Courting The Wild Twin

"Myth is our wild way of telling the truth, of sharing stories that have our living earth speaking through them. There is an old insistence that we each have a twin we know nothing about. A wild, curious twin that was thrown out the window the night we were born, taking much of our energy with them. This story is a quest to find and court our wild twin, for they have something important to tell us. If there was something we were here to do in our few, brief years, we can be sure that the wild twin is holding the key. In Courting the Wild Twin, Martin Shaw, an accomplished storyteller and scholar of myth and oral tradition, explores two ancient myths concerned with the wild twin and shares how vital they are to our ability to confront challenges with purpose, courage and creativity. Myths are our secret weapon. They have a radical agency of beauty in our age of amnesia, an agency far beyond concept and polemic"--

"With potent, lyrical language and a profound knowledge of storytelling, Shaw encourages and illuminates the mythic in our own lives. He is a modern-day bard." – Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles At a time when we are all confronted by not one, but many crossroads in our modern lives—identity, technology, trust, politics, and a global pandemic—celebrated mythologist and wilderness guide Martin Shaw delivers Smoke Hole: three metaphors to help us understand our world, one that is assailed by the seductive promises of social media and shadowed by a health crisis that has brought loneliness and isolation to an all-time high. Smoke Hole is a passionate call to arms and an invitation to use these stories to face the complexities of contemporary life, from fake news, parenthood, climate crises, addictive technology and more. Shaw urges us to reclaim our imagination and untangle ourselves from modern menace, letting these tales be our guide. More Praise: "I can still remember the first time I heard Martin Shaw tell a story. The tale that emerged was like a living thing, bounding around, throwing itself at us there listening. I had never heard anything like it before." – Paul Kingsnorth, Booker shortlisted author of The Wake "Martin Shaw’s work is so very beautiful. A new animal. His love of images is deep and contagious." – Coleman Barks, author of The Essential Rumi "Through feral tales and poetic exegesis, Martin Shaw makes you re-see the world, as a place of adventure, and of initiation, as perfect home, and as perfectly other. What a gift." – David Keenan, author of Xstabeth "Shaw has so much wisdom and knowledge about the old stories, it emanates from his pores." – John Densmore, The Doors

In Scatterlings Martin Shaw walks the myth-lines of seven stories based in and around his homeland of Dartmoor, England. Rather than the commentaries on such tales being primarily balanced against other literary sources, Shaw uses what actually occurs on these walks as the main source of information on the tales. The swoop of raven, the swamp, the thinking that moves through him, all form a knot of relationship between the land and the story. As he walks he tells the story of the place back to itself. This is a highly unusual move for a mythologist, an aspiration to use speech as form of animistic relationship, of binding, of praise to a place. In a time of rapid migrations and climatic movement, Shaw asks: how could we be not just from a place but of a place? When did we trade shelter for comfort? what was the cost of that trade? What are the stories the west tells itself in private? Scatterlings also takes us on a wonder through the wild edges of British culture, a story of secret histories: from the ancient storytelling of the bardic schools to medieval dream poetry, from the cunning man to animal call words, to Arabian and steppe Iranian influence on English dialect. Through its astonishing journey, Shaw reveals to us that when you gaze deep enough into the local you find the nomad, and when you look deep enough into the nomad you find the local. Scatterlings is a rebel keen, a rising up, to bend your head to the stories and place that claim you.

In Snowy Tower, Dr. Martin Shaw continues his trilogy of works on the relationship between myth, wilderness, and a culture of wildness. In this second book, he gives a telling of the Grail epic Parzival. Claiming it as a great trickster story of medieval Europe, he offers a deft and erudite commentary, with topics ranging from climate change and the soul to the discipline of erotic consciousness, from the hallucination of empire to a revisioning of the dark speech of the ancient bards. Ingrained in the very syntax of Snowy Tower is an invocation of what Shaw calls 'wild mythologies' -- stories that are more than just human allegory, that seem to brush the winged thinking of owl, stream, and open moor. This daring work offers a connection to the genius of the margins; that the big questions of today will not be solved by big answers, but by the myriad of associations that both myth and wilderness offer.

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.

“Big ideas that just might save the world”—The Guardian The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it. In these times of deep division and deeper despair, if there is a consensus about anything in the world, it is that the future is going to be awful. There is an epidemic of loneliness, an epidemic of anxiety, a mental health crisis of vast proportions, especially among young people. There’s a rise in extremist movements and governments. Catastrophic climate change. Biodiversity loss. Food insecurity. The fracturing of ecosystems and communities beyond, it seems, repair. The future—to say nothing of the present—looks grim. But as Transition movement cofounder Rob Hopkins tells us, there is plenty of evidence that things can change, and cultures can change, rapidly, dramatically, and unexpectedly—for the better. He has seen it happen around the world and in his own town of Totnes, England, where the community is becoming its own housing developer, energy company, enterprise incubator, and local food network—with cascading benefits to the community that extend far beyond the projects themselves. We do have the capability to effect dramatic change, Hopkins argues, but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. As defined by social reformer John Dewey, imagination is the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise. The ability, that is, to ask What if? And if there was ever a time when we needed that ability, it is now. Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most. In this passionate exploration, Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it. Once we do, there is no end to what we might accomplish. From What Is to What If is a call to action to reclaim and unleash our collective imagination, told through the stories of individuals and communities around the world who are doing it now, as we speak, and witnessing often rapid and dramatic change for the better.

In this intellectually and politically potent new book, Martin Shaw proposes a way through the confusion surrounding the idea of genocide. He considers the origins and development of the concept and its relationships to other forms of political violence. Offering a radical critique of the existing literature on genocide, Shaw argues that what distinguishes genocide from more legitimate warfare is that the enemies targeted are groups and individuals of a civilian character. He vividly illustrates his argument from a wide range of historical episodes, and shows how the question 'What is genocide?' matters politically whenever populations are threatened by violence. This compelling book will undoubtedly open up vigorous debate, appealing to students and scholars across the social sciences and in law. Shaw's arguments will be of lasting importance.