Recommendations roundup
Hi, friends,
These letters are an unfolding. They’re a coming-to-terms, an experiment, a process of groping through the dark, trying to feel my way towards truth.
I never know what I’m going to say, because I can only find it in the writing. And the writing can take a long time.
This week, I’d promised the second instalment of my foray into the cave. I wanted to talk about why our oldest ancestors squeezed deep into the belly of the earth, and how their underworld journeys might have differed from the version we’ve inherited from Joseph Campbell—all flaming ego and trophies.
I have many words of that essay—and I’m still groping through the dark. Still finding what I think. I love this process. I never feel more alive than I do in that darkness, catching glimmers of illumination. And it is an entirely impractical way to maintain a weekly newsletter.
So this week, I’m sending a recommendations roundup. Below, you’ll find some of the things that have been giving me life lately. I’m going to spend some more time in this cave, seeing what it’s all about. And isn’t that perfect, really? To hang out in the underworld for a while longer. Because you can’t force the return.
Love,
Xx Ellie
Sophie Strand’s Substack, Make Me Good Soil
If ever I needed proof that we’re all participating in one giant, shared consciousness, I could look to Sophie Strand, and the fact that whenever I’ve wanted to say anything recently, I find she’s already said it. I’d put Strand at the centre of a joyful, life-giving moment and movement in mythology, which is once again celebrating the organic and hyper-local roots and rhizomes of myth. Strand’s work is all about breaking out of individualist narratives and celebrating relationality, polyphony, and generative, teeming breakdown. Highly recommended.
The Emerald, On Resonance: Caves, Hooves, Hearts, Harps . . . And the Birth of Culture
The Emerald is an ambitious and poetic podcast series on myth, the mysteries of humanity, and the deepest truth of what it means to be alive on this spinning rock. Every episode is a banger, but I recently revisited this one on resonance and caves and it made the whole world sing. Some of its ideas will no doubt find their way into next week’s newsletter.
This beautifully breathless poem perfectly captures what it is to catch just a glimpse of something still wild.
Tom Hirons, “Sometimes a Wild God”
This is a great poem—made even greater by hearing it recited from memory while sitting around a fire, as I was lucky enough to. Still great in other circumstances, though.
Joachim E. Berendt, Nada Brahma: The World is Sound
This is one of those books that’s new to me, though I suspect it made a lot of waves long ago, when I was too young to care, and was probably dismissed as New Age bunk by a lot of people. But then, a lot of people voted in Donald Trump, so I don’t know how much attention we need to pay to that.
I’m obsessed at the moment with the idea that the world is sound, made manifest—an idea that seems to appear in most if not all cosmologies, from the Vedas to Ancient Egyptian mythology, to Orpheus singing the formless into form, to “in the beginning was the word.” There’s a wealth of interesting research and ideas in this book, if this idea speaks to you too.