On Thrown Away Stories
Below is a brief excerpt from Chapter One of LITURGIES OF THE WILD: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw, published by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Martin Shaw.
It’s January, and it’s dark. A great blast of freezing air gallops into the car. For a moment he’s lit up under a streetlamp before darting into the shadows. I will never see him again.
There’s no one in this whole wide world that isn’t carrying a story. You could be president, a yoga teacher, a junkie, and you have this one completely unique thing in your pocket. Your story. It may be crumpled like a bus ticket or writ large on tablets of stone, but it’s yours. And God almighty you need to tell it, to rest in it, to find some peace with it. You may realise this at twenty or ninety, but one day you’ll realise it.
As we age life moves fast. It seems to speed up, and sometimes any kind of coherent narrative seems lost in the crosswinds. But every now and then, there will be a moment of coincidence or even providence that makes us stop and scratch our head. We catch a glimpse of meaning. And then we are distracted, look away, and focus on something shiny and exotic. But in that distraction can be a discarding of something that is absolutely ours, distinct and site-specific. That’s the real gold, the little crumbs of plum cake leading us home when we are lost in the wires and lights of a world growing at a mechanized not human pace. The treasure is when you locate something that feels properly, authentically yours. Its treasure is its specificity not its universality.
The question is: Why do we throw our stories away? Why do we undervalue them? I think it’s to do with attention. We are perennially distracted. In the past it would have been the sheer heft of raising a family, earning a living, the struggle and gain of our years. That alone was absorbing enough, and all are noble attentions. And we had myths that made them so, that mirrored such attentions back to us, but with dignified, spiritual dimensions. These days social media pulls us in a variety of directions, but the general emphasis being achievement and visibility. In comparison to Hollywood or even Tik-Tok ideals, our own strange walk may seem unexceptional. It’s easier to just focus on something more glamourous. It seems that there’s quite the divide between the happy face we post online and the disinterest we actually have in the narrative of our own years.
The first step is to take a breath and dare to entertain the thought that in the debris of your life would be stories worth examining. That they are, as I just wrote, a kind of treasure…
People say I must be thrilled by modern life because it’s called the Hermian Age. You may remember Hermes is the Greek god of the storytellers and instant communication between people. Surely this is what’s happening now? Ah, friends, draw closer. We’re not addressing the fine print in Hermes’s contract. His connection is only successful soul to soul. If the soul is not roused, Hermes is simply not present. We are living in a facsimile of that rapidity; our ears are filled with story but maybe not myth. I will come to the difference soon.
Tristan and Isolde is still playing itself out in fraught love affairs all across America, Beowulf is called forth in the sheer guts of trying to piece yourself together after a rough divorce. It’s my job, my civic duty, my privilege to track the myth hanging onto the wingtip of the personal anecdote, or the tale you are trying to brush aside. The myth is moved from confessional to majestic, from persona to presence. It’s always a mistake to tell a myth exactly what it is: They contract from sight, stop delivering protein when we do that. We are left with an allegory, not a mystery, and that’s no kind of trade. We are suddenly standing with a pelt, not a wild animal.
Myths are wily enough to remember they have a connection to the oral tradition. Something preliterate. In a promiscuous way they have moved from mouth to mouth, settlement to settlement over the centuries. Their particular power is that they refer to what I call both the timebound and the timeless. The gritty complexity of life but also the miraculous that surrounds us if we dare but behold it. Mythic awareness is always moving us from seeing to beholding life, in its multidimensional, irrational, providential, tragic, and glorious dimensions. It is the royal road to the deepest depths of the psyche.
What is your own creation story? What characters and events helped form you? There will be fairy tales brushing up to all sorts of experiences we disregard. Myths assist in the growing of consciousness and the slow tempering of maturity. They are not just patterns or codes, they are allies.
When we reach for a myth to help recover our own stories, we make connections with the little I and the big We, and in doing so, shrug off a little unnecessary loneliness. In place of isolation we now have the camaraderie of being worked within a bigger story. This is no small thing we’re doing, anchoring ourselves to the most extraordinary source of wisdom. Myths are north stars to a culture deserving of the name, culture coming from the Latin, colere, which means to till the ground. To make a culture you dig down into a story. That story needs to be robust enough to explain a few things whilst also accommodating mystery. Myths hold together heaven and earth; they are a crossroads between the timeless and the time-bound. Myths are connecting tissue between us and the universe.
