A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  Of course, such a position creates anxiety, and so the Red King employs his three sons, one by one, to stand watch. The older son is the more connected to the King’s beliefs, position, and values. Still, even with all the determination the first two sons can muster, when the “warm, sleepy breeze” comes, they fall asleep. While they sleep, we are introduced to an image of true horror. The baby daughter grows fangs and axe-hands and floats to the chest, a Witch among us. Since we reel back in shock from this image, we are tempted immediately to frame her as villain, rather than look at the deeper implications of this change. If the King was willing to loosen his grip on the food, to offer some largesse, would the baby metamorphose into this form? What is the baby?

  When a king, country, or president swells up with a righteous, devouring presence, procuring oil perhaps, we could call that “in the red.” Some equally turbulent energy cannot help but be born elsewhere in the world, honed into a radical, terrible form by the seriousness of the original abuse. Both the King and the Witch in our story point towards a deadening of the imagination, the battlefield rather than the debate hall. The Sons embody a series of steps from the considered strategies and pressures of King, or family, to the subtle intuitions of a free thinker.

  FAR OFF CHAMBERS

  Anger as soon as fed is dead;

  ‘Tis starving makes it fat.

  Emily Dickinson3

  We could look at the baby as some marginal, undernourished part of us, a part rarely sifted to consciousness or given an audience with the King. Its ways remain unblessed, unfed, and unheard by the great, momentum-fixated ego center. If some accord is not met, some dialogue abandoned, then it remains in an undeveloped state, where it can turn black and start to grow fangs.

  One way the chest gets robbed is by allowing our own greed or avarice to cause a collapse in our outer world. A lover leaves, fraud is detected in our business dealings, and our lies are uncovered. Our hoarding makes us frail rather than powerful; we deny growth until some unknown energy (or baby daughter) becomes a seed of undoing and the whole kingdom starts to wobble.

  On a larger scale, we glimpse hoarding Kings and gnashing babies constantly: Terrorism acts out the whirling baby and the world of multinationals squats over the chest, flailing machine-gun fire into the shadows. As long as we stay, like the first two brothers, in the thrall of the Devouring King, we remain blind to the nature of the robber.

  The third brother is unencumbered with the knotted relationships between the elder two brothers and the King. More psychic space exists around him, and a great deal less expectation. The trance state of the breeze doesn’t fall on him so readily, and he is awake to small movements. The four pins he sticks in the pillow could be seen as the parts of us that are wary of the overeating of excessive praise, duty, or anything else that creates lethargy and drowsiness. Whatever enspelled the other two brothers has no currency here; the very marginality and lack of expectation put on the third brother keeps him awake. We could say that there is an undeveloped side to the older brothers that has been kept frozen by their relationship to the Red King. Red, as we know, has associations with fire, passions, and strong displays of aggression; but it can lack empathy and introversion. This very lack of maturity, this sense of cloudy inheritance is what dulls the two older brothers to subtlety and makes them open to spells.

  So far, so good for the younger brother. We celebrate his intelligence with the pins, his resistance to slumber. But his reaction to the Witch is less encouraging, although very understandable. He demands money from his father, sets off to marry, and, more than anything, outrun death. Whatever he witnessed in the dark of that chamber reeked of a starving decay. Maybe any other response would be inhuman, and would deny us our adventures.

  The planting of the money indicates that one day the youngest brother plans to come home, that there is some unstated strategy to his movements. The edge of the city is another “crossroads” place where rationality and dream compete for primacy. In many cultures which have experienced deprivation and hunger (and which hasn’t?), folk tales often carry images of hoarded food, or treasure waiting to be unearthed. Suffering and the unconscious collude with such potent images.

  Some impacted inheritance has been taken from the father’s world and buried in the unconscious ground of the psyche. Leaving our families as youths, we often don’t even realize we’ve buried anything. It can take half a century for us to unearth the chest of legacy and peer inside. On that day, we may peer in the shaving mirror and see our father’s cheekbones, or find we share our mother’s passion for small white dogs and opera. That legacy can be terrible or sweet, but it is rarely what we imagined it to be, way back then, as we hurriedly covered it in soil and ran for the midnight bus out of town.

  For eight years the youngest brother traveled, crossing huge distances, until he came to the Queen of All the Birds that Fly. When she asked him where he was going, he replied that he was off to marry, in a place that held neither old age nor death. Looking about, the Queen replied that there was no death or old age in this place.

  “How so?” replied Peter, for that was his name.

  “Well … when I have whittled away all the wood in the forest, then death and old age will come and take me.”

  “I see,” said Peter. Then he saddled up and kept on moving, knowing that if he stayed, death and old age would one morning find him.

  Eight more years passed, and he found himself at a palace made of copper. A maiden appeared who kissed him and told him she had waited a long time for him. He slept in the stable with his horse, and in the morning the maiden asked the same question of where he was going and he gave the same reply, “Where there is neither death nor old age.” She looked around and said, “When the mountains and forests are leveled, death will come.”

  “This is no place for me,” he said, and galloped off into the morning light.

  THE GREAT REFUSALS

  When a story mentions “eight years of traveling,” we understand that this is spread out over a long frame of time, bound up in the walk of a life. Even taking eight as a literal number means that Peter is now a young man as opposed to a boy. His journey has taken him to the Queen of All the Birds that Fly. So this is a feathery, airy, winged place—is he not a bird in flight? The unsightly grit of family darkness is hanging off his boots, but if he stays in the abstract realms of air a little longer, maybe he can stay safe—above it all. The tarot associates air with the mental realm, and with the sword of discernment, clarity, and remoteness.

  Maybe in our world he’s working as a computer consultant in a high, steel-lined tower for a big corporation, never visiting his parents back in Birmingham. We know the lure and relief in our twenties of meeting people who are nothing like our family, nothing like those we came from, who don’t activate the “old pain.”

  Even in this place of light and air, Peter doesn’t hear the answer he longs for. “When I have whittled all the wood of this forest, then death will come.” Even the Queen of All the Birds that Fly has a connection to the earth, to death. Hearing this, Peter heads out again; the “flying boy” flutters off towards the horizon.

  Another eight years go by, and he comes across a very different scene: a copper palace and a maiden who says she’s been waiting for him. Copper carries some interesting associations; it is an essential nutrient to all plants, animals, and humans. It is found mainly in the bloodstream. We also know that too much of it can be dangerous—studies show that schizophrenics often have heightened levels of copper in their system. It is a wonderful conductor of heat, and a building material. So we can say that copper amplifies warmth, travels through the vital organs of most living things on the planet, and can provide shelter, but that it can also reside at the edge of madness.

  The maiden offers warmth and relationship, intimacy, but Peter refuses. For the maiden as well as the Queen, to love is to sing out to death as well as life, to make an accord, something the youngest brother is just not ready to do. In
his thirties now, perhaps, he would rather stay in the bars after work than go home to the one woman and the immensity and confusion of the love she offers. In the Tarot, she would be a princess of hearts, close to the imagination, dreams, longing, and tenderness. She also has an eye toward the dark one and says, “When the mountains and forest are levelled, then death will come.” No deal then.

  To learn to refuse can be a good thing, depending on the motivating energy behind the refusal. Great musicians refuse a raise because it means more time at the office away from their instrument; some writers sense they are wedded to words and choose to honor that relationship rather than a physical one. But if fear is what causes our horse to gallop from the scene, then we find ourselves in quite a different situation.

  After a time, the horse spoke to his rider: “Master, whip me four times and yourself twice, for we are coming to the Plain of Regret. This place will pull you down, and me with you. So spur me, push me, and tarry not.”

  They came to a hut, and in that hut was a small boy, who looked no older than ten.

  He told Peter that he was the Wind, and that neither death nor old age lived here. “Never will I leave this place,” said Peter. A hundred years passed, and he grew no older. The boy one day ventured out to the Mountains of Gold and Silver and returned with much plunder. He recommended that Peter go there too, but that he avoid the Mountain of Regret and the Valley of Grief. But something in Peter made him strike out to those very mountains, and there he met Grief. Grief cast him down, and his tears made all the waterfalls of the world. A great longing arose in him to see his family again.

  He returned to the hut and told the Wind he had to return to his father.

  “Don’t go, they’re all dead! A million years have passed in their time. Where once was your father’s palace is now a field of melons. I should know, I went by it only an hour ago.”

  Peter’s horse warns him to avoid regret, to keep going forward, not to look back. Maybe the Red King had been feeding the horse rotten sugar to cause him to spout such advice. As we saw in the story of Birth of Ossian, the horse can be a powerful but survival-oriented part of us. At times a lifesaver, at others it lacks openness and subtlety. This event indicates that backward glances are starting to occur for Peter, doubts about his attempt to outrun death and old age.

  So he embarks on another period of wandering, and this time an elemental appears, the Wind itself in the person of a young boy. Finally Peter gets his desired answer, “There is no death or old age here.”

  And so there he stays, for a hundred years. He is almost beyond the human realm now, at the furthest outpost, mixing with deities. He has fluttered past the mind and the heart, avoided all attempts to be grounded into life, and now enjoys his reward.

  This longing for immortality is a very old one for humans. We think of Native American stories in which the Sorcerer’s heart lives under a rock; sorcerers have huge power but somewhere have lost the connection to their humanity. Carlos Castaneda’s work sometimes brushes up against this disconnection. Many gurus, theologians, and meditators live here. It is a place of faux-safety, sheltered from the crashing rocks and droughts of normal life. In the years I lived outside, it was easy to feel pristine and clean, but my lumbering shadow lived in community—that’s where I really had to get down and work.

  We can say that much of western culture has an immortality complex; nature disturbs us because we see things crumble and die—a car park is a far more affirming talisman of our want, its generic permanence reassuring us. The dynamic of the Red King and the Witch energies continually squares up for a fight between the starving and the bloated. The story indicates that the only way to move this dynamic, to break this internal pattern, is to step into the realm of deep feeling.

  The Wind, like the Horse, warns Peter of the Mountains of Regret and Valleys of Grief, and tells him to stay fixated on the mountains of gold and silver, but this time it doesn’t work. Of course, we know when a character in a story tells you not to do something that that’s a subtext for “Do it!” The Wind, and the Hut, offer initiatory elements or stabilizers for Peter’s journey. By suggesting that he seek Gold, they begin the process of getting him moving. He travels to the mountains, and suddenly all the turbulent sadness of life pours into him, everything he has been trying to outrun. Only when he wishes to return does the Wind reveal that a million years have passed since he left the Kingdom. When we finally realize how disconnected from our heart we have become, how long it seems since we were last there.

  The river

  —oblivious to the sadness that strangled me—was amusing himself repeating his old song

  Humberto Ak’abal4

  There will come a day when we deliberately and consciously enter the Valley of Grief, no matter what the Horse of Self-Preservation tell us. When we do, difficult feelings can emerge and refuse to leave. Our task is to make a home for them, allow them to rustle under our skin and become part of our walk in this world. The grief is personal to us, but also common to all. There is a price for ascending so high that we live with a God. The process of incarnating fully into life takes until the moment we leave it—entering the valley is when we allow the clay river bed to submerge everything below the waist.

  While every bird enjoyed his song,

  Without one thought of harm or wrong,

  I turned my head and saw the wind,

  Not far from where I stood,

  Dragging the corn by her golden hair,

  Into a dark and lonely wood.

  W. H. Davis5

  A challenge for us is to be active through grief, to find leadership through regret, to be an authentic King and Queen of many colors. I think this is a crucial challenge for the road ahead. Grief needs the container of initiation to provide this alchemy, this leadership. The great soul work done by the women’s and men’s movements would, I imagine, very much concur with this step. To get in touch with our grief is a profound move, but we need teachers and leaders who can organize themselves around it, rather than drown in it.

  Well, Peter left anyway, and on his return stopped at the copper palace. Doing so, he found the maiden whittling the last stick. As he knocked on her door, she dropped the stick and died. He buried her and kept going till he met the Queen of All the Birds. She was amazed at his youthful appearance. As he spoke to her, he noticed that the great forests had gone, only one little branch remaining, which she held. She broke the branch and died, right there in front of him. When he got to his father’s palace, all was as the Wind had said; there was no sign that the Red King had ever been there.

  TIME COMES GLIDING: THE RETURN

  On his return, Peter is given a chance to revisit his missed opportunities, at the very moment that they fall to the ground, or wither on the vine. We are reminded of a phrase in the old Russian story, “The Maiden Tzar,” which says, “There is a Goddess who doesn’t love you anymore.”6 I consider this one of the most important mythological ideas of recent years. Somehow I feel relieved when I hear these words—they pull me up sharp against my own sloth and abuse, and remind me that consequences exist. Some opportunities, if not seized, fall away forever: the boat sails away. It’s so tempting to mutter platitudes to excuse any number of indulgences and fear-bound avoidance, but why should we believe that it’s always fine, that God/Goddess loves us? How dare we say that? In our world, the Maiden has married another man, had kids and gone to live in Denver. When the Queen of All the Birds sacked you for your flighty temperament, it made you hard to trust. Sometimes doors close and do not open again. You can sit there as long as you want visualizing a different scenario, meditating for success, but it’s done, over. Cronos has arrived with a bag of tools, nails, and a heavy oak door.

  It’s a strange detail that on Peter’s return, the Copper Woman is whittling the stick, and the Queen of All the Birds is holding the last branch—both doing what the other was meant to do at the end of their time. Maybe they are two sides of the same face, two rivers of the fe
minine trying to turn the man’s canoe back to the bay of life.

  The only thing Peter recognized was his father’s well, and so he went toward it. When he did, his sister, the witch, emerged to devour him, shrieking that she had waited long for his return.

  But Peter had some magic left and made a gesture in the air, and the witch sister fell down dead. As Peter wandered the ruin, he met an old man with a beard down to his belt. The old man was greatly shocked at Peter’s tale, and in an effort to convince him, Peter took him to the edge of the city where he had buried the money.

  Where was once the stone cross, there was now only a sliver of rock sticking up a palm’s width from the ground. It took Peter two days of digging to get the chest out.

  When he finally opened it, what did he find? Death and Old Age groaning, having been cooped up all this time. Seeing Peter, they muttered to themselves, and one laid a hold of him from behind and one from the front.

  With this, they entered his body and he died, right there and then, like a falling tree. The old man buried him well, planted a cross, took the horse and the money, and stepped out into the brightening morning.

  The only energy still active is the Witch; she has outlived everything—including the King—and she waits by the Well of Remembrance for him. No tribal elders skip out to meet him, and he is met with no roasted meat or musicians, just this great, dark, un-owned force. Atanajuat, the Inuit film, well dramatizes how these family spirits get passed down.

  In our time, the well of remembrance may exist in a therapist’s room, or a confessional, or in a wilderness where we fast. The stories say it can take almost a lifetime to be ready to drink from it.