Today is the solstice. Light and dark stand tiptoe on a point in the shadows. Soon the needle imperceptibly tips toward the light. The holly branch that the Green Knight holds as he enters the feast halls of King Arthur is a peace offering. The holly holds both winter and summer. Its sharp evergreen leaves are a reminder of winter’s bite and the red berries the warmth of summer. This time of year the market is flooded with Christmas stories; most of which are interchangeable treacly vehicles for a bland Capitalist spirituality. All those stories focus on the night before Christmas and Christmas Day. This narrative turn that melts down the old pagan images into toothless mutants (such as the inflatable lawn ornaments that seem to have metastasized in the past few years) is good for the market. It’s not so good for the psyche or the planet. These image markers followed colonial roots from England: the fir tree, the holly, the yule log etc.These are Northern forest symbols and they mark Northern time and logic. One isn’t meant to pine for a white Christmas in the tropics. The images are not the colonizers and would rather be tucked in near a stone hearth with its ancestral bones beneath its earth.
Aside from the Silent Night and the story of the manger the whole thing is a pagan solstice event. What solstice looks like on the steppes or in a prairie or the desert is not the same as what solstice looks like in northern Europe. There is some speculation that Santa Claus comes from a very old shamanic tradition; a visionary who speaks with the spirits of reindeer. I like the story, but I think there is a tendency to tie our symbols too neatly to our ideology. While it is certainly incontrovertible that if someone brandishes a certain symbol at a certain time there is no room for doubt. Images have a tendency to slip the reins we put them in. Images are patient and can outlive entropy. They are also fungible and dynamic. However, they always carry the meaning germ of their natal narrative imprinted on their skin. Place resonates if even faintly no matter how far afield they travel.
Global markets warp many things. In delivering a ubiquitous product everywhere they flatten cultures and places. Flattening occurs with the sameness of different regions and it occurs in the hunger for raw materials. Local economies are destroyed, landscapes denuded and memory is broken. The gift economy that is meant to be represented in Christmas, one that is local, specific and generative becomes a manic inflammation of shipping and economic anxiety. All this pressure put on a single day and with a stable set of images all over the world creates fissures. It is the opposite of sitting in the dark with community and understanding that each of us brings a light.
The compression of the events of Christmas into one day at the same time the world over while simultaneously leaking Christmas images earlier and earlier in the year confuse what solstice should be. Solstice is a marker of light and time. It is a moment of a specific occurrence. A moment arrived at through lived experience that aligns with a cosmic event. When the Green Knight bursts into the hall he is a reminder of two things: that the weeks of celebrating the season are mythic time. It exists outside of everyday structures and as such needs to be attended to in that spirit. Not as an obligation or a box to check but what the Earth tells us: rest, tell stories give gifts. The second reminder is that the celebration is earned through the body’s experience of the full year. There is no life hack for the mythic.
Gawain’s encounter at the Green Chapel only has meaning because he traveled over all the seasons. His initiation could not be compressed or multitasked. Culturally we put a lot of pressure on a single day (which is not even the solstice itself) to deliver everything. These days it is a literal delivery of goods in cardboard boxes. What if we cast off the weight of the market narrative of this time of year? What would it mean if we truly allowed ourselves quiet, revelry and togetherness over a stretch of weeks? What would happen if instead of importing fir trees to the desert and imposing arctic shamanic familiars into the plains that we allowed the places themselves to tell us how to be present for the solstice? The images can travel. They always do. They pick up new flavors and habits. When we truly give into the Earth’s rhythms we find release and agency. The stories and images tell us that. But they have been yoked into the service of a time flattening dictator.
The act of the Green Knight bursting open the doors let in cold and winter, but also light. He reminded the court of their obligations to the time. The time at hand. His was a light of understanding. The green light of the living world flickers in his eyes. He also reminded them that nothing of worth comes unearned and that darkness and light are siblings. You cannot have one without the other. The light we bring to this day of fertile darkness is not from borrowed electricity or someone else’s idea of light. It is the light you bring, an illumination ignited by the understanding of a year lived and experienced on a specific patch of ground. Scratch away the plastic coating of the images we are bombarded with and taste the nutritious germ inside. It is old. It tastes of a snowy northern forest.
AND A REMINDER: For anyone interested in taking the drawing and storytelling workshop Nostos: the Long Way Home at Building Five in 2024 (details below) we’ve changed the dates from the original announcement. For the month of December, the workshop will be $1600, that’s $300 off of the full price. This workshop will be a rich and deep exploration of storytelling, drawing and visual narrative. We give the story of the Odyssey lots of time to open up, expand and allow you to enter into it. Ultimately you will tell your own story about home; whether that is as a native, an immigrant or a refugee. Join me in 2024 to inaugurate this workshop. Go here to register.
The Odyssey is one of the most iconic of Western stories. We look at what the story has to say about leaving home, coming home, and being a migrant in the world. What does that longing in our stories say about our own longing? Who is a migrant, a refugee, or a native? Our stories root us to the ground and allow us to travel over great distances. How do we define home? Can we find stories in the ground beneath our feet that welcomes newcomers and honors the ancestors?
Over the course of the five sessions we dive deep into the story of the Odyssey through oral storytelling and book discussions.
This course connects one’s innate creative spark with deep-time storytelling and straightforward drawing exercises. Oral storytelling, themed readings, and image making exercises are braided together into each session. This course is for teachers, writers, cartoonists, artists, or anyone interested in unlocking their visual storyteller. This is not about technical prowess, but storytelling and expression. The drawing exercises do not require drawing skill or previous training. Participants come away having created their own story based in image and text; gaining tools for telling stories with pictures and thinking in mythic time.
Each weekend begins with a Friday night lecture.
Saturday is a full day of storytelling, drawing exercises and workshops.
Sunday is work time and presentations.
Building Five, NW Marine Artworks,
2516 NW 29th Ave., Portland, OR 97210
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
Leaving Home
The journey begins. War comes to Ithaca. What causes us to leave home in the first place. Odysseus goes off to war. Telemachus grows up with the weight of an absent father, Penelope takes on leadership and grows into her role. It is springtime. Are we setting out with excitement and possibility? With a heavy heart? With regret? We consider the traveler, the wanderer and the tourist. After each storytelling session you draw. We go from quick intuitive drawing exercises to longer more reflective pieces.
JUNE 28-30, 2024:
Out at Sea
Now that the initial excitement of setting off has settled into the day to day, how do we move through the days? Telemachus tries to be a man, Penelope fends off the suitors, Odysseus heads home and is thwarted. What does it feel like to be a refugee and cast from home? More quick exercises, we build on images from the previous session.
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
Leaving Home
The journey begins. War comes to Ithaca. What causes us to leave home in the first place. Odysseus goes off to war. Telemachus grows up with the weight of an absent father, Penelope takes on leadership and grows into her role. It is springtime. Are we setting out with excitement and possibility? With a heavy heart? With regret? We consider the traveler, the wanderer and the tourist. After each storytelling session you draw. We go from quick intuitive drawing exercises to longer more reflective pieces.
SEPT. 7-8, 2024:
Dreams of home fires
We’re right in the middle. Everyone tries to hold the line and survive. Immigrants and natives consider what home means. New materials, longer exercises after the storytelling sessions.
NOV. 2-3, 2024:
The Land of the Dead
Odysseus consults the dead. Underworld musings, ancestors from the other side of the veil come to have a word. One long project after the telling.
DEC. 13-14, 2024:
Homecomings
Odysseus comes home as a nobody. Penelope starts to waver and Telemachus gets a hint from Athena. Not all homecomings are happy. Who are you when you return after a journey? One final work session and a mini-exhibition.