Children of the ashes.

December 2024

Illustration: Samantha Packman (1970-2007) (Pen and Ink)

Dear Friends

On the anniversary of my sister’s death a few weeks ago, I found myself walking along a stretch of beach where we played as kids. In the misty distance was a span of horses. Trailing behind was a young girl pulling a barrow, humbly tending to the task of picking up the piles of manure left in their wake. Her shovel leant over the handle creating the sign of the cross.

In the half-light, this profoundly mythic image arrested me. Not only did it remind me of a lucid dream I had just after my sister died, in which we were walking together along a shoreline, but it also met me exactly where I was, on the grief road.

Robert Bly, in his explorations of mythology, poetry and the soul’s maturation, often spoke of what he called ‘ashes work.’ This is the quiet, invisible labour that prepares us for a deeper engagement with soul.

The ash-worker appears repeatedly in myth, where they are often dismissed, humiliated and reduced to what appears to be the lowest station in life.

Currently at The Fifth Direction, we are midway through listening to Minnesota Men’s Conference elder Walton Stanley carry the Norwegian folk tale of Ashladdnn, or Ash Boy.

Ashlad, the youngest son, is mocked as lazy and useless, but it is his closeness to the ashes that brings him the depth required to overcome the trials that later confront him. Unlike his older brothers, who are far too eager to prove their worth outwardly, Ashlad dwells in obscurity. He is the cinderbiter, tending to the hearth, patiently watching and waiting—all the while aligning with invisible forces larger than himself.

When Ashlad eventually sets out on his great adventure, his encounters with the natural world—be it helping animals or sharing his meagre food—reveal his innate genius, the gift of his time among the ashes.

Ashlad’s transformation is not a result of brute strength or conventional intelligence but a kind of ash-born sensitivity to life’s subtleties. The ash-worker develops a deep receptivity.

In a poem from Bly’s Silence in the Snowy Fields, we catch a glimpse of this understanding:

The barn is full of corn, we are poor,
what will become of us?
There is no complaint here, only
quietness, icy field
after field,
icy field after field.

This image of a world stark and bare, with no immediate promise, captures the essence of ashes work. It is the space where outward abundance gives way to an inner reckoning. The barn may be full, but the soul must labour in the icy fields to discover its own wealth. It is a liminal space where the ego burns away, leaving behind an ashy residue from which new life can grow.

Bly noted that the modern world often skips this stage, preferring instantaneous, quick-fix transformation or sanitised depictions of struggle:

“How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy or misery?

“Disneyland means ‘no ashes’.”

It’s true that disneyfied retellings of the ancient stories often rinse out the slow, difficult work of transformation that is central to them. There is a distinct loss of ashes, which reduces them to entertainment, stripping them of their soul-nourishing power.

The evolution of Ashputtel (Ash Girl) into Cinderella, for example, reflects a profound dismemberment of the original tale. Ashputtel, as given to us by the Brothers Grimm, is undeniably dark, often cruel, but ultimately redemptive. Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon (from cendre, meaning ashes) softened the tone, paving the way for Disney’s 1950 adaptation, which then concretised the story into the romantic Cinderella archetype familiar today.

Ashputtel is another immersed in ashes. Her stepmother and stepsisters force her into servitude, her identity reduced to the soot that clings to her skin. Yet ashes have the quality of revealing the uniqueness of the whirls on our fingers—they show us exactly who we are and who we have the potential of becoming.

She works with her hands to sort lentils from the ash, mirroring the soul’s task of winnowing our grief, disappointment, shame and humiliation to leave only what is essential.

Without experiencing the soul’s capacity for this kind of discernment, the glittering transformations later in the story would lack authenticity. Cinderella, however, skips over the ashes almost entirely, which presents her eventual rise as something magical but unearned.

This is emblematic of a society that seeks transformation without sacrifice, and also suggests a broader cultural malaise: the reluctance to engage with the dark, unglamorous stages of growing down.

Such avoidance manifests in the endless pursuit of distraction and the commodification of spiritual practices. Ashes work is eschewed for another hit of dopamine, another peak experience.

It seems we want to walk on water before we have learned to swim in the dirt, but in doing so our roots remain shallow. Both dirt and ashes are remnants of everything that once lived, and we must remember that we too will return there. We need this proximity to death in order to be fully alive.

I am reminded of Shiva, the great destroyer in Hindu mythology. Often depicted smeared with ashes and meditating in cremation grounds, he teaches us the necessity of reducing all things to their essential, eternal nature.

When we stop singing, he tells us to keep going.
He sits immense and silent
as we tend to the hearth fire,
and he knows the mechanical part of us is gone.
He loves the pieces of ash in the hair.

To have ashes in your hair—or a few wisps of grey, perhaps—is confirmation of having undertaken the arduous work of the soul.

The world needs us to remember the ashes. If we pay attention to the space between the noise and the instant gratification of modernity, we hear a subtle but steady call to return to the hearth, to lose our name and consciously come to earth—to become ash-boy or ash-girl for a time.

Without the humility of the hearth, there is no maturity.

The Latin word for hearth is focus. In that sense, perhaps it is the very idea of the hearth that we have forgotten—it’s all about where we place our attention.

The hearth is the axis mundi, the sacred centre that holds within it the words heart, heat, hear and earth. It is where the soul is both warmed and tested. To listen to the crackle of the hearth fire is to hear the Great Mystery being told.

As T.S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets:

Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

The dream of my sister ended with her taking my hands, looking deeply into my eyes, and diving straight into my chest. I awoke physically winded and fighting for air. It led to a moment of clarity and a vow to which I recommit every year: I will breathe for us both.

Now I hear Bly again:

Every breath taken in by the man
Who loves, and the woman who loves,
Goes to fill the water tank
Where the spirit horses drink.

With the year drawing to a close, may we find the courage—a word which David Whyte poetically describes as “ashes slowly cooling into fertile ground”—to trust in the quiet, unseen labour of the soul as it sifts through what has ended to find the seeds of what’s next to come.

Oceans of love.

Asher

References:
Bly, R. (1967). Silence in the Snowy Fields. Wesleyan University Press.
Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Bly, R. (1999). Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems. HarperCollins.
Eliot, T.S. (1944). Four Quartets. Faber & Faber.
Whyte, D. (2014). Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Many Rivers Press.

Notes:
Applications are still open to join me for The Way. Beginning late January 2025, this is a year-long container designed for men to descend into soul and begin their own ashes work. Given the depth of the work, it is limited to just ten men with only a few places remaining.

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