Brian Shircliff

Young Royals & The Naked Path of Prophet

Anyone watching Young Royals?

I’ve always been fascinated by power...how it begins…how it messes with relationships and then whole societies, with such seemingly simple beginnings.

And in Young Royals we get little glimpses of the power that high schoolers inherited from whole systems their great+ grandparents created…and now use…and now often want to be free of, to slip from those power-systems into possibilities of freedom…unowned and unmanaged land where *relationship* can be negotiated, one word and one touch at a time.

Though we don’t call our systems royalty and nobility in our US society, there are similar themes in the stories of high schoolers I taught over the years at two private Catholic schools.  At those high schools with such rich histories, it became pretty easy to note generations of systems created under the radar by each one of us and our ancestors, systems that sometimes grant privilege and possibility and other times prevent growth from happening, systems of power that shackle future generations at every turn.  But those same systems are at every high school, in every corporation, in every family, in every society.  A society is a system, after all…pre-negotiated ‘relationships’ and ‘manners’ and ‘morals’ for how we get along generation after generation.  We inherit them as assumptions; in our early years we are even taught them, sometimes outright, sometimes by watching how adults react to things, what they value and what they don't, even what they choose not to see or hear or feel.

Such systems are malleable, changeable, of course — but what work it takes to change things that have been alive in our imaginations for decades, centuries, millennia!  Some holistic-minded things like vipassana meditation and Feldenkrais Method® and NLP can help tremendously, things we play with at VITALITY in our circle.

As I’ve been watching this Young Royals series, it struck me that it had a lot of resonances with the David-Jonathan story of 1 Samuel — The Naked Path of Prophet series I’ve been translating from the Bible and wondering about these stories’ ramifications for our world today.

In 1 Samuel, David and Jonathan are young lovers — even young royals, one currently royal and one whom the people want to become royal instead of his (probable sex-)slave-status to the king.  And the Hebrew used in their story is absolutely wild, bawdy, hilarious, tragic…no translator has yet touched what’s there.  Some of the best puns I’ve ever heard are in the Bible — even better than Dave Chappelle stand-up turns of phrase and turns of imagination…but no Bible translator will put them in their translation, whether they are religious-minded translators or not.  But those puns are there in the Hebrew — by the oodles!

I decided to go for it in The Naked Path of Prophet series, including in A Wildly Sensual YAHWEH with translations of Genesis — to try to bring forward those puns and exceedingly clever turns of phrase that are in the Bible and have been for millennia.  They've helped me tremendously in knowing YAHWEH, in knowing the good life of the wind.  I've found I'm happier, more content, with this new understanding of YAHWEH, the wind.

The stories of 1 Samuel and Genesis, like most of the Bible, are fictional — and a helpful fiction to help us catch our assumptions.  That’s what Jesus was doing with his parables, too.  Those parables are designed to help people catch their own assumptions about power 2000 years ago when Jesus was spinning off these funny, side-splitting parables about life and power…and how foolish power really is when we know anything about life, about the wind, about YAHWEH who is the wind and lifegiver (breath!) in the ancient tradition.  Hopefully you know something of YAHWEH...you're breathing in YAHWEH right now.  It's the one assumption that sustains you and me...the one assumption that is not changeable...the atmosphere the permeates and penetrates you and me...the life-force waiting to be discovered simply by an experience of noticing, of relationship...a noticing and a relationship that could lead to your contentment and mine too...that could lead to yours and my desire to let go of human-power and embrace and be embraced by the wind alone.

We are all in the grips of whole decisions about power-among-people that were negotiated by our ancestors, even millennia ago.

Those ancient decisions are our assumptions…things like critical race theory are thankfully helping us to understand and change a few of the terms of our society, assumptions we inherited without even realizing it.

How much we miss in our assumptions!

How much they are below the radar of our awareness…until something strange happens within us and we realize our map — what we’ve used to get everywhere in life and understand every situation — is no longer accurate, no longer useful.  So we welcome a new map and use that until we realize its no longer useful.  As we mature, if we mature, our map keeps expanding, getting more detailed, more nuanced, more dimensional, even 3D…flexible.

Some would say that all of our maps are changing quite a bit these days…perhaps as we come to the end of an age...all the wild changes we are experiencing in our world today.  We talk about these kinds of things in our Birthing a New Age group that meets through VITALITY by Zoom.  That group has helped me tremendously as I listen to people talk about their experiences and their wanderings and wonderings.  How much of life -- the wind -- that I don't know!  The infinite atmosphere....

Well, I’ve watched this Young Royals series a few times now — a few minutes a day — mostly as a break when the translating gets tedious or too confusing or I just need a 10-minute break to figure out why the biblical author of 1 Samuel uses a particular verb when most ancient people would use another…trying to catch the ancient punnery.

And suddenly it dawned on me how Young Royals teases a Brothers Grimm fairy tale…from deep in the woods…from deep in the dreams…from deep in our subconscious…the fertile ground where our assumptions are born and can be changed if we wish…if we have better possibilities from which to choose.

But it took me probably four views of the whole Young Royals series to catch it and what the writers of Young Royals so cleverly and subtly do with the old tale from the deep forest...almost as clever as the biblical writers of 1 Samuel and Genesis.

What Grimm tale is it…?

Will you too let the iron bands around your heart be broken — that you too might be free to love…all?

-- Brian Shircliff  (contact Brian by clicking here)

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by Brian Shircliff