A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  NOMADIC VOICES

  Early on I spent a week at a travelers’ camp up on the border between Wales and England. There on the highest field of a well-meaning-farmer’s land were a grizzled assortment of Irish travelers, vagabond English, and a small group of traditional Albanian gypsies—a rare mix. The Gypsies, settled for a season or two, were planting the earth, repairing caravans, and traditional wagons, and, apart from berating me to get a haircut, were generally friendly. In the evening they would sit on buckets around an open fire, smoke, and play music, often switching languages as they did it. The stories they told were highly speculative and veered wildly between epic sagas and rough little street tales, packed with intelligence.

  What I gained from this experience, in addition to the haircut, was a certain elegance in living outside and a sense of connection to ancestry. It felt precious even then; ten years on I doubt I could even find such a group in England again. As the Gypsies’ music pirouetted defiantly up toward low clouds and old gods, their sons and daughters were focusing their attention on getting an apartment in town or getting a job that paid more than minimum wage. It’s not my business to judge that, because I haven’t lived their life. So I continued wandering and looked for myth tellers, what the Gaelic peoples call the Seanchai—tellers of the deep words. I was lucky enough to meet a few of these people, whether they knew what they were or not.

  Their stories were not simple allegories, they were like small bushes of flame. I might hear them up at base camp at Caer Idris, or on a smoke trail from a visiting Mayan, rarely from an “professional storyteller.” I was dazzled, edified and despairing at ever being able to catch some of that nourishing eloquence in my own small beak. I would stagger back to the black tent and watch the word magic bounce around the breathing canvas. Everything that came out of my mouth seemed stumpy, blunt, and factual. It was embarrassing. No wonder my wife had left!

  I continued my own journey of listening to the living world. This time it involved being sealed into a small dark structure, like a miniscule sweat lodge, up in the forests of Wales, miles from anyone but my base camper, without food or water. Unable to see my hand in front of my face, or sit up, I was left in the pitch black, clutching three crow feathers and already thirsty. This time the journey was profoundly internal. Deprived of visual light, within a day or so images began to appear across the blackness, like waking dreams. The imagined straight line of time dissolved into something much more profound. The lodge filled with sparks of light and whiskery old voices, the structure itself shook violently. Whole chunks of my future, at that point seemingly unlived, passed by me that night. During the twilight of the second night (not that I could tell), immense storms rolled in from the Irish ocean and set about my tiny structure, assailing it for hours at a time.

  When my vigil was done and David, my base camper and long suffering mentor, appeared, I found that trees had come down, the long grasses had flattened, and my tent was awash with water. We made the long and treacherous descent through the forests to David’s car. When we arrived, there was a note from a ranger, worried that the owner had gone out to commit suicide—a popular pastime in that part of Wales. Well, we were both alive in the literal sense, but truly, some part of me had gone up there to die. I remember talking to a Choctaw medicine man about a Lakota friend we had in common, when he said, “Do you know why he gets so much love? When he walks into the pow wow everyone knows he has died, over and over again.”

  As the months moved into years it became clear that the vision-language of tribal people was not just an anthropocentric invention, but arose from a continual openness to the still-latent energies hidden in brook, desert, and moor. I would return from my fasts to the black tent, the old cat, the lightning tree, the witches moon, and wonder.

  THE LAND IS A HUGE, DREAMING ANIMAL

  Places long to speak: great polyphonic blasts of forest oratory or the thin keening of the hemlock. I tried to bathe my head in the golden chatter of holy places, and sometimes caught a word or two, sometimes silence, sometimes a whole stanza of some great epic, buried in the granite of a Dartmoor Tor. The earth’s rough harmonies are more than the metaphors of this writer, but the primordial, root relationship between us and the living world. I have begun to suspect that underneath the ancient caves, buried arrow heads, and mineral deposits, the continents of this world are huge, dreaming animals.

  Any gatherings on Ecology may benefit from myth tellers from each country attending and sharing culturally specific stories, so the animals underneath the countries have a chance for the image-language to speak for them. I think these animals have quite different characters and desires.

  We could say that earth is relaying a lot of information right now, and not all of it is accessible with statistics and logic. I believe it is a call to the prophetic within us—a big word. The pastoral-creative work designed to appeal and comfort mass civilisation completely lacks the receptivity for the task.

  However, without a process similar to the one I am describing, it would be very difficult to engender the psychic readiness required. To be clear: to function in their deepest vocation, the storytellers/ teachers/ poets should stand in the ground of prophetic image, a scarecrow of words, pushed by invisible winds. There’s a great deal of grandeur in that statement, and all sorts of problems, but I’m sticking with it.

  The intensity of my life at this point derived from grief and some loneliness; most of the time I felt ridiculous and desperate. Some dramatic part of my psyche had unfurled itself out there during that first fast, and for the next five years I did little but follow wherever it wanted to go. So more vigils in the wilderness ensued. I became adept at certain forms of divination, got inflated, the tent burned down, I was humbled, I carried on. The sheer toughness of outdoor living, the concentration of old texts, and the application of art became an ongoing apprenticeship to a culture of wildness—like a loose-footed young Bear prone to potholes, I staggered about seeking a kind of bardic shape for the dramatic eruptions I was consumed by. I ate this wildness in small, powerful chunks contained in the dawn poems of the troubadours, the act of splitting wood, rook calls, the beauty of walking small English lanes at dusk, heavy snowfalls, weeks of rain, the stupefying glory of spring, and dozens of nights under stars, by trees, and next to streams.

  STAYING PUT

  Indigenous teachers—Navajo medicine men, Ecuadorian healers, African Bushmen—all said the same thing: “Dig into where you come from, get out on the land, seek the relationship we seek, but don’t mimic our culture.” So now, effectively Britain-bound by their advice, I tried to do just that. It was during this searching that myth really awoke for me. The old stories spoke of questing for insight, riding a horse of glowing words, crafting a life of color. Fresh from the fast, I was absolutely ready to hear this. Myth described in metaphor the experience I inhabited. Suddenly the dusty tales were shot through with electricity. Underneath the cultural costume, these people were experiencing hardship, betrayal, and triumph just like we do every day.

  The old stories tell us that our whole life is an initiation experience. Watching my daughter come wailing into life late one night in Torbay Hospital brought this home to me. The epic journey she had already endured, as a kind of sea creature of the amniotic realm, now passed through the initiatory tunnel of her mother and out into air, light, and sound, the next stage of the adventure. The music that moves her as she grows, the stories that speak to her, the friendships that emerge are all a rich hoard of grain to sustain the impassioned little vagabond that she is.

  Over the years it became clear to me that many of the ingredients of initiation could still be had; there were still wild, lonely, places and ancient stories. The problem was, what was there to return to? Where was the community?

  ELDERS, BOUNDARIES, AND COMMUNITY

  The return from the threshold is no less heroic than the act of severance. The hero/ine must return to the same mother world, but no longer attached to it in the same way. Th
e problem becomes the maintaining of the visionary standpoint in the face of immediate pain or joy.1

  In the old stories, there is an emphasis on the return; that the life you lead ultimately is of use to others. Black Elk is emphatic on this point, “A man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.”2 With the rupture of initiation comes the opening of compassion, awareness—or, to use that exhausted phrase, of inter-connectedness.

  Back in chapter two, Ivan was unable to return to the community until experiencing betrayal and being shattered, bone-by-bone, in Baba’s underworld. This signifies the need for a reborn perception, a rupture that creates a new life shape for us. The body has had the experience, but it can take awhile for the mind to catch up.

  In the old stories the initiate’s return is often followed by great celebrations (a huge wedding in Ivan’s case), feasting, and ceremony. It appears that everyone is appreciative and aware of the ordeal undergone; indeed, status in the village is only ensured after such an experience has occurred. Something is shifted in these moments, transformed, blessed; the rat carcass you’ve been carrying becomes a luminescent wand. The eyes support grand gestures, and wild dances of the community throw a final cloak over the shivering initiate, their rightful garment, the one they suffered for. Although what they encountered lies out there on the empty plains and far from the hearth, the community understands its impact.

  The rawness of the initiates’s shape is collectively honed, pruned, and blessed into village life. This honeyed trail is vital to the soul’s perception of the process; it sweetens the charred edges of our descents and opens its flavor out into the wider heart of the village. It stops the trauma from becoming brittle, its motion transmuting fire into drinking water for everyone else.

  Mircea Eliade tells us that when a Fiji king experienced his enthronement ceremony, he knew it to be “creation of the world,” or “fashioning the land.”3 In these phrases we get a sense of the relationships between sovereign ritual, the ripening of crops, and the turn of the seasons; they are connected. I would suggest this is replacing a universe with a cosmos. The etymology of “Universe” is to do with “rotating, or rolled,” which is interesting in its way but linguistically flat. But “cosmos” is to do with the heavens, abundance, the display of stars, and some implicit mystery that is churning out this experience of life every second and that you are bound tight within.

  Coming home felt wretched, it wasn’t home anymore. I needed someone to see what I’d done, what I’d been through. Without that it felt hard to blossom, wilderness felt a long way away.

  Matthew, rite of passage participant4

  The initiate’s return to modernity is often a return to bafflement or disinterest in the experience from others. We can see this literally in individuals returning from a wilderness rite of passage or in our society’s general reluctance to bring a metaphorical perspective to hard times and crisis. If you don’t return to a blessing but hostility, how do you keep the experience alive? The older perception of the three-fold process is described here by Joseph Campbell:

  The two worlds are actually one. The realm of the gods (e.g. underworld) is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the whole exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. That values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. The loss of personal individuation can be the whole burden of the transcendental experience for unqualified souls. But the hero-soul goes boldly in—and discovers the hags converted into goddesses and the dragons into the watchdogs of the gods . . . there must always remain, however, a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world.5

  Anticipating this harsh response, some understandably seek to remain in nature wholly, to reject society and the challenge of re-engaging with it. The truth is that the journey continues on the return; there are more false giants, any number of sleeping draughts, alleys full of starving dogs. But to remain forever on the margins is a refusal of the call to vocation, refusal to develop the armor and facility to combat the lethargy we detect. The old adage that we seek initiation for the good of the community is a hard pill if we’ve felt rejected by the community all our lives.

  I felt vast and wild down in my meadow. I was wind, sunburn, passion, regret, the night sky, and the sunrise on my final morning. How do I live that? How do I articulate it to people?

  Suzanne, rite of passage participant6

  Vision implies clarity, clear views, inspiration. But visions can be terrifying, misguided, wrong. Hitler had vision and we can see where that led. Vision, from an indigenous view, results from seeking guidance from the expanded corners of the universe, to see with the free ranging width of the condor, or the focused attention of a digging badger. It is the clarity of Gwion Bach, the inebriated truths of Dionysus, the celestial panoramas of Black Elk. It is having the facility, the focused preparation to draw on all your sensing-nature and break from imagined limits. Big stuff, yes. Don’t make the mistake of expecting the information you receive back to be in comprehensive, perfectly formed English.You are bathed in information, mirrors, and clues from the moment you step onto the land; the challenge is how to read and develop what Gary Snyder calls “tawny grammar.”

  I have frequently encountered muddy-faced, tearful fasters stamping into base camp after two to three days alone declaring, “Nothing has happened!” With faces like storm clouds, they sip frantically from their water bottle, bemoaning their inability to have any kind of experience. “Every time I try and be still, a woodpecker comes and bangs away at a tree in front of me … it’s odd, I keep dreaming of a man slowly pulling layers of his skin off to reveal bark and moss … last night I heard music in my grove…a young deer keeps coming at dawn and standing by my sleeping bag. So, as you can see, nothing’s happening.”

  Nothing’s happening? Separated from the group, strange things can appear normal. The shift in consciousness takes days, so some are barely aware it’s happening. What wilderness mirrors back at you can be gentle, rough, or downright terrifying, but it informs the body before the intellect has a chance to frame it. The medicine is in the experiential; the mind is a secondary organ. The endless stretch of a day without watches, the emptying and filling of the estuary, the dead fox found under the bracken are all aspects of you mirrored back by the oracle of nature. They are both separate from you and absolutely revelatory of your life. Each initiate receives a different set of experiences, trails, signals, epiphanies that are bespoke to them. The vision is flowing, not static. Up on the mountain, Caer Idris becomes the teacher, dealing with hunger becomes the teacher, small animals ferreting around in the dark become the teacher.

  Three things that make a Bard:Playing of the Harp

  Knowledge of ancient Lore

  Poetic Power

  Irish Triad

  Some of the earliest British examples we have of people entering the wild to seek vision are contained in the Druidic system. As we know of the Druids, the initiation of nature would be a large part of their training, lasting decades. From it a kind of divining could be developed; a cluster of hazels, the ripples on a lake, a freshly slain deer, could become revealers of mystery. In the story of Merlin, we find that he experienced an illumination in the woods, and was driven there by both grief and fasting. “So for three long days he wept, refusing food, so great was the grief that consumed him. Then, when the air was full with these repeated loud complainings, a strange madness came upon him. He crept away and fled to the woods, unwilling that anyone should see his going.”7

  Merlin’s experience of the wild was raw, even terrifying, but necessary in the wider scheme of his life. In his grief, he uncovers to even greater depth the calling he was born for. Geoffrey of Monmouth spoke of Merlin’s wild
experience: “Into the forest he went, glad to lie hidden under the ash trees . . . he made use of the roots of plants and of grasses, of fruits from trees and of the black berries in the thicket. He became a man of the woods, as if dedicated to the woods.”8

  The Druidic tradition holds the position of the Ovate, which had connotations of prophecy, madness, and being on the edge of things. That inflamed perception can also be a kind of vision; it is a deliberate invocation of the most mysterious elements of initiation. What emerges from the Ovate is not thinned out by the language of the masses, it is a torrent, containing angular, magical trains of energy. Like a collapsing iceberg or a fox in the hen house, it is volume, action, tearing, biting, smashing; how does such an experience fall into the neat little confines of everyday language?

  When approaching the Horse of Vision, we could say it has four great Hooves:1. The Strong Bite of Antlered Language The language of wilderness is an experiential teaching from a non-human realm, and therefore its impact is not primarily to the rational, easily digested intellect.

  2. Opening to the Fierce Empty To receive its message, an emptying out is required. Full up as we are with domestic concerns, job, and relationships, fasting assists us to slow down, open up, to be aware of our own emotional currents. We need to lose the distractions.

  3. A Scattering of Darkness To go without food, company, books, watch, or phone for four days can be hard, even terrifying.

  4. Holding Gentle Cunning Don’t be naïve. You are returning to a world that hasn’t been where you’ve just been. Don’t risk potential loss by trying to share the experience too early. Don’t spill the soul-gold over coffee, even with a friend.

  COMMUNITY AND RECLAIMING TIME