Cista Mystica, Dartmoor, Dartmoor (2025)

22/06/2025

On alchemy:

Its beauty lies just in its materialised language which we can never take literally. I know I am not composed of sulphur and salt, buried in horse dung, putrefying and congealing, turning white or green or yellow, encircled by a tail-biting serpent, rising on wings.

And yet I am!

James Hillman

Hillman’s great hero, Henry Corbin, said that where there is only logic you will find a place strewn with dead angels. Corbin an academic and mystic, Hillman a brilliant shrink (as he would put it), both believed in a world ensouled and personal fidelity to an art-making that reached out and touched such vivacity.

Today in Bologna while nursing a double espresso I saw a beggar slip by the window of my comfortable, air-conditioned cafe. Something was wrong with her arm and her face was covered in Kabuki-like white paint, she rattled her tin and alarmed tourists who hurriedly stuffed coins into it, before she scuttled down a side alley into whatever Underworld she had arisen from. And I don’t say it lightly – the Underworld word – it was like something rearing up from the down below into this world of lofty Renaissance ideas. She was just the kind of person who would be making a bee line for Jesus. He never neglects to address the Underworld of his times, the leprosy of his times, the dementedness of his times. I’m not sure I can always say the same.

As you may remember from last week, here in Bologna I am running a parallel narrative of arriving in Rome almost twenty-five years before. Then a young painter with half an instinct for a Christianity I hadn’t yet encountered, but that I’ve now articulated to some degree in my essay on The Merrie. As I wistfully did the maths I realised that twenty-five years in the future I would be round about seventy. That gave me a sepia-tinged, soft, happy-sad feeling of the passing of time. This quickly drained away when I realised I was still terrible at adding up.

Eighty baby, eighty.

Ok, better make the most of it then.

I’d left Rome and gone into tent life for four years. It was about billhooks, cords of rope, rain on canvas, rabbit for the pot. All virtual social communication was handled by an alchemically red phone box on the main road between nearby villages. I had plenty of books to read, and the endless visionary gawp of watching weather bound through the valley below the tent – squalling rain, stuttered snowstorms, and a furtive sun that gradually turned my canvas from monastic black to a rather washed out grey. I could drive, and had – mercifully – friends, I worked a bit, so it was a tempering in solitude but not complete isolation. And the only way to talk fulsomely about what was happening inside of me was myth. Anything else was a little feeble. Like Hillman’s example from the beginning of today’s essay, I knew I wasn’t a mystic knight living in a forest in the middle of a great quest, but at the same time I knew I WAS...

Bologna Part Two & An Italian Fairy Tale

15/06/2025

When I travel I like to have a word or idea to be thinking about as I go, it’s my crossword puzzle. And this week it’s an old Sufi saying:

Alchemy is the sister of prophecy.

Alchemy. A common word these days, but with all sorts of implications. I’m not thinking of the external technologies of the medieval gold-maker, more alchemy as images of the soul working-on-itself, that precarious road that bubbles and hisses and submerges and then finally transforms lead to gold. These stages, both alarming and sublime, that as a Christian gradually lead one into experience of God. A theosis that walks – with grace – from the raw to the cooked. Alchemy is a very lively metaphor in the way I’m thinking about it. And for me, metaphor is not a waspish belittlement but a place for imagination to live. They are alive with association, that’s the point of them.

Alchemy can be described in a couple of sentences or puzzled at for a lifetime. I’m cautious about what I’m doing here, as when we think we understand something we tend to dismiss it. I teach it occasionally on post-graduate courses, and even the little I know has taken many years to absorb. Please note: I’m not advocating a turn to Gnosticism or slowly poisoning ourselves on fumes in a hut in an Italian forest. But I don’t think contemplating this saying will do us any harm whatsoever.

Real prophecy – a discerning of the spirits of the age – will likely require the fluidity of alchemy, the holy-spiritness of movement to accommodate its diagnosis. When you have only prophetic proclamation and no response you have all rock and no roll. So prophecy gets at the deeper truth of circumstance that-in-turn provokes changes in our inner condition (this could be seen as alchemical movement) as a response. Prophecy is a doing word. We have to be still enough to discern the prophetic, and open enough to the change it can provoke. No openness and I just tend to create my next set of panicky rules and regulations.

So I’m thinking about prophecy as an unearthing of this is what’s going on. The big reveal. Also we have prophecy in the plural; the pile up of layered realities that take a form solid enough to finally be spoken in to. And prophecy also as warning rather than a slam-dunk immutable future. Prophecy as prompt for possibility. Sometimes. Sometimes it is a ship crashing into an iceberg, two minutes before. I don’t know if prophecy is always as dramatic as the association of a message from God, more something a little less grandiose, a sober joining of the dots. Maybe an angel assisted the thought process.

And just for the record, a frequency that’s entirely prophetic is exhausting and finally hard to build on. You need the pastoral too.

I’ll come back to this later.

Bologna: The Red City

I’ve been travelling this month, and am now in Bologna. Not Canada, or Ireland, or Devon or Cornwall, or Bath or London, but Italy. A city known as being red (the colour of the houses), fat (the consequence of the delicious food), and bright (having an ancient University). So I become a chubby, sun-burnt guy with an overactive mind. What else is new? I hear you mutter.

Alchemy is the sister of prophecy: maybe it’s also a thought that the more alchemically aware of our own inner-nature we are, the more accurate our read when we lick our finger and to see which way the wind blows. Outer reflecting inner.

Bolonga is a great place to be thinking about such things. Everywhere is murals, mosaics, shadowed churches, flickering candles, sandy coloured backstreets leading to unexpected, leafy gardens...

A Fulfilment In Bologna

08/06/2025

Hello friends, just before we set sail for today’s EPIC, I wanted to let you know of five stand-alone weekends I’m leading in Devon, UK, over the next year. Usually they are tied into attendance of an entire programme, and, although the weekends are certainly connected, they can also be experienced as stand-alone gatherings.

THE SINGING BONE: Brand New Weekends 2025/26

September 5th – 7th 2025
The Hazel Bush & The Magic Hour
A weekend exploring the mysteries and grandeur of the Celtic and Arthurian traditions. From the Invasion Tales of Ancient Ireland to the magic of Deirdre of the Sorrows, through to lesser-known gems of the Arthurian cannon. This is a masterclass into a world filled with fairies, quests and adventure. Alongside the stories will be readings from bardic sources and some exploration of the Irish philosopher John Moriarty.

November 7th – 9th 2025
The Red, The Black & The White
The genius of the fairy tale – a gathering dedicated to the compact vitality of this wonderful folk tradition. Martin will be revisiting some of his favourite stories while introducing some that are quite new to him. What separates a fairy tale from a myth from a folk tale or epic? Alongside the stories, Martin will unpack classic motifs and themes from the tradition.

December 12th – 14th 2025
Wild Christ (With Rowan Williams, Mark Vernon, Natasha Kozaily, Heather Pollington)
A weekend of Christian Wonder Tales. From stories of the early saints through to Joseph venturing through the Underworld in Egypt, to tales of Yeshua himself, what do these amazing stories tell us about how to live? Martin brings thirty years of exploring myth and story to the immensity and mystery of the Christian tradition.

February 6th – 8th 2026
Bearskin
A gathering for men, exploring myths and stories that underpin masculine consciousness in its most elevated form. We will learn from myth and folk tale of the Chivalric tradition, and the concept of Noblesse Oblige. This brings much of Martin’s previous work with Robert Bly, Malidome Somé, Daniel Deardorff and others into new ground. What does mythopoetic work have to say to us in the 21st Century?

March 27th – 29th 2026
Red Bead Woman
Our final weekend is to follow an ecological thread into the heart of the mythic. We explore stories that talk about a world that thinks in myth. These are tales that invigorate us with narratives far from the city gates, that are strange and redemptive, enabling us a sophisticated kind of hope in troubled times.

Consider having a peer over at: https://drmartinshaw.com/courses/the-programme/

*
Into the West

It is a rain-flogged labyrinth of a haunt, gold-grey, ridged with un-dry stone walls and the smallest wee fields you ever saw. And it must have been some kind of anguish to cart seaweed from the ocean up to the fields. Bless those sturdy donkeys of olde. The salty mass tipped shuddering out amongst the stones. In the field corners even now, cow turds are piled up to dry and become fire-lighters. No one under forty wants to handle the dung anymore.

There’s a big emptiness on the island in the middle of winter. Could quite give you thump if you’re not used to being on your own. I walk in circles around my digs a bit, agape at the views, then locate the shop to panic-buy bacon, soda bread, eggs, coffee, butter and the like. Getting dark I peer through the windows of Flaherty’s bar and see there’s more than a few in there, re-arranging the tastebuds of their afternoon to a more positive perspective. Soon, soon but not yet. I want to relish in the aloneness before pints. I need a few more days just be buffeted about by the new-ancientness of this place. I need the discomfort I know will come.

I have something a little dreamlike for you, even more than usual. It’s a long audio recording, taken from my sit on the smallest Aran Island Inis Oirr, about eighteen months ago. This is a recording exclusively for the dear parish of Beasts & Vines. It’s a strong experience listening to this again, and wondering if I’ve been a good custodian of everything that came to me during those days. It was rather tough - raw in its disclosure - but I’d never trade such a journey.

I still find myself talking about certain moments from that time: flying over on a little plane after days of storm, finding the chapel of St Gobnait, the endless dreams, the sheer oomph of the wintering weather, the deep quiet. I’m grateful I wrote so much down. I was being led, led without much in the way of handrails...

https://martinshaw.substack.com/p/into-the-west-b64

And Brand New Gatherings

03/06/2025

Hello friends, I’ve been looking forward to jumping back into Part Two of the fairy tale Bearskin with you this week. As you read this I will have been on the road to Dublin after a day celebrating John Moriarty down at Kells Priory near Kilkenny. Sheltering under Moriarty’s Lakota Star Blanket. The very heat of life had drifted out of the turf by that point in the evening. Thank you dear blanket for keeping the storyteller warm.

Also – a note that I’m in Cornwall this Tuesday on the live Blindboy podcast, in Truro. Final tickets, if there are any, here: https://www.hallforcornwall.co.uk/whats-on/the-blindboy-podcast-live/

Blindboy is a very interesting Irish thinker. An atheist, but with a great love of myth and folklore, it should be a good meet I think.

*

Bearskin (Part Two)

We remember Bearskin (Part One) returned from a war and was not allowed back into the village. He encounters an old initiator who tells him not to cut his hair or wipe the tears from his eyes for seven years. The lad fights a bear then wears his fur, with gold always in the pockets of a green coat the old fella gave him.

For the first few years Bearskin seemed a rather odd-looking fellow, but that was about it. But after four years wandering, and with all that hair growing and all those tears pouring he was someone people tended to avoid. Still, he stuck to the mandate, and spent most of the gold in his pocket giving it away to other people. The poor, heartbroken and lost. They were his people. The last in the queue. No one told him to do this, the Old Man had never suggested it, it came to him to do so as his journeying continued. Sometimes he would pass old soldiers on the road and they would nod, as if in some strange way they understood what he was doing..
https://martinshaw.substack.com/publish/post/164162354

Orthodoxy As The Old Idea

25/05/2025

Hello there! I’m back from travelling, wide eyed and jet lagged, but grateful and revitalised none-the-less.

An account of the whole thing was lovingly put together by friend and organiser Ian MacKenzie and can be read here: https://themythicmasculine.substack.com/p/from-bearskin-to-wild-mountain-recapping

I was met by many kindnesses and an awful lot of good people, some of whom Ian mentions by name at the bottom of his article. Thank you all so very much. Without you none of this happens. Ian also mentioned a fairytale, Bearskin, which I want to bring you fresh from the oven.

This is a story – new to me – that I started telling on the Dartmoor World Tour last month, and found itself stowed away and emerging on Salt Spring Island last week. This was a day event for men, but I’d hope most of us can find a way into the story. Bearskin carries perennial themes: sacrifice, community, abandonment, generosity, fidelity, healing, more than a hint of alchemy here and there. There’s a great deal in this small commentary that I don’t mention, things taking time to surface, and I’ll be working on the story for a short book over the coming months.

The thing I remember most of that day was that I came back with even more love and appreciation for the women in my life. It was healthy. As a father of a daughter, I have an equal interest in the subtleties of a women’s mythic life, but this story has landed on me.

I also want to start to think into something that’s going on in the Orthodox church at the moment – the happy arrival of many young fellers, something I’ve not seen before – and I always use stories to ensure my manner of approach rests on something solid. I hardly need to tell you, of all people, that. An article, one of a few you can find, speaks to what may be happening: Is Eastern Orthodoxy the Next Big Thing for Young Men?

The article suggests being ‘nominally Christian’ has become an exhausted idea, that Orthodoxy’s stability is attractive, as is its attention to focus and discipline. That it’s both structured and surprisingly open to mystery.

For me at least, it’s calling to what is beautiful in men, women too. This is a long - but I hope useful - post.

Part Two is next week.

*

Bearskin (Part One)

Once upon a time in a far-off land there was a war. Many of the men from the village left, some never returned. Little word was sent back to the settlement, and it remained desperate for news. Finally the war was over and those that had survived were sent home. For most this was a scene of great celebration, but for one young man this was not the case. He had loved the camaraderie of war, the clear aim for victory, the gift of his battle-skill. He was a good warrior, not a good farmer. So when the time came for the long walk to the village he rather dragged his steps. Rather than excitement he felt filled with grief for his fallen allies, and wondered quite how he would handle peacetime.

When he returned, his brothers met him at the entrance to the settlement and told him his parents were dead and there was no place in his old life. There was no welcome home. So the young feller took to walking, never staying long in one place. He trudged around the land, cold and friendless, threadbare and penniless. Discharged.

One day he came to a circle of trees...

https://martinshaw.substack.com/p/bearskin

Calling To What Is Beautiful In Men, (Part One)

18/05/2025

Greetings my friends, from the deep hills of misty Canada. I’ve been up in the wilds in the kind of tent I lived in back in my youth. During the day I teach Parzival (over four days), at night I retreat up to my lair. Last night on the mulchy trail I saw something huge and un-named slip past me and into the trees. Turns out there’s bears in this forest.

To start us off – the best part of two hours of conversation with myself and the wonderful Paul Vander Klay. At a peak moment there was an abrupt power cut, so we continued several days later. Powercuts follow me around I’m afraid. But this was a great deal of fun and filled with sparks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGwFyvqapII&t=1s

Letting in Spring

Another spring. Another influx of eruptive life that is so arresting in its beauty I have no choice but to shut a fair degree of it down. If I am thirsty don’t bring me the ocean, says Tomas Tranströmer, a drop will do. Driving home the other night I had no choice but to gape at the purpled sash of evening settling on the River Dart as every conceivable bud and blade seemed to reach towards the heavens, bashful secrets no more. Nothing bashful about spring. Outrageous, full scale, Cecil B. DeMille level opulence. Night and her animals.

When I wake and see that unrelenting bank of blue just an inch under my heavy curtains, it’s likely a day I will rarely leave the house. This may seem mystifying: most of my friends will already be splashing around in the brook or skimping about in swimming trunks and heading to the coast. And why shouldn’t they? It’s not as if sunshine is in relentless display here in England.

St Brigid

I think of St Brigid and her Marian Yes-ness to the world. Feeding the hungry bacon from the backstep as a kid, wishing Jesus could have a lake of ale when thirsty on the cross, breaking the news in church to the startled Irish that Christ was even-better-than-a-poem! Bridgid is a bright step into the spring, she’s winking at the blackbirds and beckoning me out.

C’mon wee man. Don’t be late for God’s parade!

I’m not rude: I’ll open the back door for a little while, salute the sun with my cup of coffee, but then turn and inevitably go to my perch at the dinner table where I tend to write. I like to hear life going on around me, but I don’t need to be part of it a great deal of the time. All this sacrificed sunshine is squeezed into my books and I don’t regret a moment of it. Sometimes you may touch a page and catch a little warmth.

There are places round here that are just like they were when I was a child. That’s lovely, and can also be a little confusing. I forget which century I’m living in, which is hard for a man whose foreground consciousness is myth, and creeping around in the background is what we normally call daily life. That made my lonely when I was younger but not now. There’s others with the same creative jurisdiction.

When I write, find me a room without much view. Turned to the wall is fine. I’m a rather low-stimulus character these days. A good cup of coffee, a storm, a visitor early evening, phew, that’s living.

I flourish in autumn. I make sense in autumn. The chill walloping in from the North Sea, talk of Christmas, the first snowflake on my Donegal tweed. The red beer, the deerhound by the fire, snoozing with a book. A cigar in the yard watching Orion hopefully lope the autumnal sky. I don’t seem nearly as situated in July.

But I’m paying more attention to the spring this year...

https://martinshaw.substack.com/p/letting-in-spring

What You Say And How You Feel

27/04/2025

Hello my friends. The following thoughts have dropped slowly, and with effort. Some of these words will have an echo from previous posts over the last three years. The artist Heather Pollington is someone I admire, and whom I’ve invited to respond with both images and text (her writing will be next week). If you like it, please consider sharing this. Maybe some element of it could grow in your life. It’s where I want to focus my work. I just know I have to get these words in one place and stand back.

This is the passion of a wayward Orthodox Christian in the western wilds of England. I’m attending to the relationship between my crumpled, leafy home and this extraordinary Middle Eastern mystery religion that arrived the best part of two thousand years ago. The dynamic interplay of that encounter is closer than we think. Five years ago I staggered out of a Dartmoor forest at dawn having met someone I really did not want to face. The Ancient Good. After a good deal of time sitting, listening, repenting, laughing, this is what I’d wish to communicate. This is the joyful labour arising from the experience. The invitation of it, not, I hope, an imposition. Something with more imagination, more reality, and ultimately more freedom under its wing. The fruit that could grow will take far more than just myself tending it. Something is stirring. A lamp is getting lifted.

You can listen to this post as audio (below), or read on for the full essay…

*

The slow revolution of the months sufficed them. Their year was made up of seasons and festivals and holy days, Storm Jameson

God’s Outlaws

So, the Merrie. What is it?

These are mad times. Disorientating. Madder than usual, and that’s saying something. With religion so frequently politicised, with our screens issuing peril and deadening opportunities for distraction the Merrie could be easily dismissed as a dream, but it’s one with a spade attached. And it’s not a solo slog, it bangs along with others. It reaches out towards the textures of God’s earth. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins: It’s not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses…to lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but the man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too.

I recall the description of bold Robin Hood’s gang described as ‘merrie’. I’ve always thought of Marian’s lot as God’s outlaws. I wouldn’t mind being an outlaw for God. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, Romans 12:2. We could renew our jaded heads by encountering the Ancient Good. A creaturely culture of prayer, a capacity to both recognise and make beauty.

This Is Not A Re-Enactment Fair

Merrie has elements of pre-reformation Christianity. The creativity of a ceremonial life that wove forest and church together. But importantly it’s not something to be fixating about in history books. This is much a future imagining than nostalgia for something passed. True though, it’s a word with the bells of a village ringing deep within it. It values one or two gathered together likely more than a megachurch. It has joying in it. A lively spark of storytelling, of vigils in the forest, of understanding that Christianity has a profound initiatory core, of a circling liturgical year which involves the revival of old saints, pilgrimages, mystery plays and ceremony, of being a priest-gardener to the land you live on.

It's not a cult, it could be something of a learning community. It may just be this essay. It may end up a battered little book to carry in your pocket. That would be a fine ambition. But as was recently said to me: You aren’t going to stumble upon this, you have to make it. It’s a listening: to scripture, liturgy, nature and a lively Christian baptism of the imagination. Tonally my description is English, but the essentials would work anywhere. With a bit of pluck this should land wherever you live. We take great inspiration from the First Nations Orthodox of Alaska as we do the plucky saints of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. This isn’t nationalism.

The Fertile & Generous Open

The Merrie is about how to absorb the impossible mandates of Christ. I think we need more space. To abide in the glorious nervous breakdown of what he’s saying. To be under the oaks for days at a time, belly tight to the shamanic drum-thump of Mark’s gospel, at others to feel the mammal warmth of the lit candles and the canticled chant of the gathered parish. There’s pale bones of consciousness stretched between such locations and Jesus says: perfect, keep stretching. I can’t draw him with one line, he goes where the Pharisee in me disapproves.

David Benjamin Blower says, and says truly: This figure whose greatness became immediately mythical was continually giving out tools with which to unmake whatever towers may be erected in his name. Within every saying there is a trapdoor that empties out all the power, leaving a fertile and generous open.

Amen the fertile and generous open. That’s our God there, the strangest of the lot...

FULL POST & AUDIO:

A Reliquary For Saints Yet To Come

20/04/2025

Happy Easter one and all! Let all conceivable rocks be rolled away, let us all see keenly into the nature of things with a Magdalene eye. I write from Devon a day just before today – as it were – where the clouds have gathered, the burner has been rebooted and I can neither confirm nor deny an electric blanket may have been utilised in the creation of this essay. Berry-large rain drops have smeared my window and rooks flop about in a nearby field. My flask of coffee has stayed warm throughout the night and so is unofficially sponsoring these very early morning words. Later I will pad down through the house and watch again Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. If you have some time, turn off the phone, draw the curtains, stoke the fire and sink into the slow wandering majesty of this most extraordinary film.

It’s less than three weeks now till I arrive in Canada for two weeks - To Fall Beautifully From The Edge Of The World is the name for the wider endeavour.

As well as bringing a long excursion into the epic of Parzival, we have Gawain & The Green Knight coming along for the party and a quiver of new fairy tales I’ve only just started exploring. I’m excited. Spring can be a great time to travel and dust off the last vestiges of winter. I’m sorry I’m not coming to your town.

I went INTO the river to pray. Delighted to assist in the baptism of my friend Duncan yesterday. Let this moment be with you always D.

So….this week we have segments of a new version of the poem The Dream Of The Rood, and a reflection from my seat in the leathered hull of the recent Skinboat & The Star – starting up again this September.

I’ll start with a confession: I’ve often attempted to read the old Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream Of The Rood and barely made it through. Earnest language and tons of non-too startling heavenly descriptions quickly made my eyes glaze over. However, there is an original and very moving idea at its centre. What I present here is not the full poem but a distilled version I compressed – mainly for my own benefit – to hopefully get a clearer picture of its essence. You can find a loyal translation here: The Dream of the Rood.

No one quite knows who wrote it, I have it in a book of Cynewulf poems, though others have argued it may be Caedmon. Some scholars place it firmly in the 7th century as time of composition. Parts of it can be found on the Scottish Ruthwell Cross and all of it’s in the Italian Vercelli Book. It’s a Christian poem though features a talking cross. This nod towards some kind of panentheism is thought to be a kind of bridging device between the Anglo-Saxon Gods and the new arriving Christ. The Saxons would have been fond of a nature in full disclosure. You may remember this kind of approach from back in October when I wrote about The Heliand as an Anglo-Saxon amalgamation of the four gospels. That begins like this...

The Dream Of The Rood

14/04/2025

If the rivers of the world were spun of pure silver, the leaves on the trees pure gold, Finn would have given them all away.

Irish saying about the warrior-bard Finn MacColl

Generosity is a big thing in a folk tale. The second you come across a miser, a hoarder, someone small in their actions, you know you aren’t in the presence of the good or the heroic. They can be a high falutin’ Czar or Empress but we sense they are impoverished somewhere essential. They may have the important title but have no authentic sovereignty. In fairy tales – again and again – it is the simpler, humbler third brother or sister who succeeds in their quest by taking the advice of the beggar or giving their last piece of bread away. The older siblings rarely lean down from their horse, and are often swift to betrayal. It is frequently the most Christ-like character within a tale that finally achieves what seemed impossible to the others. They locate the firebird, journey to the edge of the world, complete a night sea voyage only to forgive the person they set out to kill. Transformation often comes with mercy, not with might.

As I travelled round Dartmoor teaching last week I thought about generosity from time to time. People were kind and said I was being generous with my time and energy, playing five evenings when it would be possible to get the combined amount of folks in one night in a bigger venue. Well, generous possibly, but selfless? No.

Because there’s at least two considerable paybacks. One is five times the amount of time to wrangle and dream with the stories’ content. I can’t do this in the study in anything like the same way. Secondly, five times the amount of opportunity to make contact with people who generally are fed by what you’re doing. These are not inconsiderable rewards. I’m going to be bushed for a few days after, and even staying local there are bumps along the way, and that’s as far as I can allow that I’m being ‘generous’ as such. I could have saved some wear and tear and done it in one night - that’s about it re: generosity. But stories blossom and change and deepen when told night after night, certain ideas and wayward philosophies only surface when I am deep in public improvisation. Anyone who watches me regularly would have seen this happen in real time. I am clearly benefitting.

Mid-storifying: with the oft mentioned Widecombe church in the photo.

I’m not, and have never been, selfless, with the exception of parenting. But I’ve also been naively generous on occasion, and generous to the wrong people. Generosity can also get you in a lot of trouble. Consider the story of Pwyll and Rhiannon, from The Mabinogi. The following glimpse is from a feast where the two are getting engaged...

On Generosity

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