Nimue Brown's Blog, page 138

Speak your truth

It is the morning after a hard night, the anxiety rode me into the early hours. I think of folklore and witches night riding horses, and I know I am that sort of horse.

There is anger inside me. So much anger. There has never been a safe way for that rage to come out through my skin. It turns on me. I think about stories of people possessed by demons. I know how that goes.

Sometimes I fight my demons. Sometimes we just snuggle. Those modern stories, those cute meme responses to distress. There’s comfort to be had there. Sometimes I try to hold the demons that are inside my skin, and I whisper to them the things I wish someone had whispered to me.

This morning I am a mangled wreck of a person, washed up from the sea, shipwrecked nameless on some unfamiliar shore, waiting for the crows to come. I think about the true stories of fisher folk, and the things they did to protect their loved ones, and make them identifiable if worst came to worst. I do not feel there is much left of me to identify. I think about the people who knitted jumpers for me.

There’s always a story to turn to. Always some last, desperate thread that gives context and continuity. Something to wrap around your fingers when there is nothing else to hold on to. Once upon a time… nothing is new… someone else washed up on this shore before you, broken and unrecognisable.

You may not have it in you to tell a story about how things got better from there. Some stories do not end well. Some stories are warning signs. Mind the gap. Do not feed the bears. Danger cliffs. Sometimes all we can do is show where we fell in the hopes that others stay away. Be the story that saves someone else.

Tell the story in the hopes that it makes sense. Tell whatever fragment you have, so that you know you were there, and it was real. Murmur it to the sand where you lie abandoned by the tide. Whatever story you have, speak it.

Sacred Actions – a review

Dana O’Driscoll’s Sacred Actions is a rare example of a book I think everyone should read. It’s written for Pagans and Druids, but I think there are lot of people who simply care about the natural world who would also benefit greatly from this book.

This is a book about how to embed not just sustainable practices in your spiritual and daily life, but also how to be restorative. It’s not enough to be sustainable. The idea of being regenerative is exciting, and the book as a whole has a hopeful, encouraging tone and is a good antidote to despair and distress.

You could take this as a manual for a year long project, or you could just read it all and pick the bits that work for you – there’s plenty of inspiration and flexibility here. Author Dana is a longstanding Druid, with a wide range of life experiences. The result is a beautifully written book that is pragmatic, realistic and recognises the breadth and limitations you might be facing. It is as applicable for urban Pagans in small spaces as it is for those who can run off and start an organic homestead, and all places in between. There’s attention to issues of wealth and privilege, and this is an excellent piece of writing for not excluding anyone or assuming much about available resources.

The book follows the wheel of the year, and the 8 festivals familiar to most modern Pagans. You could draw on this material to enrich your own seasonal celebrations, there would be no difficulty setting it alongside a different set of celebrations, either. If celebrating the festivals isn’t part of how you do your Paganism, that will also be fine, you can make this entirely about action without any need for ritual.

Each festival explores an area of thinking and action and looks at how to bring this into your daily life, and spiritual life. It’s a book that is very much about embedding the spiritual in the everyday, and increasing earth awareness and feelings of interconnectedness.

If you’ve been a deliberate eco-Pagan for some time, you might find some of the content familiar. However, this is a book with so many ideas in it, that the odds are good of finding new things to bring into your life. There are original rituals and triads here, and content for contemplation and meditation that will enrich any Druidic practice. I really like the emphasis on meditation as an action, and using meditation to embed ideas, reflect on relationships and deepen understanding. These are the most valuable meditation pointers I’ve seen in a very long time.

The author writes from her own experience, which means that the book has most to offer a Pagan in similar circumstances – someone living in North America. If that’s not your situation, there is still a great deal to gain from this book, you’re just going to have to do extra work to find out about relevant plants and groups where you live, for example. As a UK dwelling reader I enjoyed the decision to make the content specific – in many ways, specific details provide a better map for those of us outside the area of interest, than vague content that doesn’t really give anything precise to anyone.

If you need inspiring and uplifting right now, this book is for you. If you need help finding out how to live a life that is regenerative, and more than sustainable, this book is for you. If you are even slightly interested in earth based spirituality, this book is for you. I cannot recommend it enough. It’s made me realise a lot about what is most important to me in terms of Druidry – connection, care, community, responsibility, action, living our values, and uplifting each other so that we can all do better.

More about the book here – Waterstones

Giantess – fiction in progress

She saw the sea.
You saw her.
I saw both.
Shadow, shadow on your shadow.
Her blood plants are covered with tears
of your regret.

A woman on the shore at twilight, towering such that at first you do not realise she is a person.

And then you think she isn’t a person after all, but the great swelling mass of the kelp beds re-growing.

But you see the face in the kelp, and you feel her presence and know she is there.

Your heart hurts with loss, with the weight of too little care over too long.

She is striding in the water now. She is life and regeneration, she sings the songs of spawning grounds and turtles.

Weeping, you bend to gather rubbish from the sea. It is the only offering of yours that might interest her.

(Art by Dr Abbey, text by both of us.)

Druidry and Privilege

Back when I was first exploring ideas of privilege, there was a person who used to show up on my blog to argue with me. I’ve since deleted most of her stuff.  If I talked about body size, she’d be in to tell me how hard things can be for thin people. I talked about the social issues around being found unattractive, and she responded by telling me how hard things can be when you grow up pretty. I remember her writing about her home, and big garden, and driving to get to the farmer’s market, and me raising the issue of privilege and being told that she wasn’t privileged.

We were all fairly new to the privilege conversations at this point. I did not then know how normal this type of conversation would become – that people who have considerable amounts of privilege are often incredibly resistant to seeing it, or to imagining what life would be like without those things. I know at this point how normal it is for people with massive privilege to dismiss the challenges faced by others, to treat the inconvenience they experience as being comparable, and to minimise the suffering of those who have significantly less.

These days I would have both the confidence and the insight to call out someone for this kind of crappy thinking. At this point I know that I am right about this stuff, and was right at the time. I never owed anything to the poor little rich girl who wanted to feel sorry for herself over how her attractiveness made other people jealous. One of the things massive privilege likes to do is whinge when it looks like the focus of attention is moving somewhere else. Immense privilege is used to being centre stage, and feels entitled, and resents the suggestion that something else matters more, so dammit, if the way to compete is to prove that really you are the disadvantaged one, then that’s what you do to stay firmly centre stage and most important.

For me, justice is an important part of Druidry. The work of seeking justice begins in yourself. If means being anti-racist and starting by looking hard at your own prejudices and assumptions, for example. It means looking at your privilege and the differences between what you have, and what others do not have. Justice requires a willingness to be uncomfortable. This includes a willingness not to be centre stage, and to recognise that other people may have bigger problems. Yes, thin can bring issues and criticism, but it will not usually mean a doctor automatically ignores your symptoms and attributes them to your body shape. 

For there to be justice, we have to listen to each other. One of the easiest ways to derail a bid for justice is to insist that something else is more important. When men insist on foregrounding violence experienced by men in response to someone trying to talk about violence inflicted on women by men, for example. At the same time, if someone is talking about issues with no reference to the privilege involved, that actually needs derailing. No, we can’t all drive to the farmer’s market to buy local organic veg. Not all of us can drive, or afford that kind of food, and it isn’t that we aren’t trying hard enough.

And today, justice is allowing myself the space to feel angry on my own account that I had to deal with all of that. Angry that someone persistently worked to undermine me, to derail me, to minimise genuine issues and to put themselves centre stage in this space that is mine. I’m allowed to be angry, but it’s taken me a lot of years to be able to hold that for myself.

Pride – being an ally

It’s Pride month, and you might be a straight person who would like to be an ally and support your queer friends. This is not an exhaustive or definitive list, just some things to think about.

Don’t centre yourself – if this is about looking good, or cool or wanting to go to events you aren’t really helping much. 

Don’t police the language queer people use to talk about themselves, and don’t demand that queer spaces be adapted to make you feel more comfortable. Amplify your queer friends. Put your pronouns on your social media profile, if you feel comfortable doing that. Listen, and learn. Building insight and understanding is a really meaningful thing to do.

Don’t treat LGBTQA folk like we’re all one thing. We are not a coherent entity with a single set of opinions, feelings and needs by which we are all tidily defined. We don’t all agree with each other about all kinds of things. What you’ve picked up from one queer friend, or one queer celebrity you follow on Twitter isn’t the whole story. Don’t assume you know enough to speak for people – because no one does. Not everyone who is (by my reckoning) queer would be comfortable with me using the word ‘queer’ to describe all queer people because not everyone identifies this way. But, it’s my blog, I’m using my preferred term and I’m not going to spend the whole time flagging up the language complexities. It’s ok that we don’t all agree about everything. Diversity is good.

Don’t buy Pride merch from corporations. It’s just commercial exploitation. Putting a rainbow on something is pretty flimsy support, and does very little to support LGBTQA people. If you want to spend money on having cool gay things during June, then look for the independent creative folk who are making Pride stuff because they are queer creators. Supporting them is a much more meaningful use of your money, and will do all kinds of good.

Don’t lose sight of what Pride is about. It’s not a celebration, not really. It’s an assertion of presence from a marginalised group that is subject to abuse, and in some places, at real risk of death, injury or imprisonment. Pride started as a riot, and continues as a protest. It’s about people coming together to support each other, and raise awareness. It isn’t just a party. It isn’t about the corporations who want to co-opt it because they reckon they can cash in on the gay pound, the lesbian dollar… It should not exist to comfort the comfortable.

There are of course invariably people who respond to Pride by wanting Straight Pride. If you want to take on any work as an ally, this is a good one to go after, especially if you catch people you know expressing this idea. Straight people don’t need Pride events because they are not at any risk as a consequence of experiencing hetrosexual desire and love for people of the opposite sex. Pride in no way makes it unsafe to be straight. There is no shift towards a world in which the currently dominant majority will suddenly find it has the love that dares not speak its name. That’s not what this is about. More rights for everyone does not mean that the people with the most advantages have something taken away from them. 

Druidry and the body

One way to honour nature is to honour it as it manifests in our own bodies. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because capitalist cultures are set up to have us not doing that. We work for too long and don’t rest enough. We’re sold allegedly convenient foods that are harmful to us. We dose ourselves with chemicals. We don’t spend enough time moving around, or being outside. Consumer culture makes it hard to honour nature within ourselves.

This week my body has made it clear that I have to figure out how to be a lot kinder to it. My body is no longer prepared to go along with the demands I make of it. This animal self needs more that as healing, comforting and restorative. I note that I think of my body as something separate from ‘me’ and that I’ve been in a running battle with my body for most of my life. What I want to do and what I expect of myself are not compatible with what my body can actually sustain, and this has always been an issue for me.

Currently I’m experiencing menopause issues. I have been for a while, and every now and then I get really knocked about by it. Where menopausal stuff intersects with problems I already have, the results can be desperately unpleasant. One thing that is clear is that I need more slack in how I organise my time so that if I get in to trouble, I can focus on it. I’m going to have to give my body more priority and I’m going to have to be kinder to it and take better care of it.

There are ideas that come up around Druidry, around other spiritual paths and in other aspects of life that don’t help with this. Discipline is one such. Discipline doesn’t encourage us towards listening to our bodies or treating them kindly. There are all kinds of ideas out there about what we should be doing in relation to the wheel of the year that doesn’t take into account how the seasons impact on our bodies. Notions of spiritual routine and daily devotion may not give anyone enough flexibility to handle a body that just can’t do the things right now. An approach to Druidry that begins with practicing kindness towards your own body might work very differently.

At the moment I am simply trying to figure out how to be kind. It goes with trying to figure out how to be this body, rather than just inhabiting it. This flesh and skin is also part of the natural world. It is a soft mammal that craves rest and peace, gentleness and sleep. It’s time to stop making this body fit in with capitalist notions of what a person is for. This is no longer just a philosophical consideration for me – I can’t face being in so much pain that I can’t function, and that seems to be where I’m heading if I can’t make enough changes.

It’s taken me far longer than usual to write this blog, and I’m going to be fine with that. Everything is taking far longer today. I need to slow down, to prioritise rest, to sleep more and do less. I know I’ve been saying all of this for years, and I have been (ironically slowly) moving in this direction, but I need to embrace it more fully, and let this body call the shots more often.

For the time being, I’m going to make listening to my body the focus of what I’m doing as a Druid. I’m going to dedicate myself to learning about nature as it manifest within my own skin, and treating that piece of the natural world with more care and respect.

Matters of Pride

Coming out isn’t something you get to do once. It’s something you may have to repeat, many times, always with some anxiety about how people will react to you. It doesn’t help that it’s the people who get close that you will most need to come out to. The people you need to have understand you, and who may be impacted by the way you are and the kinds of relationships you have. It’s high stakes and a lot to lose if they don’t turn out to be ok with who you are. But, how close can you be to someone if you have to hide significant parts of yourself?

I take great comfort in my queer friends, and my kinky friends, and the folk I know will not judge me or think less of me on account of who I am. The people I am close enough to that I can be honest with them about the other people I am close to.

I get off fairly lightly. There are far too many people in this world who are not free or safe to love the people they love. There are too many people who are not free or safe in expressing themselves sexually in consenting ways with other adults. The consequences of coming out, or worse still, being outed, can be dire. Sometimes fatal.

Many human cultures have stories about who is allowed to do what with whom, what is moral, what is evil, what is acceptable to various gods, what’s abhorrent. Those stories are based on value judgements and priorities, and some of those stories are cruel, and toxic. If it seems more appropriate to kill someone than to let them love who they love, something has gone badly wrong.

Love is good. Love is always good. No one should be afraid of loving whoever they are moved to love. Sex is a good, beautiful thing and anyone who wants to do that in any way that works for them should not have to be afraid of how other people will respond. That there are so many people who are more horrified by what consenting adults choose to do together than they are by rape does not say good things about us as a culture.

To be a Pilgrim

Over recent years I’ve been developing a seasonal walking calendar. The idea is to visit the places where I can best encounter key seasonal events in my locality. This is primarily about what the plants are doing, because these are predictable year to year. Good places to see the bluebells and the spring beech leaves. Good places to see the wild orchids, especially the bee orchids. I also know the best places to see glow bugs, and some migrant birds. I also know where the herons nest, where to see ducklings, where the bats go, where I am most likely to find young owls in the summer, which paths open or close in which conditions and so forth.

This walking calendar has been built over years of exploring, and finding out how different parts of my surroundings change through the seasons. Creating it has been a rich and interesting process, and a body of work I don’t imagine it is possible to complete. There’s always more to know, and more plants to learn about and encounter.

Last year, covid limitations meant I didn’t get to a number of my key places at the right time. We were encouraged not to be out for more than an hour per day to exercise, and in some areas that was enforced by the police and by neighbors reporting each other. This had an awful impact on my mental health. What made it worse was knowing that it was total nonsense. Transmission requires people. If you’re outside and you don’t see another person, you can hardly spread a disease. Time spent outside is not an issue unless you are trying to alleviate pressure on inadequate amounts of green space. And there’s a whole other set of problems that needed better consideration.

This year I’ve struggled with fatigue, and various other bodily problems that have really impacted on my ability to walk. I managed to see some bluebells, but not the wonderful blue swathes that make the hilltops so enchanting. I may not get to see the bee orchids. These walks and encounters have been the heart of my Druidry for years, and it is hard being without them.

I’m focusing on doing what I can, seeing and connecting with what I can, and accepting my limitations while doing my best to push against them. Perhaps later this year I will be able to be a pilgrim again on my own terms. It’s something to aspire to, and to work towards.

Escaping clock time

Clock time is very much a feature of industrialisation. It goes with shift work, and the need to have workers in the right place at the right time. Regular working life gives us little to no scope for improvisation, flexibility, time off when ill or when needing things. For most of human history, we haven’t had clocks. We’ve had sun time, and operated in small enough communities that organising without clocks has been just fine. It’s notable that industrial towns and cities tend to have clock towers so that people too poor to have their own watches would know the time.

When the schools closed in 2020 for the pandemic, we no longer needed alarm clocks. Both Tom and I are self employed and can work when we choose. With study moving online, James’s start time was a lot later – he’d been getting to school by bicycle and needed to get up early for that. Suddenly we had a lot more flexibility. This was as well because pandemic stress played havoc with my ability to sleep. I slept when I could, and got up when I couldn’t sleep, and paid little attention to the clock.

We’ve stayed that way. James has continued studying from home and is old enough not to need any help with that. He’s also not faced with an early morning bike ride, so does not need a hearty breakfast, so we can leave him to it. In practice I mostly still get up early, but it’s nice not having to.

Last winter was the first winter I can remember of being free to wake with the light. It was lovely, soothing and restorative. I find winter difficult. Not having to get up in the dark helped me emotionally.

It’s also great having the freedom to sleep in a bit if I’ve had a bad night. I take sleep seriously, I go to bed at sensible times, I drink soothing tea, I am mindful of screen use and over stimulation etc. But, sometimes I get hit by insomnia. Sometimes the anxiety gets me, or the depression, or the menopausal weird night events – sometimes all of these things together, which means failing at sleep. The freedom to wake when I do has brought a lot of health benefits and greatly reduced my stress. Insomnia is much worse when you know how many hours you have left when you could sleep and you can see the next day falling apart before you’ve even got to it. The freedom to sleep in changes everything.

I’m not convinced that the way we currently organise our lives is necessary. With increased automation, we aren’t going to need people in factories working to clock time. Clearly there are some jobs – medical and emergency especially – where you have to be able to count on other people being there. But what if other work and activities were organised in more flexible ways? What if we had more scope to negotiate, or respond to the situation on the day? It would be a much kinder way of interacting. It would be interesting to see how much work doesn’t really depend on clock time, because my suspicion is that many things could be done more flexibly and much more comfortably than they currently are.

Thoughts on world building

The kind of world you imagine shapes the kind of story you can tell. This is an important consideration when writing, but it’s also true in everyday life. The way we imagine the world affects the kinds of stories we can tell, and the kinds of lives we can lead. The person who believes that this world is grim, vicious and that people are awful will make a very different story of their life from the person who believes in cooperation and kindness. The fiction we create contributes to how the people who encounter it imagine the real world to be. This is why I want to work in hopeful genres, not dystopian ones.

When Dr Abbey first started drawing pieces for our joint project, I saw deserts, ruins, haunted people, and a lot that was troubled. This was our shared starting point. It struck me that it would be an interesting thing to write a story in the aftermath of disaster, where people are trying to rebuild. It’s the rebuilding that I’m interested in, and the idea of what it means to be restorative. If we can imagine being restorative, it will be easier to achieve it.

A world in ruins could very easily be the setting for grim and dystopian fiction. This is a scenario where everyone is damaged in some way – bodily, emotionally or both. Everyone has seen horrors. Everyone has experienced the kinds of things that make it really hard to trust other people. However, there are people who have set their hearts on rebuilding and re-greening. The key characters will either be people who are already working on that, or people drawn into it.

It struck me that there are other implications to a traumatised society. Mostly the characters aren’t going to talk about it. Everyone knows that everyone else has seen terrible things. If you’re going to work with people, it may be better not to know what terrible things they did in the past, and just go with whatever they are doing now. If you’re trying to atone for what you did, it may be better not to have to speak of it. How do we forgive each other? How do we forgive ourselves? These may be important and relevant questions to ask as countries around the world seem ever more divided and people become polarised. How can we be kind, when there has been only cruelty?

So, I won’t be telling the stories about the terrible things that happened. I will allude to them, but no more. The question will be how to move past those wounds and conflicts, to make something better. How to build hope when it is almost impossible to imagine anything good. How to rebuild trust, and faith in humanity.