Category Archives: Storytelling

When things fall apart

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There is a story that I love to tell, and it’s a story that I used to open the ‘Singing Over the Bones: Women Writing the Wild’ retreat a couple of weeks ago. (If you’re interested in where it comes from, please have a look at the footnote at the bottom of this post.) It’s a story about what happens when things begin to fall apart, and it goes something like this:

Somewhere, among the cliffs on a rocky coast close to the end of the world, is a deep dark cave. The cave is inhabited by an old woman. No-one knows how long she’s been there, and she’s not even sure herself. She only knows that she doesn’t remember ever having been anywhere else. For all the days of the world she’s been living in that cave, and her major occupation is weaving. You can see her, if you’re lucky enough to happen across that cave – right at the back there, weaving an enormous tapestry which she plans will be the most beautiful weaving in the world. See the complexity of it – the rainbow colours of the threads, some thick and some thin; some soft and some shiny. Right now she’s getting ready to make a fringe for the weaving, and she wants the fringe to be as intricate and unique as the body of the tapestry. And so she’s making the fringe from porcupine quills. That’s right: she loves the idea that such a beautiful piece of craftsmanship will be finished off with quills which are so thorny that they are usually avoided at all costs. She has to flatten the quills to work with them, and so she gnaws on them. Because she has flattened so many quills during the long history of the world, her teeth are little more than stubs.

Over on the other side of the cave is a big fire. They say that fire has been burning in the cave forever; certainly the old woman can’t remember a time when it wasn’t burning, when she hasn’t tended it. And if you look at the shadow of the old woman cast by the fire on the wall of cave, sometimes they say it looks like a giant spider … Spider Woman, some call her; others just call her the Old Woman of the World. But back to the fire: over that fire hangs an emormous black cauldron. And in that cauldron is a soup which contains all of the seeds and all of the herbs and the essence of all the growing and living things in the world. As well as weaving, it’s the old woman’s job to tend to that soup. But sometimes she gets so caught up in her weaving that she forgets about the soup, and it starts to stick to the bottom of the cauldron and it splutters and splashes – and then she jumps up from her weaving and crosses to the other side of the cave to stir the soup so that all the precious seeds and essences of life won’t die.

But there’s another inhabitant of that cave, and he’s biding his time, waiting for the old woman to leave her weaving for a moment. He’s been watching her, you see – watching all the beautiful shiny threads going back and forth, watching and waiting. He’s a big black crow, and his name is Trickster. I wouldn’t say that he was a companion to the old woman, but wherever she goes he seems to be there too, as if they’re bound together somehow, like the weaving and the soup. So when the old woman leaves the weaving to tend to the soup, Trickster Crow flies down from his rocky perch at the back of the cave, and stands in front of the weaving. And then he begins to peck at it. Thread by thread, he begins to unravel it. Faster and faster, picking and pecking, until by the time the old woman turns away from the soup and makes her was back to the tapestry, all that is left is a tangled mess of threads on the floor. And Trickster, of course, pleased with his day’s work, has disappeared back to his hidden perch at the back of the cave.

What does the old woman do now? Does she weep and wail, and sit down by the tangled chaos of her work and think that she’ll never create anything so beautiful again?

She doesn’t. Because as she stands there, staring at the mess in front of her, a particular thread catches her eye. Who knows why it’s that particular thread – but she happens to glance at it, and before she can even begin to think about it, her hands are reaching out and she’s picking up that thread and she’s weaving it back in – and before she even understands what’s happening, a new pattern is beginning to emerge and a new tapestry is taking form. The old woman isn’t thinking about the beautiful work that was lost, or wasting her time getting angry at Trickster Crow. Because the old woman is a weaver, and weaving is what she does. Weaving is what she is for. So on she goes, warp and weft, thread after beautiful thread, weaving a new pattern, until the next time that the soup needs stirring, and Trickster Crow flies down again from his perch. Because Trickster Crow understands this: that if the weaving is ever finished, in all its beautiful perfection, the world will come to an end. And so Trickster keeps on disrupting, and the old woman keeps on weaving, through all the ages of the world, so that even when it seems that everything is falling apart, new patterns are always in the process of becoming, and the world doesn’t come to an end.
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There are reasons why I chose to share that story today, and I’ll share those too, with apologies for the length of this post. Because we all have our times when it seems that things are beginning to fall apart. We see it in the wider world around us, as environmental crises continue to proliferate, and retrenchment and despair seems like the only possible way to go. We see it all too often in the intricacies of our own individual lives too, and there has been a good deal of falling apart in our specific lives on this outer Hebridean croft over the past few weeks. And as we work our way through it all I find myself believing what probably is an obvious thing to others: that those of us who live and work closely on the land see its pain before others do, and feel that pain more deeply. We are feeling that pain for sure, because it’s been a hard spring here, as in so many other places in the country and across the world. Icy temperatures, drought followed by serious rain – the grass hasn’t grown, and the wildflowers which should have bloomed by now are non-existent, and so there are no insects, and the birds are suffering, and it seems likely (in fact, we’re now pretty sure of it) that even though they survived the winter and have been seen out and about on the few good days that we’ve had until recently, we’ve lost our hive of honeybees.

Which would be painful enough in itself, though arguably not surprising – we are very much on the edge of the world, and right on the edge of anything that could be considered to be a viable habitat for bees. But in talking to a neighbour who has kept bees in this region for thirty years or more, we discovered that when he first came here all those years ago, feral honeybees were very common. But there haven’t been any of those for a very, very long time, and now it seems that even the most loved and best cared-for hives can’t survive the sweeping changes in climate over the past few decades which the old-timers are beginning to talk about more and more.

Which would be painful enough in itself, but it’s springtime on the croft, and though every spring brings new life, it also brings sickness and death. And this year has brought more of that than we were ready for. We lost a lamb, from a beautiful Jacob ewe we call Just Jacob – because that’s what she is: nothing more and nothing less, with no particular defining characteristics. Just a good old plain Jacob ewe. We almost lost a wether – one of last year’s castrated males who we are growing on for meat – who fell into a deep ditch and was swept away in the torrential rain two nights ago, but thankfully a watchful neighbour was keeping an eye out and so he survived. But we lost a goose – a delicate white Roman goose, the daughter of the old goose who I hatched from an incubator and hand-reared along with her sibling (who died last year) in the spring of 2006. The dead goose’s name was Blue, because of the colour of her leg ring. She is buried on the croft, in the field where the remaining geese live.

Which would be painful enough in itself – bees, lamb, goose – except that my old golden retriever Frodo, who’s getting on for ten years old now, has been ill for the past week and neither we nor the vet are entirely sure what’s going on. Something abdominal: an ulcer, a tumour … either way, he still refuses to eat and the prognosis isn’t looking good.

Which would be painful enough … except that ten days or so ago we borrowed a lovely and experienced Shetland bull to mate with our two-year-old Kerry heifer, Brighid. Brighid is called Brighid because she arrived on the old Celtic festival of Imbolc – dedicated to the old goddess of the land Brighid, or Bride – over a year ago. She was a tiny wild thing when we brought her here, and we spent many hours getting to know her, spending time with her, calming her, reassuring her, until a year later we found that she was quite happy to have us handle and stroke her, put a halter on her, and lead her through the cattle crush if we needed to confine her for any reason. All of which was necessary because Brighid was to be our milk cow, and in order to milk a cow you really need to be able to get up close and personal without her being fearful or wild – for your own safety as well as hers. So far so good: except that the bull, while mating, went right through the wall of Brighid’s vagina and into her abdomen. A totally freak thing, according to the vet: she was abnormally small. But she now has a large tear in her which can’t be mended and which means that even if she survives (and in spite of looking very ill indeed two days ago, she is now up and around, so she just possibly might) she’ll never be able to mate again or carry a calf, and she’ll always be prone to infection.

A croft with limited grazing has no room for a pet cow. Which means that Brighid will probably, some time in the future, if she does survive, need to be killed and eaten.

Which brings me to the darker side of dealing with the fallout of what happens when things begin to fall apart: the anger. Because curiously, what makes me angrier than anything isn’t the loss of Brighid – or any of the other creatures I’ve been writing about. We are very well aware that people go through worse things, and that we are more fortunate than most. What can make me very angry in the darker times, though, when I’m lying awake in the middle of the night trying to make sense of our lives in the smaller as well as the bigger picture, is the reaction of some others to the idea that we might choose to eat a cow who we have named and loved and nurtured. Those who find it in some way morally repugnant. Who believe that raising animals respectfully for meat is bad to begin with, but that eating a cow who you had planned would live with you forever, who has become your friend, who runs up the field to you when you call her name, is some kind of mortal sin.

I shan’t go into detail about all of that here; I’ll only say that those are people who probably haven’t ever looked into the eyes of a ewe like Just jacob when her dead lamb, who has managed to kill herself in a six-inch-deep ditch with no more than an inch of water in it, is lying there beside her and spent the next two hours pacing the kitchen floor and howling because you wonder whether – if you had only gone out to check on them ten minutes earlier – you might have saved her lamb. Those people haven’t cuddled up to the side of a cow, stroking her beautiful soft black neck in the byre on a winter’s morning and smelling the sweetness of her breath while she’s eating her hay, and planning all of the ways in which you will nevertheless find it necessary to eat her offspring in all the years to come, which is the only way that you could ever possibly afford to keep her alive and milk her. Few of the choices that we make around our food are easy, but I can tell you that for sure they aren’t easy for small farmers, crofters and smallholders, who know their individual animals and nurture them and love and respect them too. But the truth is this: we all must kill something in order to eat and to survive ourselves, and the only real question is where we draw the line. I have heard people argue that it’s ok to eat plants and pulses because ‘they don’t have central nervous systems and so don’t feel pain like we do and so it doesn’t matter’. I personally find that so far beyond curious that I can’t even begin to articulate it, but I have no problem with it, as long as it’s presented as an aesthetic choice rather than a moral absolute. But I do have a problem with people who recoil from all of this messy farming stuff and make to adopt the moral high ground. We will eat the cow we love because in some curious way that we cannot explain to people who don’t live in the deeply connected-to-animals way that we do, we feel that it offers her more respect. But whatever we do, you can be sure that when the time comes we will weep, and we will sing over her beautiful elegant bones. She will be buried (whatever is left of her) in a special place that we will visit, just like the place where we buried the dead otter: the place to which sometimes we take a pebble from the beach, or a piece of seaweed as an offering to sweeten his long dark sleep with seadreams.

I can do anger, when things begin to fall apart. But anger isn’t the solution to death, any more than it is the solution to life. It is all too easy, when things begin to fall apart, to rail at the universe or get maudlin about the fragility of life over a couple of glasses of wine. We’ve both been there this week, just as we have at other times in our lives. But ultimately, that’s self-indulgent. It’s all too easy also to give up, retreat, retrench – to go back to buying horsemeat burgers from Tesco’s, or lentils and beans imported to this small salty island from half a planet away. That’s self-indulgent too – and what’s maybe worse, it’s defeatist.

What I think is hardest, but somehow truest, and necessary, and a choice that can only really be made out of love (even if it is also sprinkled with a few grains of sheer stubborn bloody-mindedness) is to stop still for a moment, and stand, and take a good long look at the chaotic mess on the floor. To focus then on just one thread, no matter how tangled or poor. To reach out and pick it up, believe in it, and use it to begin to weave a beautiful new pattern from scratch.

And to do this because whatever else you imagine you might be you are above all a weaver, and so, come what may – even when it seems that things are falling to pieces and Trickster Crow is lurking at the back of your cave just waiting for the next opportunity to pick the threads of your life apart – all you can really ever do is weave.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

The bones of the story come from a Lakota (Sioux) tale (see Spider Woman’s Web, by Susan Hazen-Hammond, Penguin 1999; I’ve also seen Michael Meade use it). The main difference between my story and the original is that there is no Trickster crow in the original, but a black dog who lives with the old woman and is a kind of companion to her. However, it seemed to me that in these difficult days Trickster was an important idea to bring into the story. Trickster disrupts, but out of his disruption new forms arise. For more on Trickster, see the brilliant Trickster Makes This World, by Lewis Hyde.

Waiting for Everyman: some thoughts on building community

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Waiting here for Everyman —
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go I understand
Waiting here for Everyman —
Don’t ask me if he’ll show — I don’t know
Make it on your own if you think you can
Somewhere later on you’ll have to take a stand
Then you’re going to need a hand …
Jackson Browne, For Everyman. Watching this solo acoustic version at the Amnesty International Concert/Secret Policeman’s Ball on video is higly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr-hqAjdNrU

I first learned about community when I was sixteen. I didn’t learn it from my own family, or from the people who lived around me in our rundown part of town: I learned it from a diverse group of mostly crusty and hard-bitten alcoholics in the recovery room of the local alcoholism information centre, where my mother then worked. For the best part of a year, while my schoolfriends were out at the local disco or youth club (yes, we had such anachronisms in the mid-70s…) I spent every spare moment hanging out in that room, where I received the education of my life. Quite apart from the more practical aspects of that education (I can still beat most people I’ve ever met at darts) what I predominantly learned from that curiously mixed group of dustbinmen, itinerants, steel workers, priests, doctors and ex-Army majors – men and women, of all ages, shapes, sizes and many different nationalities – was how to hold together a community. Specifically: how it could be possible that this diverse group of people could empathise with and actively support people whose social and family background and view of the world was vastly different from their own – people who they would almost certainly dislike intensely if they met them in another context. I learned that much of what made that possible derived from the simple fact that the group of people who gathered together in that room for support were required above all to listen. From this simple act of open listening they grew to understand what had made the people they were listening to as they were, to literally understand where they were coming from. That act of compassionate listening was possible in good part because the listeners had almost always had their own experience of the extremity and the pain that was being shared by the speaker.

I witnessed some of the most astonishing feats of moral and physical support, empathy, compassion, and simple grace during that year. I witnessed more inspiring human behaviour from this group of people – people who would be considered by much of our ‘civilised’ modern society to be down-and-outs who are beneath their notice – than I have ever witnessed in supposedly much more ‘civilised’ situations during the decades since. I learned more than I have ever learned about caring, supportive community in a situation where the members of that community were not only as different from each other as can be, but were often difficult, challenging, combative, filled with anger, pain, memories of abuse … I learned above all, and have insisted upon it ever since, that no matter what horrors we may sometimes inflict upon ourselves, others, and the wider world, human beings are capable of astonishing feats of courage and compassion in the most unlikely circumstances.

Nevertheless, I’ve worked also with groups of people where the practice of healthy community can be very much harder to build. Back in the mid-2000s in the midst of my narrative psychology practice I was working with a number of organisations in the field of conflict resolution based on storytelling. One of the people who inspired me greatly (and whose ideas I still use in current related work) is Okanagan writer, educator and activist Jeanette Armstrong. Here’s a quote from an article in which she talks about the process of traditional Okanagan decision-making in the community:

‘… in our decision-making process we have a word, enowkinwixw, which demands four things from us, and they all have equal weight. These are the needs of the individual in being an individual, the needs of a family in being a family, the needs of community in being a community, and the needs of the living relatives on the land. We use that process continuously in an informal way in our community. We can also engage this construct in a formal way. Robert’s Rules of Order, for instance, is thought of as a democratic construct in which the understanding of democracy is that the majority have the decision-making power. From my perspective, embedded in that construct is an adversarial approach. It sets up a construct in which there is always going to be conflict. There are always going to be those people who are in the minority and those who are in the majority and the subsequent oppression of the minority. I understand that is probably the easiest way to do things. But in terms of looking at what the outcome is in this country and on the land and globally, it seems to me that, systemically, we might want to rethink how that works. From our native point of view, the minority voice is the most important voice to consider. It is the minority voice that expresses the things that are going wrong, the things we’re not being responsible toward, the things that we’re being aggressive about or trying to sweep under the carpet or shove out the door. Our leaders would say that if we ignore the minority voice, it will create conflict in our community, and this conflict will create a breakdown that’s going to endanger all of us….’

Jeanette then goes on to describe how ‘speakers’ are elected to represent each of these four ‘participants’ in the decision-making process. So, for example, there is one who speaks for the land, another is elected to speak for the community … and so on: ‘All four of those components within community participate in a decision-making process. The process becomes not only participatory, but inclusive. This gives people a deeper understanding of the variety of components that are required to create harmony within community.’

For those of you who are involved in groups, organisations, communities who are struggling to work through personality issues and other conflicts, I strongly recommend reading Jeanette’s work, some of which can be found around the internet, and also in a number of very fine books.

Martin Shaw on why we can’t just throw out the old stories while searching for the new

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My first posts on this blog at the beginning of last year related to my concerns about increasing numbers of calls by various groups and individuals around the world for ‘new stories’. Don’t misunderstand: those calls for new stories sprang from an important place: the notion that the stories which we tell ourselves about our current ways of living need to be replaced with something more authentic, wild and free. Absolutely. But there are two other ideas that are often smuggled into those calls for new stories: (1) the notion that you can change the entire meta-narrative of a culture from top-down (which I blogged about at some length here: http://reenchantingtheearth.com/2012/03/20/more-on-metanarratives/) and (2) the idea that our old myths and stories – especially our old European myths and stories – are outworn and outdated and no longer have relevance in any conception of a new and better future. Having worked with precisely those myths and stories for many many years now, I’ve seen their power and believe that throwing them away would be both tragic and misguided.

Martin Shaw, a mythteller whose work I admire deeply and who has written for the magazine I edit, EarthLines, expresses this thought as deeply and poetically as only he can in a recent blog post which you can read in full here: http://www.theschoolofmyth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-old-stories-why-would-we-need-them.html. The long quote which follows below is the heart of Martin’s blog post:

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It is hard for us to imagine the time when human language was primarily just a sound in a wider polyphony of earthy expression – the splashing brook, the patterning of bird song. Hard for us to hear human sound without drawing on the resource of visualizing letters if needed. The inside of our heads has changed dramatically in this regard. This apparent sophistication has crafted a speech that can seem to sit uneasily in the panorama of the wild, with its burbles, chirrups and thunder. Human language can seem like the voice of a guardian or overlord, rather than the confirming murmurs of a being placed absolutely within this textured web.

Some distance away the leisurely bellow of long horn cattle gently re-orientates a calf back to their emerging story of the trip to the watering hole. Watching it all, the mountain Caer Idris holds the shadow of scudding clouds gracefully in its lap. Caer is also a good thief, capturing differing colors as the day progresses, sometimes golden crested, sometimes muddy red and green – the mountain is telling a story of the value of shape-shifting for anyone ready to behold it. These stories are the legacy of time bent open to the archaic hymns of the land. But this non-usual language, this fragrant cluster of apple-blossom words, how can it be spoken of to the rinky-dink world, the world we can see glittering below in nearby Barmouth?

Certain myths, certain stories, are a bridge to the muscled thoughts of the living world. These thoughts we could call ‘wild mythologies’.

Some stories these days do not offer that avenue of perception. Like genetically modified crop, their intrinsic design is so shaken up, so bent only to allegory, that this root-connection is lost. Their taste is briefly sweet but lacks texture and weight. Nuance is ironed out. If the hand of the human community is too impacted, then story becomes only pastoral, an affirmation of what we already know. We don’t need stories like these. Many of us long for the prophetic, the unruly, the associatively spacious, the ones that awake our animal soul to pad lonesome tracks in sweet dusky meadows at the edges of our imagination.

At the same time, stories gathered from the wild places, if authored and spoken by just one individual, will lack the psychic weight and difficult edges that many myths and fairy tales hold – even ones gathered between the pages of a book. Receptivity to nature’s humors is the great opening, the essential vehicle, but the passing of the story through time and community also enables it heft, maturation, authority, the hard yards of living between the horizontal and divine worlds.

Having sat round hundreds of campfires for twenty years hearing powerful, truly deep stories pour from the mouth of returning vision questers – stories ablaze – i have wept at their mythic truth, but have not quite heard a myth. A subtle distinction, but important. They carry the ‘I’ elegantly, but not always the ‘We’ that the great stories reveal. The storied images have not passed through enough lives, communities and culture. They are intensely beautiful rivers, but they are not the ocean.

It was the waiting tribe, many years ago, that would help the initiate dig the tributary that took their river to the bigger tribal soul-story. The ancient stories, rather like our vast, majestic seas, may have occasional temporary pollutants, but are not to be abandoned, but cherished, worked with, carried, honored. They carry silvery shoals of insight, slow moving crab wisdoms that survive at great depth and under intense pressure, many limbed aquatic revelations that give themselves up for our nets, time and time again.

On one level myth is not really about ‘a long time ago’, but a kind of vitalized, ritual present, but at the same moment, the opening up to that heightened liminality through many centuries and communities both deepens and broadens the power of the images. Repetition has enormous weight. So, although the myths usually refers to eternal concerns, the repeated practice of invoking that very ‘timelessness’ is one of the elements that, on the human side at least, gathers resonance and psychic vigor to the telling, like moss around a stone. It’s very mysterious.

Although some would rather be done with myths and folktale and produce, almost overnight, new stories of harmonious and stress-free relatedness to the living world, it is like trying to out run your own shadow. Naive. All those power games and paradoxes that myths and fairy tales engage with – they keep revealing to us difficult inner-material, material that comes with the labour of being a human – a human with a history of betrayal, urbanity and a tricky lower intestine- and not always the pristine mind of the elk or indigo bunting. That’s useful as we turn our head towards wild intelligence. Its rather domestic grit reminds us of the village we come from as well as the forest we long for. Human initiation always calls forth dwelling in the crossroads of both.

With a great deal more investment and community rather than solitary focus on wilderness, those individual stories from the wild may indeed collude, over time, into something lasting, with broad shoulders that can carry the wider soul-story again. But i balk at the notion that we must choose one over the other. The great stories, the ones that challenge, mystify and wake us up, if they have origination points at all, will come from these earthy eruptions, and to this very day contain vast windows to the Otherworld and the Animal Powers. But, like us, some contain the soot of city streets and contemporary agendas garlanded around their feathered neck. I don’t think they would be so hard to loosen up, to get their wingspan free of the oiled and inked page. The stooping hawk catches the dawning and is gone.

It is myths like these that carry the dreamtime of what came to be called Europe, bedded down in the blue green forests and the nomad lines from India and the Caucasus Mountains, its rich loam carrying the loose wild fields of pagan thought clear of the accelerated logos of Descartian advance. Things survived, down there, in the spidery mossy gleam of the hearth fire tellings, compacted images of such animistic intelligence that they send brilliant shivers of recognition continually into the orbit of anyone that gets near them. They are Yeats’ Wild Swans of Coole.

So do we just tip toe away from this complex inheritance, and rattle off endless cut and paste ’new’ myths after an afternoons brisk walking on the Brecon Beacons? I think this would prove to have little sustenance. It would lack authenticity. We need the experiential, the great un-shackling, a loosening, but bardic thinking would entail that encounter then challenging and deepening the existing mythos, not abandoning it completely. This is where study arrives. We won’t get into heaven without it.

Restorying the World: Listening to the Land’s Dreaming, and The Bear Outside

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At this time of year our work on the croft is so intense that finding time to keep up with writing is close to impossible. And so I offer you this article, published in the May Issue of EarthLines Magazine. It includes an article from me called ‘Listening to the Land’s Dreaming’, and a beautiful new story, ‘the Bear Outside’, by the talented Tom Hirons, also known as Coyopa.

Please CLICK HERE to view the article.

Making new core myths

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I’ve been re-reading Sean Kane’s superb book, The Wisdom of the Mythtellers, prior to a performance this coming weekend at the Carrying the Fire festival in Biggar with Alastair McIntosh. (The session is called ‘Re-storying the Earth’, with a focus on myths from the Outer Hebrides; I’ll be posting parts of it here when I get back.)

Kane is an expert in oral traditions and philosophy, as well as being the nephew of acclaimed Irish-Canadian storyteller Alice Kane. One of the subjects he discusses in the book is the issue of where core myths come from, how they change and develop, and how new core myths are formed. As those of you who’ve read the early posts in this blog will know, I’m always concerned when I hear groups and individuals call for ‘new stories for our changing world’ etc etc that these calls don’t take into account (and often seem completely oblivious to) the rich store of knowledge that’s been collected and interpreted by ‘practising academics’ (academic/storytellers) like Kane and the redoubtable Robert Bringhurst, who have studied the development of myth and story in many different cultures for many decades now (Bringhurst specialising, of course, in translating and disseminating the poetry and myths of the Haida people). There’s a large body of evidence relating to the issue of how stories work. Kane makes it clear that not just any old story is going to hack it:

‘A new story [may be] released into the social repertoire … But the release cannot be sudden … The story has to be told and retold until it passes the test of narrative art, and then the further test of the society’s repertoire of acceptable mythological experience. The story has to conform to the patterns of narrative pleasure and the patterns of being in a society. Only then is the society ready to move mythically in the direction indicated by the story. Even then, the society shifts its overall mythological memory subtly, not in a way that disrupts its hierarchy of narrative experience.’

Often, the fact that there is even such a thing as ‘narrative art’ is ignored; often it’s assumed that creating a culture’s ‘myths to live by’ is really no different from sitting down and writing a short story. But, as Alan Garner reminds us:

‘The difference between legend and modern storytelling [he's talking about writing fiction in the latter case] is that the modern story is a conscious fiction, whereas the legend … was, in its origins, an attempt to explain a reality.’

Stories are some of the basic constituents of the world – at least, of the way we perceive the world and our place in it. They deserve to be treated with respect. In future on this blog I’ll be focusing on the work some other modern mythtellers who have studied this very special form of ‘narrative art’, and who are working to revitalise our own lost myths.

Sharon