A Branch From The Lightning Tree

A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE is centered around several key elements: 1. It features four texts and commentaries ? Welsh, Russian, Siberian and Norwegian myths that explore the process of leaving what is considered safe and predictable and journeying out into wild, uncertain areas of nature and the psyche in search of new insights. The four stories have at their center a man, woman, and adolescent. 2. A narrative of why the author gave up a large musical publishing deal with Warner Brothers to spend four years living in a tent in the wilds and over a decade facilitating wilderness rites-of-passage for others. 3. Shaw's eloquent insistence that without a renewed attention to myth and the initiation process we are only partially equipped to reestablish a complementary relationship with the living world. 4. The core of these stories are paradoxical in nature, far from the clumsily perceived ?hero' myths, and point towards Trickster, or Coyote, as a way of existing in a world ambivalent to the insights of what you could call traditional knowledge. A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE is unique in the field of myth and ritual in several ways: 1. It carries an ?in-the-field' narrative of several hundred men and women who have gone out into wild places to fast for four days and nights. Not in the Amazon, or in Mongolia, but in a place that is indigenous to them, that grounds the experience in the wider context of their lives, rather than a one-off event that can be hard to reconnect with. This is part of a growing mood to get to the bones of initiatory experience, rather than the cultural affectations. The stories illustrate both the grandeur and struggle of this often subtle process. 2. Unlike many of the big mythological sellers (i.e Bly's IRON JOHN or Pinkola Estes WOMEN WHO RUN WITH WOLVES), A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE is not a gender piece, but focuses on both men and women's movement into wildness as part of the bigger awareness of climate change and ecology. It presents the old stories as keys into any debate on these issues, that the ability to think metaphorically/mythologically loosens the grip of literalness, and can ?re-enchant' our perspectives. 3. As a wilderness teacher Shaw has noticed that the real point of crisis that is emerging is the return to community, rather than the time out in the wild. This is turning of rites-of-passage on its head: Shaw reasons that the rites-of-passage process requires three stages following an initial Call to the Soul: (i) Going out of the Village, and the severance from ordinary life and the stepping into the image-laden language of myth, story, ritual; (ii) Into the Forest, baring the soul to extraordinary forces, receiving the sacred wound, bonding with the living world; (iii) And Back Again, return to community, the performance of identity, and the confirmation in and of the Soul. A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE invokes Robert Graves work on the White Goddess, and the Crow poems of Ted Hughes-it is a combination of practical knowledge, imaginative insight and passionate storytelling that gives Shaw's book its persuasiveness and power. At times incantatory, at times novelistic and poetic, he writes as someone who has been to these places, undergone these trials and tested himself at the extremes of lived experience.

From the author of The Whole Wide Beauty: “Transcendent. What unfolds is a story not just of young love but of how to cope when it is lost and shattered” (Financial Times). United Kingdom circa the 1980s—Ursula and Jerry find themselves surrounded by hip hairdos and dominating parents. The future looks bleak if they do not change their lives dramatically. Both are itching to escape their current lives and engage with the wider world. Ursula’s work as a teacher takes her far away to India to instruct disabled children, while Jerry accepts a scholarship to Magdalen College—but only to “highlight the absurdity of privilege.” Their written exchanges are deep, political, and full of irony. All the while, Jerry stays committed to Ursula in mind but not in body, questioning their relationship and the nature of their love. “Woof . . . succeeds in conveying ‘the infinity of moments’ that make up a lifetime.” —The New Yorker “An unusual but convincing love story that charts the often-distant lives of her two distinctive and appealing characters, written with wit and a lyrical flourish.” —The Daily Mail “Engaging . . . In precise, lyrical prose, Woof creates empathy for her characters’ struggles and desires.” —Kirkus Reviews “Woof is a storyteller and you can tell this from the first few pages.” —The Times (London) “Woof finds humor and poignancy in the gulf between how things are and how they ought to be.” —The Observer “[A] quixotic, forceful voice . . . [An] indubitable talent.” —The Guardian

Winner of the 2023 MOONBEAM Gold Medal in the Young Adult - Mystery/Horror category. Perfect for fans of Stranger Things and A History of Wild Places, this is a "fast-paced, intriguing story that will likely appeal to young and older adults alike and keep them turning pages." -Kirkus Reviews Nature finally rises against humanity. Flora Reed discovers a lifeless body in her front yard the morning after the last day of her junior year of high school. Matters get worse when more people from her small town are found dead under mysterious circumstances and police take an interest in the boy next door, Carl. Flora is convinced that Carl is innocent. Instead, she suspects that the deaths are somehow connected to her younger sister Fauna's tragic accident a year earlier. What she learns changes everything, and she has to race against time to prevent the killings from spreading. Flora and a small group of friends soon find themselves at the onset of an apocalyptic battle between man and nature, with no one believing their story. The Lightning Tree is the first installment of The Natural Intelligence Revolution Trilogy. "Captivating! With lyrical prose and an engrossing combination of supernatural mystery and slow-burn romance, The Lightning Tree takes readers on an emotional journey as Flora Reed's dedication to her sister leads to a most unlikely discovery about her family's traumatic past and the future of the planet." -Amalie Jahn, author of Phoebe Unfired and The Next to Last Mistake

The Lightning Tree is a deeply moving and inspirational story of the Nolan Moss clan, a close-knit black family of fifteen souls bound together by love, living on the edge of existence, struggling to eke out a living, plowing the hard red clay on a small plot of ground in the isolated backwaters of Tallassee, Alabama. The head of the family is Charlie Nolan Moss, the patriarch, a devout man of strong character, proud, fiercely independent, and deeply spiritual. He is bound and determined by the grace of God to provide for and protect his family despite the ever present threats and challenges that are a part of everyday life in the racist and repressive atmosphere of the Jim Crow South. Yet in spite of all his efforts, vigilance, and prayers, bad things still happen.

When U.S. Marshal Sam Begay first discovered the wolf hair clues, he never expected they would lead him to a string of murders. The Reservation deaths appeared accidental, random, and unrelated until he found a connection in an old High School yearbook. An ancient, Spanish gold coin he carried was part of the mystery, and it put his own life in danger as it drew him closer to an evil, malignant being called a skinwalker.

God designed men to live with risk, adventure, and danger. But today's man has no rites of passage, no elders, no map to manhood. He may physically be an adult, but still wonders, "Am I a man?" When John Sowers twin daughters were born, he felt exposed, thinking manhood was out of reach. He needed direction. Following in the steps of ordinary men and the heroes of history, legend and myth, he uncovered a new and ancient road. Walk with John on his personal quest to discover the "wild masculine" and to become all that God intended men to be. From a thrilling brush with Kodiak bears in Alaska, to a war hero who rescued his comrades in the Valley of Death, from mythic heroes of Tolkien, to the footsteps of the One, True Myth - as Jesus walked from village into the wilderness, and back again. Stunningly written, this revolutionary book calls older men out of complacency and younger men out of confusion. It calls all men into the greater Story - into a life of sacrificial love, holy defiance, and clear purpose.

Linking the ongoing ecological crisis with contemporary conditions of alienation and disenchantment in modern society, this book investigates the capacity of oral storytelling to reconnect people to the natural world and enchant and renew their experience of nature, place and their own existence in the world. Anthony Nanson offers an in-depth examination of how a diverse ecosystem of oral stories and the dynamics of storytelling as an activity can catalyse different kinds of conversation and motivation, helping us resist the discourse of powerful vested interests. Detailed analysis of traditional, true-life and fictional stories shows how spoken narrative language can imbue landscapes, creatures and experiences with enchantment and mediate between the inner world of consciousness and outer world of ecology and community. A pioneering ecolinguistic and ecocritical study of oral storytelling in the modern world, Storytelling and Ecology offers insight into the ways that sharing stories in each other's embodied presence can open up spaces for transformation in our relationships with the ecological world around us.