Soul Armour

Stitching Our Psyches to Earth's Green Heart

Not long ago I was seized by the unsettling realisation that I am no where near as awake to the world as I once was.

In the liminal realm of childhood, a thousand faerie streams flow into us on a daily basis, every little experience crackling with vibrancy. The world is shudderingly alive for a time, then, as the grey tendrils of boring culture penetrate deeper into our psyches, the world begins to lose its lustre.

That luminous topology of imagination gets squeezed and flattened; the spired towers and labyrinthine castles of the child’s inner world are replaced by the grey res extensa of the motorways and office blocks that come to dominate our localities and the imaginal worlds those localities are interpenetrated with.

What’s that about?

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the same for our primeval ancestors, who’s quality of attention probably had more in common with a child’s than we 21st century adults. The world was once a living body replete with secrets, every glowing cloud and sleeping stone a fellow presence enfolded within the runneled earth and arcing skies. Now it’s mostly camera fodder, the setting sun snapped into our smartphones before we’ve even felt the kiss of its light.

I’d thought my curiously enchanted upbringing had kept those faeries streams from being filled in, and it did. Just. When the cosmos continued its relentless tumble of violent creativity by coagulating some of its physical and invisible substance into the being known as ‘Ben’, it did so by granting a fistful of blessings which gave me a fighter’s chance of sustaining those faerie streams into adult life.

Some of these blessings were family-shaped; a mother who, in her teens, wandered around Manchester council estates in an elven cloak reciting William Butler Yates, and a father afflicted with so much creative zeal that founding and performing in a travelling circus was just one in a string of outrageous high-wire acts.

The cavalcade of unconventional characters surrounding my early life included all sorts of misfits and weirdos, green witches and hedge wizards, a lot of them contained within the sheltering walls of Hebden Bridge, a village now as famed for its artists and gay folk as it is for its flooding. There, at the Bronte end of the South Pennines, a shamble away from the place Ted Hughes entered the fray, I went about my merry business, quietly assuming the whole world was like Hebden.

It wasn’t, and after thirty odd years of moving through it, boring culture gradually managed to loop its tendrils around my daimon’s esophagus. But the attempted suffocation failed, and that invisible twin who guides the trajectory of these sentences is coming back, swinging.

Not that I stand a chance against the overbearing power of consensual reality. It’s definitely a David Vs Goliath situation, or more like the Red Viper Vs the Mountain. Still, if I’m due to get my eyes gouged out by the towering forces of boring culture then I might as well as go out in style.

Exaggeration is vital here, mainly because the soul-eroding effects of boring culture are so pervasive that we need to make them a little more visible. How to see that inside the bubble of hamster-wheel-life we experience only a tiny fraction of what’s possible?

Painting by William Blake (Pretty sure he wouldn’t approve of my Photoshop compositing).

At around the same time my son was born, I started to meet and learn from extraordinary characters like Terri Windling, Malcolm Green, Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw. My commitment to the 2019 School of Myth and Storytelling course ended in a four day wilderness rites of passage ritual, which coincided with deep immersion in the work of proper wizards of the academic type, like James Hillman and Iain McGilchrist.

As a result, I was able to see that the entity known as ‘Ben’ had, over the years, inadvertently picked up some of the habits and holding patterns of the very thing I was trying to stand against: the world of dry information and mass-produced experiences, of hyper-addictive technologies and commerce gone psychotic; a world that facilitates our forgetting and complicity in ecological crisis, whilst damming up the faeries streams so effectively that we can barely hear the trickle of the anima mundi’s bleeding heart.

In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram elucidates how our language can either shut down our open up the sensorial and imaginative faerie streams that keep us linked to the richness of the world. This is what poetry is supposed to do, and is perhaps the best compliment to immersion in nature. In a world where our ways of speaking often feel as tame and square as the built environments we inhabit, poetry becomes vital. Here we have a way of weaving ourselves a protective cloak made of wild language. Soul armour. All we have to do is read it.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

I dare you to speak these words aloud three times aloud not feel those faerie streams flooding back into your breathing body (or at least you can hear a trickle underfoot?). It doesn’t matter if the poem confounds us. Understanding comes later. First we feel. Courageous sensuality opens the door to the other world. Sustained practice keeps it from shutting.

If we’re serious about stitching our souls to Earth’s green heart and its neglected underworld, then we need to realise we’re swimming against a powerful current. Without some kind of community, ritual or practice, then we’ll be lulled to sleep by the soporific whispers of boring culture, spooning down our Madagascan custard in a Netflix-induced coma as we’re swept out to sea without even realising it.

I don’t want to reach my deathbed without having lived.

So I’d love to know what rituals, practices and counter-spells do you rely on to keep yourself alive, enlivened, and in love with life?

Do you light a candle for the other world? Do you pour a cup of single malt to honour the old gods? Or is it something more casual? Walk, dance, breathe? Drink a proper pint in a proper pub?

Comment if you dare. I’d love it if you did.

As you’re thinking about what to say, here’s a poem to finish on. It’s good to finish on a poem.

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!

~ William Blake

Footnotes:

The art for the thumbnail is called Spinning Moonlight by David Wyatt.