“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).