This is small edit from chapter three of Shaw’s A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE

(avail 2008)

Then he fed himself to the fire as well.

For a while he burned.

Then he vanished completely

and stood in plain sight on the ground below.

And he called on his brothers to do the same.

From Those Who Stay a Long Way Out to Sea, a Haida myth, trans. R. Bringhurst.

Thoreau's extended movement into the wild required a conscious abdication of communal expectation. His twenties, often a time of nest building and career were spent moving further into the slow and dazzling tempos of the natural world. He viewed a kind of emotional scarcity in the communities he encountered around Concord, and saw his wilderness retreat as a pointer towards a more sincere, bespoke, life. Thoreau, and Emerson before him, paid particular attention on time outdoors-not being in your study thinking about the outdoors.

So what is Thoreau talking about when he says 'Live sincerely?' There is choice, responsibility and hardness in this idea. It requires a psyche that extracts itself from the loud hum of family history, peer pressure, and self-imposed need to conform. Maybe these voices never quite go away, but that’s all they are: voices, rather than the ten commandments. That sincerity involves the possibility that your life will get snarly and possibly shadowy to anyone witnessing it. Thoreau opened up some part of himself that was both receptive and disciplined to non-human dialogue. For him this required a certain 'turning away' from the human community. There is a great deal of lover and warrior here. Lover in the ability to be nourished so completely by snowstorms and reed beds, warrior in the discipline of his daily walks and writing. He's not smoking pot under an oak tree and then wandering back to a condo.

To live sincerely also means the development of patience. If you have committed to living as honestly as you can, then the absence of artificial buoyancy will probably mean you disappear from public view for a time. Thoreau followed this movement into nature for thirteen years; Walden only appearing eight years before his death. In a culture that is so uneasy with vertical attention as ours, its rhythms are not predisposed for this kind of process.

Any kind of extended retreat also offers the possibility of inflation and delusion. The experience always has the capacity to 'turn', especially when simple contact with other human beings is absent, we only have to think of Kerouac up in the Fire Watch tower. The Initiatory journey arches out and the soul relishes an extended foray into swamp moisture, buttercups and open tundra, but it also loves the simple grounding of a human face. I sometimes speculate on how Thoreau’s work may have moved if he had been vigorously and passionately met by a woman. The possibility of human relationship can be perplexing after so much time in the long grass.

In my own time outdoors, after a year or so I noticed that my writing was not useful to any other person but me; that the experience was stripping away the education of sentence construction or straight lines of thought. Peculiar blurs of aggressive language would spit across the page and then hide behind the woodpile. If I tried to talk at length about what I was experiencing I would notice the room get heavy and people start fiddling with their coats. This is all indicative of this decision to incubate; it will hold a peculiar energy for an unspecified amount of time. Being out there means you are going to feel 'out there'.

We have to understand that all of this points towards a fairly incoherent or disturbing picture for those we left behind. You have effectively 'gone off the radar'. Well, you may have gone off the radar of consumer culture, but you are right on track according to much older trains of thought. Thoreau we know, was sustained by the poetry of Kabir through to Goethe, so would have felt a human connection into wildness, that he was part of an experiential legacy. This book refers to the bardic tradition which also holds ‘luna’cy next to brilliance. So there has to be a drop of external expectation and a movement towards inwardness. At some point in the future that only the gods can designate, the cradle of your psyche is tough enough to move some kind of coherent voice out into the human world. Be prepared to do a lousy job for awhile, but do it anyway.

The receptive and the disciplined have to make an accord with one another, a pact. Beauty can blossom in the most adverse of conditions, but personal diligence has to be there too, Iron spine is a good phrase worth stealing from the Buddhists. Get up early if you have to, stop drinking (start if it helps), and have several paintings of Cronos hanging around to drag little fluttery moments of crowd-pleasing creativity into the slow, dense work that nourishes you for a lifetime. A body of woodsmoke and raven's is maybe just strong enough for the glare of the market place. Thoreau says;

"In the shade i will believe what in the sun i loved." (9)

It is often in the quieter moments that we locate vision, if we are only used to our own impatient tempo then we can ride roughshod over many messages coming to us from the brush. Vision is associated with leadership, motivation and action, but the initiatory road shows us that to locate it in the first place can require incubation and openness. Mythological vision, nature vision, hunter-gatherer vision require a slowing, a stilling, very different from a brainstorming session in the boardroom.

Bushmen will slow to a trance like state to venture into the dreamtime of the animals they wish to hunt, to both locate and arrange which of them will lay down their lives. This is clearly accessing dramatically different parts of their consciousness that which many of us are used to. But, contained in the training of tribal groups worldwide is the simple attention to the subtle movements of nature, something any of us can develop. Time in wilderness can be the first opening into the panoramic, multi-layered vision that traditional people have cultivated for so long. It is in the realisation that you are part of a seething mass of intelligence called the living world that clarity about your place in it can surface. A distant neighbour of Thoreaus once saw him motionless before a pond for eight hours, watching frogs.

It is often a focused gaze on small things that reveal what could emerge as a great force in our life. The peculiar nature of what catches our attention is a clue to what could come next. I had been painting for several years when I realised I was obsessed with the same image: hunters leaving villages to head out into large forests. I didn't see this as metaphoric or anything else, it just was. Ten years later I find myself writing this book about that very thing. So allow mesmeric images to approach-the stiller you are, the deeper the resonance. In quietness some power can show up, sift through the pornography of want and really bite you on the ass. An image you could spend the next five decades approaching. 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.

Some of the earliest British examples we have of people entering the wild seeking vision is contained in the Druidic system. From what 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 killed deer, could become revealers of mystery. In the story of Merlin we find 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 complaining, a strange madness came upon him. He crept away and fled to the woods, unwilling that anyone should see his going.

Tolstoy, N. (12)

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.

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.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (13)

The Druidic tradition holds the position of the Ovate, which had connotations of prophecy, madness, being on the edge of things. That inflamed perception can also be a kind of vision, it is a kind of deliberate invocation of the most mysterious elements of initiation. What emerges 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 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? We see by Geoffrey of Monmouth that the woods nourished Merlin, that a kind of food existed for him; but what sustained him was twofold: the roots, fruits and berries and the submersion in the deepest recesses of his own nature. Sometimes there’s no way through it but to do it, no matter how gruelling.

In the Gaelic story we hear of Tuan Mac Cairill, a man who passed through the hard edges of wilderness finally into rapture;

Then I was from hill to hill, and from cliff to cliff, guarding myself from wolves, for twenty two years…and I was hairy, clawed, withered, grey, naked, wretched, miserable. Then, as I was asleep one night, I saw myself passing into the shape of a stag. In that shape I was, and I young and glad of heart. (14)

When a community was in a state of magical health, it held a balance between the practical and the esoteric. Even amongst the wider title of Druids, you had individuals that resided over domestic disputes and those with prophetic abilities, it ranged that wide. The initiated Bard was seen to have a soul similar to a bird, to account for their ability to soar out of the familiar

with verse, incantation, presence. In the ninth century Glossary of Cormac

we find a beautiful description of a Bard’s clothing;

Made of the skins of white and many coloured birds; up to the girdle of the necks

of mallards, and from his girdle up to his neck of their tufts (16)

Like the red painted initiates of the first chapter, their physical demeanour

illustrated something of their nature, their affinity with birds, of things that moved through air, like a struck harp string, a brilliant turn of phrase, a spell. The art of their appearance was ‘living the vision so the people can see’. We find this all over the world that the physicality of initiation requires change in dress, ritualised steps back into the center ground, external language that illustrates inner change. If all you get these days is being dropped straight back into an uncomprehending sea of greyness then you are entering another kind of initiatory zone, without the vessel of ritual as a container.

As I mentioned in the first chapter, initiation always illuminates our relationship to death, and that is another factor in the pursuit of vision. When mortality moves near, much nonsense falls away. Even four days and nights without food alarms the body to the potential of death. In truth, nobody could starve, but the hunger, exposure, boredom and night fears create a sense of vulnerability, that 'anything could happen'.

Rather than an inflated, euphoric experience you can feel ridiculous, or ashamed. This darkness comes from the inevitable reflections that arise whilst out on the mountain. All sorts of apparent failings can appear and then fall back out of view, like the tide filling the estuary.

Something in the boundaries of ceremony can engineer this extraordinary process, that the 'awen', nature consciousness that the Druids talk of assists the rational mind to sift through its bank of memories.The magical and psychological ricochet off each other beautifully, and who's to say where one ends and the other begins? The vision the ancients talk of is derived from this merging, this field beyond polarities, beyond 'the stand off.' If we allow our perception to extend out beyond the village, eventually it brings the village back to us.

Finding community is a tricky thing, it could be located in your immediate neighborhood, or advertising to get a small group of kindred spirits together, or communicating with people thousands of miles away. It will rarely be a 'village' in the traditional sense, but a meeting of minds. One of the positive aspects of the internet is the capacity to communicate with people instantly, all over the planet. Community can be born in a conversation, or an idea hatched. We have to hold a wider perspective on the potential of the word. We rarely have the luxury of relationships developed over decades in a steady location anymore, we have to be active in our pursuit of shared ideas and support. The idea is to emerge from isolation on the return, not remain in a marginalized position.

Friedrich Holderlin is making the comparison here between the early followers of Dionysus and the poets. This is useful to us because it creates valuable links between the archaic and the contemporary, and that it is possible to carry some of that older, intense consciousness into the modern world. The poetic imagination is the part of us that leaps toward metaphor, that breathes deeply when the lapwing passes. ‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox it enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, the page is printed.’ Ted Hughes draws on fox consciousness till it possesses him, bends his writing and suddenly the work is finished.

To hold the strangeness of poetry in your mouth is an extension of the initiatory road out into the community. It can be about black lightning, folded linen, bitter green apples or high heels but it requires your full attention; it opens realities, not shuts them down. Call it magical awareness, psychological, mythological, creative, artistic, poetic; whatever it takes to maintain the balance of the seeming opposites, the solar village and the lunar forest. Indigenous people view this as practical as fixing a leak, practical because it shows things as they really are.

Language can become stunted, one layered and lacking much Otherwordly resonance. The injuries inflicted on the very vocabulary that brought us Shakespeare somehow mirror the injuries we carry to the width of our imaginings; our peculiar, bespoke, longings. If our mouths can’t catch and support their delicacy how do they birth themselves? I’m not suggesting we trot out soliloquies all day but look for imaginal links between the high end language of Yeats and the warmth of simple expression. The garden in our chest then has more than one bird fluttering in its branches.

Think again of the Siberian words for the moon: those creative love spells can be a way of staying connected to wildness on our return. It’s not about self-aggrandizement, it’s about an ancient kind of prayer. If your ego grabs too much of a hold (as mine can), then bring yourself back to silence for a while, get grounded, remember what you care about. Take these words and feed them to small parks in inner cities.

You can arrive in your study at 7am, eyes bleary and uninspired, but simply by looking at strange marks on paper - by reading the work of the thinkers that awake your imagination, you can feel the energy in your guts that tells you it’s time to start work. If that isn’t magic then I don’t know what is. Words are linguistic seed pods handed down through the centuries, ready to uncurl like elegant dynamite in the right pair of eyes.

It's important as a reader not to feel ostracized by this talk of poetics. For years in my school life I found the kind of poetry I was exposed to over flowery or measured and impossible to relate to; there seemed to be a lack of blood in it. This however, is a fault of the education system, not poetry at large.

We are each a strange container of unique experience, a castle full of erotic chambers, dust filled cupboards of old bones, great halls with unending feasting, small towers of arcane literature, and balconies from which heartbroken lovers hurl themselves from into the moat. All this is going on inside us all the time. Poetry is a divining tool that dips into these waters and dredges it to consciousness, that gives it form.

A close relative to the Bard and the Poet is the almost extinct role of the Seanchai, the wandering Storyteller whose very body is a rattling bag of mystery. This is what you might call a Storycarrier rather than teller. Characters like these have walked between settlements in Ireland and Celtic Britain for thousands of years. In Africa they may be called a Griot, in Guatamala a Great Rememberer. The Seanchai had a mystical dimension, were even seen to have pulled some of the energy from the Filli of ancient Ireland with them. Focused specifically from stories from the oral tradition-from the campfire to the farm house to the Inn to the Great Hall to the camp fire- they could move between huge hero cycles, to geographically specific folk tales, to meandering multi-dimensional personal anecdotes that somehow spun the whole evening into a shimmering cloud that rained ecstatic intimacy on the listeners.

While I was talking to another wilderness teacher only last week, he estimated that it takes about three days of fasting in the woods before you move from your every day dreams into what he called 'Wild Land Dreaming'-when the wild starts to rear up through your subconscious and really starts to communicate. From this, aboriginal people are of the opinion that western culture is 'only three days deep.' If this is true, then Initiation can be a way to move beyond that three day scarcity and into the rich terrain of the Seanchai. The stories that have stayed with me are stories that have chosen to speak through me since i first headed up the mountain. They are not the ones I may have expected to tell, they just wrapped themselves around me like vines. Just as you learn to sensitize your attention in solitude, we have to do the same on the return to locate the next set of clues.

So stories that feel authentic to you may swing by when you least expect it. A detail will catch you, revulse you, intrigue you. The thing is to learn the story-speak it out into the room-it'll die of cold there on the page. When something is spoken well ( or at least sincerely), that mythological hole appears and the brightening beings come.

Let your home be an ancient Norse longhouse for an evening, become the storyteller of your siblings or family. They may not want one but that’s beside the point. When you do this you start to tug at the thread of history, the land, your imagination and the Otherworld. So the community is fed and the Initiated soul turns slowly in its oceanic waters.

Poetry is healthy because there’s no doubt it belongs to the elusive

and egalitarian realm of the imagination…the leaders of a nation

cannot prescribe the people’s deepest feelings;

they can only hope to steer them. In this they contend with the poets

and storytellers…

Seventeeth and eighteenth-century british and French poets wrote poems

that drew on the Symbols and stories of Greek mythology. This is not

trivial: Greek myths helped keep the wild side of European culture alive; had

it died it would have left Western Europe a lonelier place, with less love,

less wilderness, less joyous art. Gary Snyder (19)

Whilst flying between destinations on domestic flights in America recently I experienced the phenomenon of the television in the seat in front of you, directly in your line of vision. Unless I was to pay the required seven dollars (which I didn't) for the other channels, they played the same half dozen adverts over and over again. With there being no way to shut it down I was literally held captive by advertising. The unpleasantness of this experience brought home the deadening effects of media. Train or plane journeys are a kind of liminal space; neither here nor there, and are a good place to gather thoughts, write, read, look out the window. How many poems won't get written, ideas remain unhatched when we cut into even these small times with the remorseless mundanity of adverts?

If submitted to entirely, the castle I mentioned in the last section becomes a bungalow identical to its neighbor, with the same want for a lawnmower, Belgian chocolate, better pecs. It can cause a kind of paralysis of imagination, a homogenous blurring of desire into generic want. Cars are silver with two litre engines, houses have to be sold every five years for bigger and bigger mortgages, careers have to be a straight line with no deviation, God is either monotheistic or doesn't exist.

As technology catapults itself into hyperspace the walls of the city become immune to the face of nature. Whereas two hundred years ago tendrils of ivy and sweet grass could poke through the wall, pesticides in the form of fundamentalism and avarice wither any information on the vine that doesn't conform to its parameters. A star becomes an individual capable of contorting themselves for the projections of millions, grass is just something you smoke. It for these reasons that the poetic imagination is so important, it's not a luxury, it’s a weapon, a tool, it's political.

Only by paying attention to the images and desires that arise directly from our soul do we get any sense of center; a place to act from. In this era, initiation is a stabiliser, a way of deeply checking in. It's a kind of straightening out to have a heart big enough for the work ahead.

Giving it all up and living in an isolated cave forever won't work either (believe me, I tried). This is the place we come from, it can be horrifying, tedious and boring but it’s a squabbling market place we have to engage with. What will be on your stand?

Initiation provides two seemingly different qualities; sobriety and intoxication. There is the weight of grief, awareness of death, the growing responsibility of adulthood, but also the exuberance of relationship to wild nature and the strength of myth to guide you on your return. On the one hand it grounds you into the hard cycles of mortality and on the other it provides an electrical current to open you the real vitality of your life.

It's said of the generosity of the great Irish hero Finn Mac Cool (Finn Mac Uail) that; ' if all the rivers of the world were to run pure silver and the leaves pure gold, Finn would have given them all away'. Now there is an attitude worth emulating. Finn grew up in the woods, had a poet's heart and a warriors fist, wildness pours from that saying.

The boons revealed are ultimately a give away for the whole tribe/community/country/planet. We have to establish the nature of our gifts and find a way to make them available. Not naively, with placards and sound bites, but with Yaga’s canniness, not to be an easy target, but get the job done. We carry knowledge of skeleton woman with us, of betrayal by false giants, of dismemberment, of being fed back to life, morsel by morsel by the smallest, wildest of birds. We have carried our knackered, leathered hearts through difficulty, hospitals, depressions, redundancies, addictions, success, catastrophe; we are formidable.

Whilst concerns of society now are now political and economic, the fact is that through this focus the planet itself is imploding, its layers haemorrhaging. There is no greater concern for society than its survival which means a hard, desperate move back into dialogue with ecology, sustainability and the ground under the concrete. Suddenly the myths that speak of the links between nature and culture, or humans as animals are no longer archaic, but a vital part of the wider ecological situation we face. This most essential vision must be birthed out of the intelligence and awen of Caridwen’s cauldrons, the Dragons wrapped around each other’s scales.

The rationality of considered debate, planning and activism is inspired and nourished by the ancient awareness of listening to the great mirror of the planet. Forty years ago it seemed every canyon and tundra was explored, that the only source of infinite exploration left was the self. With the frantic tilts and sways of global warming at hand we are forced, humbled, into renegotiating our relationship with wild nature.

As individuals we can feel vulnerable and doubtful of our ability to change anything. The seemingly overwhelming images of disaster we are confronted with can freeze us like rabbits in the headlights. As we feel our collective energy go down the psychic plughole, I am reminded of someone at a conference asking Gary Snyder why bother to save the planet. He replied with a grin; "Because it's a matter of character..and a matter of style!" Finn would stand up, Boudicca would stand up, Arthur would stand up, Crazy Horse would stand up, Bridgit would stand up, Robin Hood would stand up. An adventure always has uncertain outcomes, but we're better off taking a first step.

Stop looking for twigs and become the tree.

Jim Lenfesty (20)