“The story of Parzival says that there is a lion in us: a lion who opens its vast jaw to the feasts of court, the tangles of the forest floor, the intrigues of culture, the thin road of the pilgrim. It has spirit-appetite. This lion is independent; willful, focused, sometimes harsh—it cannot be bought. It longs to wrestle with God. The lion consumes emptiness and space with just the same vigor as it settles on fresh meat. Rumi’s lion is in the business of saying no. It will eat desert and tundra, experience all kinds of heavy weather, but will not shoulder the trite, facile, or domestic. This energy does not get fed by much of what we see around us.”

Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet Black Branch of Language by Martin Shaw, available from Cista Mystica Press (White Cloud Press, 2014; Cista Mystica Press, 2019).

Praise for Snowy Tower

“Martin Shaw’s a conjurer, a thirteenth-century troubadour dropped into our midst. Snowy Tower animates a tale from a far-off place and far-off time into vibrant, immediate life. He breathes into his characters a beating pulse, agile speech, and bedazzling with. Catch him any way you can.” –Eric Utne, founder of The Utne Reader

“Martin Shaw has hung around a great deal in the Otherworld. There is woodsmoke and fox fur in his thinking, and a wild mix of courage, stories and troubling ideas – Snowy Tower is a kind of outlaw language.” –Robert Bly, author of Iron John