Nimue Brown's Blog, page 110

Soothing the troubled mind

Person A: I feel terrible about myself.

Person B: I think you are an excellent person.

Person A: Thank you. I still feel terrible about myself.

Person B: Why do I even bother?

The thing to remember about hurt and wounded people, is that it was seldom one event. People who are depressed, anxious, who have no self esteem and who feel grim about life tend to have gone through a process. However much we want to fix and heal each other, saying one nice thing once won’t restore the brain of someone who has spent years under attack.

Helping someone rebuild themselves means being in it for the long haul. One complement isn’t going to change everything. Over-complimenting can feel weird and uncomfortable. 

The best thing you can do for a person is be affirming. That includes affirming that their responses to their own historical issues are valid and reasonable. Affirm that it’s ok if things are difficult now because of what happened before and be patient while they work on things. Affirm that their choices and decisions are good, whenever you can. Give positive feedback whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Saying things like ‘I understand why it might seem that way to you’ or ‘your response makes sense to me’ can be a good opener if you need to explain that they’re wrong. People can get trapped in perceptions of the world that really harm them and need help getting out of that.

“I can see why this is making you feel bad about yourself, but it was an honest mistake and we all do that.”

“I can see why this makes you uneasy, but this isn’t going to play out the way that other thing did.”

Affirming the other person’s validity as a person, affirming their feelings and reactions can go alongside gently challenging all of that baggage. When we feel valid and safe it’s a lot easier to do the work of healing and moving on from past woundings.

On the Bard path

As River pointed out in a recent comment, the idea of the Bard path can be really intimidating. The quest for sacred inspiration and the pressure of putting that out into the world in a meaningful way can make it hard to get started. Where are you even going to find sacred inspiration? How can you possibly make anything good enough?

As far as I’m concerned, all inspiration is sacred. It’s the flow that is vital and magical, and the form it takes is irrelevant. If your inspiration takes the form of a fart joke that briefly lifts the spirits of someone who is in pain, then you’re doing all the things.

The urge to be Serious, to create things that are weighty, significant, important, worthy and so forth, isn’t reliably a good urge. It can result in work that is totally inaccessible. If all you want to do is create poetry in an ancient language to honour your Gods – go for it. But it’s not the only option. Trickster Gods are likely to be up for the fart jokes anyway. Not all Pagan Gods are literary heavyweights. Some are very much about the drink, the partying, the sex and frivolity. 

Mirth is as important as reverence and the two are not at odds with each other. Apparently trivial things can be healing and comforting. Laughter can break down barriers. Foolishness can enable others. A small, lightweight thing can transform your perspective of an issue, in a way that some massive, indigestible tome never could. 

There’s real magic in finding the enchantment inside ordinary, everyday things. Simple expressions can be far more beautiful than overworked ones. Trying too hard doesn’t always get results. Grace and flow, delight and enthusiasm all get a lot done, and these can all be part of your inspiration and part of your work. 

I know that my best animist writing to date happened when I was trying to amuse people. Some of my kindest writing has come out of my angriest feelings. Sometimes I turn out to be at my best when I feel I have least to offer. Sometimes it’s the work done with little thought and intention that turns out to be most powerful and meaningful for other people. In matters creative, what you intend and how it works out don’t always match up. The trick is to trust the flow and see where it takes you.

Real inspiration can be mucky and chaotic, unpredictable, earthy, silly and apparently trivial. Taking yourself too seriously can be a barrier to real magic. It is better to be a holy fool, and not worry about your literary legacy, or being taken seriously by anyone, and just let go and have fun with it all. When the creativity comes from your heart and soul, magic enters the world. 

And so it was spring

I saw lambs at the weekend. Some of them were very small and clearly hadn’t been out and about for many days. The garlic has its leaves up and the blackbirds have started singing fairly reliably at the end of the day.

After what has felt like an impossibly long and grey winter, there is finally sun. It’s still cold here, but not as cold as it has been.

I’m not experiencing a rush of energy or enthusiasm. I’m feeling relief – to a mild degree. I crave light and warmth, but I don’t know how much difference that will make when I’m also craving peace, economic sanity and responsible leadership. Here in the UK things are grim. Killing people with the cold, with hunger, with poverty isn’t quite as dramatic as killing them with bombs. I grieve for the people of Ukraine, but I live in a country where class war is killing people every day and no one is going to send us arms to fight back.

Fewer people will die when it gets warmer. We can have the windows open and improve our chances of not getting covid. Spring offers some relief, but not enough.

Just a Druid connecting with nature

I found the mermaid’s purse in the photo, washed up on the beach at Aberystwyth. It was firm and shiny and it felt alive – this is a case for a growing embryo, either a shark or a skate. I think this one was a shark. I wasn’t going to let this baby thing dry out and die on the sand. As I had my frog wellies on, I took the case back to the retreating tide in the hopes that it would be carried away.

That should have been the whole story. Just a Druid on a beach having a moment with another being and then carrying on with their day. But, I did not know this beach, and it turned out to have consequences.

The beach was mostly fine gravel on a steep slope. The tide was clearly going out, but every now and then it threw up a much bigger wave than the retreating ones – this much I already knew having got my legs wet from one of them. I gave the mermaid’s purse back to the sea and turned to walk back up the beach. One of the big waves caught me from behind, fast moving, and washing over the top of my wellies. That was challenging.

The force of the wave as it headed back down the beach was even more powerful. It pulled the gravel out from under my feet and it dragged on my legs. I fell, backwards, into the water. It wasn’t deep, and it wasn’t as cold as it might have been. But, with my feet higher than my hips thanks to the slope, and the shifting gravel beneath me I could not stand up. Fortunately I wasn’t alone. Tom and James – neither of whom were wearing wellies – came straight into the water to get me on my feet and to help me up the sand. We all ended up moist, and I was soaked to the skin from the waist down – with hindsight it was obvious that we should have got in the sea deliberately. We’d have been drier.

I’ve swum in the sea many times, from many beaches on the UK coast. I’ve paddled my feet in the sea so many times. I’ve never had the sea come up at such speed before, I’ve never been grabbed by water before and I’ve never been so powerless before in face of it. It was a startling experience – no harm done, but that feeling of being bodily overpowered will stay with me. Geography and geology interacting with moon pulls and water to drop my (relatively) small mammal self on my bum.

Connecting with nature isn’t always gentle, or simple and it certainly isn’t always restorative!

When Panic Becomes Dangerous

CW self harm

In theory, fear and anxiety are there to keep us safe. For the person who has been traumatised, this can lead to jumping at shadows, hypervigilism and flashbacks in ways that can really mess with your daily life. But still, the theory is good, the fear is learned, rational, reasonable and your brain is dealing appropriately with the threat level it is alert to. 

My panic does not exist to protect me. My panic exists to protect other people from me. It’s not a mystery how I got here – my ex did a very good job of persuading me that I was an awful person – cruel, manipulative, aggressive, unreasonable, ungrateful and causing him constant pain and difficulty. His words stay with me, and when I make mistakes, they loom large. It doesn’t help that this wasn’t my only experience of me being a terrible person, and it’s all there waiting for me any time I get anything wrong.

So instead of trying to protect myself, my panic has me hurting myself. Including having a lot of trouble eating or drinking. If I’m weak I am less of a threat to others. If I hurt myself, I’m not hurting someone else. At the worst extremes it leads to the idea that everyone would be better off if I didn’t exist.

It’s taken me a long time to understand this as a process. It’s not easy to think about the mechanics while it’s happening, and almost impossible to make any sense of it afterwards. But, I’ve had about a month now of intense panic, and that’s given me a lot of opportunities to notice things about the mechanics.

I’ve got a practical intervention in place – if I get the urge to hurt myself, I use resistance bands. At least that way the pain I inflict is helping me build stronger muscles, which I need anyway. Moving with them helps calm me, and I’ve managed to use them through really bad episodes where I felt that I did not deserve any kind of comfort or ease. This is one of the worst periods I’ve ever had for panic, but it’s also been the best managed around self harm and I feel encouraged by that.

I didn’t get here on my own. Not this episode, not this issue. I think this is often the way of it with emotional and psychological damage. The wounds come from outside. We don’t expect people to put their own broken arms into plasters or to sew up the gashes in their bodies. 

Gorgeous Things

A shoutout for a few folk I know who have been doing cool stuff recently.

Haven Jean has made an album. It is a splendid thing and you can listen over here –

https://havenandben.bandcamp.com/album/fragile-spark

It’s not overtly Druid content, but there’s a lot of powerful stuff shared, and humour, and charm and that’s all good Bard stuff.

There is background info for the album on Haven’s blog –

https://melancholypolytheist.wordpress.com/2022/03/07/i-wrote-an-album-fragile-spark/

River has posted two beautiful poems on The River Crow blog –

https://therivercrow.wordpress.com/2022/03/07/after-spring-rain-a-poem/https://therivercrow.wordpress.com/2022/03/02/tacet-nox-a-poem/

Intense and lovely and powerful poems from Meredith Debonnaire

https://meredithdebonnaire.wordpress.com/2022/03/07/poem-midnight-seabones-by-meredith-debonnaire/https://meredithdebonnaire.wordpress.com/2022/02/21/poem-marginalia-by-meredith-debonnaire/

Make mediocre things because that’s awesome

There is a famous Neil Gaiman talk in which he says that whatever happens, you should make good art. I am here to argue. The idea of ‘good art’ can be pretty intimidating, especially when it feels like everything is on fire. When you and/or the rest of the world is in crisis, making good art can feel like a lot of pressure. 

It is good to make things. Make the things that cheer and comfort you. That might not be art at all – it might be lunch. It might be rubbishy comfort food lunch, it might be awesome legendary lunch, it’s all good. Make the lunch you need right now.

Make a pillow fort. Make a bigger pile of cats. Make a mess. Make something so that you know you are alive and real and able to change the world around you. 

If you want to make art, then make art, but don’t put yourself under pressure to make good art. Do what you can. You might not have the skills and experience yet to be able to make good art, and some of us need to spend years making shit art first, and that’s fine. Make what you want to make, for the joy of it, not to meet some imagined standard. Maybe you’ll develop the skills to make really good stuff and maybe you won’t but either way it’s fine.

There’s a particular magic around making bad art, and being able to enjoy that and share it. I’ve had some wonderful bad poetry sessions in my time. I delight in bad taxidermy, and terrible paintings of animals by historical people who had clearly not seen horses from the side, or lions… There can be utter joy in the cheerful sharing of rubbish things. There’s release and relief in not having to be good. How much sweeter and gentler life is when you don’t have to be brilliant, when it is safe to laugh at yourself and you can enjoy offering up your crapness for other people to laugh along with you.

What I tell people at the start of bad poetry workshops, is that everyone can write bad poetry. It’s totally accessible. The more awful the poem, the better. If you accidentally write a good one it’s not a disaster, no one will think less of you for that. Then we get in there, and write deliberately terrible things, and laugh a lot, and relish the rubbishness. There’s joy in it, and freedom. 

One of the easiest ways to write a really bad poem is to be self important, grandiose, overblown – like someone trying too hard to make good art. There are in fact no guarantees that trying really hard to make good art will lead to something good – you might just end up with something awkwardly self conscious and pretentious instead. There’s no point focusing on the intention to make good art. It’s a lot better to focus on the pleasure of the process and the scope to do something interesting or enjoyable.

Cat Blorbs

I’ve been drawing Mr Anderson as he sleeps. Black cats can be hard to photograph, they become strange dark shapes that make no sense. So I thought I’d go with that. I have to draw fairly quickly to get the outline – he moves a lot even when asleep. I’m hoping to get faster and more capable so that I can catch some of the funny things he does when awake.

It entertains me that the middle image below only makes visual sense in the context of the others. He is a puddle of darkness. Mostly liquid.

Where even is his head?

I’m learning by doing this, and I hope to improve my drawing skills a bit. In the meantime, the notion of cat blorbs amuses me, and hopefully will amuse other people too. There’s some comfort in harmless humour, I think, and cats can be good for that.

Playing for misfits

I remember as a small child being taught by my grandmother how to play with a cat. She explained that it wasn’t about winning, that if the cat couldn’t get the string the cat would get bored and not want to play. I think this was my first explicit lesson in why cooperation is better than competition. 

There isn’t much fun to be had in winning against a cat. In learning to cooperate in this kind of play, I learned how to get the most delight out of a bit of string.

Looking back I note that it was one of the few instances of an adult explaining to me what the rules were for a specific sort of playing. As a child, I struggled with playing, which caused me a lot of social problems at school. I had no idea how any of it was supposed to work. I wanted to explore and experiment, and to learn how to do things. I liked imagining stuff, but the kind of communal imaginative role play games that children go in for made no sense to me.

When my son was a child, I got to revisit all of this. I still had no idea how to make certain kinds of play happen. Coming to it as an adult and a parent turned out to be as bewildering and uncomfortable as it had been as a child, only with extra layers of responsibility.

It may seem like an odd thing for a writer to feel, but as a child I did not want to play pretend games. As a teen playing role play games, where the rules are clearly defined, I was comfortable enough. I don’t think unstructured pretend play is actually that unstructured, it’s just that the rules are never explicit, and are intertwined with social standing and confidence. Some children are allowed to make the rules of the game, and change the rules of the game at will. Some are not. I was always in that second category with little grasp of how this first group got its power.

Writing is not like a make believe game. I get to make the rules. Even when I’m collaborating, I get a vote on how things work. It’s not like school where you can be stuck, day after day with people who will punish you – socially or physically – if you don’t play the games the way they want. These days I can at least vote with my feet if I need to.

How we play, who is allowed to play, who decides on the game – these things are all socially informed. How much of that do we learn unconsciously from our environments? Or in my case, fail to learn. We assume that play itself is intrinsic to children, but much of it did not come naturally to me and I doubt I am alone. How we play is part of how we learn, and this all has huge implications.

The need for joy

Recently, I went to see awesome folk trio Levert at a venue local to me. One of the things that had a profound impact on me was fiddle player Sam Sweeney’s capacity to fill the room with joy. His intense happiness in being out and making music with people was palpable. I felt it, and it got me asking when I last felt joy like that.

Like many people, I was badly knocked about by the pandemic, and I’m not really through that because it isn’t over. When you’re in panic/survival mode, joy isn’t really a thing you have time or energy to think about. I’ve spent too much of my life just trying to keep going in face of things that terrified me. There have been times when music has been a joyful part of my life, too. I can look back and see many things that made me joyful, and in seeing them I am aware of how distant it all seems.

I know that joy isn’t a happy accident. It isn’t the case that you should sit around waiting for joy to manifest. That kind of emotional intensity only happens when you invest heavily in something. Joy is something you make. To go there requires open heartedness, trust, vulnerability, confidence, belief that joy can be found. There are reasons I’ve struggled with all of that.

I’m promising myself more time for things that are undertaken in a spirit of delight and hopefulness. I need to throw myself fearlessly and wholeheartedly into something. Ideally into a lot of things. I need to rebuild my faith that investing deeply in something isn’t just another opportunity to get myself knocked down and crushed. There’s been too much of that. I am going to insist that joy is possible, and figure out how to make more of it.