Dealing With Crossroads: Something to Hang Your Heart On

At a time when we are all confronted by not one, but many crossroads in our modern lives—identity, technology, trust, politics, and a global pandemic—celebrated mythologist and wilderness guide Martin Shaw delivers Smoke Hole. Here, he invites us to put down our phones and lower our gaze to the prayer mat. In Martin’s own words “In a time when we are begging for a new story, it may be the stories we need are supporting us right now, if only we would lower our gaze.”

The following is an excerpt from Smoke Hole by Martin Shaw. It has been adapted for the web.

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Once upon a time, there was a kingdom under the grip of a spyglass.

If you had the spyglass, you could see anything in the world. If you had the spyglass, there was nothing from which you couldn’t glean information. It had mesmeric power over the people. It had been created by a king who gave it to his daughter, to be used for the strangest of courtships. If you wished to marry her, you had to achieve only one thing.

You had to disappear.
You had to become a magician of the invisible.

If you could achieve that and defy their magic, she would offer you her hand. If you didn’t, you were executed. No one had ever succeeded, and many had tried. It was as if the spyglass secretly longed to be defeated.

But it seemed there was nowhere, absolutely nowhere, the spyglass couldn’t peer into. For the longest time, it dragged its hypnotized citizens with it.

But there was a chink in the design. A blind spot. There was one place that the spyglass couldn’t find you. It was directly under the feet of the daughter.

 

Smoke Hole is a small attempt to meet one infection with another: beauty.

What kind of beauty, do you (maybe wearily) ask? The kind we see on Instagram?

Not exactly.

I am a teacher of old stories and a guide into deep places. In this life, it would appear I am to be wedded to the thinking of the wild. The wild as a regal stretch of Siberian larch, the dark fuse of a Lorca poem, the high clear cry of the hawk. I swoon when I feel it. Then I sober up, pay my libations and study it. My study is a kind of praying. A courting, certainly. It’s not bragging; frankly, it’s pretty much the only thing I can do. So it’s beauty with a salty, old-world panache I really care for.

Beauty kicks-starts our attention. The real sublime. To behold it is almost scary because we suddenly have a longing to stand for something. Beauty not as generic but specific, troubling in what it may call forth in us.

I hope this book infects everyone who reads it. I hope there are soon tangible signs of its impact: you breathe deeper, feel steadier, become acquainted with rapture, held strong in grief. I hope this book is a conduit between the timeless and the timebound, prayer mat and smoke hole.

Between Prayer Mat and Smoke Hole

Let’s start by kneeling down.
Because the thing I’d love to talk about is beneath us.

That ground the spyglass can’t quite access. It’s a little worn, possibly with hurt feelings, but it’s there.

It’s a prayer mat. We’re all praying to something.

I know there’s a lot to hold our attention right now – everywhere I glance, there’s a screen pummeling us with statistics – but I’m going to ask us to lower our gaze for a moment, you and I.

Examine the weave of the mat; scrunch up your nose and rub up to the dizzy, strange scent of its perfume. There is no one-size-fits-all mat. There are countless millions of prayer mats, and every last one is different. They’re just enough room for you to kneel on, and that’s about it.

It may not look like much, not with all these other distractions, but we make things holy by the kind of attention we give them. So let’s really look at the weave. It’s moving. There’s a Norwegian tugboat pulling into Alexandria at midnight, there are pale stars over a Provençal castle, there’s a desert woman weaving an emu feather into her hair. If we keep paying attention to this little stretch of rug, strange things happen.

We start to witness a secret history of the earth.
Not the only history, but one tributary of a bigger river that eventually leads us to the vast ocean of Time and Consequence.
We behold this with our old mind, not our new mind.
Sometimes I call this Bone Memory. Not skin or flesh, but bone knowing. It’s what makes storytellers.

This prayer mat is the stuff of our life. The idiosyncratic, usually shadowed, often neglected root system dwelling patiently underneath us. Not just things we’ve lived through, but even further back, things our people lived through. Events that, if they were extraordinary enough, got woven into stories, and by a conscious act of memory decided to be remembered.

Let’s keep looking.

Behind even your people are swooping cranes, misty Welsh hills, lush Ecuadorian valleys, and miles and miles of flowers. These are your ancestors too.

I say it again: we make things holy by the kind of attention we give them.

In a time when we are begging for a new story, it may be the stories we need are supporting us right now, if only we would lower our gaze.

Many of us don’t know it, or more likely have been seduced into forgetting. When you forget what you kneel upon, you are far more easily influenced by energies that may not wish you well.

Well, enough of that.
It’s time to kick the robbers out of the house.
I want my imagination back.
And, now we’re kneeling, I ask you to do something else. Look up.
Towards the smoke hole.

The smoke hole reveals to us the timeless, the prayer mat the timebound.

The stories we remember, sink our teeth into – that we never discard, disown, grow too old for – are ones that live in the tension of both timeless and timebound.

The stories that got us and our people here in the shape we are. Those are the timebound. But it’s the smoke hole that brings in the timeless, the essential, the vital, and I’m petitioning that we could live between both.

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Want to hear about Smoke Hole from author Martin Shaw? Then check out this video!

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