The prose glimmers, but softly, quietly, the way mind turns an experience, catching the various facets—sense impressions, emotions, images—more raw experience than a recounting. Just like life itself…

Perhaps in the West, if we think of initiation at all, we are prone to amplify the personal journey of the initiate. Rites of passage, like going off to college, getting married, even taking vows in a religious community, are read mainly as threads in the narrative arc of an individual.

Thich Nhat Hahn’s beautifully simple articulation of inter-being, the recognition that while things have form, they are also possessed of emptiness, meaning no thing exists alone but arises and falls in its form with all things.

What makes the Celtic tradition unique, according to Newell, is that “compared to most other Western traditions…it cannot be reduced to a set of doctrines or beliefs; instead, at its core is the conviction that we essential need to keep listening to what our soul already knows, either in the particular circumstances of our lives or in matters more universal”

As climate crisis, social fragmentation, and a global pandemic continue to evolve, we are faced with an increasingly urgent questions: how are we to live?

Perhaps most of all, Yellow Bird is a story about story. What are the narratives that shape and define our experiences, both individual and collective? How do we shape those narratives, for ourselves and for others? Who gets to tell them and what is lost or found in the telling?

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague (Knopf, 2020), the latest work from Glasgow based writer Maggie O’Farrell is a fictional account of William Shakespeare’s family life, inspired by the early death of his only son.

On an increasingly imperiled planet, in a world where human technologies manufacture ever more disembodied realities for us, the question of how we are to live becomes more urgent.