Where The Wild Things Are

The Selkie Skin: A Teaser from My Heart Ate Light, Southwark Cathedral

Hello my friends, It’s early Sunday morning - after midnight - and I’m back from the London train and an extraordinary evening with Rowan Williams and Mark Rylance. We were talking grief, story, longing, improvisation, all sorts. Rylance was sparkling with the honesty of sorrow; Rowan rugged with his decades-long engagement with the many tough spots of religious life. It was unbelievably nourishing to be with my friends for these few hours, and this emerging focus. No one was pushing a polemic, more listening and responding. Somehow a bird had slipped into the cathedral and circled high above our heads, occasionally dropping feathers.

The whole game was raised by whatever the last one of us had mused. I’d dare to suggest we all became a little more inspired by the last turn of thought, story, poem or song, I know I was.

Storytellers

It was glorious to meet a few of the parish there (you know who you are!) and yet again it caused me to reflect on how precious these Sunday meetings are for me and my life. I feel lucky to be in the world the same time as you. After the book signing, Mark, the effervescent Lucy Cooper, John Mitchinson, Matthew Burton and a few of us slipped off for a Guinness in nearby Borough market. The evening was rounded off with picking up some fried chicken just opposite the hotel. These are wonderful, wonderful moments. I clink all your glasses.

I’m extremely glad to report that because of you donating to the documentary, we had the funds to get the evening filmed, and sections of it will go into the final movie. THANK YOU. If you can help, or know someone who can, please consider having a look at: My Heart Ate Light

Call Three Times:

Iron John! Iron John! Iron John!

So, I’ve started a big bit of work.

Not big in terms of word count but in terms of significance. I’ve been asked to write the foreword to the re-release of Robert Bly’s million-selling Iron John. I think it’s likely I’ll be doing the audiobook too. Forgive me for not having a Minnesotan accent, bending my sentences down at the end, as Robert did so well.

This task is forcing me to think more deeply about my relationship to that book, its legacy, and wider feelings about what has come to be called Men’s Work.

I realise my feelings are fairly complex.

Bly’s dismayed and enthralled me in almost equal measure, and created enough pressure and opportunity to enable me a life doing what I love. Such is his cultural impact I sometimes want to be a hundred miles from his patch of earth – all artists go through something like this – but wisdom is wisdom, and it’s churlish not to pass it on, and reprehensible if you don’t name the old growth tree you once sheltered under.

Three ways to think about Iron John.

It’s:

A grief manifesto for a culture ill equipped to catch up with their own sorrow.

A call to freeing up the eccentricity of knowing what story you’re actually in.

A legacy to the irrationality of conscience.

All mean: be awake.

Robert Bly’s story could begin twenty different ways.

But let’s begin with Eisy Eisenstein.