Legends of the Common Stream

This is a wonderful book to read and to contemplate. In this book, Mitchell celebrates legends and myths rooted in nature and some of their modern re-enactments. His chapters take us month by month as he walks, skates and ruminates along Beaver Brook and its surrounds, while recalling 15 centuries of history linked to legends world wide. The chapter for March, for example, notes skunk cabbage shoots, snow fleas, pussy willow, red-winged blackbirds, purple finches, cardinals, Carolina wrens and the preening call of a Woodcock. I enjoyed the way the book brought back memories of my own wanderings in landscapes, one that has forest cut by a small stream dammed by beaver, another, where I grew up, Arizona desert in which streams were sudden and temporary. Along the way the book recounts of the loss and tentative restoration of the place of myth in modern lives. In addition, the book invites attention to the potential for myths and archetypes to be recognized as the vocabulary of the imagination, not just in quaint re-enactments but as elements of the advance of modern knowledge. I found it enchanting.

Book review: Legends of the Common Stream by John Hanson Mitchell. reviewed by Hugh Powers In John Hanson Mitchell’s literary-poetic imagination a common stream winds through five of his Scratch Flat books. He has indeed written an American saga. Starting in 1984 with the New York Times reviewed book Ceremonial Time (where Scratch Flat is perched on 15,000 years on one square mile of land) to his current triumph Legends of the Common Stream, the author drifts down the local Beaver Brook merging time, nature, local story with myth, magic and world legends. The Common Stream is a unique summit and triumph of Mitchell’s imaginative creative works because in this book his vision of local place is enlarged to present a much broader conception. We can enjoy the common place beauties of the seasons of the year, the immediate and personal experiences of nature, and move upward to the broadest sweep of human imagination. We are treated to the stream of the human story, a voyage which Joseph Campbell would thoroughly approve.

Legends of the Common Stream is a beautifully written book that takes you on a journey through history, myth, legend, and the natural world. Mitchell weaves together his own wanderings by the stream with extensive research and recollections of conversations with friends and naturalists, and mesmerizes in the process. I learned so much at the same time that I was very moved. I haven’t stopped talking about this book since I finished it and ordered it for everyone in my family. Linda Gould Levine

In the spirit of his hero Henry Thoreau, John Hanson Mitchell chronicles a year observing the progress of the seasons in a local stream. He evokes the history of the stream and the area, connecting it to folklore and myth drawn from all over the world. He shows us that, if only we keep our eyes open, there is much more to see even in a small stream, than we might at first think. This book will open your eyes to what may be going on around you.

Amazing reading taking his audience not only along the stream of myth and legends, but into the essence of what it means to be human.

If you like nature, you will love this beautifully written book.

John Hanson Mitchell’s new book, Legends of the Common Stream, is a wonderful natural history of a section of a brook that defines the eastern boundary of Scratch Flat, a square mile of agricultural land in Massachusetts that Mitchell has used as a metaphor in several of his other books. But this book is also a review of world-wide myths and legends associated with nature. Along with traditional folklore and myth, Mitchell here strays into world religions, including, naturally, enough, Paganism. He argues that pre-Judeo-Christian beliefs were all closely related to nature and that our current environmental disasters have resulted from our loss of contact with the natural world through common and popular myths due to the arrival of monotheism. Pagan beliefs and myths predate civilization by thousands of years. Mitchell gives numerous examples of Christian proselytizers, either destroying outright or co-opting the nature-based figures of paganism. He also writes that the story of the Resurrection predates Christ by thousands of years; at least four gods before him were tortured, hung from trees, buried, and rose again from the dead --- all of them in spring, with the return of vegetation. Perhaps. though John Hanson Mitchell is a fluid, entertaining writer, some might find some of the subject matter in this book unsettling. In any case, it's definitely food for thought.

John Hanson Mitchell, as usual, adds magic (literal and metaphorical) to his seasonal account of outdoor experience close to his home, along his beloved Beaver Brook. He invites us on his adventures and recollections of floral and faunal life along the brook. We learn about the deep traditions and values of the aboriginal people of the few miles along the brook and the mythical origins that drove much human behavior, not only of our indigenous forebears but also of the European tribes whence we sprang. "Legends of the Common Stream" is more than a very good read. Like it or not, we learn about our collective selves too,