2 days ago I was sitting in the Magic Bean Coffee Shop on Ocracoke Island (NC) with my love reading the title book.  He was having coffee and I was having a smoothie and he was reading passages to me from a book he found at our hotel.  That was a first: going together to a coffee shop and reading.

Funny how books show up at the right time.  “The Dark Line” for him and “A Branch…” for me.  The full title is “A Branch from the Lightning Tree:  Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness.”  In it, Martin Shaw, a storyteller, does what storytellers do:  shares tales.  But then he pulls them apart so you can see their underbelly (much like Clarissa Pinkola-Estes does with “Women Who Run with the Wolves”).   I bought this book about 3 months ago and had forgotten it until I was organizing all the books I’ve bought in the last 3 or  4 months (enough for years of study, let me tell you).  I needed a book to take along on our trek to the beach and chose this one and it’s perfect – it opens all kinds of doors for the linked stories I’m writing right now, which easily fall into the mythic.  So far I’ve been just writing scenes with little idea of how or why I should connect.  But at least an idea (just in my head, not on paper) of how I might proceed glimmered into being in that coffee shop.

In the introduction, Shaw says:

We have always turned to the moon-heavy knots of forest, desert, and bush for initiation.  Shakespeare sent certain characters in his plays into the woods for transformation.  Merlin split his mind in two out in the Forest of Caledon and returned on the bac of a great Stag.  We know the forest generates fear and trial, but we once understood that contained within that experience was crucial growth for the human community, for the village.

This made me wonder:  where are the new places of initiation?  We have looked to forest, water deep, moon, desert, fire, mountain – isolated places of quiet.  But nothing holds the same over time – so like the goddesses who are rising in new forms with their old names, what are the new places we fall into for initiation?  And how o we prepare?

How do we go to extremities these days?  How do we get pushed not into a catharsis (‘there, I posted on FaceBook, I have done *something*”) but into a change action whereby we change ourself in order to change everything (because change on the outside can’t happen unless there is first change on the inside).

Well, ask a question and throw out some answers (I’m just getting started and would love to hear your ideas):

altars:  in a place of noise an oasis of silence indoors and/or outdoors
cairns (because I love them and because I think they call to us of magic)
just stopping and taking in the “now” – until you can see the edge of the unknown and follow it
art or (better) creativity – any kind that puts us into timelessness.

Anything, really, can be a doorway if we are willing to open ourselves – then we become the door that we walk through from here to there, known to unknown, answer to questions.

Just some thoughts from a quiet place on a small island at the edge of a very large sea.