A Branch from the Lightning Tree Quotes

“Holy isn’t always a church or open meadow. It can be a zone of profound change, where sexuality, the mythic realms, dreams, and the opening of soul can all occur. Those sculptural images on the temple walls are telling us this, warning us of major potencies at play. If you want to keep everything just so, nice and white, go no further.”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness

“To be in touch with wilderness is to have stepped past the proud cattle of the field and wandered far from the twinkles of the Inn's fire. To have sensed something sublime in the life/death/life movement of the seasons, to know that contained in you is the knowledge to pull the sword from the stone and to live well in fierce woods in deep winter.

Wilderness is a form of sophistication, because it carries within it true knowledge of our place in the world. It doesn't exclude civilization but prowls through it, knowing when to attend to the needs of the committee and when to drink from a moonlit lake. It will wear a suit and tie when it has to, but refuses to trim its talons or whiskers. Its sensing nature is not afraid of emotion: the old stories are full of grief forests and triumphant returns, banquets and bridges of thorns. Myth tells us that the full gamut of feeling is to be experienced.

Wilderness is the capacity to go into joy, sorrow, and anger fully and stay there for as long as needed, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Sometimes, as Lorca says, it means 'get down on all fours for twenty centuries and eat the grasses of the cemetaries.' Wilderness carries sobriety as well as exuberance, and has allowed loss to mark its face.”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree

“Myth is promiscuous, not dogmatic. It moves like a lively river through swarthy packs of reindeer, great aristocratic families, and the wild gestures of an Iranian carpet seller. Myth is not much to do with the past, but a kind of magical present that can flood our lives when the conditions are just so. It is not just the neurosis of us humans trying to fathom our place on earth, but sometimes the earth actually speaking back to us. That's why some stories can be hard to approach, they are not necessarily formed from a human point of view.”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness

“The journey simultaneously holds the contraries of solitary longing and relatedness to community, as Shaw tells us: “It’s an extraordinary, indigenous idea that to find an authentic center we have to wander lonely beaches and sleep under hedges, longing for something we know is lost. To make a place in us for a small, cultivated altar to the bird that flew away.” And, “This intensely mysterious experience is solitary in nature—a conscious break from society—but requires the warmth and subtlety of a return to community to help grow the seeds that can flower from such an experience.”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness

“I see that life’s uphill
From here on out. My tiny art,
Circling its grief, will have to grow
Joyous the only way it knows how. Frank Steele 6”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness

“have begun to suspect that underneath the ancient caves, buried arrow heads, and mineral deposits, the continents of this world are huge, dreaming animals.”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness

“There is a poetic thread, William Blake said, that if grasped, will guide us through these stages, through giddy achievement, the sobriety of loss, and finally into the heart—a place of service to a wider purpose than just our own predicament. There is character in exchange for safety just beyond the streetlights, scars to be boasted of. Initiation recognizes this truth, holds it in ritual and gives it shape, lest too many go down that don’t come back. What we notice again and again in contemporary life is the process without the context. If the culture has amnesia around this reality, then nothing is to be gained by risking it, because it’s too terrifying: “Your early work was your best.” “Life has dealt me a cruel hand, if it wasn’t for my bad luck . . .” Without the dimension of myth, the world can seem depleted and arbitrary. With it there is perspective, tools, and the sense of an adventure to be lived. As the Chinese say, “No one becomes a good navigator on calm waters!”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness

“Fall seven times, stand up eight” Japanese Proverb”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness

“The breakdown of initiation and the diminishment of mythic understanding are actually defences against encountering our own beauty.”
― Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness