We Are Ceremony People

Inis Oirr, (Part Four-Final)

It’s not an indulgence to go walkabout. It loosens up habit, unblocks our ears, lets all sorts of concealments float to the surface. It exposes. I ‘hear’ here in a way that I don’t surrounded by clocks and screens and chat, the edges of the tent have more freedom to wrestle with the wind. I would be thirty years into adherence to this practice. The vigils, the years in the tent, all re-openings of the fontanel. Picking at the dark bread these experiences offer. They do tend to change the life you return to, working to a differing frequency as they do, and most of us squat in the tension of the prophetic and the pastoral: how do we negotiate the forest epiphany and how that may or may not eventually become a village wisdom. I’ve often called this entering the Bone-House. Almost by necessity, ways of talking about that can seem distinctly circuitous: sometimes called twisted language in storytelling form. You are both disclosing and protecting something simultaneously: something you may have never seen before.

Campbell used to say, the role of the community is to torture the mystic to death. Depends on the community I would say, though he has a point. Oh for the wider clan tapestry to sew your emerging vision into.