Living in the Bone House: Divination as a Way of Staying with the Trouble
‘My petition is that we accept the challenge of uncertainty. As a matter of personal style. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what the Anglo-Saxons called “living in the bone-house.” We get older, we find life is riven with weirdness. We should be weird too.’
Martin Shaw, storyteller
Living in the Bone House is an inquiry into what it takes to stay with a tension long enough for it to ease. As humans moving through the world, we live our lives within a web of negotiations, tensions and push and pulls. Our attention is fought over by marketers, picked to pieces and re-created as bitesize. We carry tensions with us like snail shells, retreating into locked jaws and tight shoulders. Our riddles riddle us all over and we feel the stress build in our bodies.
Divination has been used in human communities for millennia. I am interested in how this most ancient of processes gives us time to be with our tensions in a fully embodied, attentive way.
I conducted a series of divinations throughout this project. People came with tensions / questions such as:
How can I find more joy in parenting?
How can I leave my partner?
How can I support my son in crisis?
How can I become less scared of growing older?
How can I leave the only home I’ve ever known?
How can I find a joyful way to do the thing that scares me most?
For each person, I pulled one image and four to five slips of paper with phrases from The Winter’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Divine Comedy. All of these texts deal with shifting cosmologies, the move from mythological to psychological, and the effect that this shift has on our psyches and the way we move in the world.
