Nimue Brown's Blog, page 10

Christmas, grief, and loss

(Nimue)

This can be a really hard time of year for anyone who was already struggling. It’s important not to demand jollity from people or to make anyone feel uncomfortable for not showing enough ‘festive cheer’. For people facing the first Christmas without someone they love, it can be really painful. I think losses tend to loom larger at this time. I miss my grandmother more around Christmas than at any other time of the year and I think that’ a fairly normal experience.

It can seem like everyone else is having a good and happy time when you are struggling. The faux-cheer so many project can increase loneliness. I’ve never been a fan of the fake it till you make it approach. I think trying to hide how things are for you in the hopes of feeling better that way is seldom a good tactic. Faking it means your struggles are even less visible to those around you. It doesn’t help if no one knows that you might need help, support or patience.

I’m also not a fan of telling people who are struggling that they ought to reach out. My experience of struggling is that it is hard to ask for help. If you’ve been told to just pull yourself together, stop bringing other people down, or to otherwise try harder then asking for help can just feel like exposing yourself to the risk of another demoralising knockback. Reaching out works a lot better when it comes from well resourced people checking up on people they think might be struggling.

All kinds of losses can loom larger right now. That includes health troubles, work related struggles, fear for the future, the pressures of insecurity and so forth. Many people end up in debt over this period. It can be a good and helpful thing to encourage people not to spend money on gifts.

Christmas is not necessarily our festival as Druids, but community is always a consideration. Whatever else we are doing, it is worth giving some thought to those around us who might need some extra care and attention right now. Even small gestures can be worth a lot – a kind word and a check in get a lot done. Who might be glad to hear from you at this time? Who might need a little extra warmth and kindness this year?

I think also on the Druidry side it often makes sense to take a little time for the ancestors. Many of us grew up with Christianity in our wider families, or have families who celebrate this as a social celebration. It can be a good time to remember those we’ve shared good times with in the past.

If your family has not been kind to you historically, you are not under any obligation to honour them now, or at any other time. If ancestry rears up as a difficult issue at Christmas, then take the time and space to do what you need to do for yourself. Find the best way through it you can, on your own terms. It can be the season of emotional blackmail and unreasonable obligation. Consider what you need, and what you can do to guard your own boundaries and protect your wellbeing.

Whatever this time of year brings you, I hope you are able to find comfort and meaning.

Burnout, recovery and community

(Nimue)

After my previous post on burnout I set off to do some reading and it turns out the science around this is interesting stuff. Research into people with workplace derived burnout has happened, and the available evidence indicates that what happens around workplace burnout is much the same as what happens in other situations of overwhelming and extended stress.

Burnout affects the physical structure of the brain. This is not surprising as everything we do with our brains contributes to the structures we have in there. Specifically, burnout weakens connections between the amygdala and the frontal cortex. As a person becomes overloaded with stress, that older more instinctive part of the brain takes over, and the rational part of the brain becomes less able to get the steering wheel. The more burnout you experience, the less able you become to push through or tough it out. You become more vulnerable to panic and less able to cope.

This is really important stuff. You cannot develop resilience while being hammered. It’s not physically possible. The only way to recover is through rest, time off and changing the situation that caused the problem in the first place. The advice is explicit about that when dealing with workplace stress overload. Why we aren’t applying that understanding to other forms of stress overload I do not know. It’s clearly the ongoing stress that burns people out, not the precise method by which it hits you.

The vast majority of mental health advice focuses on changing your thinking and fixing the inside of your head. But, what we know from workplace burnout is really clear that you cannot fix your head if your environment is making you sick.

This is where I think the community aspect comes into play. The person with no wriggle room cannot magically create time off for themselves. The person who is under too much pressure may well not have the resources or the opportunity to lighten that load for themselves. When we insist on treating these as personal problems, we put many people in situations they cannot hope to overcome and that will just grind them down.

However, when we support and take care of each other, all of that changes. We can give each other respite, share loads, and bring each other uplifting and restorative things. If we work as a community and take each other’s wellbeing seriously then the scope for everyone to be well greatly improves. This doesn’t have to mean dramatic and difficult interventions – indeed I’m pretty sure we’re all better off avoiding those. Small, everyday acts of kindness and mutual assistance can lighten everyone’s loads. Being resilient together is far more realistic than trying to do it alone, and any small gestures we can make will contribute to this.

Considering meditation and thoughts

(Nimue)

Most meditation content I’ve read has included ideas about how we want to calm or eliminate thoughts. I’ve struggled with that – I like my thoughts. I’ve come to realise that what the majority of writers mean when they say ‘thoughts’ is some kind of unstructured babble of brain noise that people get tangled up in, identity with and cannot control.

I’m curious as to how this aligns with other people’s experiences. Is the inside of your head a noisy mess? Or is your thinking generally calmer and more deliberate?

As soon as I had words, I was thinking deliberately and using them. I’ve got better with that over time. I also know when to loosen my grip and just let things bubble up as that results in the best ideas.  The surfacing of thoughts is important – I think – for self awareness, insight, making connections and being inspired. Deliberate thoughts allow me to make considered choices. Time when my thoughts are a bit free form allows ideas to occur. I don’t live in a state of perpetual inner chatter.

It can get noisy in here when I’m overloaded, but that’s a reflection of too much random information coming in. Are other people struggling with noisy brains as a consequence of being in overstimulating environments?

Brains can be noisy when there’s a lot to keep track of and no real time to process anything. I’ve experienced that plenty of times. Sitting quietly and letting things surface so that I can work them through invariably sorts this out. Again it’s overstimulation and/or lack of processing time.

I do see overstimulation and information overload as a problem – and one that can be tackled with gentle meditative and contemplative practices. I see this as an environmental issue, not as a problem occurring in my brain. The noisy thoughts I have sometimes experienced are just my brain trying to keep up – that’s not a problem, it’s a symptom. Calming my brain down won’t work if my environment continues to overload me.

I’m very interested to hear other people’s experience around thinking, not thinking and meditating. Does any of this chime with anyone else?

Avoiding complicity with oppression

(Nimue)

Sometimes, in order to survive, your best hope is not to resist. Where there is tyranny, resistance can prove fatal. That may mean having to pretend to be someone you are not, hiding truths that would invite harm. Many people in America are preparing to do this at the moment, removing their online presence, camouflaging who they are and aiming to survive the coming administration.

This is often the wisest choice. The people who are most vulnerable are not the ones we should be put on the front lines when it comes to dealing with oppressors.

Where this gets difficult is around the issue of how much you have to join in to feel safe. When you are persuaded that the only way to be safe is to comply, you can end up becoming someone who supports and enables the very system that is harming you. Women are often quick to police other women’s clothing choices and to agree that some women are ‘asking for it’ based on their clothes and this is a case in point. Sexual violence does not vanish when women are swathed in fabric, adhering to dress codes does not keep you safe, and this approach actually makes the problems worse.

Keeping your head down as a survival tactic is a good and honourable choice. But, when we become participants in order to hide more effectively, a line has been crossed. We can think here about people historically denouncing others as witches in the hopes of evading punishment themselves.

Intense and ongoing fear makes good choices difficult. You can’t make good choices when you don’t have good options. The more frightened you are, the more readily you can be manipulated – I’ve been there. The responsibility for this always lies with those who oppress and abuse.  At the same time it is vitally important not to be frightened into complicity, and into harming others. Abusive regimes depend on getting people onboard – either through fear or through the belief that they can get ahead in this system.

It is better to focus on small, barely visible acts of resistance that keep your heart and soul alive. Keeping your faith, your integrity and sense of self whole isn’t easy when you cannot safely be yourself. Now is a good time to read up on radical history, and how people kept going in other difficult periods. The more we can do to keep each other brave and hopeful, the fewer people will be persuaded that the only way to stay safe is by becoming an oppressor too.

Crushing other people is not a good answer to being crushed – but this is what colonial and patriarchal structures have taught us all to do. We’re told we can have power by punching down. This is a system in which most of us lose. The less we play along with it, the less harm everyone experiences. Not joining in is itself a form of resistance.

You can’t say anything these days

(Nimue)

Last week I was in a room while three people shared their observations on how you can’t say anything these days. They were lucky – I was ill and tired and did not get involved. I wanted to ask them who they wanted to offend, and whether they were prepared to hurt people with their words, or add to the oppression of others. One of them admitted (in a roundabout way) that she liked making rude personal comments to others, and seemed surprised that people took offence at this.

Often, the desire for ‘free speech’ is really a desire to be free from consequences. In practice a person can often say whatever they like, short of stirring up violence. If you do it privately and in a small way, you might get away with almost anything. However, we have laws about not threatening people, not using hate speech, not inciting violence, and with good reason. There should be consequences for doing that. Being polite gets a lot done, and I am tired of the rudeness and lack of consideration that certain people demonstrate.

People often mistake free speech for the entitlement to a platform. We’re seeing that on Bluesky a lot where there’s a culture of blocking and not engaging. Being a troll doesn’t work as well when there’s no one there to hurt and harass, whereas the rest of us get on perfectly well without their ‘contributions’.

It is noticeable that the people who bang on about free speech and how you can’t say anything these days tend not to like other people’s free speech. Tell them that they sound like Nazis and suddenly they get all offended – and it matters to them when they are offended although they believe other people should suck it up. The double standards are telling.

In practice you can usually say anything you like, but there can be consequences. People might decide they want nothing more to do with you. I would rather lose people because of what I’ve said than maintain the comfort of people I think are massively problematic. The people who break the social contract by trying to harm others, do not get a free pass to do that. Nor should they expect one.

I’ve been having a bit of a re-think this week. I am always open to debate, criticism and questions in the comments here and I won’t remove those. I am not going to validate bigots by engaging with them and I don’t want to give space to anyone doing that. So, if a comment comes in that I consider unacceptable, I’m going to edit it – because wordpress lets me do that. I will replace it with a statement about why the comment has been removed, so that the person who posted it can see what is going on. I wouldn’t want them imagining it was a mistake or a technical issue. This is my space and I do not owe anyone a platform.

I know I am blessed with a community of people who come to my blog and share ideas from a place of compassion and thoughtful wisdom. I deeply appreciate you all, and the insights, challenges, wisdom and questions that you bring. Almost all of the comments I get on this blog are a joy to encounter. However, every now and then there’s a clear intention to cause harm, and I’m not giving that oxygen.

Dancing with all of my elbows

(Nimue)

Learning to use the pointy bits is important for all kinds of arts. As a child, I studied ballet from an early age. That dance form is all about smooth curves and elegant lines, it is all about grace and flow. There are a lot of things you can’t express with grace and flow. It wasn’t until much later in life, in a 5 Rhythms class that I started to use my elbows when I dance, and it has made me a much more capable dancer. I’ve become alert to the staccato beats in other kinds of dance, and the power of contrast between the sharp and the smooth.

On the visual art front, there was a time when the smoothness of photoshop work seemed to epitomise what professional art looked like. I work in physical media, I’ve never been and never will be a digital artist, but that means my work has a spiky quality to it. You can see the pencil lines, the brush marks, the physicality of the oil pastels. The arrival of AI has taught me to love and appreciate these things. It is the messy realness of physical media that makes the humanity of it shine through. The textures of paper, the process of putting down colours and marks. It’s all very real. It is easy to tell art created this way from art created by a machine. It’s a process of recognition that brings up similar feelings for me to using my elbows when I dance.

I’ve known where my elbows were for singing purposes for some time. With music, there are two kinds of harmony available – you can have smooth, comfortable harmonies or you can have crunchy, exciting ones. Too much smoothness makes the music bland. Too much crunchiness makes it unpleasant. It’s all about getting the right balance. I’m now trying to bring that elbow quality into my fiddle playing as well. Amusingly enough that will be quite literally about how I use my right elbow around managing the bow. It’s the spiky elbow movements that bring the sharper and more energetic sounds that I want to add to what I do.

When art is too smooth, there’s no life in it. To make something effective you often need to allow space for what’s messy, spiky, a little bit raw. Smoothness isn’t the only kind of beauty available, and sometimes we need the jagged edges and the dissonance. There’s no point seeking some notion of ‘perfection’ in all of this – as that tends towards bland and insipid. Rougher, more complex voices are often more interesting to listen to than ones that can create really pure notes. Whatever you’re doing, bring your elbows. Bring the raw parts, the ungainly parts, because when you can incorporate all of that, it opens up the way to deeper expression.

Book News!

(Nimue)

Outland Entertainment have just released Semblance of Truth – a novella set on Hopeless, Maine. This was written more than ten years ago, but for various reasons has only just made its way out into the world. You don’t need to have read anything else in the setting to pick this one up. It follows the adventures of Frampton Jones – the island’s only reporter – as his experiences slowly drive him insane. It’s a cosy cosmic horror, a comedy eldritch nightmare and cheerfully ridiculous. It may well appeal to steampunks and to anyone else who doesn’t take their gothic fiction entirely seriously.

If you are familiar with my fiction and like what I do, then this is a fairly typical book for me – shades of light and dark, funny and alarming, plenty of weird things going on and a character driven plot. For fans of Hopeless, Maine, this one happens in the same time frame as The Gathering (Personal Demons and Inheritance in the American editions) so offers some extra insights into what was happening on the island during those stories. The graphic novels and this novella should stand alone without reference to each other, and it doesn’t matter what order you encounter them in.

You can get it directly from the publisher https://outlandentertainment.com/products/hopeless-maine-a-semblance-of-truth?variant=42877284319368

From Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hopeless-Maine-Semblance-Nimue-Brown/dp/1954255985

And probably from plenty of other book selling sites too.

At the same time, Moon Books have a sale on, so if you buy directly from the publisher you can get some of my Pagan titles half price. You can find those over here – use the code WINTER50 for that.

https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/authors/nimue-brown

Connecting with community

(Nimue)

As Druids and Pagans we can often end up feeling like we are on the outside, or at the edges of mainstream society. However, I think the ‘mainstream’ is an illsioin and that in practice more people feel like outsiders than feel like they’re at the centre of things. There are so many people trying to maintain facades, and running around frantically trying to keep up with whatever they believe everyone else is doing. If we could meet each other more often in gentler and less performative ways, that would help.

One of the problems with being online a lot is how easy it can be to fake perfection. Feeling under pressure to do that leaves people also feeling fraudulent and insecure. When we meet in person it’s harder to hide the bad hair days, the cock ups and the mess. This is better for us. I’m a huge fan of the internet, I love social media but I recognise the shortcomings.

I’m very deliberate online about bringing something real rather than trying to fake the perfect life. I talk about the struggles and setbacks. I haven’t got it all figured out. I’m not winning at everything, and on some fronts I’m not even sure what winning would look like. I also know that being a bit crap opens the door to learning. Permission to mess up is permission to grown.

I love the spaces where we can encounter each other informally. Space you don’t have to pay to get into, where there is no dress code, and we can just be people together. I love the traditions (new and old) that invite this. One of my local ones is a late night shopping opportunity ahead of Christmas, that has music in the streets and a lantern parade. This is my second lantern parade this year. It’s a beautiful way to get together, share lovely things and just be around each other in a low pressure way. In Stroud, many of the lanterns are made by children, and look that way. There’s a loveliness in that, alongside the beauty of lanterns that are more skilfully made.

Gentle spaces like this are affirming. Being able to turn up as your messy, imperfect self is good. Coming together to make something beautiful out of all that chaos and good intention is a magical thing. We need the spaces that allow us to be human together, with no impossible demands and plenty of room for muddles and limited skills.

Anger and privilege

(Nimue)

How a person is able to handle anger can often reveal a lot about how much privilege they have.

A person who has great wealth and power is usually free to express anger in any way they like. At the extreme end, despotic leaders can imprison and execute people as an expression of anger. The more power you have, the more freedom you have to act on any anger you might feel. With power, you can take anger out on whoever it suits you to abuse, and you can express anger without any personal risk.

On the other side, if you have very little privilege it will not be safe for you to express anger. Your job, your home, your physical safety may depend on not making a fuss. When you have no power, you may have little choice but to swallow your anger, accepting oppressive treatment and whatever injustice comes your way. Speaking up can result in bad situations getting worse, when you have no power and are faced with a tyrant.

It is worth taking the time to sit with this one for a while. Most of us fall between those two extremes. Consider the situations in which expressing anger feels safe to you. Consider when it might not be safe to do that, and see what it reveals about what kind of power you have. How you express your anger will also show you a great deal about the kind of person you are. Do you respond to anger by tackling injustice, or by taking your frustration out on people who don’t have the power to resist you? Are you getting angry about big issues, or small, personal discomforts? What can your anger tell you about your expectations? How does it connect with feeling entitled, or not feeling entitled?

Anger when used well can be a very healthy and productive force. It is hard to use it well when you are working in an intrinsically unjust system. It is easy to end up using anger badly when you feel entitled. Our anger – along with whether or how we express it can teach us a great deal about our lives. If we’re able to choose how to express anger, then we must ask whether that aligns with justice, or we do it to vent our frustration. Do we get angry over trivial things and take that our on others, or are we able to be more patient and compassionate?  

Justice is an important part of the Druid path. Anger can be a powerful tool for justice but it can as easily be a weapon of injustice, depending on how you wield it. Our relationship with anger can show us what we’ve internalised. This isn’t always comfortable, but it is vital work. You can’t deconstruct colonialism or dismantle patriarchy if that is living inside you. Looking inwards at your own anger, you can see what’s been internalised. For the person who wants to challenge unjust systems, this inner work is the place to start. Changing yourself is often the most powerful choice you can make.

One of the harder things here is dealing with being a person with little power who has opted to be complicit in injustice as a form of self protection. This is a huge area of consideration so I will come back to it at some other point.

Challenges and lessons learned

(Nimue)

It’s been a startlingly tough few weeks. There have been a number of challenges – these things never seem to turn up at decent intervals. Between the stress, the anxiety, the workload, and a bout of being bodily very ill, I crashed badly. This led to migraine territory. I’ve had largely visual migraines on and off for years and usually I can just muddle through it. This one knocked out my ability to focus my gaze on anything near me. For several days I could not read on screens for more than a few minutes at a time. I couldn’t read books, or even ingredients lists on food packaging.

I’ve spent a lot of time lying down with my eyes shut trying to get on top of this. It’s been intimidating. Without being able to read, I can’t do any of the things I normally do of a workish nature. I can’t do many of the things I do for leisure either. Spinning seems to help with soothing my brain, so that’s been something.

I’m used to being able to push through. Often I depend on the fact that my willpower is significant and I can push my body when I need to. Hitting such a hard no from my body has been disconcerting. I clearly need to be much gentler with myself in face of both psychological stress and bodily illness. I thought I’d been doing better around resting but this week indicates that I’m still not doing what I need to do.

I tend to get visual migraines in response to overload – not enough sleep, not enough nutrients, dehydration, stress, too much light and noise. My vision fills up with weird extras. Yesterday it looked like a squirrel for a while. I get flocks of birds, shoals of fish. The first time it happened I got a large and brightly coloured sea horse. At least the shapes my brain makes when distressed are of themselves endearing and distinct enough that most of the time I can identify them as not real. I did once spend a weekend with a huge swarm of tiny insects, and that took me a little while to figure out because it was more plausible.

I’m behind on everything. If I get a couple of good days I can fix that, but I know I can’t push for it.  Currently I’m writing this by taking breaks regularly and closing my eyes. Today the visual interference looks like someone is writing me messages in Japanese.

I’m sharing this partly for accountability, and partly because I think it’s important to talk about limits. Our mammal bodies can only take so much, and if you keep pushing, eventually you push yourself over a cliff and then there are far fewer options. Hopefully I’ve not done myself more damage than I can recover from, but this week has shown me that this is a possibility and not something to be complacent about.