“Bow and arrow” offer our best and most powerful Western insight into the mystical union of opposites, represented symbolically in the Orient by yin and yang, the Chinese equivalents for cosmic duality which precede even Greek metaphysics and Platonic dualities by at least four centuries, and form the very basis of traditional Chinese assumptions about an ordered natural universe. We blur this duality with rugged, masculine names and harsh, angular shapes for bows, but then the Western world has always had a rough time thinking of opposites as anything but unrelated extremes.

At any rate, on any level, this is powerful medicine we carry around, this wooden bow and this wooden arrow, so dissolved into one another, and yet moon and sun. Can you deny they inspire you?

However the world sees it, every bow wrested from every thorny wooden prison and given life is a Sleeping Beauty, every toad bowyer brave and skillful enough to perform this magic finds himself transformed. Such tales don’t come true, they are truth.