The cover of my next book, out in Dec. Actually, that's not quite true. The 1st in my fantasy trilogy, The Stolen Queen, is due out in June.
COMMUNITY
We all want community. But you're not going to find it, not if you are serious about being true to who you are. That is not what regular humanity wants, for whom belonging comes first. At best, you will have a few friends where you won't always agree, but where open discussion is still possible. Even then, such friends will come and go over the years. Maybe beyond that there are one or two friends where there is a spirit connection, like a breath of fine air, who have been sent to you, that endure, and who you know you will always cherish. But that doesn't make it easy, for the spirits still want us to learn
SHAMANISM and THE MODERN WORLD
The
great project of modern shamanism is continually to reclaim the natural
human, within our headlong technological trajectory. It is a difficult
task, and extremely interesting. Technology is natural to humans. In
some ways we know better than the world, in many ways we do not. We need
to work alongside humanity, and be wary of the counter-cultural
assumption that it is all corrupt. That is a self-serving cop-out, a
spiritual bypass.
THE UNIFYING MYTH OF SHAMANISM
The unifying Christian mythology of the West collapsed because it had separated itself from the natural world. The Spirit lay elsewhere. Nature was looked down upon, the province of the beasts. But we are nothing other than the natural world, it is she who nourishes us, cares for us, ensouls us. Shamanism understands this: it is its foundational living idea. We do not have a complex mythology to replace the Christian story. But we do have this one very simple story: nature is ensouled, and we are indivisible from her. That is enough. That story is deep enough and connected enough to carry a civilisation on its shoulders, one that will not this time collapse from its internal contradictions, much as the indigenous societies never seemed to collapse for this reason.