Martin Shaw > Quotes

“By going deeper into myth, I go deeper into love, and when I go deeper into love, innately I find morality; I locate a True North in my own heart.”
― Martin Shaw

“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

“The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.”
― Martin Shaw, Snowy Tower

“Fall seven times, stand up eight” Japanese Proverb”
― 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

“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

“It's a time of great paradox: we want to live forever but seem intent on executing the earth.”
― Martin Shaw

“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

“So, as you may be sensing, I wasn’t quite cooked.”
― Martin Shaw, Scatterlings

“The Dagara of Africa believe that when something from the inner world becomes public it is already in decline. Power at its most potent is private not public, tacit not explicit. Magical consciousness has to accommodate shadows or it has immediately made its potency finite.”
― Martin Shaw, Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet Black Branch of Language

“When I started reading Smoke Hole, I noticed the hair on my body growing faster. Midway, my fingernails needed to be clipped sooner. By the end, my voice had dipped from a Barry Gibb falsetto to a Barry White baritone. If you dare ... read with care.”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“This is weft and the weave of story for me. The endless lyrical emerging of the earth’s tremendous thinking and the humbling required to simply bear witness to it. And the extraordinary day, when for an hour or so you realise that you too are being witnessed.”
― Martin Shaw, Scatterlings

“It may not look like much, not with all these other distractions, but we make things holy by the kind of attention we give them.”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“It is your task to walk back from the woods with an animal, not a pelt, not a corpse, but something alive. Curate that energy, feed it, don’t domesticate it, make culture from it. It should be walking alongside you, not slung over your shoulder. You build your structures from its growls.”
― Martin Shaw

“The Handless Maiden doesn’t arrive like Boudicca; she’s less strident”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“What needs to change? Deepen? What kindness in me have I so abandoned that I could seek relationship with again?”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“The long-departed cave lion is more indigenous to the moor than I will ever be.”
― Martin Shaw, Scatterlings

“The mess out there is because of a mess in here. Inner and outer talk to each other. That’s the truth of things. Let’s get to work.”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“Keep an eye on where you put the book down – it may have moved when you come back.”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“A good metaphor is something you can hang your heart on.”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“Is it possible for a small book to contain the vast wild? Can its pages hold the cool breeze, the rustle of small things, the secret history of the earth and of your own face? Can a book help to break the spells holding us prisoner? This book can. Our time is one of breaking and breaking open, and Martin Shaw’s tales help us to reimagine our world so that we can rebuild on the ruins of our untenable civilization.”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“There will be conversations for these two, and bright-rimmed goblets and a walled garden with tall pines. The wedding will last for years.”
― Martin Shaw, Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems

“Beauty kicks-starts our attention. The real sublime. To behold it is almost scary because we suddenly have a longing to stand for something. Beauty not as generic but specific”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“It may not look like much”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“What we don’t sift to consciousness rolls in as drama.”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

“As we all know”
― Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass