Liturgies of the Wild - Martin Shaw

Began listening to this as an audiobook and had to buy a physical copy because of the pure bars Shaw drops over and over again. If you like myths, spirituality, or Mary Oliver, you’ll love this.

“What we lack is the architecture of tempering. There is an adolescent tone to our ambitions, the sheer gimme gimme of them. There's not a lot of real eldership about…Every decade that passes creates young people from many societies who are hypnotised by the same trail of influences; we’re losing our bespokeness. We are zip code earth these days. It doesn't have to be like this.

Human beings don't mature just because of breasts, beard, or the like, but by active intervention of what we used to call initiatory encounters, and what, these days, we'd likely call bad luck. Times of travail used to be choreographed into rituals and ceremonies that consciously tempered the human, so when life gave them the squeeze there would be an animal memory as to how to respond, techniques to draw upon.”