This essay can be found in the book of the same name available 2008.

This story first found me in a Minneapolis bookstore. Even briefly glimpsing James Riordan's book of translated Siberian folk tales, I could tell I was in for a strong read. Told in a sparse, indigenous style but rich in metaphor, it has rarely left my side since. Almost a year to the day later, I found myself back in that very same store leading a night of storytelling-in fact telling stories from that very same book. The tail end of a story always leads back to it's beginning, a circle rather than a straight line, and it felt good for the stories to live in the air-on the page they can die of cold.

'Deer Woman and the Velvet Antlered Moon' is the title I have given to the story; 'The Girl and the Moon Man' Riordan translated from the Chuckchi people. whilst honouring the spartan feel of the translation, I, as a rambling Celt, cannot resist playing with some of the more succulent images, throwing in some flamboyant speculation. Storytellers work with the 'matter' of a story-the bones, but the 'sense' they add-a bespoke flavour- is theirs. The story has something to say to you that I know nothing about: my commentary is a glimpse of frost and hooves-maybe you'll catch udders, black tents and the whole night sky.

The illustrations come from the artist Cara Roxanne. Haunting and deft, they supply another road into the story, one that grounds the leaping images of the text. Cara’s images went through a great process of change during their creation- the ones you see before you literally clambered out of the inks when she had dug such a deep well into the story they could emerge. Roxanne's work stays true to the atmosphere of the startling wood's and inky night.

This is a story from when the world was fresh as the cheek of a newborn, wild as the talons of a hawk, and tender as the wind that shakes the barley.

Amongst the Chukchi of Siberia there lived a man who had only one daughter. She was a Deer Woman, she kept watch over her fathers herd. Keeping a lonely vigil far from the camp with the animals, when she needed food she would return riding a stocky red deer. She was remote, elegant and arresting to the eye. One night as she was returning to camp the red deer suddenly cried: 'Look, look, Mistress, the Moon Man comes!'.

Sure enough, from out of the sky came the Moon Man in his sledge drawn by reindeers.

She knew by his determined gaze he meant to have her for his own, and in panic asked the Deer to help her. The Deer raked the snow until he had scooped out a large hole. The woman dived in the hole and the Deer covered her in snow until she was completely obscured. She was but a mound of crisp white snow in the freezing night.

Moon Man went here and there, stalked the camp excitedly, even slowly circling the mound sniffing the air, but he never, for a second, suspected it was his beloved Deer Woman. Bemoaning her absence, he clambered back into his sledge and rode up the singing curtain of the inky night calling her name.

As soon as he was gone she sprang out of the hole, clambered on the Deers back and headed back to her fathers yaranga at great speed. Unfortunately no one was at home.

Suspecting the Moon Mans imminent return the red deer made suggestions. 'I will turn you into a block of stone so the Moon Man won't find you'

'He'll know it's me!'

'A Hammer?'

'No Good, No Good!'

'A tent pole?'

'A hair on the tent flap?'

'I've got IT! turn me into a lamp, he'll never suspect that!'

Deer woman adopted the posture of a lamp. So the deer struck the ground with his hoof and suddenly the girl was a glowing, brightness bringing lamp. In the time it takes a rock to hit a window, Moon Man turned up in camp. He searched between the tent poles, the pots and pans, every twig, every rough hair on a deer’s fur, every knot on the bed planks, every grain of soil upon the floor.

The Woman was nowhere to be seen.

Although the lamp was bright, Moon Man was radiant, and so didn't notice the lamp. 'Where is that women? Where in all of this tumbling earth can she be?' As he returned defeated to his sledge he heard the delicate peal of her laughter, like sunshine on a salmons back.

'Here I am! here I am!'

He rushed back in and searched the wood piles, the reds and oranges of the fire, the worn felt of the walls, he even split the air itself into two halves and looked for her there. No luck, for she was a lamp again. As he left the tent in despair, again the laughter, and he jumped back in. searching with a renewed vigour. So intense was his search, so focused his ambition of discovery, that he withered from his previously cherubic form into an exhausted, shrivelled figure that could barely move his spindly form.

Knowing she was now safe, she appeared in her much desired human form, threw him on his back and bound his hands and feet.

'Ahh..' cried the sliver of the Moon Man 'I wished to carry you off, now I see I must be punished for my wickedness...I beg you, cover me with sealskins so I may be warm before I perish, truly I am freezing'

'What!' she cried 'you live in the harsh blackness of the night sky, that is your nomad home, why would you need sealskins?'

At this moment his voice took on a sincere, exhausted and tearful tone

'Because of my nature I am doomed to roam the skies forever,.. where you to free me I would aid your noble people always. Free me and night will become day. Free me and I shall measure the months of the year for you. They shall be;

'But if I free you' Deer Woman cried, 'You will regain fat, and like a Walrus of the Night come after me again!'

'Absolutely NOT! I shall always remember the vitality and wisdom of the Chuckchi maids. I'm done, I’ll never come down from my domain again.'

Well, she was convinced. When free he flew into the heavens and illuminated all around him. From that moment on he has served the Chukchi faithfully..

as he does tonight!

As the tail of this story rushes back into it's mouth, a small bird has landed on the storytellers shoulder and told him that it is in the glorious space between the longing of the moon and the upwards gaze of the Deer Woman that the first song got created, and it is the job of poets and troublemakers everywhere to get caught in that magical crossfire, listening for notes.

The story begins with the Deer Woman in her arresting aloness, far from the warmth and the squabbles of the tribe. We are quickly informed that some magical relationship with the animals has opened up in her solitude. Indeed, the deer she rides actually speaks to her -informs her and can actually assist her in the changing of shape. In many myths, a ridden, speaking animal indicates a certain power awake in the rider-they ride an intuition that guides them through their life, alerting them of snares and blind allies. If we listen to this voice, we have the capacity to bend and erupt into constellations that confuse the oncoming challenge. it is worth mentioning at this point that all the characters in this tale-the Moon, Deer, Woman, are seen as abiding somewhere in your psyche as well as up there in the mythological realm.

She appears to be a woman deeply connected to human solitude and big empty spaces. We suspect she has a tail hidden somewhere, never watches the shopping channel and lets Foxes rip up the couch.. We know she can lead a large herd, but also contains a tribal connection through the relationship to her father. When we think of Georgia O'Keefe up there in the splendid isolation of Ghost ranch making her paintings, we get an impression of this kind of character; contained but also slightly out of view, 'all to themselves' as Tom Waits puts it. We know this is not the story of a defenceless girl.

What leads us to such solitude is speculative, and the length of time spent there can make the difference between illumination and just simple hiding from humans. We think of Bly's lines;

What does the son do?

He turns away,

loses courage,

goes outdoors to feed with the wild

things, lives among dens

and huts, eats distance and silence,

he grows long wings, enters the spiral,

ascends (2)

Bly understands the magnetic attraction of the open, troublesome wilderness, but also the element of escape that can underlie it-the chaos of family that causes us to 'kiss the horse and ride off into the sunset’. The emotional distance gives the son the ability to start to flutter up above his family grief, experience ecstasy, keep remote, glowing. That's a fragile ride though, as any butterfly will tell you.

As a wilderness teacher I have experienced many sons who have 'lost courage' and arrive on the mountain with a longing for huge, mystical experiences. I think I was one. It is part of the humanity of being a guide, that you help ground that man or woman in the difficult, knotty stuff of relationship that got them there in the first place.

Only when they are anchored by grief is it deemed safe enough for them to move out into wilderness-the grief forms a cord that connects them to the village as well as the elemental.

Thoreau, in his attempt to 'live sincerely', makes a similar move away from the human community- the animal he rode was disciplined, observant and practical. His dealings with the moon where minutely executed, but sometimes lacking the easy warmth of the village. Wilderness has its own en-spellments to keep us locked into a certain valley or copse for decades. This isn't always a positive thing. His psychic marriage to a 'shrub oak' probably didn’t help matters much either.

The old stories rarely name much emotion, and the characters can seem elemental because of this. You don't get the quick, emotive confessional of the modern novel. So we can only speculate on her time out in the open places. Was she happy? miserable? probably both at different times. It's worth remembering times in our own lives of such sufficiency and aloness. What we can be sure of is that in some ways her isolation has strengthened her, made her subtle. But all seasons have to move, and here comes our big lunar initiator to crack the whole scene open.

The first point of interest is that the Moon in this story is considered Masculine. In European myth we normally makes associations of the Sun with the masculine -rationality, activity, thrust and vigour-the Moon connected to intuition, stillness, receptivity and mystery. It feels a like a welcome change to enjoy this twist, to wrestle the moon back from the women awhile, and wrench the sun from the men. The word Moon actually derives from the German

'Der Mond', connected to the word 'Man'. This has a very different ring to the 'La Luna’ of the Spanish; it’s slower, denser, less fluttery. Actually we find male moon deities frequently-Tecciztecatl of the Aztecs, Mani of the Germanic tribes, Thoth of the Egyptians, Tskuyumi of the Japanese and Rahko of the Finns are just a small selection. So this time the Moon is male, and curious. Wandering his nomadic route over the heavens he had become fixated by this similarly 'alone' figure; not sheltering by the hearth or warm in a lovers bed.

Sometimes when we see someone that holds solitude elegantly, when they are of the particular disposition that makes our head spin, we summon our chariots, 'shine' to our fullest, learn a tap dance and go charging into their splendid isolation, not realising they may be relishing the space.

To attract a deity is no small thing. It is a shamanic activity to head out to the ice, forest or vision pit, seeking to entice a spirit-bride or husband. Whether she knows it or not, she has created enough elegance and space around her for the Luna God himself, a Lord of Night, to be beguiled. Many unexpected things come to us at night; many storytellers only tell in the slow time, when the fragile shell of hours breaks and the moon egg of enchantment arises.

The Irish always say that the Otherworld is as interested in us as we are in it and this descent of the moon is an auspicious image of just that. Indigenous artists often understand that a huge percentage of their gift comes from 'somewhere else'-the mythological, religious and cosmological realms of that specific region. When we start to orientate towards the community of stars, night and moon, as well as the human, the impact of that relationship can be overwhelming.

When moon energy starts to flood our life/home/deer herd, it's very force and lack of 'human-centeredness' can tell our instinct (the deer we ride) to start digging a hole to jump down. It can cause us to spend two days and night without sleep working on a novel with no hope of a publisher, to forget our nephews names, to stop tipping waiters. It's not about grounding it's about leaps. Dylan Thomas, never famed for a balanced hand, writes;

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their grief's in their arms

He makes a flurry of connections-between his vocation as a poet- a raging moon-the lovers bed as a nest of grief. His bounding soul knows all about the midnight tundra, it's where he encounters the lightning of his work. His poems are for those very grief lovers, his tribe, who;

pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art (3)

Maybe the art feeds the moon as much as the human dimension.

We suspect that Jeff Koons is unfamiliar with this intensity, whereas an abundance of it's light poured from the brush of Ken Kiff or William Scott. We know that Mark Rothko painted layers of very thin paint so hundreds of little pricks of light illumined his work-moon light. This very old artistic pursuit requires a developed inner life, a steady psyche to ground these huge invocations. Rothko being found dead by suicide raises questions about his ability to sustain the vast energies he awoke. If we just stand still and soak it up we're often dead by twenty eight-blazing and consumed by our 'luna'cy. Basquiat made a home for moon energy in the early part of his career, but with Warhol's help as a False Father, obliterated any human boundaries to contain it. When the light scatters, he uses heroin to mimic it's tides, his art goes on repeat and he soon dies. His interior life was depleted by star, not moon lust.

So we can see the Moon as a vertical connection in our lives, but also something contacted through solitude, intensity of task, broadness of community-owls, mist, streams, bracken, and up into the cosmos.

It is a genius clue that when the gift comes, the Deer woman hides. The myth-world is a different frequency to that of the human, and much tearing and thunder can appear when the two worlds square up to each other. Destiny is an awesome thing. James Hillman tells the story of the great Spanish bullfighter Manolete (1917-1947), a man who as a boy 'clung so tightly to his mother's apron strings that his sisters and other children used to tease him' (4)

His clinging was an attempt to jump down the hole; to buy himself time until he had the container strong enough to bear the gift offered. Come adolescence, he ran towards his gifting, and towards his death. Gored by the bull Islero, at age thirty he died, creating the largest funeral Spain has ever seen.

It could be that Manolete sensed his destiny, the glory and the sobriety of it, and bought all the time he could before the pulse became to persistent to ignore. For others, the sacrifice of relationship to the moon is that they are unable to re-enter the village, its light grows dim around other people. An artists studio could be seen to be an attempt to 'catch beams'.

Of course, when we are overwhelmed, we attempt to return to safe ground-when the Deer Woman is confronted with the Moon she runs back to her fathers tent.

However, like many initiatory stories, he's not there. The father and the tent represent her grounding in community, her childhood, her humanity. The container remains, but this time she has to be the negotiator, the elder, the one with wit. Sometimes when making a painting I will occasionally slip into ground so new and unexpected to me, I will panic and paint over it, calming myself with more 'negotiated' gestures. Like the surface of the moon, I don't recognise the landmarks, I can't see any foot prints. So I try and drag the Moon back into my black tent of tradition, comfort and warmth. I too will try and wear out the otherness of the experience into something that can gradually be integrated into a wider body. Try as I might, I’m not an astronaut yet.

She stays safe by a kind of mimicry. It is an invisibility that preserves us in all sorts of situations-at school we imitate the teacher and their 'light of knowledge', and gradually learn to hide our peculiar, idiosyncratic opinions. If they pop out, we become visible and vulnerable, so better to ape what is bigger and brighter than us.

This kind of activity, whilst potentially life saving as we grow, if carried into adulthood can become a castrating and unconscious habit. Of course the Moon is looking for her, not an imitation of himself. But, in this case it bides her time and wears him out.

Of course, there could also be a straight avoidance of intimacy in her hiding. Better to munch a lettuce leaf and practice detachment than get down into the muck of relationship, with the unwieldy shadow that entails.

It could be said that to know the moon is to be connected to thievery. Even his glow is stolen sunlight, reduced 500,000 times. Not content with stealing sunlight, the moon also has a penchant for pilfering colour. The gold of a cornfield or the crimson of a rose are quietly replaced by greys and blues, when moonlight's fingers fall on them. A lover of letters, he steals into books read at dusk-as we read in the gloom, words become indistinct as he scoops them up and carries them off. Night is the time of break-ins, affairs, slow time-ruptures to the agitated clock of light. At the same time however, we know that Moon replaces everything the next day, just as we left it-so he appears a cheeky thief rather than a savage robber. The Moon is also a friend to lovers, his inky sky covers them as a blanket, but his light offers a tiny trail to the sweethearts door. So to draw down the Moon brings a certain wiliness, a kind of cunning.

All this talk of thievery could have scared the Deer Woman-would she want her own colour, her essence so consumed? We see a strong reaction to the bluster of the potential suitor. Can you remember being with someone who cast so much light, yours couldn’t be seen? Like a Hip-Hop star covered in 'Bling' jewellery, the moon so far offers no real relationship, only adoration. The Deer Woman has been alone long enough to know she doesn’t want that. And so it begins. She refuses calls, rain-checks dates, has always just left the party when you arrive. This just intrigues and frustrates you more, until, like the moon, you find yourself frantic and sweating, searching under animal skins and through friends address books trying to track her down.

Just when you are finally turning away, you hear her voice from the top floor of a crowded restaurant and there you go, charging in amongst the tables again. This faint voice is a tiny clue to this being a courting rather than a flat refusal.

Once his grandiosity is lessened, and he is wrapped in the cords of the world, when he even faces something approaching mortality, they really start to communicate.

How can she trust such an energy? Surely better to stay in her glorious isolation. But the Moon Man also offers an image of largeness, flamboyance. His arrival had broken up the steady rhythm of the animals and the frost-he offers an outwards expression, to be seen. In the tangle of our own relationships, the rambunctious partner offers a challenge to our inwardness-we despise but are attracted. In the myth-world, all these characters reside in us, and so we could say that the Deer Woman-solitude loving wilderness being-and the Moon Man-mighty, galaxy shining, tide altering-are trying to find an accord with each other. The Road of Solitude and the Road of Voice have found a crossroads.

All of us sense that many types of love exist. There is that first burst when we feel immortal and beloved in the eye of our sweetheart, huge and extraordinary. It is as if this sensation is propping up some fantastical posture of our own importance. The 'love' is really about what we are experiencing- a sense of connection, support, ardour-still centered around the self in someway. A relationship based on this pattern has roughly a three year life span in my experience. The crunch- time is the possibility of a less self-centered love emerging, something rooted in compassion. Instead of trying to frantically draw your self esteem from your partner, you, like the Deer Woman and the Moon Man, start to appreciate the others separateness, the intense beauty that is theirs alone, that they have desires, dreams, and idiosyncrasies that say nothing of your life. This can be experienced as so mysterious that the other passes out of view forever. The Deer Woman never seems to be caught in the former, that instinct body is always pushing for a place of real appreciation, she's not looking for props.

We know that in many of the old stories there is this primeval pattern of leaving society, journeying into feral zones of trial, isolation and adventure and then the return-bringing back some talismanic knowledge that could only be found in the heavy places. We could say there are three orbiting energies in this story, that make one large body:

The Tribal Concerns (community)-the gut, shoulders, and muscled back of hunting, raising kids, burying the dead, telling the stories of the hearth fire.

The Nomadic Scout (trial)-the curious heart, the tester of boundaries, the ranging eye, the one that slips away from parties.

She Who Calls Down the Moon (return)-The Humming Soul, the magical body, the God-Caller, the Splitter of Blackness.

It is the ingenuity of the human that provokes this offer of twelve names from the moon: flowered barometers of the passage of time into the hard Siberian year. We could also enjoy them as a kind of love letter from the moon man down towards his beloved. It would appear we all have our tundra, deer herd and watching moon.

The question is: Do we know how to dance with the Moon? have we created a pristine tundra for him to appear? Do we ride an animal power that can negotiate his velocity and turn it into something that can feed the whole village?

We thought of an artist's studio as a place to 'catch beams', our own wilderness place where we can attract lonely deities. Forget 'artist' as someone being tied to oil paint or video installations, but that part of yourself that is not snared in insurance documents and loves sitting quietly alone for an anti-social amount of time.

When the attention in our lives is all focused on the First body-the tribal concerns-mortgage, status, how do my peers view me?, then the tundra of the Nomadic heart gets smaller. That tundra literally starts to disappear in front of our eyes, condo's appear in the woods and, one by one, the deer are stillborn.

Any hunter will tell you that much of the action occurs on the periphery of your vision, bushmen will sit for hours stilling themselves to pick out the stealthy animals moving at the edge of what they could see. Neruda could do this with words, pulling a wriggling, startling metaphor from a bush of thought. In the understandable hysteria around climate change, a similar stilling is required, an arching out of the imagination. All these stories of shape shifting are an indication of a healthy psyche, to rupture the consensual into a new constellation. Therapy can be wonderful at causing a kind of magical 'shrinking' of us into our specific neurosis', dislocating our grandeur and god-juice into little childhood boxes. A useful stage perhaps, but we see Taliesin, Cuchulainn, or at least Nikki Giovanni waving distress flairs at this point.

This story points towards huge forces: relationship with a deity, a mythological being, but also having the hard cunning to draw it into manageable chunks that guide the process of living. The animal self and the Lunar self find an accord, an arch of imagination that creates the impossible tension called a good life. Psychology cannot contain mythic thought entirely, but proves a good meadow place between village (everyday) and forest (mythological) consciousness.

Hafiz says;

Drink the ruby wine and look upon the moon-browed face

Contrary to the religion of those, see the beauty of these. (4)

or to remember Yeat's;

The power that awakens the mind of the reformer to contend against the tyrannies of the world is first seen as the star of love or beauty. (5)

The moons word-hoard is subtle and magnificent, not just a shock to the adrenals as much ecological protesting is. It promotes the feeling of a love affair. A good way to start sewing snow boots and oiling your winter coats is to find an object you love and give it twelve names. Not quickly, but slowly, by observation over six months, like Rilke watching that panther at the zoo, its hemmed in, fearsome steps.

Solitude opens the door of longing- longing is invisible-which connects to the Otherworld, which calls down the Lord of the Moon. Our lives appear full of accidental spells, huge consequences for tiny actions years before. A conscious spell, or wish, is contained in this story, for a marriage of the three energies.

When we live in a society that is determined to sate longing instantly, a door to the myth-world closes. Some incubation is lost, our messages are never carried to the tundra and the moon because the village instantly supplies the gift.

My father tells the story of, as a child and aspiring musician, walking the several miles from his house at a weekend to stand at the window of a music shop, gazing at the drum kits he couldn’t afford. For a long stretch his imagination had to construct a kit out of the old sofa he would pummel for hours at a time. But some bird of tenacity was born in his chest, a longing for something just out of reach. Years later, when I wanted to pick up the drums too, he engineered a similar process. From eleven onwards, I had sticks, much encouragement, but no kit of my own. I would walk the two miles from my house up to the creaky, damp old hall where his kit was and practice. After five years of this, I wandered downstairs on my sixteenth birthday and found a very elegant, second-hand kit waiting there, ready to be set up. I'm still playing it, twenty years later.

Something of that yearning has sustained a long and edifying relationship for both of us with the drums, and also a shared language. The long walks we both took, the financial scrapes, the adoration of the appearance and sound of the instrument, the calloused hands, are all devotions to the Court of Longing.

I want to leave this short essay with words of Fran Quinn. It's important to be depressed and alarmed about the things of this world, but tedious to the Gods if we stay there too long. We sense the three orbiting energies all at once in these lines, and take courage.

Now in time-warp speed a whole new testament begins:

dedications, visions, cathedral cities

as death reveals himself to be a joke that lightens our way

to the feast. (6)

Footnotes

1.Cesar Vallejo, Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, Translations by Robert Bly,

John Knoepfle and James Wright, Beacon Press, Boston, 1971, p187

2. Robert Bly, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, HarperPerennial, 1985, p4

3. Dylan Thomas, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, JM Dent, 1952

4. James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In search of Character and Calling, Bantam Books,

1996, p15

5. Hafiz, The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, Translation by Peter Avery,

Archetype Books, 2007, p480

6. Yeats, The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry, 1900

7. Fran Quinn, A Horse of Blue Ink, Blue Sofa Press, 2005, p47