Dr. Martin Shaw on Liturgies of the Wild

Summary

Contemplify: Dr. Martin Shaw on "Liturgies of the Wild"

Host: Paul Swanson
Guest: Dr. Martin Shaw
Date: February 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features a heartfelt, poetic exploration of myth, prayer, and Christian mysticism in the company of Dr. Martin Shaw—renowned mythographer, writer, wilderness guide, and Christian thinker. Together with host Paul Swanson, Dr. Shaw discusses his latest book, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us, while delving into the formative myths, contemplative practices, and wild rituals that shape an examined, soulful life. Expect a rich narrative: from whisky and weather to deep mythic structure and sacramental encounters with the wild and Christ, it’s an invitation to bring liturgy out into the woods and into our bones.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Shaw’s Setting & Roots

[01:46]

• Shaw is speaking from the far West of Great Britain, in the old Celtic lands of Devon and Cornwall.
• He reflects on the Roman occupation of the region (“400 years, that’s like going back to the 16th or 17th century”).
• The weather, described as “skittish,” is part of his lyrical connection to place.
• The conversation opens with both men sharing their fondness for whisky (“Lagavulin single malt, 16 years old. It’s just delicious.”).

2. Formative Influences: The Contemplative Life and Foundational Texts

[08:12]–[19:42]

• Shaw resonates deeply with the contemplative label:

  “Actually as I get older, I am really an ordinary mystic from the west of England... and my primary concern at this point is... the shamanic mysteries of Jesus.” [09:56]

• He outlines three life-defining disciplines: painting, wilderness rites of passage, and cultivating a poetic basis of mind (“It permeates the paintings, it permeates the books...”).
• Required Readings for a course on Dr. Shaw’s formation:
  1. Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard—on the philosophy of how we experience and inhabit spaces.
  2. Iron John by Robert Bly—“The first time I had seen a mature figure approach a fairy tale with the reverence it deserved.”
  3. The Captain’s Verses by Pablo Neruda—Celebrated for its erotic charge and full-range expression (“It’s absolutely sumptuous... I want to be able to talk and think [like this].”).
• Notable story: Bly's Iron John transformed a time of personal hardship into symbolic richness (“My environment went from a prison cell to a hermitage.” [15:42]).

3. On Poetry and the Mystical

[20:48]–[24:52]

• Shaw is drawn to W.B. Yeats (“He profoundly wants to be [a mystic]… but the poems are too well made to be mystical.”).
• Contrasts Yeats with Blake (“The mystic would be the terrain of someone like William Blake.”).
• Points listeners to Dylan Thomas’ poem “Fern Hill” as an example of true mystical poetry (“He has his fingers in the hill. You know, he has his fingers in Arthur’s cave.”).

4. "Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us" – The Book

The Origin of the Title

[25:52]–[29:47]

• The book’s title emerged late in the writing process, symbolizing the marriage of ritual (liturgy) and wilderness.
• The phrase “liturgies of the wild” represents repetitive, sacred engagement with nature—a “nod toward religious experience” and an act of “artistic bricolage.”
• This was inspired by Shaw’s own 101-day vigil in a Dartmoor forest (“There was a lot of attention on fidelity rather than high emotion.”).

Transformative Spiritual Encounter

[30:48]–[37:06]

• During his 101-day vigil, Shaw experienced a profound external phenomena (“A great phenomena. A star fell out of the sky. It’s as simple as that.”).
• Received a visionary phrase: “Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home”—a moment that gradually led him into Christian mystical encounter.
• Found himself “called into an encounter with what I’ve come to name the mossy face of Christ,” a realization first met with terror, then joy.

Wrestling with Spiritual Identity & Outside Perception

[37:21]–[40:41]

• Shaw describes the difficult transition from “masterful” mythologist to feeling like a beginner again due to his new Christian orientation.
• Noted friends and colleagues reacted with “bafflement and disappointment” rather than anger.
• Key insight:

  “People love you when you’re searching. They really dislike it if you find anything.” [38:14]

• Faced skepticism regarding Christianity’s colonial associations from First Nation friends, yet maintained his journey was genuine and soulful.

5. Grittiness of Myth and the Tension of Soul and Spirit

[41:07]–[43:30]

• Discusses the complementary dynamics of spirit (mountaintop, eureka) and soul (valley, despair), referencing James Hillman.
• Myths that matter are those with “negative capability”—the creative tension Lorca called duende:

  “It’s that great rasping rub between life and death. It’s the sound of flamenco.” [43:12]

6. The Three Movements of Mythic Structure: Severance, Threshold, Return

[43:57]–[49:06]

• Severance: The instinctive break from family/community, often in youth.
• Threshold: The liminal, more alive and vulnerable space traversed after leaving the familiar.
• Return: Not just to enjoy the threshold, but to bring back wisdom for the community.
• Shaw sees these as critical cycles for becoming “real human beings.”
• Remarkable dream:

  “I met... God, and God said... the template of the book is really important...” [48:12]

7. Midlife, Sacrifice, and Creative Surrender

[50:27]–[53:35]

• Discusses how adventure and call-to-adventure differ when tethered by midlife and family responsibilities.
• Personal Bly anecdote (“I’ve lived only 50% of my creative life. The other 50 I gave to my family...the 50% I have sacrificed has made the other 50% much more poignant.” [52:26]).
• Key theme: The necessity of surrender and sacrifice for a deeper, more poignant existence.

8. Prayer as Identity and Presence

[54:25]–[56:02]

• Shaw’s view: “In the end, prayer isn’t something we do, it becomes something we are.”
• True prayerful people are “not judgmental generally, and there’s a lightness in them. And maybe they cry easily.”
• They become “letters from Christ moving through the world.”

9. Closing Ritual: The Drink that Pairs with Myth & Conversation

[57:02]

• Shaw chooses a Negroni:

  “There’s spirit and soul in a Negroni...there’s a sweetness and there’s a sourness...If you like a tipple and for any reason you haven’t come across Negroni yet, you know, seek it out. It’ll make your evening super sweet.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Myth and Spiritual Encounter:

  “I think I’m being called into an encounter with what I’ve come to name the mossy face of Christ... my predominant emotion was terror mixed with a little bit of unbelievable joy.” ([33:35])

• On the Contemplative Life:

  “I am really an ordinary mystic from the west of England that’s what I am and that’s what I’m interested in.” ([09:43])

• On Spiritual Maturity:

  “People love you when you’re searching. They really dislike it if you find anything.” ([38:14])

• On Prayerful Presence:

  “People that are living prayer...there’s a lightness to them, and they’re not looking at you and sizing you up all the time...once you’ve been in their presence, you feel a little rewired.” ([54:56])

• On Sacrifice and Poignancy (Robert Bly):

  “The 50% I have sacrificed has made the other 50% much more poignant.” ([52:26])

• On “Liturgies of the Wild” as Title:

  “Liturgies is a word...I’d never seen that connected to the word wild. They almost seemed like they shouldn’t be in the same sentence together.” ([27:11])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:46 — Dr. Shaw’s physical and cultural setting (Devon/Cornwall, whisky, weather)
• 08:12 — What “contemplative” means to Shaw, relationship to mysticism and solitude
• 12:25 — Foundational readings and disciplines (Bachelard, Bly, Neruda; painting; wilderness)
• 20:48 — Mystical vs. poetic in Yeats, Blake, and Dylan Thomas
• 25:52 — Genesis of “Liturgies of the Wild” title and concept
• 30:48 — Shaw’s transformative 101-day forest vigil and mystical encounter
• 37:21 — Spiritual shift, peer reactions, and being at the threshold
• 41:07 — Mud, soul, spirit, and the richness of mythic tension
• 43:57 — Severance, threshold, return as a mythic-life framework
• 50:27 — The changing shape of adventure and surrender in midlife
• 54:25 — Prayer as embodiment and lived presence
• 57:02 — If this conversation were a drink: the Negroni as spirit and soul

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Final Impressions

Through stories of wilderness, poetry, myth, and transformative encounter, Dr. Martin Shaw invites listeners to see the wild as sacred and to craft rituals (“liturgies”) not only in church, but in every story, every place, every threshold. This conversation bridges earthy grit with soulful breath, reminding us that to become truly human means to adventure, to return, to sacrifice, and—ultimately—to become, in our living, a prayer.

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For more on Dr. Shaw’s work, visit drmartinshaw.com.
For show notes and further contemplative resources, visit contemplify.com.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Contemplify. I'm your host, Paul Swanson. Contemplify is where we seek to kindle the examined life for contemplatives in the world. Today. I am over the moon to welcome Dr. Martin Shaw, a writer, mythographer, wilderness guide, and Christian thinker. In our conversation, we delve into liturgies of the wild myths that make us. This is Dr. Shah's latest book, a book that any personal library would benefit from. Shaw delivers a rousing grasp of the mythic life from a poetic lens of the dream of Christianity. A master storyteller with wit and wisdom and grit that will have you smiling as resonant tears well up in your eyes. As so, without delay, let's jump into that conversation. And as always, you can visit contemplify.com for the show notes on this episode. And be sure to check out Dr. Martin Shah's [e-mail] for links to his courses, events, and all of his marvelous books. Now join me in raising a glass to my guest today, Martin Shaw. Beautiful. The magic of the Internet's working. Dr. Martin Shaw, thank you so much for being here. I know it's getting into evening time where you are, but I would love for you to share. For those listening, where are we finding today? What is the context of your setting and your location?

[B]

Thank you, Paul. You find me in the far west of Great Britain. So if you can imagine going a long ways west from London, within about two and a half to three hours, you'd come to the ancient kingdom of Dumnonia. It's not called Dumnonia anymore. It's now called Devon and Cornwall. But these are the final two counties. We would call them the final two counties, like tiny little states of England. And they are a kind of Celtic fringe to the rest of the country. The Romans got some some way into Devon, they got to Exeter. And by and large, apart from a couple of camps, they said, okay, this is enough. And it's just I hadn't really realized, actually until just about a week ago that the Romans were occupying Devon for 400 years. That's an enormous amount of time. I don't really think about it. I thought, yeah, I think in my mind's eye, they're here for about 80. They're like a lifetime. But 400 years, that's like going back to the 16th or the 17th century. So that's where I am. The weather is skittish. There is some sort of storm playing itself out on the ocean about eight miles away. And night has already come in. It's dark. It's cocktail hour, you know.

[A]

Beautiful. Do you have a drink at hand just in case you need to sip on something?

[B]

Funnily enough, very. Oh, no, I do. I actually do. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Yeah, I have a. I actually have. This is left over from last week. I was teaching online two hours a night. I taught the Grail epic of Parcel. And there would be a certain kind of fraternity of people who love cigars or pipes and whiskey and things like that. And whiskey's quite a part of my life. So every night there was a different whiskey. So anyway, this would be my go to whiskey, unless it's an incredibly special occasion. It would be lagavulin single malt, 16 years old. It's just delicious. And so, astonishingly, I would. I don't normally have booze at my desk, but sure enough, there it is.

[A]

Well, certain occasions certainly call for it.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

What's funny, you wouldn't know this, but I'll ask this at the end of our conversation. I always ask the guest, if you could pair our conversation with a drink, what would be your drink of choice? So just know that's coming at the end. So I appreciate that you've already got a. A friend there next to you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, I'm with your skittish weather. I can't think of help but think of here in the States and my neck of the woods in the Southwest. We're preparing for a big sn snowstorm that's gonna cross the entire states. And there's something about that preparation for unruly weather that feels ripe for me to be in conversation with you on your work. Because it's. You're a man for all seasons. And I feel like when storms are coming, I turn to your work.

[B]

Oh, where. Where are you, by the way? In New Mexico.

[A]

I'm in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[B]

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I. I would. I would know Albuquerque a bit. And I have an extremely fond memory of about. Long time ago now, about 17 years ago, I was in Santa Fe with a very sprightly Gary Snyder. The poet.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And Snyder was in Santa Fe talking about his relationship to Jack Kerouac, because it was at a time when they had, you know, they had the document of. On the road, that one long sheet of piece of paper wrapped around the kind of the town hall in the middle, you know, in the marketplace. And yes, sure enough, Snider was there. He would have been a relatively sprightly sort of 72 at the time. I remember he felt even From a distance, he felt a bit like a fox. As an animal, he felt light on his feet. But I have a memory of that. I also have a memory that nobody explained to me that there's a little bit of altitude adjustment going on. So I got there and I was like, I am. I think I might be ill or I'm finally. My heart is giving up on me. And then, of course, after a few days, I. I figured it out. I even. I went back about 10 years later and I wrote most of a book in the desert. There's a book of mine called the Night Wages, and a lot of that was written in a hut in the desert. Yeah.

[A]

No kidding. No kidding. Well, I'm glad that you have some familiarity with this land and landscape. And, you know, Snyder is one of those. I actually have a photo of him above my desk here that is just a reminder of the invitation to the real work at all times.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, he's snider. I. I've taught on and off at Stanford University, and to my absolute horror, he was. He was literally down the hall in another class a few years ago. And it was, it was just exactly the same time I was doing something myself because of all the old growth human beings that are out there, Snyder would be the one that I would really love to meet. His influence on me, I suppose, is not sort of immediately obvious, which is nice. You know, it's, it's. But, but he's as an, as an. As you're saying, as an inspirational figure. Absolutely grounded, humorous, practical, efficient, phenomenal. Phenomenal. And, and has. And continues to do great, great work. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Certainly one of the great elders still with us at this point. Martin, as a way for folks listening to get a sense of who you are, I'm going to ask you a few questions about you. As I said earlier, this podcast focus on the contemplative life. And so I'm curious, when you hear that word contemplative, how does that moniker relate to you or your work, if you think it does at all?

[B]

Yes, it does. I feel very settled by it. I probably would have used different words to describe the same thing when I was younger because I grew up in the Christian tradition, but it was, you know, typically extroverted and Western. Really a lot of good things about it, but a contemplative dimension, although, of course, you could get there through prayer, but the notion of, you know, a hermit or a saint or some eccentric old figure living in the woods, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have been Aware of that. But of course a Great North Star in my own life is a four year period. I lived completely alone in a tent on a succession of English hills. That's an unusual thing to be able to get away with these days and without, you know, this was before the phones and before the laptops, it was before emails. It was at the, the hinge of the last century. I had, I had an instinct to do it. And it's funny now, of course, I look back on that and I can see a certain Athenae quality to it. I can see a longing for the holy mountain. I can see, I can see that if I'd been around people with a, you know, definitely not just a Christian but an orthodox persuasion that might have pushed me in that direction. But I'm certainly, I've, like a lot of us, I've had these different words attached. You know, I've been an academic, I've been and remain a writer. I know on my gravestone it'll say storyteller. There's no way around that. It'll, there's no, you know, that is, I can't shift that, I can't change that. But actually as I get older, I am really an ordinary mystic from the west of England that that's what I am and that's what I'm interested in. And my primary concern at this point is, you know, the shamanic mysteries of Jesus. I suppose.

[A]

That'S a lovely way to put it and I can't wait to dive into some of that as we start moving towards your book as a way again for folks to get a sense of what's formed you. This is a bit of an odd question, but if someone were going to teach a class on the formation of Dr. Martin Shaw.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What would be the three mandatory readings or works that formed you that would definitely be on that syllabus.

[B]

Well, that's interesting. I mean, as I think, as I will come back to you in a split second with some books, but I think probably the disciplines though, just for a second, the wider disciplines of painting, you can't really get underneath the way that I write and the way that I think without understanding my interest in painting. So that's a big thing. Also of course, 30 years now as a wilderness rites of passage guide. And so fairly, fairly intensive periods out in the wild, out in the bush, getting in touch with everything that is waiting out there for you. So painting the wild. And I think thirdly, I have what James Hillman used to call a poetic basis of mind. Now that's not the same thing as saying I am a poet. I'm not. I don't know if I am a poet or not. It's not really for me to say. But there's a poetic, there is a. There's a certain way I have of beholding the world that permeates the paintings, it permeates the books, it permeates the way I see now if we were to look at books, I can't. You're thinking that I mentioned Snyder a minute ago in terms of old growth human beings. And certain books have an. In an influence at a certain time. One of the books for me is a book called the Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelor, who is an extremely interesting, warm, unusual French philosopher.

[A]

And.

[B]

Really interesting, really interested in images and senses. He's interested in fire and water, darkness and light. And I think. I think there was something in that book. The Poetics of space. How we inhabit spaces, how we inhabit what makes a temenos, what makes a place set apart. Why is one place holy and the other not? The Poetics of Space is great if you have a leaning towards a kind of. A leaning towards a kind of philosophical mind. But you are off put by the harshness and abstractions that often live there. Like there's a more sensual way of living. In philosophy. The writer David Abram, who's also in New Mexico or was anywhere a few years ago, spell of the centuries, he'd probably agree with me. I think you're looking. I was looking at ways to inhabit philosophy that was pretty sort of fleshed out. However, to be. I have to be honest, the book that fundamentally rewired me, probably in the way that 40 years before it on the road had rewired people, was my introduction to the guy that became my really significant mentor, I suppose, Robert Bly. Now Robert Bly, if you don't know him, was a Minnesotan poet, critic, storyteller, phenomenally influential fellow. And a total Viking, you know, a total Viking. Very, very tall, physically tall, compassionate, terrifying, strange, a healer, you know, very bright, very radical. And when I was 23, so I came to it young because I'm still comparatively young. I'm only 54, so, you know, in my world you don't really make a move Till for another 10 years, you know, I could just stay in this chrysalis state. Everything is, is. Is about being older really. But anyway, I. When I was 23, so we're really going back sometime. I ended up in a men's hostel outside London going, believe it or not through a very early divorce. And it was in this incredibly bereft, frightened state that I read his book on fairy tales, Iron John. And that was the first time I had seen. I'd seen a mature figure approach a fairy tale with the reverence it deserved. C.S. lewis always said, one day we may be. We may be ready to. To understand a fairy tale. You know, we may get to that point of sophistication. And I was just immediately entranced at the kind of exegesis that Bly could pull out of it. And it was life changing for me because what happened through reading Iron John was my immediate environment went from a. Basically what felt like a prison cell to a hermitage. You know, I thought, oh, okay, I am in tremendous pain. But there is a way in which if I just put one foot in front of another and I follow up all the leads that are in this incredibly generous book, he can help me recontextualize a nightmare into something with real symbolic resonance. That's what I and John did. And then, of course, so that happened in 19, sort of 1994 or something. Ten years later, I meet him. I meet him and we. I. It would be hubris to say we got on. He was. That's like saying, I got on with Carlos Santana. I got off with Muddy Wood. This is a. This is a biblical figure. This is a biblical figure for me. But he. He tolerated me and pushed me and encouraged me as he did a generation of others. So we've got Gaston, Bachelor, we've got Bly. The Poetics of Space. Now, what would be. What would be the last one? I mean, there's many. I read a lot of anthropological work. One of the things I've been interested in is returning myth to its relationship to anthropology as well as psychology, because what tends to happen in the universities these days, the. I'd say, in a way, the negative of Iron John and the negative of a phenomenal book, Women that Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. What happened is those books come out at the doorway of the 1990s, and they open up a very long dialogue on gender through myth and almost to the present day. When anybody does anything about myth now, it's to do with gender. But I was only half interested in gender. I wanted to talk about that's, in a way, the poetics of ecology and things like that. I just wasn't fixated in that fashion. So, okay, final book. Well, we've got philosophy, we've got storytelling, we've got myth. Let me. Okay, the The Captain's Verses by Pablo Neruda. Captains Verses by Neruda. Now, I. I have always liked small bits of poetry, but Neruda really blew my head off. I was living alone in the tent and, you know, it was interesting. You know, there was not. There's not a lot of romance going on when you are alone in a tent in your 20s, looking out over a wet English valley. But Neruda's work is so erotically charged. And when I say erotic, I don't mean sexually charged. It's not that.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's just sumptuous. It's absolutely sumptuous. And these are. These are letters and poems he's writing to a love late in his life. And in those poems, he allows the full range of his personality to express itself. So actually, some of them are. They have jealousy in them and heat in them and anger in them and. And loathing in them and the whole poetic range. So Neruda is one of the first poets that I started to learn by heart because I thought, I want some of that. I want to be able to talk and think. And it's not a bad thing to say. Okay. This winter, my teacher is the poet Jane Hirschfield and the writer Robert Bringhurst. They're my go tos and just copy them and just find out quite what it is they are pointing towards. That's the thing, is don't look at the finger, look at the moon, look at the thing they're pointing towards. And gradually, bit by bit, you find your own relationship to it. So there you go. Neruda, Bachelor Bly. That's pretty good.

[A]

That's a beautiful list. And you've added Poetics of space to my. To my reading shelf. I'll have to check that out. I'm actually a Minnesotan, so Robert Bly, you know, is a towering figure in Minnesota. And just. Even the way you spoke of him, I could just picture him again. And just the way that. How much he did for writers and poets and thinkers and I mean, wilderness guides that he was always gathering folks. To him, it was a powerful figure. So I love just hearing his name on that list as well and knowing that your relationship with him, you know, poetry is something that we share in common, is almost like this foundational lens of looking out through the world. The poetics of. Of life, the spiritual life, the mythic life. Is there a poem that you've read or written recently that that has sparked or sparked deeper enchantment with life?

[B]

Well, somebody that I'm thinking about a lot is Yates. W.B. yates. Now, the reason I'm thinking about W.B. yeats a lot is that I am delivering. It's about quite soon now, actually about six weeks I'll be delivering at Pembroke College, Cambridge, which, for those that are interested, that's where Ted Hughes went. I'm delivering a big lecture on Yates and particularly how Yates shifts and remakes himself as he goes. So I suppose Yates has been on my mind of late. And when I was younger, the fact that a lot of his poems rhymed, I found really risable. I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard because I grew up on American free verse. Really. I was like, this is insane. These are like poems for children. And then you settle down and you realize there's an inner rhythm that's actually kind of interesting. And as I get older now, I respect Yates more and more. I don't think Yeats at his core, and this would sadden him to hear me say this, I don't think Yeats is a mystic. He profoundly wants to be. He's something of a magician. But the mystic would be the terrain of somebody like William Blake. And Blake just. There's a success, a very strange level of success afforded to William Blake in terms of the world he's able to create. Very, very few people have gotten near that ever since. And in the end, Yeats's poems are simply too well made to be mystical. Yeah, they're too well made. They're too. They're just too robust. But the permanence of Yates will be for that very reason, because they don't. Like, you know, Shaman writes a poem and he'll allow it, or she will allow it to disintegrate and to become dust, because they're not taking the form that seriously. But. But Yates had an eye on, you know, preservation, and so there's a. So it's Yates that I come back to, and in his way, I respect more and more.

[A]

Yeah, that's such an interesting take about the smoothness of Yates like that. It almost limits the texture of the grittiness of life, even though I think he can speak to that. But like you said, they're so well versed, so curated in a way that I think the poets that really, you know, get my goat are the. Those that have a little bit of dust on their fingers as they're writing and. And a little wind blown.

[B]

Do you know. Do you know the poem Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas?

[A]

I don't.

[B]

Yeah. Now. Now that, that. That's gonna. That's if you have any Celtic. Any Celtic in you, you'll never recover from Fernhill. It's like. It's like the song of songs, but aimed at a couple. A small hill in Wales. You just can't believe what is happening. And that is mystical poetry. That is sacred song that, that. That Dylan Thomas is up to. But I would suggest because. Because Dylan was sort of irascible and genuinely wild and very unusual and a little unreliable on occasion. He doesn't have the. He doesn't have the senatorial kind of quality, the senatorial presence that Yates has. But in terms of what Dylan Thomas calls it, the green fuse. The green fuse. Like he has his fingers in the hill. You know, he has his fingers in Arthur's cave. You know, he's just there. And that's different.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Well said. Well, I'm gonna check out that poem when we get off here. It was actually through a book of poetry that I first saw your name. You wrote a blurb for Teddy Macker's book, this World, who's become a dear friend of mine and great poet, great poet, great poet. And that's where I'm like, who is this Martin Shaw guy who wrote such a wonderful recommendation? And that was my first gateway into your work. Which feels right. Which feels right. I'd love to dive into your book, Liturgies of the Wild. Myths that make us, as I said before, we hit record. This is a book that quakes, that resettles the foundation after the eruptions of life. You walk through that. I want to begin by asking you about the title. The title is so captivating. What is. Why did the Liturgies of the Wild become the namesake for this collection of writing?

[B]

Well, I think the. One of the things that's worth knowing is that it only became the title at the very end of the book. So. And that's a three year process. This took three years to make this book. Other books I've written, Courting the wild twin smoke hole books that I dearly love took seven days, eight days. You know, I can write at a rack, at a rate. At a rate. But because there was something really rather ambitious at the center of Liturgies, it was going to require a lot of study and a lot of reading. So we didn't have a title. And that went on for years. Years. And that's unsettling. When you're kind of, I don't know what my boat's called and you're sailing. I don't know what my boat's called and my Editor, who is a very wise lady, just said, you know, you don't have to name it yet. Just. Just keep. Just keeping the expl in the exploration. And so in the end, litigants of the wild was something that I'd mooted early on because I liked it, because liturgies is a word. It has the notion of repetition in it. It has a feeling of people in it. It has a kind of nod towards religious experience. But I'd never seen that connected to the word wild. They almost seemed like they shouldn't be in the same sentence together. It was an act of artistic bricolage to bring them together. But it very much suits how I am wired. And my small set of gifts really sort of circle around these two areas. I had re entered Christian experience almost as. Almost as I hit 50 by going through 101 day vigil in a Dartmoor forest nearby. And there was a liturgical element to that. You know, I turned up every night at dusk. I sat quietly. I did the same things over and over again. There was a lot of. A lot of attention on fidelity rather than high emotion. That's the thing, you know, these days, you know, you want that iboga or that ayahuasca, that kind of third eye thing to happen immediately, and it can on those visionary vegetables. How you grow anything that is of use to other people is an entirely different question. And I knew that for me, showing up to an event like going into a forest every day for 101 days, it would lose. It would lose its sex appeal fairly quickly. And that's partially why I did it, to see if I could do it, to see if I could do something. We talked about, we mentioned Bly a minute ago. I remember Bly saying to me, part of being a man is giving up certain forms of excitement, you know, laying them on the altar, you know, like Jacob, like. Like Abraham and Isaac. You know, you put your excitement on the altar, you get the blade out and you say, you sure this is what you want? And then God says, well, maybe you can have a bit of excitement. So in a way, I was trying to do that. As I think about that now, I've never quite processed it like that before. Yeah, I think I was. I knew I was deep into middle age and I needed to acknowledge that because I come from a family who. We all have access to glee, we all have access to high spirits. And that's terrific. But I needed. There was another note like when Yo Yo Ma plays the cello, you know, and Bach's cello could say I needed this lower sound in me, and I got that through there. And so in a way, they would. That was a Liturgy of the Wild, and that's where the title, I suppose, came from. And eventually, after trying on lots of different hats, that was the title of the book.

[A]

It's a marvelous title. And my youngest is. Is 7 years old and is captivated by the image on the title. Oh, yeah, yeah. With the subtitle Myths that Make Us. With your name right under it. They thought the title of the book was Myths that Make Us Martin Shaw. And I got a huge kick out of that. I said, well, partly. Partly, there's a connection there. But it's a beautiful book just visually to look at. And I think the title evokes such a. Such a gate to what readers get to experience within. And you mentioned those 101 days in the forest and the liturgy of that which led to this event, or I started to think of it as an erupting event. That eventually led you to nine words and as much or as little as you'd like to share about that event in those nine words. How did that lead you to break into the how of living this life?

[B]

Well, it took a while, so I'd. I. I have this background in going out and fasting in forests for periods of time. I've done it myself. I've trained in that work. I've paid. I've taken many other people through it. But what I was looking for at 50, in a way was. Was a new way in you. You think of the Narnia stories, and C.S. lewis warns you, he says, don't habitually go to the back of the wardrobe, because one day it will just be the wardrobe. You'll just hit wood. It won't be. There'll be no tumnus. And so I suppose I was aware that I had slightly deciphered the code, a little bit of what the wilderness vigil is about. But I didn't know anybody that had ever tried anything like that for that long. And so, you know, I ate food and I kept my wits about me. But on the last night, I had a protracted spiritual encounter that was very remarkable. It wasn't in no way to do with some kind of inner revelation that happened to me or occurred to me in my mind at that moment. It was something that happened right outside of me. It was a great phenomena. It was a star fell out of the sky. It's as simple as that. It's very strange. And I was. I hadn't been fasting at that point, I'd just eaten a meal, I'd had a cup of tea, and suddenly I was just propelled into something entirely different. And I bore witness to that all night, staggered back down to my cottage, and then as I was closing my eyes, I suddenly saw, sort of rich in front of me. Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home. Really. A bit of a mouthful. A bit of a mouthful. And I thought, oh, God, what. What's that? It kind of glowed. It was like kind of pale gold. Then it was gone. But I must have written it down on a piece of paper. Then it was locked down. And so I had about 18 months where I could barely leave home anyway. And believe it or not, I didn't immediately make these connections as ostensibly or blatantly Christian. I just thought, oh, another. Another psychic doorway has opened. Doorways have opened before. I wonder what this is. And then I started to have dreams and certain encounters, and the thing began to build up ahead of steam. And I thought, oh, God, I think I'm being called into an encounter with what I've come to name the mossy face of Christ. And I was. My predominant emotion was terror mixed with a little bit of unbelievable joy. And interestingly, there's a. There's a wrestling period of about six months, the end of the summer, where I was wrestling and wrestling and wrestling. But once I fully just said, oh, I realized this presence, this indwelling presence is nearer to me than my own breath. Once I sort of verbalize that and I told my parents, I spoke to my mum and dad about it. And really from then on, I had a kind of. It didn't last forever, but for about six months I had, like. I had a kind of euphoria being just funneled into me day and night. It's a very interesting detail is alcohol tasted differently. I just didn't like alcohol very much instantaneously. I just didn't need it or want it. And that wasn't something I was looking for. I'm not an alcoholic. But there was a sense that things began to return to their right order. And anything that I was leaning too hard on, that didn't come from grace didn't seem compelling anymore. And so, bit by bit, all sorts of weird things happened. I. I started to develop affection effortlessly for people that I'd had huge difficulty with for decades. It just went away. And I thought, oh, good, something's actually happening to me. I. I'm not talking about a religious experience, I'm actually having one. So incrementally Bit by bit, I got to a point where I realized the adventure I was on could be called a Christian adventure. Although even that was so horrifying for me, the name. I actually did a bit of research and found out that a lot of the early Irish Christians were called peregrini. And I thought, well, peregrine is cool. Who wouldn't want to be a peregrini? You know, it's a. Yeah, it's. It's got a wild. It's got a hawk in it. It's got a walk in it. You know, it's really good. So I thought. And I thought, well, Christians never even named themselves Christians. That's a Roman invention. So in other words. And I'd say this because there will be. I guarantee someone will be listening to this, Someone will be listening to this, and my journey will be chiming with them.

[A]

But.

[B]

But they're just so profoundly resistant to that word. They are currently stuck. And my advice would be, brother, sister, the water's warm. Don't worry. It really doesn't matter what you call it. Just invite it a little closer and see what happens. You know, Just invite it a little closer. So in the end, that's what I did. And then I had a little bit of. A little bit of quiet, and then the word sort of got out, where it was met with a bafflement and disappointment, predominantly. Not a lot of anger, but certainly just bafflement, disappointment by a lot of my colleagues and people that previously had read my books.

[A]

Well, thank you for sharing that. There's a line in your book where you say that your work is to track the myth hanging onto the wingtip of the personal antidote or the tail you're trying to brush aside.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it was interesting to me how that work that you've been doing so publicly then turned inward in a way, or it turned into your own life, and then to hear of the fallout or some of the confusion or disillusionment by peers. How was that, experientially, for you to be formed in such a way and emerge with this new sense of this myth that was hanging on the wingtips that was now yours to carry?

[B]

Yeah, it was. Well, you know what it is? It's like going from a position where you were fairly masterful in an area right back to your first day at school. That's what it felt like. I. There was, you know, there. The work I had chosen to do as a mythologist and a storyteller. I. I have a very particular kind of flavor. And you either like it or you don't, but if you like it, you really like it. And I've been lucky, really lucky enough to have met thousands of people that do like it. So that's a reassuring place to be in midlife. You feel people's goodwill and the goodwill stopped. And it wasn't, as I said, it wasn't met by generally anger. It was just met by. That is really, really odd. Why would you be doing that? As I've said quite a bit in the last few months, people love you when you're searching. They really dislike it. If you find anything, they want you in the position. The, you know, oh, I've met Ayahuasca Jesus. There he was, you know, and he also said, all, all, it all leads up the mountain or it's all cool. Keep looking, brother. Trust your intuition. Off we go. I understand that. I understand the kind of bravado of it. I just don't believe it anymore. And so one of the things that was painful especially for me, was I'd have First Nation friends, I'd have native friends who understandably said, oh, you do understand that this thing that you've now put, you've. You've tucked your boat into a colonial religion. Yeah, this is, this is the. This is that. This is the great poison, you know, etc. So that was hard stuff to hold on to because that wasn't how I saw it, and it isn't how I saw and it isn't how I see it. And there was, as is often the way with anything real in life, there was a considerable period, period of just sort of silence. And you're aware you don't have anything cohesive to say about what's actually happening to you. But to keep talking about what you already know in the wing, in the rear view mirror is not interesting either. So you have no choice but to persist and to continue. But you are aware, you are. You are swimming in very, very new waters that are also very deep.

[A]

Well said. You know, as I think about the way that you set up this book, the chapters, you know, they're so anchored in muddy, soulful themes on death, on envy, on limits, and breathed with spirit. How does holding the tension of the soul of mud and the spirit of breath play together in mythic work?

[B]

Well, it, it plays together in the relationship between spirit and soul. Now, spirit, you know, soul, they're often used interchangeably. But, you know, a lot of my great teachers said, no, one of the things you can do is look at the difference. James Hillman Wrote an essay called Peaks and Veils. I think that was what it was called. And, you know, a soulful experience is down in the veil and a spirit experience is on the top of the mountain. Which one is not better than the other. But you live in the tension of both. And there aren't many people that can do that. Most people elect.

[A]

Early on.

[B]

I may have something of a depressive personality, but I also can get down into the guts of things and I can feel my despair and I can articulate it. I'm a soulful character. And then there are others who are filled with, you know, great conceptual knowledge and eureka moments, but they are floating in some fashion. They. They're above the world. And the old image I would always use is. In Greek myth, it's the senex. It's the old man holding onto the ankle of the Puerto Nus. The part of you that feels a little like God and is trying to fly away. The senex holds on to the ankle. Now, the very important. The senex is not to. Is not to drag you to the ground, but they're not to let you escape. You live off. You live in movement. You have a wingspan, but you are not so adrift that you incinerate yourself. And that tension is what in Romanticism is called negative capability. And I call it the relationship between the timeless and the time bound. And the stories we remember and the myths that really matter are the ones that have that. That tension in it that Lorca, the poet Lorca called duende. And duende is something. It's that great rasping rub between life and death. It's the sound of flamenco, you know?

[A]

Yes, yes. Duende is one of those words that has to be experienced before defined. I feel like.

[B]

Yeah, it's.

[A]

It's just so evocative. You name three movements within myths that kind of the storied, layered patterns that we tangle with in myth but also in our own lives of severance. Threshold in return.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How do you see these as serving as key and necessary components when we reflect on our own lives?

[B]

Well, if we think about the first one, severance, the idea is hopefully that at some point, usually in your teenage, what we now call your teenage years, you will. As a natural expression of the energy you have in your body and the. Probably the disquiet you're now feeling amongst your family. There'll be a. There'll be an urge in you to leave the village, to leave the town, to leave the hamlet and to see how you look and feel outside of the watchful eye of your parents and their expectations for you. What is my shape outside the family that I've been forged in? So you can sever like that. You can sever simply when you leave home or you go on a gap year, you go traveling. That's a kind of benign form of severance. But on the other hand, it could be more extreme than that. There are lots. I've worked a lot with guys that have done, you know, done tours in the Army. You know, they've been over to Iraq or even a long way back. They would be telling me about 30 or 40 years before in Vietnam. So that's a severance. Severance means the old life has ended, the new life has begun. And so that mythically takes you into a new space. When you've left the familiar, you enter what is often called threshold. Now, threshold is moments where, in a way, you're more vulnerable than you were, but you're also more alive. So imagine that you're traveling, you know, and you. You may or may not have health insurance. Your family are not back in the day. When I did it, you did not have a phone in your pocket. You just went and you sent postcards. Now, what people tend to notice is when you're traveling like that, you tend to have. You tend to make meaningful connections, Unexpected things happen, and one way or another, you were just sort of more open than normal. Now, the word to describe that that is now very popular is liminal. You've entered liminal space, and things of tremendous meaning can zip in and out of the liminal. That's. That's threshold. However, interestingly, the process that we've described is not a twofold process, it's a threefold. Because the notion, tribally and mythically, is that in the end, you are not just to stay there forever, but you have to suffer the indignity of returning back from that to the community you originally left with some form of information that is meaningful to them, not just you. And so the whole thing has a sort of cyclic quality. And these three ingredients are all contributing to. To what is the great theme of liturgies of the world, which is how on earth in modern times, do we become real human beings? What does that actually look like? And what I'm presenting through the travails of each chapter is. I'm glad you spotted that. The themes are quite gritty. You know, who wants a chapter on passivity followed by a chapter on evil, followed by a chapter on limit? You know, that's. This is not me. This is not me auditioning for Winfrey, but if you're watching Oprah and you know, I'd love to come and chat. So there's. That's in a way, in a way, I suppose, as I'm talking to you, I. I chose rather difficult things to write about to anchor my natural high spirits in writing, you know, in my own kind of turns of phrase. I kept that relationship with the Senec within the book. I actually had a dream. Paul, early on had a dream. And in the dream I met, believe it or not, God. And God said, okay, here you are, you've got this book to write. Don't worry too much about the words. The words are going to take care of themselves over time. But the template of the book is really important. The shape of this book is really important. You on, you are to hold the hand of the listener or the reader. And we are. You're going. He didn't tell me quite line by line what to do, but he said, just give me. Make it as direct as you possibly can and then let the luminosity of the words fill up each chapter. And so, yeah, usually it was. I've never ever done anything like that before. In terms of site specificity.

[A]

Well, it sings in the depths and plums the depths with that spirited voice carrying it forward, allowing readers in, I think, to, to the framework, but also to their own lives. At least that was my experience. And I'm thinking about this of, you know, when I was a wandering 20 something, I'm now 45. I, you know, if I had enough coins in my pocket, I would take off to some foreign land or new experience just, just to feel that sense of aliveness. And as I was reading the chapter on passivity and that line about when you hear that call to adventure and when we do not heed the call or respond with urgency. I'm thinking about myself now in midlife. Like I'm. I'm joyfully tethered to my family. Um, but I witness myself more resistant to emerging calls. You know, it rises up in the tenderness of, of my family stability while also acknowledging who will I become if I don't answer this call. How does this look different in midlife versus kind of that, the, the adventurous spirit of a 20 something who's footloose and fancy free with itchy feet to get out on the road?

[B]

Well, I think that there is a wisdom to go in and doing that early because just on the most innate biological level, your 30s and 40s often are going to get caught up with Other concerns. Amazingly, there comes a day which is very painful when that changes and the kids are gone. And you're like, oh, my goodness. Okay, now. Now all these other things can happen, but they happen. They don't happen in negative space. They happen in the absence of your children. So they'll always be. It'll always be rather poignant, you know, it's not the kind of flat space before they were born. It's the empty space with them not being around so much. But do you remember there's a poem. Bly would have translated it by Rilke. It goes something like this. I can't remember all of it, I don't think. Sometimes a man stands up during supper and goes outside and keeps on walking because of a church that stands somewhere in the east. And his children say prayers over him as if he were dead. And another man dies there amongst the plates and the dishes. So his children have to go far out into the world and find that church that he forgot. So that would be. That's, you know, very real carrion and very Bly. And the interesting thing is you are going to have to die amongst the plates and the dishes. You'll. Here's it. You'll like this. So I'm in the car with Robert, and we're driving somewhere, and it's a long drive. And it's just that he was always chatty, always. He always happy to talk. And I said to him, here you are. You know, he's about 86 at the time. You know, all these books you've written, all these translations you've done, you. You were at top of the best seller list for two years, you know. And he said, I've lived only 50 of my creative life. I said, that's. Good Lord. What do you mean? And he said, the other 50 I gave to my family. And he said, interestingly, the 50% I have sacrificed has made the other 50% much more poignant. You know, rather than just don't be on the take all the time. Don't be on the grab. There is an interesting old spiritual idea that all. All religious information has to be paid for. All religious information has to be paid for. And partially religious information. You know, as Christians, we are surrendering. We're endlessly surrendering into the mind of Christ. And so we start to make decisions that aren't so selfish. Amazingly, you know, so that was a. That's a lovely little thing, isn't it, from Bly. I've lived half the life I thought I was going to live. Creatively but the half, I. I quote, unquote sacrificed, that's the ballast in the saddlebags that have made everything so much richer.

[A]

I'm so glad you brought that up. That the requirement of surrender and sacrifice is what this life calls us to. To participate more fully, whether it's the next call to adventure or the deepening of place as well. I'm thinking about your chapter on prayer where you write in the end, prayers and something we do, it becomes something that we are. And I'm reminded of the book, of course, the Way of the Pilgrim and other Christian mystical texts. Yeah. Where becoming prayer itself is more than words on paper. So what do you think of those who become prayer? What stands out to you about their presence and the path that led them in this becoming?

[B]

They are not judgmental generally, and there's a likeness in them. And maybe they cry easily. There's just, I. I have met these people. I have met them. People that are. Are living prayer. People that are letters from Christ. Isn't that lovely? People that are letters from Christ moving through the world. There's a likeness to them, and they're just not looking you and they're not looking at you and sizing you up all the time and telling you what you've done wrong. But they have that quality that all saints have, which is once you've been in their presence, you feel a little rewired. You feel a little different. As Rilke says, oh, I think I'm going to have to change my life. So it's not as if they are. The prayer by now is not something that's coming out of their mouth. It's not something they're rushing off to do every five minutes. It is the endless circling Jesus, pray prayer that now occupies their heart and their body. Like their pulse, you know, it's like their pulse. There's a way of doing that. Even. Even a little one like me has glimpsed that reality. I know that reality is there. There's a lovely word in Orthodoxy, hesitation for extremely profound level of silence. And I'd have some feeling for that. And people I know would have some feeling for that through the wilderness. Vigilance. That's what you get in the end. That's what you're trying to get. So prayerful people, for me, don't remind you of their. They don't remind you of their. Of how prayerful they are. They're just it. They are just there.

[A]

Yeah. Marvelous. I think when we're lucky to come across those folks, we can feel it in our bones, and it inspires us to stay the narrow path. Martin, you've given so much time and I'm so grateful. Of course, in all good conversations, I have a dozen more questions that we did not get to. And that's the joy of living this life. The conversation continues within and without. So I just want to say thank you so much for writing this book. It has generated dozens of conversations with friends and kin are ready for me and the chance to. To begin that here. It was delightful. But like I teed at the beginning, I always like to end by keeping it in our body and our spirit and our soul with the tangible. If you were going to pair this conversation with a drink, what would be your drink of choice and why?

[B]

Unquestionably, it would be a Negroni, which is a really, really fantastic cocktail. It would be a Negroni because there's something, there's spirit and soul in a Negroni. There's a sweetness and there's a sourness in a Negroni. Also, a Negroni has the, you know, has a bit of the med in it, has that Mediterranean feeling. And so I'm thinking about Neruda and I'm thinking about Juan Ramon Jimenez and I'm thinking about Antonio Machado. I'm thinking about Lorca. And so I'm thinking about the South. This time in winter, I'm always thinking about the South. So it would be a drink that I would offer up now. And if anybody, if you like a tipple and for any reason you haven't come across Negroni yet, you know, seek it out. It'll make your evening super sweet.

[A]

Yeah, I love it.

[B]

I love it.

[A]

I think that'll be my cocktail choice tonight to end up at this week.

[B]

Good, ma'. Am. Wonderful.

[A]

I appreciate that. Good people, thank you for listening to this episode of Contemplify. May it aid you in plumbing the earthy depths of this shared cosmos. Pop over to contemplify.com to find the show notes for this episode or sign up for the monthly Contemplify non required request reading list or to sign up for the weekly contemplative practice. Lo Fi and Hushed. If you are enjoying Contemplify, you can rate and review it on your podcast player. It helps fill the cup of contemplative cheer. The theme song of Contemplify is called Langside by Charles Ends and Darian Hofius. Fellas, thanks as always. I'm looking forward to bringing you more musings here and conversations with contemplatives in the world in the near future. Until then, be well. Sa.