my-brother all over my greedy little face.
The shame of my actions will follow me out into the bush when I flee Esau. In some awful way I am still covered in goat fur. My un-ripeness blocks out the stars and bounding hares and watering holes. I am in the dark. Later Jonah will be wrapped in seaweed, me in goat fur, both on the back foot, both desperate for a word from our God.
What pattern have I now gouged into human behaviour? What subterfuge now lies secreted in the workings of my people? Cain was explicit, I am tacit.
I need to go back.
We need to go back.
Give me a sign lord, in this reek of my animal darkness. Tell me of the original blessing. Of a blessing freely given, that wasn’t stolen. I squint out into the darkness of the fur covering my head.
Who’s here with me under my goat-skin? Which of you blessing-stealers will chant along in my song to God? Us blaggers, sly ones, tricksy folk. Apostles of the slantways.
God, speak to us in our derangement too.
Us assembled nations.
Tell us of the Good World.
I try and sleep in my skins. Pillow is nothing but a sandy rock, hard, cracked earth under my stiff hips.
Give us big dream, big dream, big dream.
Show us the stairwayed reality between dusty earth and marvellous heaven. Show us the Chryst-ladder. Up and down go the angels. Please don’t be too absorbed for my feeble prayer. Even a wave in this direction would help.
In all the butchery can we remember everywhere as a Bethal – God’s House?
Can we wake and drizzle oil over the rough stone we use as a pillow? Right where we are?
Because to make a blessing is to start to crawl out from under the fur.
Later our family will leave us alone and travel to the other side of the river.
In the night a man will come and wrestle with us. If we survive we will be both lamed and blessed. God wants us un-fit for certain kinds of display it seems. A limp has its truth.
*
Abundance
Another story of fur.
Three years ago I sat in the moonlight outside John Moriarty’s cow stall in Kerry with a dead vixen on my lap. Even dead, she wasn’t in a good way. She needed some help. For hours I gently unpicked the detritus she’d got bound up in until finally, as dawn broke I dug a hole with my own paws and was able to lay her gently in the October soil. Only a few hours before I’d told the story of the Fox Woman (a story I’ve only ever heard me or John tell) in Moyvane, and now the real labour underneath that story presented itself to me.
The vixen was in a Gordion knot of discomfort and had been dead some time. To handle a corpse for that long (and in so focused a manner) felt almost spiritually prohibitive. It could give you the shudders. There’s the odour for a start. But she’d walked right out of the story and into my lap. It was the least I could do.
I find myself back there a lot, circling that encounter. So many of us are working with fox fur. Not to steal a Jacobian blessing, but to try and give one. You’ll feel the seismic difference between stories.
I think our work is to wake up, cross the cobbled yard, cradle that hunched little body. Inch by inch, hour by hour, releasing its stiffened limbs from its freezing metal cords and give it back to the wild darkness. It’s testy, unwitnessed work for the most part. But in some way it gets me out from under Jacob’s furs.
I was trying to pick a truth free that night.
My daily work feels similarly overwhelming, but I don’t know what else we are meant to be doing with our time. Pick, pick, pick. Stay calm, and attend to the work. Be light with it if you can. You can risk abundance.
*
Joyful Labours
This week I am consciously choosing joyful labours not endless attention to the news. I appreciate I am lucky to be able to choose that. I’ve made a new batch of drawings – The Hexworthy Revels. Hexworthy is a little Dartmoor hamlet I know well. Has St Raphael’s Chapel up there, where John Wesley once preached, then rode away on his horse. The drawings are of the coming of spring, and lots of archaic Dartmoor figures are waking up from their wintering. I suspect this will be an ongoing series under that title.
Hexworthy Reveller
I’ve also written the foreword to Malcolm Guite’s fabulous The Coming of Arthur, attended The Oxford Literary Festival to talk about Liturgies, led a weekend on Irish and Siberian folktales and happily accepted a visiting fellowship at C.S. Lewis’s old college Magdalene in Cambridge for early next year. That’s the good stuff.
Meeting some Beasts & Vines folk in Oxford! This contact, even if brief, means an awful lot to me.
In case that all sounds like a big old humble-brag I’ve also spent hours on hold to the Tax Office, gained weight from eating badly on the book tours and had all sorts of minor setbacks and scuffs as I go. As we know, it’s quite possible to be living several realities at the same time.
But for the main, ‘to happily labour’ is the best description I can give. And why not? It feels radical under current circumstances. I could write about what’s happening politically but for now at least I’m focusing on small, beautiful, life-giving things. I give my time when needed to those that need it, but we gotta keep nourishing our soul too. I’d be drawing or telling stories whether there was a gallery or crowd or not. Did that for years.
The splendid poet Michael Symmons Roberts was there: ‘I am a moth caught in a fist, I am the salt left in the pan.’ Look out for his book Dog Star.
There is an exclusive, just for Beasties (you) recording of my conversation from the high technology of my phone:
In this Lent, in this time, God goes in and out of focus for this sinner.
Sometimes Maker is a black bear charging and we run screaming the other way, not seeing the snake that was poised to clamp our ankle. Sometimes he floods the valley for the benefit of shoots many years from now.
God can be the slimmest cuticle of moon over the pine trees.
Don’t go out God - like the candle - please don’t go out.
It’s ok to say things like that.
Listen to the audio of this post:
I found you in the winter brush of a Virginia field tending my sheep.
The strange thing is, it felt like I've known you my whole life.
What a wild internal journey this has been, to which you are not solely responsible, but are a very unexpected and integral guide (inviter/ host?).
Being a first generation, steep learning curve, regenerative farmer, I'm well acquainted to the picking, picking, picking, staying calm, attending to the work, routine of the faithful seemingly mundane. Finding the abundance there.
You have a gift to entice the attentive onto sailed ships launching out onto the ocean to the Unknown, with the unexpected wind and catalyst of the mundane.
I was a little coy to write a comment, but as I was contentedly sleeping my 1 year old son thought it a good idea to be awake for your 4 am (our time) post and introduce myself. So I listened.
What better time than with the cold moonlight outside?
I often struggled with the mundane, farming, but I now see its my biggest blessing, daily connection point, the prod to get me out there, no matter the weather, the resistance I need, the dirt on my hands, I get too antsy in a comfy chair, I need that reality flowing over my face, although I wouldnt mind more time for writing.
But one thing I noticed is, out there magnifies what ever is going on inside, or makes clearer, it truly is like a mirror.
Jacob could feel it, see it, out in the bush didn't get him away from it, the skin stayed with him, the stars, rabbits, and watering holes shouting back.
The earth does indeed speak in myth. Thank you Martin for helping me have the eyes and ears to see and hear that.
I've known since I was a child, sitting under a tree touching moss for hours, Jesus was nearer, but you helped me have clarity with that now as an adult.
Digging deeper where I am in this dirty glorious grace filled mess.
I look forward to hopefully meeting you someday, I have to say, sometimes out on the farm and in the mountains, I have fully expected to see you walking around a creek bend with a walking stick and flask in hand. Sometimes I really do think I see you, but it usually ends up being a gnarly old tree in my periphery. But the Appalachian Mountains do connect us in a way, so who knows.
Not writing about political matters feels like a wise call when the ‘news’ is shot through with every conceivable form of lie and omission, and individual and collective scapegoats grow ever fatter. I have just listened to Malcolm Guite on the Church Times podcast talking about how he handled the events in Galahad and the Grail where good flows from proscribed acts, in this case Galahad. And it seems like these bible stories keep presenting us with the same issue.
How many perspectives might there be on any one event? What information do I not have? Delete, delete, delete! This is what Richard Rudd has to say about our evolution:
“Falcons are hooded because their eyes are a great marvel of creation. They can see a tiny ‘O’ on a packet of Marlborough cigarettes from a mile up in the sky while moving at speeds of up to 200mph. So with the hood on, the falcon is docile, almost in a trance; all it’s primary awareness systems are on standby. But the moment the hood is removed, the system that comes on line . . . those eyes are connected directly into the bird’s central nervous system. So what the eye sees is instantly translated into action without any additional cognition: when the falcon is released into the air to hunt it becomes this all-seeing eye connected to a 200mph killing machine. It’s no wonder the falcon became the royal bird because it is an awesome creature. There’s no time delay between seeing and acting. I give you this image because our future awareness is like that, but instead of being predatory, it’s revelatory.”
Please, please carry on labouring happily Martin - I am looking forward to welcoming a Hexworthy reveller to Winchester. “Inch by inch, hour by hour, releasing its stiffened limbs from its freezing metal cords” - such a powerful image: there is a beautiful integrity in the service you did that vixen by Moriarty’s cow byre. Good cheer to you.