What first opened you to myth?

When I was about five years old my dad woke me up early one morning and took me for a walk. We had a flask of tea and I trotted along next to him down old Devon lanes. As the sun came up he recited by heart an old poem, ‘Sohrab and Rustum’. In my young mind, the power of the words helped the sun rise, they were almost incantational, like a piece of magic. Around the same time in my life my mother would read me stories at night and I would see the moon rise. Big yellow moon. Mum with long dark hair.

On a very direct level I made some instinctive connection between words and nature - that you can find a thunderstorm in a line of Yeat’s, or that if you look into the flames of a camp fire for long enough you will start to hear a creation story. So it was myth and poetic language actually spoken in the air that i responded to. It was a house of orality, mighty speech - my dad is a preacher, my mum a painter, and me and my two siblings grew up surrounded by appreciation of language, music, the arts in general. We were also pretty broke most of the time - no car, tv, or phone, and that gave us kids time to brood. Brooding’s useful. It was spacious, some soul crept in. There was sometimes conflict in the mix, as there is with all familes, but fairy tales became a hollow tree I could crawl into and rest, a place for dreaming.

Our garden backed onto a forest which was an enormous source of wonder. The trees would bend over the wall onto our stretch of grass and drop these big dark red berries onto the ground. We knew we couldn’t eat them but I wondered even then if each one was a story.

I loved Robin Hood and Red Indians. I was also constantly throwing my coat over puddles to be chivalrous to local girls (I was only six). This got me nowhere, but i guess it’s the spirit that counts. I liked outlaws really. Bandit Queens.

As regards actually telling stories i have no kind of theatre in my background. I enjoyed being around lively people, scenting the woodsmoke, ‘in our jubilation’ as the Irish put it, as someone bursts forth with some mad anecdote or, later, some grief story. I was always interested in the notion of a kind of authenticity in the telling - not too removed from turns of character that the teller actually holds.

Having said that I have an interest in the Dionysian relationship to theatre and its clear relationship to ritual. I’d like to see more. I didn’t read Shakespeare at the time, but I did appreciate ornate language. Not as artifice but as kind of raising of atmosphere, of sharpening a mood. There wasn’t much of that about in mid-eighties education. My folks front room also became a place for speculative banter. They seem untroubled if I wandered in late and smokey from the Inn. We would sit round till the small hrs trading tales: big, small, holy, profane. It was a pretty tribal scene really, even if we were gathered around an electric fire rather than long house blaze. It was quite normal for a tear to come when telling a fragment of some delicious old poem. Deep feeling was a regular event down at the house. I owe them a lot for that alone.

Years later I have developed that notion into what we call ‘story carrying’ at the school, rather than just telling. It’s an important distinction. It’s about an emergence of personal character rather than just techniques to hold an audiences attention. In my twenties I ended up in the company of several medicine people (religious visionaries in their communities) - Lakota and Choctaw - and

Sometimes their language was informal, loose, and then would rise like a bird on the wing into some poetic gathering of power. It never seemed ‘stagey’ or self conscious. The stories they told they inhabited. It’s very popular in england to suggest that a storyteller needs to stand ‘behind’ the story i.e. don’t put too much of their own personality into it. It’s a kind of caution against showboating. But these characters and the stories they told and the lives they lived were utterly intermingled. I loved that. I don’t need a zen monk telling me a bloody story, i want a pirate.

 

Why did you live outdoors for four years?

Well, that’s back to Yeat’s again, “I went to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head”. In my early twenties I had fasted for a period alone in Snowdonia and had experienced a major, for want of better words, spiritual or psychic break through. I encountered some very ancient, extremely potent forces up in the oak groves, and when I came back i was not the same person. I got majorly rewired.

So the time in the tent was a focussing utterly in that direction. As we say at the school, I “left the village and found the forest”. I had been married, had a career etc, but i needed to get deeply grounded on what had opened up for me. It was not always an easy process. It was often a kind of wild land dreaming, although the things i encountered were very real and entirely independent of my imagination.

I am unclear how much of that experience should be communicated, or how useful it would be for anyone else to hear about. Mystical experience doesn’t benefit anyone as voyeurism. Best seek your own. Still, I enjoyed living in a circle, the hard weather, the solitude, the rapture of spring, the comfort of my cat. At a certain point I endured a fire which burnt away much of my most treasured possessions, that was very humbling. I remember planting a hundred rose bushes, having cut and soil covered hands a great deal of the time, sipping lagavulin whisky whilst the fire got going. A strange jumble of memory.

I was no poster boy for ecological living believe me. It’s important to state that. I would walk five miles through dark fields to get to a decent pub, no one alive enjoys a plate of fried chicken more than I do. I’m not a practical man either, as my friends will gleefully tell you. But I had to get close to what some call the ‘bush soul’, to get quiet. In a way I was engaging in a kind of apprenticeship to wild nature - through landscape and story. The way rooks gather over a winter field influenced my thinking just as much as any prose. Myth was a way of communicating something of those trials and epiphanies in a universal language - it’s the natural expression of deep experience. Whether you literally live out in the wilds or not, all of us share much of the ground found in these gnarly tales.

I became over time a wilderness rites-of-passage guide, training with a wonderful man called David Wendl-Berry. I realised that the hardest part of an experience like a wilderness fast these days is not the rigours of the time in the wild but the return to a society with amnesia or active hostility that such an experience should exist. Much of the Lightning Tree book works out of that idea. The book claims that we are actually addicted to severance in modern society, and hugely defended against an experience of our own beauty. That in turn leads to a corrosive sense of disappointment as we age. By severing I mean the belief in ‘the next big thing’ - also severance as a way of avoiding grief or difficulty - the very thing that myths are full of. When a society is a spiritually flat as ours, when desire has degenerated to want, then recognition of beauty, especially our own, gets very hard.

Still, the book is a fight back in the Finn Mac Coll/ Boudicca tradition - it has seven stories - from tribal to Irish romances, that present longing as an anecdote to disappointment, with long tangled commentaries and heated language. It also plays with the relationship between orality and literature and the rather limited belief that you need to choose between them - where is the Trickster in that? Hermes third ear? That discussion is all in the epilogue.

Towards the end of my years in the tent I fell in love, and somewhere a little further down the line became a very proud dad of an astonishing little girl. So I can sense much of my soul growth now is based on the example of these two women, and the business of raising a family. That is an experience just as mysterious as my time in the black tent. Just as tough, just as sacred.

 

What does the School of Myth offer?

Let me just say what a huge variety of student we get - from professors to artists to surgeons to street musicians. As long as you have a love of story and nature than this is a good place to come - regardless of experience.

What makes the school unique in Britain is a very developed relationship between rites-of-passage and the myths that we believe are linked to that process. So if we experience many initiations in our life, then these are stories that we need, regardless of age, to orientate ourselves in challenging times. For those that want to experience a wilderness fast then we offer that (from summer 2012), and then those who would rather take a more gradual pace can experience the year programme without the fast in Snowdonia. We ask: what myths speak to you? Why? How can they be carried and expressed?

So here’s some of what we provide -

Foundational Stones:
A spacious exploration of the relationship between myth, wilderness and the psyche. We also reclaim the artificial divide between ‘culture’ and ‘wildness’ - all decent initiatory practice is a culture of wildness. We believe that discipline is the dance partner of wildness. We are based on residential centres within Dartmoor National Park, and under canvas when the weather is good. We offer what I would call foundational stones to becoming a storycarrier. Each weekend is one of these stones - with plenty of study between sessions to deepen your practice. How you integrate and express the stories is up to you - this is not a course entirely about storytelling remember-but the old belief is that find some way of communicating the radiance and murk of your own walk through life. Areas around story we explore are:

Story is a Sharp Knife:
Story not as allegory, repertoire or form of psychology but as an independent energy. How do we nurture it if it decides to be told by us? Recognition of your inner- eco system, your own weather patterns, your character, and how they relate to the grand characters that radiate through these stories like jaunty tigers. So we develop an appropriate relationship with story. Some would say a very old one.

From the Comparative to the Associative:
Not just the comparison of one myth to another but a move into a much more varied eruption of information - the condition of our souls, the wider history of culture, the sweet intelligence of the wren. We are less interested in the notion of harmony - that all myths are telling the same story - and far more engaged with the pursuit of polyphony, independent bursts of multiple insight, from both teacher and student alike. Harmony is a western pre-occupation, useful sometimes but not at the expense of certain unique insights. So we are very engaged in a constant emerging conversation. We bring in some myth theory - Eliade, Segal, Zimmer, Hyde, Von-Franz, Kane, but are very tuned to what is actually revealing itself right there, in the moment. For those that read we provide an exhaustive reading list, but for those that don’t we have other means. I’ve worked extensively with folks with dyslexia and autism too, giving their situation a mythic as well as diagnostic appraisal. From my way of seeing they are in the realm of the Magician - those that see in a different way, and need to be approached appropriately.

Myth is Nothing to Do with a Long Time Ago:
It’s about a place that you can inhabit at almost any time - Blake’s ‘eternity in a grain of sand’. It’s why a story seemingly three thousand years old can seem to be speaking to the nature of our lives today. It is! They are partially referring to inner realities that are ageless, hence their impact right this very second. At the same time I offer a caution for making stories entirely personal - the anthropocentric can become a form of brutality to stories - i believe there are little dark nests within them that are entirely for the pleasure of the gods, not just about our nutty love lives. It’s a fine line the mythteller treads.

Myth is also promiscuous, not dogmatic. It’s a bed hopper. It’s not designed for tablets of stone in my opinion, but moves through history with fluidity, catching but also challenging the mood of the times. When it becomes too dogmatic it becomes toxic - but I think that’s an anxious human response to the stories rather than the origination point of the stories themselves. I don’t even think many stories arrive from a human point of view. Many of the stories I love are when you are suddenly seeing through the eyes of Raven, or caught in the foamy curls of Irish sea.

The Pastoral and Prophetic: This is not a Goddess time, a Zeus time but a Trickster moment.
At the school we study what we call prophetic rather than pastoral stories. These are stories that hold paradox and grit equally, that have hard material within them. Romanian Gypsy, Siberian, Gaelic and onto Arthurian Romances - it’s that enquiry that links them. They are certainly all initiatory stories, that’s a great focus to the year.
In that huge question that frequently gets asked: “what stories do we need now?” we say, “the prophetic!” Stories of shape-shifting, relationship to crafty animals and lonely stretches of river, the emergence of the feminine, stories with both the Trickster and the absolute simplicity of love for the earth at their core.

Place and the Arising of Value:
Re-consecrating a relationship to five miles around where you actually live. Walk its boundaries, become an apprentice to its mythologies. When you find its stories - either a local folktale or a personal experience, don’t write it down with words but by image - a kind of visual map. That’s how I learn all stories; not by script. Offer libations, beat the boundaries, get into walking. Blake found all of this in the east end of London. What are the songs of stewarding this place down through time?, the ploughing, market, crofting, ferrier songs? The songs of the fisherman leaving before dawn from Brixham? Cities have their deep histories too.

So we ground ourselves as well as leap into the imagination - what is the story of that watering hole, that rowan tree, that stretch of grass between two abandoned buildings. We encourage a little grandiosity - become the resident storycarrier of your milage - as Gary Snyder say’s “be famous for five miles” These are bio-regional times we are moving into - we care about eating local food, being connected to our surroundings. Well, what about the stories? Local folklore? Grimms and the Russian fairy tale world are great to jump into, but not at the expense of a localised experience. Seek both.

Magical Privacy:
In an era of frantic networking and frankly too much information about things that are actually not that important we offer space to carve out some interior time. To cook in your own images, feelings, compulsions. To wander the moors, to get wet, to warm by the fire sipping hot tea, to have fellowship with us but also some delicious solitude.

The Dagara of Africa believe that when something is made public it is already in decline - so all really potent acts of magic are done in private. That thought has impacted me a great deal. I think we are in danger of becoming addicted to disclosure. So we like to assign projects to students that are never revealed to each other! Never shared to the human community - only buzzards and long grass - to them you can talk all day.
I am working into this idea a great deal at the moment. I think many people are longing for a deeper life.

So that’s a taster of what we get up to. Lots of time in nature, lots of time by the fireside, great fellowship with your fellow travelers - it’s one hell of an experience, truly. You won’t get a diploma worth a damn in commercial terms but you may just get a swan feather cloak of story, culture and deep belonging placed around your worthy shoulders. What would you say is of the most value?
It’s a place of study and transformation. Many of our students have gone off and become wonderfully authentic storytellers, almost all are causing some kind of trouble in the world. This makes us very happy. Some fall so mad in love with our nomad life they become part of the school crew - visionaries, cooks, musicians, poets - it’s unbelievably sweet at times.

 

What is developing within your own work?

For the last eight years i have taught variants of the year programme and worked with many people in the wilderness fast experience. I have also taught abroad a great deal - really the life of the traveling Seanchai (storyteller), carrying some cultural stories, relationship to landscape, ritual and a holder of poetic imagination. I count myself extremely lucky to be doing it and aim to continue as long as god views it appropriate. I have many friends out there, it’s outrageous really.

I continue to be influenced by some of the early Troubadours; the Countess of Dia, William of Poitou - the whole relationship with dawn (or Alba poems) that both they and the Persian ecstatics like Hafez share, although with slightly different motivations. I love Grave’s troubled masterpiece “The White Goddess” - because of rather than in spite of its obtuse and jumbled nature. I also love the Gaelic and Siberian worlds of story, as well as many Gypsy tales that are dear to me. For the stories i leave out glasses of whisky and honey in my small garden, to make sure they stay plump and frisky.

I am just finishing a book on the Grail story, Parzival, from what I believe is a fairly unusual angle. It also contains a deepening of the Lightning Tree book’s ideas about the countries of the earth being huge, dreaming animals, and that real myths are a kind of tangled succession of their thoughts. That actually our our psyche is far wider than our body and reaches out and can actually touch these great unfoldings of the earths imaginings. I also have an abiding interest in the notion of chivalry that develops through challenge, and that is cooking in the book. So, more than just ‘manners’ - I call it dark chivalry.

I’m a kind of wayward feminist who really loves men and the masculine too, so there is also some playful thoughts on courtship. There’s almost no area of life I don’t think we need far more women involved in, and even deeper than gender, the feminine. At the same time, many of us men are in a profound state of re-evaluating what it means to be a man too - which also requires space and attention. There is a whole new generation moving into these concerns.

I was born and raised with Dartmoor in the far distance so my private deepening into that landscape continues. I am certainly being pushed by an invisible hand to tell more and more local stories - of the tumps, hillocks, great tors and mad little ponies that inhabit it - and of the vast scaly animal underneath. I also have a kind of dartmoor song-line of stories utterly rooted in my local geography that i hope to walk, tell, conjure and make a book of - as a contribution to this notion of place and imagination. To be Devonian means to be ‘ a person of the deep valley’ and I guess that’s a nourishing aspiration for all of us.

Copyright Westcountry School of Myth 2011