FIRE IN THE HEAD & MY WRITINGS

1 RIDING THE DRAGON – myth & the inner journey

For about a week now I’ve been obsessed by the date 17th November 1993, and it’s been driving me slightly crazy, as I’ve had no idea why that date has been so insistently in my mind. I finally figured it out yesterday: see below.

As a consequence, I find myself writing the first ‘writing about writing’ post on Substack, much sooner than I’d intended. At the moment, I’ll probably post irregularly; later, I’ll be offering a mix of free and paying posts at regular intervals. Most of you who have come to my Substack pages – and I’m so appreciative, thank you – have come because you know me as a writer or workshop and retreat leader; those of you who don’t know me but who’ve signed up for my eco-smallholding posts might be less interested in this. I shan’t be offended if you unsubscribe. On the other hand, of course I’d love it if you stayed! And maybe even shared this to a friend or on a social networking site?

My main focus the last 18 months has been our work on our vegan and regenerative small smallholding in Brittany: some very beautiful land which moves from organic permaculture-type growing through orchards and forest gardening segueing into the unmanaged woodland that tumbles at the slope down to a stream, currently very swollen (I love hearing it always at the edges of my perception).

Our project here is to be as self-sufficient as possible in food, while disturbing the land minimally and enabling regeneration largely via reforestation. The little writing I’ve done has been in relation to this, and in imagining new ways to cook our produce, to contribute to my vegan cookbook. And to be honest, it’s been an exhausting and in many ways stressful and challenging time (Brexit hasn’t helped).

But I always knew that my Fire in the Head programme and my life as a creative writer would both re-emerge. Even being apprenticed full-time to the land hasn’t absolved me from the need to create in other ways.

As I write this, I’m wondering quite how these two aspects of my life (relationship to land and relationship to creative expression), arguably the most important on a personal level (leaving aside love, family – dogs included – wild, and friends), intersect with and cross-fertilise each other.

Actually, it soon emerges clearly in the questioning. It’s partly my psychospiritual relationship to each and both. It’s to do with our inner and outer ecosystems.

My courses and retreats have always had the intention of facilitating others in expressing themselves as authentically and as well as possible. But just as importantly the writing offers tools for exploration and reflection: observation of and participation in the outer world, and recognition of the importance of the considered life, the imagination and the inner world.

The more we can draw our inner and our outer worlds together, the closer we are to wholeness. A life lived in both realms is also potent for effective activism in the world, whatever that means to you.

This has been my own practice for as long as I can remember; of course it would be more than hypocritical to put this forward to readers and participants and not attempt the hard and unending journey towards wholeness oneself.

What I’m truly interested in is awareness: waking up, staying awake, becoming more conscious. And then trying to live that for the benefit of all beings.

These twin aspects of my life are central to my vision of how things could be on this planet, if only; and are the subtle and manifest streams of the values I talked about in a recent post (#5) over on the main page of my Substack.

Many of you know that I’ve been leading creative, reflective, psychospiritual and land-based workshops and retreats part-time since 1991, full-time since 1994. In that time I’ve had a range of books published – poetry, novels and creative non-fiction. (The image below needs another 2 or 3 added, including my latest, A SPELL IN THE FOREST – tongues in trees.)

But Riding the Dragon, above, kicked the whole journey off.

So 17th November 1993. It was only yesterday when I realised that that was the date when the proof copy of this my first book arrived in my hands – and confirmed a dream I’d had, that of being a ‘proper writer’, since I was a child when my essay on ‘Cats and Ecology’(!) won the Lloyds Bank children’s writing prize. (I must have been all of 9 or 10 or so, and I can’t imagine that back then in the 60s I knew what ‘ecology’ really meant.)

At the time when Riding the Dragon was commissioned, I was a single parent making a hard-pressed living as a shoemaker, tending my daughter and our animals, scribbling poems, articles and essays in the corners of my life, keeping that flame alive.

I had recently qualified in transpersonal psychotherapy, rooted in myth and archetype, and in the writings of C G Jung. My thesis was on a personal discovery in the training: how the motifs of my own life could be seen to be mirrored in a powerful (and tragic) Celtic myth that had captured my imagination, and a part of my psyche, when I was very young indeed. Discovering this gave me a ‘way in’ to changing this subconscious pattern.

This marked a turning point in my life, and I began in 1991 to lead ‘personal mythology’ workshops on this theme. An artist friend made me a very beautiful flyer to advertise my first ‘Myth as Metaphor’ weekend. This was back before social media took hold, so the flyers went out as paper copies.

I was in my shoemaking workshop, which at the time was in the grounds of the beautiful C13th Buckland Abbey on the edge of Dartmoor, owned by the National Trust. Although I used almost entirely hand-or foot-operated machinery, my huge green cast iron antique grinder, for smoothing the natural rubber edges of the shoes, was electric and very very noisy. I just heard the phone, and couldn’t really hear the voice on the other end as the switched-off grinder made loud touchdown like a plane.

I thought the person was asking if there were spaces on the forthcoming workshop. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m the commissioning editor for Element Books. I’ve seen your flyer and I’m wondering if you’d like to write a book for us on the psychology of myth.’

Element Books! They were the leading international mind, body, spirit publishers of the last century. (They later went bust, owing me and many other authors a lot of money, but that’s a different story.)

I am sure that I had to sit down quite quickly. I’m also sure that I did no more shoemaking for the rest of that day. I’m fairly certain that I had to ring her back the next day on a pretext, to be clear that I hadn’t imagined it all.

I was 30-something. And yes, of course I’d write it differently now, but the thesis was a good one, and works, I believe.

So the book was written. I had a six-month deadline (and an advance! – Remember those, writers?? – the first of only two in my writing career, and a 4-figure one), so I sat down to write it at 9.30 each evening after my daughter was in bed. I believe it was the first of its kind in Britain, though I’m told it’s influenced others and I see its shadow in some more recent books. From time to time, I still hear from a reader somewhere in the world telling me it’s ‘changed my life’. I am so grateful for this.

And it’s 30 years since I first held that proof copy in my hands and thought ‘I’m a writer. I really am.’