Shaw is our guide in examining our broken relationship with the world. He shares this advice about deep listening. “If myth is the way that the earth thinks, I needed to listen deeply to forests and to rivers and mountains and to gullies and to open more land, to see the stories that were trying to disclose themselves to me all the time.” He uses ancient European myths that concern our own inner, wild twin. He speaks about the deepest need of humankind which concerns relatedness, relatedness with awareness. He helps us along this path by sharing story. He says, “Ancient stories rarely traffic in the day that was like the day before. They usually begin with the day that everything changes, whether that’s something that happens in an individual’s life or whether it happens in a culture, or a tribe, or a village. They are designed to take us deeper when circumstance starts to squeeze us. They don’t indulge in arbitrary misery. They are always trying to dig into the mud of the encounter with the notion that possibly there’s a little bit of gold in there. There’s some information that, over time, could turn into wisdom.” As our guide, Martin Shaw, helps us get acquainted with the kind of folktales and myths that can be helpful in navigating these turbulent times. He shares the story of “The Lindworm” as an example from his new book Courting the Wild Twin.
