Nimue Brown's Blog, page 119

Season of the Yule Badger

This year’s Yule badgers are made along the lines of paper angels I used to have as a child. The internet has lots of templates for cone shaped foldable paper angels. Having looked at a few, Tom figured out a Yule badger for me, and I coloured a few.

The Yule badger has become very much part of my winter celebrations.

Why Terfs aren’t feminists

CW rape and domestic abuse

Trans-excluding ‘radical feminists’ are not feminist for a number of reasons. Their insistence on reducing femininity to the narrowest of biological definitions is harmful to women. Right now, the obsession with trans women as an imagined threat to female safety is distracting from some really big and genuine issues.

Abusive men don’t ‘pretend’ to be women to get access to women. If you wanted easier access, you might join the police force, or just pretend friendship or the desire for a relationship. Abuse is a common experience for women. Most of that abuse does not come from strangers in toilets – although that’s not what you’d think if you listen to the terfs.

We are all most likely to be abused or killed by someone we know. There’s no gender component to that statistic. 

In this last year we’ve seen a young woman raped and murdered in the UK, by a polic officer. At her vigil, the police were excessively aggressive towards women. Failure to take female safety seriously is a real problem, and it is a problem that needs a change of police culture to fix it. Prosecution rates for rapists are notoriously low. There are major questions to ask around what is presented in court as consent or invitation in the first place, the assumptions the courts, the media and the public make about women coming forward as victims, and the way in which we prioritise male reputations over female safety.

No group of people is free from abusers. There are women who abuse. There are non-binary folk and trans folk who abuse – it’s a people issue and no one is exempt or beyond criticism. However, there are cultural and systemic underpinnings to the ways in which men are able to abuse women. That men are also victims of male violence stems from the same cultural issues and it would take far more than one blog post to properly unpack all of that. Feminism is about taking down the patriarchal structures that support and enable male violence – for the benefit of women (cis and trans alike) for the benefit of male victims, and even for the benefit of male perpetrators. Systems of male violence do horrible things to everyone caught up in them. 

If your feminism is about making a group of people more vulnerable to violence – it’s not feminism. If your feminism doesn’t recognise that hatred towards trans-women makes all non-gender-conforming women more vulnerable, you aren’t any sort of feminist. If you think attacking trans-women is more likely to increase female safety than taking on the much more dangerous work of challenging the police… I’m not honestly sure what planet you’re living on right now.

If your feminism rests on the idea that men (or anyone who has ever had a penis) are the problem, and not that the systems of patriarchy are the problem, you’re not going to disrupt patriarchy. You may however end up co-opting it and supporting it and benefiting from it.

Authentic Living at a Time of Climate Crisis

Dear readers, I find myself rather unexpectedly writing a book! A few weeks ago, Trevor Greenfield, of Moon Books (where I already have a handful of titles) dropped me a line. He’d seen something on my blog and was rather taken with it, and asked if I could expand on it for the new Earth Books line.

Earth Books are small books. “The purpose of the series is to stimulate and help develop ongoing discussion on what is, of course, pretty much the most important topic anyone could focus upon today – the future of the planet.” – you can read more about the series over here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/blogs/moon-books/earth-spirit-%E2-a-new-series-from-moon-books/

I’m writing about the things that make for a meaningful and authentic life, and how that relates to sustainability. My own experience is that seeking authenticity will align you with living in more sustainable ways. It’s all about slowing down, and not being persuaded to buy things in response to emotional needs. We can’t shop our way to happiness. Once our basic needs are met, material wealth does very little for a person.

I’m hoping to have the book handed in by the end of February at the latest. It will of course take a while from there – with the editing and production process. In the meantime, anyone signed up at the Bards and Dreamers level on my Patreon will get work in progress from this book – https://www.patreon.com/NimueB

Like most writers, I don’t earn vast sums from writing – success in this industry can look like earning £10k a year, which frankly doesn’t look like success by any other measure! Patreon certainly helps – if you like my blog and want to support me, that’s always really welcome and I put up extra content there. I also have ko-fi for people who want to make one off donations. https://ko-fi.com/O4O3AI4T – and check out the store for books that are free/pay what you want.

I don’t recycle blog material for books, but I do share books on Patreon. 

I’m excited about this current project as it’s an opportunity to share a lot of ideas I’ve been developing and exploring in recent years. I hope it will help people step away from the consumerism and find more enriching ways to live. And yes, there’s an irony in trying to sell a book about not buying so much stuff, but one of my core principles is about investing in owning things we can truly value, and moving away from throwaway culture that values nothing.

Winter Light

The place I live is made up of hills and valleys. The town of Stroud nestles (mostly) between the hills, with villages occupying other valleys. This place was carved out of the limestone by water working its way down to meet the Severn.

In winter, the sun doesn’t clear the hills much in some places. I have a friend whose home gets no direct sunlight at this time of year. For those on the hilltops there is still plenty of light, but also a lot of wind. Down in the valleys, where I live, it is a lot more sheltered, but also gloomier. 

I don’t experience the solstice as having any great impact. For me, the dark part of the year starts in early December and continues well into January. My sense of the light and the season has everything to do with how I experience light – and the absence of it – in my own home and that in turn has everything to do with where I live in relation to the hills.

I think it’s important to be specific and personal in our relationships with the natural world. Thinking about ‘nature’ as some sort of vague abstract won’t give you much. It’s easy to pay lip service to a vague idea, but a real relationship calls for specifics. 

How does the wheel of the year turn for you? What are your personal experiences of the seasons? What happens where you live?

The Feral Haus Spaus – a story

It isn’t real folklore. It isn’t even real language, but the feral haus spaus isn’t one to fret over conventions. You find them in the garden, wild birds are eating grain from their outstretched hand. At once, you are struck by their loveliness. So sweet a face, such bright eyes, a glow of health in their skin and a lively, playful quality in their demeanor.

Of course the haus spaus is in part what you wanted them to be. Husband or wife, or partner, according to your desires. They know that about you, and it is part of their innate magic. 

“It will rain soon,” says the haus spaus. Their voice is warm and soothing. “Best get the laundry in now.” You will be grateful to them in a few minutes, when the safe delivery of your laundry under your roof coincides with the first patter of rain. You do not remember hanging laundry out to dry, but perhaps that does not matter.

Mostly, they are in the garden. They plant flowers, and the weeds grow in profusion. Not only do they feed the wild birds, but also the badgers, who go on to dig up your lawn, but you don’t mind. It’s hard to resist the feral haus spaus.

They bring you dirty vegetables, fresh from the ground and nothing else has ever tasted so good. There is bounty in their open hands. Wild bees take up residence in your attic. Sometimes an owl stands on your roof to hoot. You find ivy growing on the inside of your home and you are not quite sure how this happened, but the feral haus spaus likes the ivy, so you leave it alone and soon there’s a robin living in it and it sings to you, early in the morning.

You forget to go to work. You forget even that you had a job. Trees grow in your garden. Your front door sprouts leaves. The postman no longer delivers anything. You forget about the postman. There’s not much reason to leave the house now, you have so much bounty from the garden. Where would you go, anyway? Why would you go?

The feral haus spaus patches your clothing with spider webs and dried grass stems. You are never too cold. Sometimes there are moths in your hair. You laugh a great deal, but you do not know why sometimes. The haus spaus smiles at you, and life is good.

By the time your home turns into a tree, your blood relations will not remember that you existed. Sometimes children come to play in the garden. Their clothes seem strange to you, their talk is full of words you do not know. The feral haus spaus smiles at you and tells you that everything is fine.

(Prompted by a meme about how the existence of the domestic housewife implies the existence of a feral one.)

Love & Other Fairy Tales – a review

This isn’t an objective review – poet Adam Horovitz is someone I am blessed to count as a friend, and I live with the cover artist! 

This is a lovely collection of poems. You should definitely get a copy.

I’ve spent days trying to work out how to write a review without saying anything too obvious or tedious about this new collection while getting across something meaningful about why I like Adam’s poetry so much. So here we go.

Adam is like the sea.

Stay with me, this works. The sea takes whatever it encounters, and polishes it until the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Adam is much the same. His poems are often about scenes and experiences that are likely to be familiar. He also favours the everyday language – he isn’t one of those poets where you have to go in armed with a thesaurus, willing to try and decode the poem as though it was some kind of cryptic crossword. Which is as well because mostly I hate that sort of writing. 

You don’t have to have read a lot of poetry to make sense of Adam’s work. There are no rules or references that you need to have a handle on. Some of the pieces do allude to other work, and while it’s nice when you know what’s going on there, it’s also totally workable when you don’t. I knew some of the pieces he mentions and not others, and it was fine. 

In these poems, simple and everyday language turns into something enchanted. It’s about the pacing, the placing of words in relationship to each other, the soundscapes thus created, and the way a pairing of words can birth a sense of meaning that feels magical and unfamiliar even when those words are wholly mundane. The ordinary becomes remarkable.

It’s like the way the sea takes ugly broken pieces of glass, and turns them into colourful, smooth delight. 

More on the publisher’s website – https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/adam-horovitz

How not to be lonely

Loneliness is very much a modern plague and has terrible, health-undermining impacts on people. Some of it can simply be attributed to the amount of time we spend working and the consequences of being exhausted from that. People are often quick to blame TV, streaming, computer games, the internet and anything else involving a screen. I’m doubtful about that – I’ve formed some powerful, life-changing relationships through the internet. Turning to screens for comfort and distraction strikes me as being a symptom more than a cause.

Relationships aren’t things that happen by magic. They depend a great deal on what we’re willing to give of ourselves, and I think that’s where a lot of people get into trouble. Relationships require you to be emotionally available and honest, to be willing to be vulnerable and to make the time for someone.

Along the way I’ve run into so many people who were clearly averse to doing some or all of those things. People for whom investing time and care in other people seemed too much like work. People who wanted the freedom of being unaccountable. If you feel uncomfortable about people caring about you, then you aren’t going to have much of a relationship with them. If you want to be able to disappear off for days, or weeks on end without checking in, you can hardly expect people to invest in you emotionally and just put up with not knowing what’s going on. A person cannot keep everyone else safely at arm’s length and realistically expect to have substantial relationships.

Of course there are many ways in which we can have fleeting, superficial contact with other humans. We say hi to the person at the checkout, we nod to people we see each day when commuting and so forth. In face of desperate loneliness, these small points of contact can offer some relief. But not much. Being around people doesn’t ease loneliness in the way that being involved with other people does.

I think there’s an emotional immaturity around wanting the unconditional care of a parent from people who are not your parents. The desire to have care and affection bestowed by someone to whom you feel no obligation in return is something I’ve seen repeatedly. Casting other people in the role of your mother (more often than making people into fathers, in my experience) and then feeling free to also punish them for being too mothering/smothering is a pattern I’ve seen play out a few times now. I have no desire to be cast as mother in the life of someone who wants to be a perpetual teenager cliche, acting out, demanding freedom and expecting unconditional love.

Unless we are willing to face each other as equals, with equal responsibility for the relationship and comparable investment on both sides, loneliness is inevitable. We should not be looking to other adults in our lives to replicate the relationships we had with our parents, or step into the role if that’s been lacking for us. People who cannot or will not give of themselves are bound to be lonely. If you’re waiting for someone to come along and offer you unconditional love, that’s the essence of your problem right there.

It is of course possible to be alone without feeling lonely. Not everyone wants or needs a great deal of contact with other humans. What’s on my mind in writing this is the people who talk about being lonely but also don’t seem to recognise that their unwillingness to give of themselves is a key contributor to all of that.

Online and accessible

One of the consequences of so much moving online during lockdowns, is that many people who are normally excluded became able to participate. Clearly we could do more to include people who cannot travel to events, but as the people who always could do the things get back to normal, people at the margins are again left out.

There are many barriers to attending real-world events. Illness and disability can make it really hard to go places. Poverty is a big barrier to participation – travel, accommodation and event tickets aren’t cheap. People who are carers can have a hard time getting out to events. For people on unpredictable zero hours contracts or with massively involved jobs – such as farming – can find it hard to take breaks. When you start to consider the number of people excluded from venue-based events, it’s hard to see why we don’t take this a lot more seriously.

I’ve been involved with online events for years – the Pagan Federation were doing them long before covid struck. I put a lot of content online in no small part because I know what it’s like not to have any disposable income for nice things. But, I want to go further. To that end, I’m organising an online festival for late January. It’s going to be based around the Hopeless Maine project and will include many of the people who are already involved. It should be highly entertaining.

My hope is that I’ll be able to do this every year. January is a miserable time (for me, anyway) and I think getting out to things is harder when the weather is against you. And hopefully it will provide some cheer for people who might otherwise be less cheered.

He made me do it

CW domestic abuse.

One of the areas of language use I’m currently scrutinising is how I use the idea of made/make. It’s interesting to ask where the balance of power really lies, where I might be abdicating or ignoring my own power, and how unhelpful habits of conventional phrasing are in this regard. He made me do it.

It’s a phrase that comes up a lot around domestic abuse. The idea that the victim made the abuser act as they did is something many victims are subjected to. You made me angry. You made me hit you. As though the abuser is powerless and has no choice in face of the victim’s actions. That sense of being to blame for what happens is part of what keeps victims trapped in abusive relationships as they try to fix things, atone and do better.

The idea that someone else’s behaviour made you react in a certain way is popular with small children. I think much depends on how the adults around you then handle things. Which brings me to the flip-side of this issue – that it is equally problematic when people deny all cause and effect and insist that we are all responsible for how we react to things and not responsible for what we provoke in others. Upsetting someone isn’t an excuse for following through with violence, but at the same time, emotional harm needs taking seriously. If someone says you are making them miserable, the answer is not to tell them that they are wholly responsible for how they choose to feel. 

We can and do make each other feel things. The person doing the feeling has some control over that process, but it isn’t total control. People can make you feel things you do not want to feel. Our words, actions, inactions all impact on other people emotionally. It may not always go as we intended, but if you want any power over the outcomes you have to be willing to also take responsibility. Can we make each other take action? I think how we act on our feelings is normally an issue of personal responsibility, but there are times when it isn’t.

People can be trained to act in certain ways. My understanding is that this is an important principle in military training. We often train creatures on these terms, with fear and threat of punishment so that they do exactly what is wanted of them without hesitation. We may choose to use rewards in the same way. If the threats and rewards on offer are significant enough, saying no isn’t really an option. If you’re given an electric shock every time you do the ‘wrong’ thing it won’t take you long to learn and stick with the ‘right’ behaviour.

I suspect most of us prefer to believe that we couldn’t be trained in this way. Sustained programs designed to train us will have that effect over time. Most of us cannot effectively resist such things. It’s not a comfortable thing to consider. 

When it comes to writing, I’m comfortable discussing things in terms of how I am made to feel. I watch out for inadvertently saying ‘made to do’. At the moment, no one is running power over me in a way that makes me do anything – although that has been an issue historically. I’m watching out for the times when I give too much power away, ascribing too much significance to whatever prompts a feeling and not recognising how much is intrinsic to me. I take it seriously if someone habitually makes me feel uncomfortable. I step away from people who want to make me responsible for their actions. I’m not going to make anyone do anything, if I can help it.

Illuminating observations of the perils of an indiscreet life…

Once upon a time I wrote a novel that involved Druids on a traction engine… I was utterly delighted by this recent review for it.

The Passing Place

For reasons, that have never been explained to me, at Pudsey (the small town between Leeds and Bradford and somewhat merged into both these days), in the large park behind the swimming pool, just up past the aviary, this is, and has been since my childhood and probably before, a old traction engine.

Not a working one, I should explain, it’s fire box has long been welded shut, the many levers disconnected from such interesting things as breaks and gear boxes. The wheel doesn’t turn the cumbersome front axil. The great steam whistle to warn people ahead that this great lumbering beast of the industrial revolution is ponderous heading towards them has long been detach. But then the great lumbering beast hasn’t moved for over fifty years or more.

Instead of its original intended purpose it has been a climbing frame, and well of possibilities the imagination of children can…

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