NEWS!
Here’s the trailer for INTO THE UNDERWORLD online course, more at:
There’s a few lovely things arriving for those on the waitlist. There’ll be a live component as well as the previously filmed sessions, I’m looking forward to this!
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WINTER SCHOOL
Feb 8th –12th Dartmoor, England
Winter school is all about the long stories: the sagas and epics. Irish, Scandinavian, Arthurian and a few Dumnonian slipped in around the sides. Get your big, bardic imagination moving. Conviviality and dreams by the fire. Final places here:
Please note Winter School is held in a big old house with food and company and roaring fire. Sometimes people get it confused with the kind of thing described in today’s post. That’s a wilderness vigil and very different.
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AND: On The Odyssey, Underworld, Resurrection, and Glen Hansard
New conversation with my friend Jonathan Pageau – likely my favourite of our talks.
Shall we go?
Songs From The Wood
So this week is not at the desk but the woods: that would seem a pretty good trade. The Peregrini Sit has come round again, and it’s time to take the dusty track up into the old growth forest and make camp for a week. Six intrepid souls will, after preparation and counselling, make their way to a quiet place and fast for four days and nights, returning on the fifth morning. We lead two other wilderness vigils earlier in the year, but this is the one I lead, and the one with an explicitly Christian emphasis. The bones are basically the same – fasting in the natural world – but there’s a kind of religious ear for what may be announcing itself through the process.
The first two days often take care of themselves, but those last two, oh boy. Time expands almost beyond all understanding. An hour can become a day and a day a year. And the emphasis is always the same: surrender. The vigil is not something to be overcome but submitted to. Its deepest elements require a quietening not a swagger. Hand in the bushcraft skills for the still small voice.
Peregrini Sit 2023
Saint stories and lives of the early Christians are filled with such listenings. A glade, a blackbird, a white deer, even an angel may have information for you. All may have a gospel simmering in their shape. Slowing down and staying curious is a great way to encounter their story.
By the time you read this we will be about half way through. It will have been ragingly hot yet again. Relentless sun is never ideal for an entire vigil – though of course the Desert Fathers and Mothers made it work for them. A little cloud, a little rain can deepen things considerably. You go inwards.
This marks my thirtieth year with the wilderness vigil, sometimes called the Vision Quest. I quietly changed the phrase in my own work as I wanted to lower expectations a little! It’s often a rather tough, occasionally boring experience mixed with peak moments of absolute joy and blind terror. Rather like our everyday lives I suppose. But also not at all like them.
Basecamp is an interesting place while we wait for fasters, a little further out in the woods. Sometimes people expect us also not to be eating, but that would make no sense. We need to be solid as a rock while they are out there in the bush. Fairly frequently a faster will need a tick removing, or more water, or a chat, so we need to be robust and alert.
So for four days we have the fire slowly rumbling along – sometimes just embers – and we guides ruminate and make jokes and go quiet and tell stories to pass the time. It’s easy to slip into a slightly altered consciousness yourself, so we pass the chocolate and keep the tea strong and fairly constant. There’s a fierce blast of energy needed when the fasters return, so we can’t be getting too drifty.
The call to the vigil always reminds me of the arrival of the Green Knight at Camelot that Christmas in the myth time. Remember it? In the midst of a feast arrives a Green Knight who challenges those at the Round Table to lose their head to find their head. Young Gawain takes up the challenge and has to locate the knight a year later, at his Green Chapel. He wanders into any number of troubles along the way, of both physical peril and sensual temptation, and becomes an appalled witness to his own frailty and shortcomings. But in the end, that very self-knowledge, that rueful awareness of his limits is a deeper gift than the glamour of court.
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