ice. And then the sun comes out and the whole world becomes a prism, a rainbow.
And when the wind moves it chimes. And you go through a humdrum cutting in a
mountain on a highway and where the moisture oozes out of the rock, as it always
does, and there are these enormous fields of stalactites in the most ethereal blue.
They’re not white; they’re blue. And then it all starts again in the spring.
But is that a sense of place? I don’t think it is. I think it’s a sense more of a
cycle and of change rather than ... to me place is stability, place is not change.
I write about such different things ... because I am a nomad and I have no sense of
place.
4.4 Discussion
The empirical research established that the readers, writers and shamans
sometimes experienced a de-centred self, the term ‘self’ indicating a unified centre
of personality and consciousness (Sharp, 1991:119), often imaginatively becoming
the characters of the narrative, entering and experiencing the places of the tale,
whether actual or fictive. The research also confirmed that there often occurs a
unique relationship between the self and place, and that MLC has correspondences
to SC in that it ushers the reader, and writer, into the I maginal Realm, the
dimension where the certitudes associated with persona and place are shattered.
The responses also provided sufficient detail to assume that the shamanic realm is
almost certainly an aspect of the I maginal Realm and suggests, also, the
involvement of the collective unconscious.
I t might appear that the majority of respondents did not report childhood
illnesses but a closer reading reveals that most experienced trauma that set them
aside from family and friends and that in a sense acted as an initiation to an altered
and extended consciousness that in turn shaped an expanded or de-centred self.
Overall, they indicated that deep reading of mythopoeic literature not only
instigated a profound and primal awareness of the boundaries of their being but
also expanded those boundaries. I t was as though the text read them more fully
than they could themselves. There were significant correlations between the
responses of the readers, writers and shamans that allowed the data to be
categorised into four major groupings.