WILDERNESS VIGIL
WILDERNESS VIGIL
For just a little while, we ask you to consider trading comfort for shelter. To ask: what does it mean to be dreamt rather than dream, or to be claimed by a place? For some of us, these are yearnings almost painful to contemplate. The wilderness vigil is something immeasurably ancient, and the way our ancestors tuned their ear to the furry emanations of the living earth.
Wolf Milk
Chthonic Memory in the Deep Wild
Here, under the emerald bough of Dartmoor forest, we invite you to seek what they sought. In this place they called Dumnonia, or Defenascir, on the island they used to call Albion, we invite you to walk out of this century altogether.
What does that look like?
Four days and nights alone in the forest.
Just like the fairy tales.
The wilderness vigil is a moment when the grinding of your ambitions and your griefs settle into the ground of something far deeper. This is always the place we have gone to mark transition – from one stage of life to another. It can be difficult, wonderful, resolutely un-ecstatic, and absolutely life-changing.
Tribal folk have always known it was where you go to die and get born. A place where big questions get asked, things bend their heads to die and green shoots spring up.
These vigils are part of a long standing engagement from the School of Myth to offer deeply experiential work with the living world. We are really interested in a deepening conversation with a specific stretch of land over a long period of time.
Having long been in love with oral culture we are paying specific attention to the local, rather than an emphasis on the pan-global relevance of the ceremony. This will grow straight out of the dark soil of Dartmoor.
It sees these forages into the bush as a dialogue with a non-human world, and such an experience needs subtle handling. What makes this experience so nourishing is in part the holding – the professional support, the telling of your story to trained guides who have both fasted themselves and can assist you in the locating of the deeper story within your experience.
This is an ancient process and the bones of it can be located in many cultures all over the earth. The Wolf Milk wilderness vigil looks like this: four days and nights alone, fasting in ancient forest. No tent, fire or phone. Just a tarp, sleeping bag and water.
An extraordinary rite of passage the experience is something that is undergone for all sorts of reasons. To deepen your relationship with the wild, to wrestle a grief or question, to mark a transition of one kind or another.
Remember this is not essentially a human teaching. This is the old bones of the forest as teacher, the cawing raven overhead as guide. You pay attention to your dreams, interactions with animals, where your thoughts are drifting. Everything is trackable, and filled with information. Despite what we’ve done to it, the earth is still extraordinarily forgiving and wants to communicate with us in this most ancient of ways.
See below for the dates of our 2026 vigils.
Wilderness Guides
Martin Shaw trained as a guide for many years, and began leading wilderness vigils in 2001. It was a process that changed entirely the direction of his life and became the root system that underpins his work with myth. He trained David Stevenson, Tina Burchill and Tim Russell, now in their 12th year, and Lucy Cooper and Michael Martin, who are in their sixth year.
Martin named the process wilderness vigils rather than vision quests to lower expectation of incendiary visionary encounters (though it can happen). Refreshingly free of many psychological handrails, this decade of work in a Dartmoor forest has opened up an extended conversation with the power of the place itself. If it’s true that the earth thinks in myth, this is a dynamic introduction to such dialogue.
Reading
Martin Shaw’s book Wolf Milk is highly recommended for anyone considering participating in a wilderness vigil. You can find it in the Cista Mystica shop here.