In reading the book, Merlin: Shaman, Prophet, Magician, by John Matthews, I ran across a great passage underscoring something that I touched on before, with the help of an excerpt by David Abram: the connection between insight, knowledge, and the land. The quote from the book on Merlin runs thus:

Messages from the Land

Physical contact with the earth is another important part of the transmission of the skills of both the seer and the prophet. The land held information like a great book, which could be accessed by those with the skill to see or hear it. The most subtle methods of prophetic tradition in Britain and Ireland seem always to have been available to those who live within the spiritual continuum of the land, and this, we have seen, is very much a central aspect of Merlin’s life in the wilderness.

The ancient gifts of the seer poets were not fueled merely by clairvoyance or poetic sensibility, but by resonance, touch, connection. Their ability to root into any object, place, or person and discover identity, quality, and answers to questions concerning these is part of this symbiotic continuum. Thus Merlin’s shadowy successor, the bard Taliesin, speaks constantly of “becoming” certain objects — a tree, a staff, a stone or a lantern — as well as being able to slip between the cracks of time to predict future events.

The author goes so far as to reweave the connection between poetry and visionary language, something I feel strongly about:

The Spirit of Inspiration

…We see that the role of the poet and the seer were considered as interdisciplinary. Poets were also seers; seers were poets. Merlin, in his earliest incarnation, is both.

In light of this, it is not surprising that the Celtic prophetic tradition, of which Merlin is very much a part, is primarily fueled by the search for poetic inspiration.

Every place a riddle…every riddle a poem…every poem a spirit…every spirit a place….

Join instructor Willem Larsen in walking the web that weaves
ancient Spoken Traditions with the human experience in the mys-
tery and beauty of the land. Explore how far your senses can reach,
the capacity of your memory to re-experience past realities with
astounding clarity, your intrinsic ability to speak and write fluent
poetry of place, and the traditions of exploring mystery both physi-
cally through animal tracking and imaginatively through the solv-
ing and creating of riddles. Gain knowledge about a specific sam-
pling of local plants, trees, and animals, through the applied use of
your skills in Spoken Tradition. Edible, medicinal, ecological, meta-
phorical, and survival uses and relationships with our neighbors in
the living world all come together in this workshop which reawak-
ens the Bard in you.

The workshop runs 9am-6pm, Saturday November 4th and
9am-5pm Sunday November 5th, 2006. Location in Portland,
Oregon.

Tuition costs $125 per student, if we receive it before Octo-
ber 10th. $165 after. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Regis-
tration closes Wednesday noon, November 1st. For those in need of
financial assistance, check the website for the opportunity to solve
the riddle that will earn you a full scholarship…

Contact Willem for more info, or to register:
mythic.cartographer at gmail dot com

Erm…just to make it a little more elegant (and solvable) I’ve changed the ending of the scholarship riddle. I apologize for my meddling in your feverish riddle-solving. We all have a little OCD elf we need to feed now and then.

See there…
Going down red in the west
the heart of the sun dips itself
into waters
and gives birth
to a Serpent of Life
like a many-legged centipede
here I touch
and feel scales
there I touch
and feel soft fur
she breathes hot on my face
and I feel refreshed
the rot of old worries and ways
evaporates
with the steam
and smoke.

Coming soon, expect to see the Riddle that, if answered, will both demonstrate your riddlin’ scholarship, and earn you a scholarship to the Riddle workshop in November.

All respect due to the right honorable Martin Prechtel, who (as far as I know) conceived of such a delightful notion.

Keep your eyes peeled! But don’t expect it right away, either!

Impress your friends! Spread the Love. You can also find this info in the Events Calendar on the sidebar.

Supper of Raven’s Wings Flyer

By the responses, everybody had a blast at the first Riddle Workshop, “A Supper of Raven’s Wings”. I plan to run another one in November…keep an eye out for more details! I’ll also look into getting online some of the ingenious riddles that workshop participants wrote. The biggest drawback of the workshop involved time: not enough.

High points involved the trip to the wildlife refuge and the private Quest Walks everyone did there….learning the secret cycle of the Riddler’s Round…the riddler’s tools of Questioning and Web Weaving…and the great feeling of “finding a home” for the pursuit of Questioning and Riddling.

Perhaps we’ll plan for a whole weekend next time…

You’ll find here a simple list of practices to build your ability to create and solve riddles. However, the discipline of Riddling runs so far and so deep, this can only scratch the surface. Nevertheless, the more that learn even the little taste offered here, the more likely the tradition of Riddling will not fade into the whirling modern vortex of consumable entertainments.

I speak for myself, first and foremost, in all these things. Know this now. Yet what I have discovered may help you find your own heart-hidden-in-a-box.

The word Poet has always had far more easy fascination for me than an actual poem on a page. That poem stares a challenge: the Universe speaks plainly only to the Dead, or the soon-to-die. If you would live a life, cunning and richly, it behooves you to learn a subtler language than that of bluntness and injury. A knife cuts, yes. And? How did that knife come to cut you, of all people? Backtrack before it ever happens, read the future before it arrives, solve the Riddle before it comes to pass.

Onward.

The Question

Everything in the world has a voice, and tells its stories over, and over, and over….everything. You must challenge yourself to open a vaccuum, a pulling space, in your mind, in your senses. You must become a constant wordless question. The great Riddlers of old would fade away to nothing more than a human ‘?’, invisible ghosts upon the land,. Stretched out to the horizon, they knew everything that happened the moment it occurred.

It all begins with a question. Nothing more.

Pick a single object, the more mundane the better. Once a day, for a week, ask 50 questions of this object. Pick a new object every day, if necessary.

Count off the questions with your fingers. When you reach ten, touch your head with that finger, as a marker. Starting with your fingers again, count until the next ten, touching your left shoulder to signal twenty. Then the right shoulder. Then the left hip. Then the right hip. You just marked off 50 questions.

Does 50 questions sound impossible? Good. Find them anyway. Cheat (and if you can, you’ve probably discovered some foolish limits anyway, that you’ve imposed upon yourself for no good reason).

You do not have to answer any of the questions, though you may find yourself curious about them. Do what you like with the answers. For now, just the questions.

The Web

Much like a spider’s web, you now weave a map of connections, everything leading back to the center, that object upon which you asked the 50 questions.

Once a day, find 50 links back to that object, 50 ways it connects to other things in the world. Count off the same as before. Links can consist of links-of-links, as far removed as you like, as long as they lead back to the center. You can consider the links in the web as metaphors, or associations, or poetic allusions, if it helps. Find those kinds of connections.

The Chronicles of the Dreamtime

Every night, when you go to bed, one part of you sleeps, while another wakes up. This one will teach you to master the riddling world, if you learn to speak its language.

When you wake up, you have two options. Immediately tell the story of your dreams, or what momentary snatches of them you remember, to the person next to you. Or, write them down. It amounts to the same thing. Some cultures honor the telling of dreams, and make space for it. In ours, you may find your best audience in the pages of a journal.

Write down all the details that you can remember, even the stupid, foolish, unpleasant, inconvenient, embarrassing ones. Especially those.

More layers exist for this, but essentially, take nothing for granted in the dream, and begin your mapping web on it. 10 links for every detail you can single out. Results don’t matter at this point, but the practice does. You don’t want to find out what anything ‘means’ - you want to see what connections you can make.

The ‘Aha!’

Having said results don’t matter, you may notice every once in a while, you get an ‘aha!’. Something clicks. Something makes sense. You accidentally decode a little piece of dream language. Good for you. Write it down. But don’t let it suck you in…this concerns the practice, not the results.

The Waking Dreamtime

If this next notion doesn’t turn your world upside-down, I don’t know what will. Because before you now lies the task of treating your waking world like a dream. Take one short interaction, between yourself and the world and treat it like the dream. Find the connections, 10 connections to every element you can single out. How short? Make it short it enough that it seems easy. Then make it a little longer every time you practice anew.

The Door Has Opened A Crack

You’ve just learned the most rudimentary practices of Riddling - rudimentary, but unspeakably powerful. Any single one of them could turn a life upside down, if practiced consistently. Consider that, if doing them all seems like too much. Start with one piece, one practice. Then add more practices, slowly, one at a time.

And the door will slowly open, inch by inch…you’ll hear the hinges complaining, but pay them no mind. Uncared for, abandoned, rusted with old grief, they have the right to complain, the Riddlers of Old (that took such care of them) having long ago disappeared into the maw of the machine that eats beauty and excretes despair. Make yourself indigestible to that machine. Keep the door opening, and oil the hinges with your Riddling mind.

At the College, we consider Dreams, Riddles, Poems, Memory, and Story the same beast. To study any of these, you must study all of them.

I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details. -Einstein

If a divinity had thoughts, would they not most closely resemble dreams?

Myths are public dreams…Dreams are private myths. - Joseph Campbell

Listen to a world of riddles that comes to us through folktales, myths, and dreams. A riddle, spoken by a character in a myth, represents a double riddle: the riddle itself, and the riddle as a single line in the great riddle of the story itself.

Riddles ask us to associate, to think in metaphor, to see things as layered and poetic. Could we describe a riddle as “a poem with an (as yet) unknown subject”?

In panoply of painted feathers
I shrug off a cape of small sooted wings
Rising resplendent from the pavement
Born of outcast crumbs and forgotten foods
I’ve died crushed underfoot
I’ll die again torn by talon
After I scatter my spirit to the sky.

So to write a riddle, study your dreams. Learn the dream language of poetry. And write a poem with an unstated subject.

Sweat on the table
Yet chilled to the bone
At first, kissed and cradled
Once drained, left alone

But why stop there? Why not use riddles as a vehicle to a sense of place.

Big hands catch the glint of coin
though it may remain forever out of reach
I’ve learned to stand tall and spread my arms wide
Lest golden fortune slip between my fingers
And when those around me perservere
begging for handouts though the coins
have begun to fade
I withdraw my begging bowls
I retreat deep within
Nourished on the syrup of my soul
And wait for better days
to spring forth.*

We propose that riddles originally served that exact purpose. To awaken our minds, and to connect us to the knowledge of our place.

*Acer macrophyllum, Bigleaf Maple tree

Join instructor Willem Larsen in unraveling the web that ties ancient Spoken Traditions with the human experience in the mystery and beauty of the land. Explore how far your senses can reach, the capacity of your memory to re-experience past realities with astounding clarity, your intrinsic ability to speak and write fluent poetry of place, and the traditions of exploring mystery both physically through animal tracking and imaginatively through the solving and creating of riddles. Gain knowledge about a specific sampling of local plants, trees, and animals, through the applied use of your skills in Spoken Tradition. Edible, medicinal, ecological, metaphorical, and survival uses and relationships with our neighbors in the living world all come together in this workshop which reawakens the Bard in you.

Location in Portland, Oregon.

Sliding scale donations, $10 - $75 for the two day workshop.

Email Willem for more info, at mythic dot cartographer at gmail dot com.