A Branch from the Lightning Tree
- Jul 11
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★☆☆
I first learned about Martin Shaw from an interview with Emergence Magazine’s Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee in their first printed volume from 2019 (though I neither discovered the magazine nor read the issue until last year). Shaw touches on several things, but primarily the intelligence of ancient myths and why humanity desperately needs them to navigate our current ecological and spiritual crises. (Amitav Ghosh would be pleased.) It wasn’t the mythology that hooked me, but the notions of being “three miles wide and two inches deep” and “adrift in possibility,” the difference between being “from a place and being of a place,” and the story (not elaborated upon in this interview) of Shaw living in a yurt in the wilds of England for four years when he decided he wanted to get serious about place.
Shaw has written nearly 20 books—where to begin? After a bit of research, I settled on the Mythteller Trilogy—A Branch from the Lightning Tree, Snowy Tower, and Scatterlings—because they appeared to touch closest to the primal experience that led to his four-year life in a tent: “At the end of the last century, Martin Shaw spent four days and nights alone in the wilds of Snowdonia.” This wasn’t just any four days and nights alone. This was four days and nights without food, tent, company, or fire. I was intrigued. It felt important—if not exactly necessary, because what is necessary?—and, above all else, it was an experience that was clearly life-altering, life-expanding, life-making.
It’s never too late to do something seismic, and it’s never too late to allow your life to be altered by the experience. But for those who haven’t done much leaping before looking, or who have treaded cautiously or deliberately (with regret or no), the prospect of doing something unpredictably transformative (because there’s no telling how one will come out on the other side) without the will to actually make that life-altering change? That’s either madness or stupidity. Is it my mind that’s up for the experience, but the heart that knows I lack the courage to go where it leads me? Or the other way around? Whichever it is, I was content to live vicariously through Shaw, and that’s the frame of mind with which I entered this book.
What of it? Let’s just say A Branch from the Lightning Tree did not meet my expectations, despite what was like a promising start: “If you don’t want to be Crazy Horse, Boudicca, or Pablo Neruda, stop reading now. It’s probably best we nip this relationship in the bud. This is a book about teasing out the mischievous, solitude-loving, flamboyant, sorcerous, arms-extended-into-the-inky-blackness singing songs of the lost-highwayman aspect of your nature.” I was reminded of Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” which also started sumptuously strong—“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness …”—before ultimately getting lost on its own ramble. Here, Shaw goes more Emerson (see his essay “Nature”) than Thoreau, more Tracy K. Smith (Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times) than Ada Limón (Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry), hitting you intellectually rather than viscerally. I wanted to be roused, to question everything, abandon sense and reason, strip naked and run with wolves, and howl at the moon, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
But A Branch from the Lightning Tree never takes us there. Unsurprisingly, much is made of myths (Shaw tells and interprets several throughout), their potential to illuminate the present, and, especially, their power, should we heed their lessons to extract us from the rut of living but not being alive. Little is made, or even said, however, about one thing I actually wanted to know. Rather than speaking directly (at least too much) about it, we are given quotes from participants in Shaw-led wilderness vigils, as if their words could do justice to the story I’d come to hear. (Mostly, they felt like testimonials of satisfied customers—and not in a good way.) I’m not comparing Martin Shaw to Gautama Buddha, but even Buddha spoke directly and extensively about his own enlightenment, while also establishing the Dharma and founding the Sangha to allow for others to achieve enlightenment for themselves.
What I wanted was a story told around the campfire, not a lecture in an auditorium (despite the latter being dressed up as the former). Maybe we’ll get there in volumes two and three. Or maybe Shaw’s written more directly about his experience elsewhere and I chose the wrong place to start. Or maybe, as I keep finding—or not finding—no book will give me what I’m looking for. That, perhaps, is exactly the lesson Shaw was trying to teach.
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