Nimue Brown's Blog, page 139

The writing life

I thought it might be interesting to outline what I’m doing with my time at the moment…

I’ve got into a lovely routine where there’s often an hour between my getting up and my starting work. I use that time to think, drink coffee, sometimes I do some exercise. I approach the day slowly, rather than getting up and starting work, which used to be the way of it.

For the first hour or two, I write blogs – for this site and https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/ I also do assorted social media work. Up until February of this year, much of my day job was running Twitter accounts, but I’ve cut right back on that to make more space for other things.

At the moment I’m switching gear in the morning and becoming a colourist for an hour or two – I’m mostly working on the next graphic novel in the Hopeless Maine series. I work in pencils on paper, my husband does all the drawing which is all very old fashioned, but I like how much more texture and character you get that way.

On Wednesday mornings I sort out my Patreon content for the week, although I may have created the content on the previous day. Currently on Patreon there’s usually a poem each month, a section from a novel serialisation, a seasonal song and a Druid book in progress. https://www.patreon.com/NimueB

On Mondays and Thursdays some of the afternoon goes to writing a Wherefore episode, these are recorded and shared on Tuesdays and Fridays. You can find series 3 here – https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd-6bmI3UuPDMpi5gY_L1KRrzTQDnQMhp It’s a sort of supernatural soap opera. Animism and comedy.

On Wednesday afternoons I’m working on a new Hopeless Maine project. At other times I’m also chipping away at world building for a new project and you can find that in the creative section of this blog.

Other, less regular things go into whatever spare time there is during the afternoons. That can mean magazine articles, reading review books, learning material, developing content for talks, doing things  to help and support friends – like reading early drafts of their novels…

It’s full on that the moment, I have to concentrate hard for extended periods. Happily, my natural concentration span is about an hour, and if I take breaks to move around, I can make that work.

This also represents quite a gentle pace compared to the kinds of workloads I’ve had at some points in the past. There was one autumn when I was working 7 different part time jobs…  At this point my life is a bit more coherent and not as difficult to organise as it has been. And still, I’m having to be deliberate at cutting myself slack for how long I can do some of these things for. I am uncomfortably aware that I expect to be able to work like a machine.  I know creative work isn’t simply about the ability to crank it out. I know I need rest time, thinking time, research time and inspiration to create well, but I still struggle with the way capitalism has colonized my head.

Taking your children to Pride

I’m seeing a lot of discussion online this week about how Pride should be safe and family friendly, and that people who aren’t sexual should feel that they can safely turn up and not see sexual things. This worries me.

Children are actually exposed to sexual imagery all the time – only usually it is heterosexual in nature. Try watching a Disney film… Straight sex is a constant theme in TV adverts. We’re all normalised to this so we don’t always notice the sexual lessons and stereotypes and the sexualisation of women that happens in front of us all the time. Children grow up seeing female bodies dressed for the male gaze – which means highly sexualised women.

I’m not aware of any Pride events where people actually have sex in public. There may be booths handing out information, there may be things you can buy. Pride is about sexual identity. If you take your children to a Pride event, you have to be willing to deal with whatever questions they have. Parenting is an active thing, and around sex it is really important to do clear and active parenting of your child. That includes making decisions about what you think it’s appropriate for them to encounter, and dealing with it when they encounter things that they weren’t ready for.

Because that’s going to happen regardless of whether you take them to Pride events. If your children are online, they’re going to see things. If your children watch television, they are already seeing things, and if you aren’t conscious of that because you think it’s normal, you have much bigger issues around sexual representation, and sexualisation than what might happen at Pride events. If you are happy to have your children soak up sexualised images of women presented for the male gaze but you worry that Pride events will corrupt them, don’t go to Pride events. Also, you have some massive issues to deal with and no idea what kind of sexualised ideas your children have already absorbed.

If you don’t know what a Pride event might involve and you take your kids along because it looks like a fun day out and are then horrified… that’s actually on you for bad parenting. It is not an issue with the event.

If you want the queers to behave nicely so that you can go out and have some innocent fun with your family, that is utter shit. That’s you wanting queer people to perform for your amusement in a way that makes you comfortable. If you want all the pretty rainbow flags and a nice parade, but you want it sanitised for your comfort – you have no business being at a Pride event. This is not a pageant for your amusement, you are not entitled to make it all about you.

And to any fellow queer who wishes those other queers would tone it down and be less controversial and not embarrass you…. or whatever it is… Take a moment to look at how patriarchal, hetranormative and toxic this whole line of thinking is. We live in a culture that has normalised presenting sexualised young female bodies for the male gaze, and we treat anything sexual that isn’t about the male consumption of the female body as offensive. It is vitally important to change this, and we may need to start with looking hard at our own beliefs and feelings.

Druidry and Confession

I’ve felt for some time now that the Catholics are on to something with confession. There are times when it would be an enormous relief to be able to tell someone the things.

As Druids don’t have a clear set of rules in the first place, it would be down to the individual to decide what they need to confess. We wouldn’t need to frame it as sin necessarily. Failures, shortcomings, mistakes, bad ideas, poor responses – whatever a person felt uncomfortable about, could be usefully owned in a safe space.

The wise and experienced Druid hearing the confession could then tell us what they think of it. There are times when it would be really helpful to hear things like ‘this is just ordinary human error.’ ‘Clearly you could not have know how this would work out’ and things of that ilk. Feedback that isn’t forgiveness, but that could be permission to forgive yourself. We all mess up, but it can be hard not to beat yourself up over mistakes.

Confession in a Druid context wouldn’t be about penitence or punishment, but it might be about restorative justice. Again there are lots of times when it might be of great benefit to have someone else’s wisdom in the mix. Imagine someone who can say ‘you really do need to apologise for this’ or ‘here are some things you could try that might be restorative.’

People who are having a hard time with their mental health and/or dealing with abuse can end up feeling responsible for things that aren’t of their making. The process of confessing could open the way to hearing that you may be taking too much onto yourself or judging yourself too harshly. It could signpost the way to therapy, or to kinder thoughts. Sometimes being told that you can’t possibly be responsible for what’s going on is the first step to recognising an abusive situation. None of this requires much in the way of qualification, I think. Just enough life experience to spot when people feel responsible for things they cannot possibly be responsible for.

There would be relief in being able to say to someone ‘this is how I have messed up’ and hearing their take on it, offered in kindness. Obviously there’s no formal way to do this at the moment, but it is something we might be able to do for each other.

Green, or Normal?

One of the biggest obstacles to living more sustainably, is our idea of what’s normal. This is something that impacts us at the personal level, and as wider societies and cultures. Normal is comfortable, and for many people, just imagining an alternative is difficult. We don’t automatically question things we think are normal, and we all tend to resist change away from what’s comfortable for us.

Most of us at this point are used to wildlife degradation. We’re used to seeing almost barren landscapes presented as beautiful. If we’ve never seen them covered in trees, or rich grassland, if we’ve never seen them complicated and thriving we won’t know that the thin covering of grass they now have is a disaster. We’re used to living with few songbirds, and not being surrounded by wildflowers. We don’t miss things if we’ve never known them. This means we are comfortable with situations that are actually grim.

If you grew up being driven everywhere, then cars are normal. You won’t think of your feet or a bicycle as modes of transport. You might not have shoes for walking or a body that can walk a mile or two at need. You won’t have an emotional relationship with walking and you will have an emotional relationship with your car. Changing this isn’t easy.

If you’ve grown up with foreign holidays and flying as normal, you may feel that you’re being asked to give up a lot in cutting back on that. If you grew up with throwaway clothes, and throwaway toys and an expectation that anything can go in the bin when you are bored with it, just the effort of recycling can seem like a big deal. Reducing, reusing, repurposing and repairing will seem very alien indeed.

We take ‘normal’ as a measure of goodness. We see the normality of the commute, and not how much of our time it wastes. We see the normality of the food we’ve been told is tasty and convenient, and not what it costs our bodies and not what it does to the planet.

It really doesn’t help that ‘normal’ has an advertising budget. Every day you are subjected to ideas and imagery in the form of adverts that reinforce a wasteful and consumerist society. Car adverts are normal. It’s hard to see these things when you are steeped in them.

It’s also easier to make changes if you can see what those changes would look like. It’s easier to re-think what we consider normal when you can see someone else doing differently. Doing all the mental work to deconstruct your reality and social norms on your own is not easy, and for many people it may not even be visible as an option.

This is why it’s so important to share what you do. The upcycling projects, the veg plot, the lower carbon choices… What we do on social media really can make a difference because it shows other people that ‘normal’ isn’t the only option.

This week I questioned the normality of the vacuum cleaner. The old one had broken, and was a cheap one so getting replacement parts would be difficult. This kind of device isn’t made to be repaired. I wondered what we might do that would be better. I prodded the internet a bit. Repairable and more efficient and eco friendly vacuum cleaners exist. Hurrah! But there’s also very expensive. It was only then that I started to ask why we needed this device specifically. We’ve bought a floor sweeper – it will pick up dust. The cat and I do not have to endure a noise level we both find stressful. It has almost no parts and those are repairable and replaceable, it uses no electricity, and there’s so much less of it that if it breaks irretrievably it represents a far smaller impact.

It’s all too easy to default to things because they seem normal. Questioning that is a constant process for me.

Kiss the Ground

If you care at all about climate chaos, you’re probably also experiencing depression, anxiety and despair. It all looks fairly grim out there and the politicians aren’t getting to grips with the issues anything like fast enough. Meanwhile Elon Musk adds to the pollution as he fires rockets into space and crypto-currencies use an alarming amount of energy. People with money and power seem hell bent on making everything worse.

Kiss the Ground is a documentary. It’s genuinely hopeful and offers what sounds like a real and realistic solution to de-carbonisation. It’s all about soil. The best thing is that no one has to wait for their government to get moving. Anyone with any land at all can take things on board from this and do something.

The solutions offered in this documentary benefit farmers. This is a way forward that offers lower costs, greater resilience and a better chance at making money – which is persuasive. It’s not a big ask to suggest people do something that will greatly benefit them. The solutions are low-tech for the greater part, so people in poorer parts of the world can get started without having to wait for help. The principles are easy to grasp.

We can keep a lot of carbon in the soil. We can add to it at a significant rate. Ploughing releases carbon, but we don’t actually need to plough to grow crops. If the soil isn’t bare, it takes in carbon, if it is bare, not only does it not take in carbon, but there are flooding issues, and earth becomes dust, topsoil is lost and we get desertification. Maintain plant cover and everything works better.

Here’s a trailer for the film, and if you get chance to see it, I heartily recommend it.

You might also want to watch this fantastic video on re-greening.

Contemplating Promiscuity

We’ve been taught that promiscuity is bad – especially for women. Men might be able to be dashing and exciting while putting it about, but anyone female-seeming who is sexually available and enthusiastic can find themselves slut shamed. They can find that if they are raped, people will say they were asking for it. Is there anything inherent to promiscuous behaviour that justifies this?

Obviously the more sexual partners you have, the higher the apparent risk of getting and spreading an std. However, unsafe sex in fairly committed relationships can also do that. People who aren’t sexually responsible don’t need to have a lot of partners to harm themselves or others by spreading disease. Only having a few partners does not guarantee your safety. Disease is not an inevitable consequence of promiscuity.

Promiscuous people might be seen as greedy, but so what if they are? Financial greed is killing the planet, sexual greediness actually won’t do that. The desire for pleasure isn’t harming anyone.

It’s not really the case that promiscuity will destroy society, even though that’s often the fear. Small family units are not the only way of having a stable society. The idea that small family units are the basis of society does a lot of harm to LGBTQ folk. It excludes anyone not breeding. There is a relationship between breeding and capitalism, and people who have sex for fun may not be busily making extra workers, or extra believers for your religion. The failure of people who have sex for fun – especially queer sex – to breed workers and believers is why capitalism and religion alike tend to frown on this.

Promiscuity is only a moral failing if you believe that monogamy is a moral virtue. There’s nothing inherent in either state that makes them good, unless you are obsessed with making ‘stable’ units for baby raising. See above. A promiscuous person can be honest, and honourable. They can enter into sex with clarity about their intentions and are not necessarily going to hurt anyone.

What promiscuity does, without a doubt is to undermine the idea that the goal of our lives, is a faithful one man one woman baby making unit. If there are people who seek sex for fun, no strings attached, it makes it harder to convince people that they should stay in unhappy and unsatisfying situations. Queer sex and acceptable promiscuity might have women questioning whether being units of production for capitalism and/or religion is really the point of their lives. Destroying the underpinnings of capitalism, patriarchy and religion would not actually destroy society, it would just requite us to cooperate with each other on different terms.

Sex is always about power. It’s about how much power your state has to dictate who you can have sex with and on what terms. There is power intrinsic to how much say your culture has over whether you are allowed to be comfortable with your own impulses. It shows us whether we live in freedom, or whether we live in the shadow of imaginary evils that have been pinned to activities that don’t actually hurt or harm people.

Promiscuity is morally neutral. So is monogamy, and polyamoury, and chastity and being non-sexual. These are not morally informed states of being, they’re just different ways of being in the world. The only moral bit in all of this is how we treat each other, and that includes whether we shame and hassle people for being different.

Mapmaids – fiction in progress

The land has changed a lot. War, desertification, the work of resisting desertification, the abandoning of war-ravaged cities, the establishment of new towns and the building of the railway. No one quite knows where anything is any more.

The mapmaids are a band of adventurous young women who travel alone or in small groups, to map the land, find out what people are doing, and share stories. They favour wind powered go-carts, hence the goggles. There will be maps that are hand drawn onto large pieces of vellum – paper being far too delicate for this environment. There are also story maps, because those are easier to share and learn.

The idea of the mapmaids came about as a happy accident. Dr Abbey and I were talking about Hopeless Maine. I knew he’s meant to write ‘mermaids’ but as soon as I saw ‘mapmaids’ I also knew that they were a vital addition to this project. I’ve been waiting for him to draw one – and as soon as I saw this character, I knew that she was a mapmaid.

What if we opened borders?

I’m in favour of open borders for many reasons. I think people should be free to work, live, marry, shack up, study and settle any place they like and that it should not be about the accident of where you were born.

The main reason against open borders is about not wanting a flood of refugees. Affluent nations fear being swamped by people fleeing war, poverty and disaster – human-made climate disaster included. This is precisely why we need open borders. Big, affluent nations are very good at causing poverty and are the major driving force on climate change. There’s a long history of affluent countries fueling war – for political reasons and to make money from weapons sales.

If we opened all the borders, there would suddenly be a lot of political pressure for those who have most, to end war, deal with poverty and tackle climate change. Those who cause most harm would have a vested interest in cleaning things up. Currently, we dump our waste and recycling on poorer countries. We denude their landscapes growing our luxuries and then we don’t pay properly for what we take. We export the shittiest jobs to places we can pay less to have them done.

No one wants to have to flee their home because of war, natural disaster or climate change. Yes, there’s a lot of attraction for a young person to go out into the world and seek their fortune. But that’s not the same as being an economic migrant, forced by lack of options and desperation to try and find a better life somewhere else.

Opening borders would pave the way to taking better care of each other. It would change how we think about war and refugees. It would impact on the willingness of wealthy nations to tolerate the behavior of countries who abuse their citizens. It would make it harder to image that there is an ‘away’ where we can dump our crap and ignore our responsibilities.

Why shouldn’t we have the freedom to travel about and live where we please? If there was more fairness in the world and a more equitable sharing of resources we wouldn’t find some countries overloaded with incomers and others denuded of their young and talented folk. It would all balance out plausibly well. ,

Artio and Artaois – a review

If you’re a Pagan who loves bears, this is for you. This is a beautiful exploration of Celtic bear deity.

As is so often the way of it, we don’t have much by way of written sources for Celtic bear deities Artio and Artaois. What Andrew has done with this book is to share his journey in search of them, and it’s a really engaging read and an excellent way of approaching the quest.

It’s always clear where the material has come from, as Andrew searches widely for bears. His explorations are thoughtful, informed and intriguing. They also function as a map – there are so many Celtic deities for whom we have names and little more. The quest to forge a personal connection with a God or Goddess about whom little is known, is a challenging process but one that a person can undertake with honour and sensitivity, and this book demonstrates ways of working that anyone could use to inspire their own quests.

I have always loved bears. They were incredibly important to me in childhood, and they remain significant and deeply loved by me. I’m not very good at deity – it’s a complicated issue for me. However, I really enjoy work that is written with passion and integrity, and it felt like a privilege to join Andrew on his journey to find the Celtic Bear Gods. It was an inspiring read, as much for what it showed of personal devotion and enthusiasm as for what it teaches about Bear Gods specifically.

Heartily recommended.

More about the book here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/pagon-portals-artio-artaois

To keep talking

In witchcraft, keeping silent can be an important part of what you do. In Druidry however, I think it is more powerful and important to keep talking. Our magic doesn’t depend on secrecy anything like as much as it depends on communicating. Bard magic is very much not about keeping silent.

Talking, writing and communicating are key parts of activism. If you’re interested in peaceful protest and non-violent ways of making change, then it has to be all about communication. Education, information sharing, awareness raising – it all counts. Speaking truth to power, speaking personal truth to anyone who needs to hear it – this is all part of the Druid’s work. In many circumstances, silence is complicity.

There is magic in what we can share with each other. We can enchant, uplift, support and encourage each other with music and with words. We can put beauty into the world, comfort the uncomfortable, challenge the people who are too comfortable.

Druidry tends not to be secretive. We meet in daylight, often, we meet in public places. Many Druid groups offer public ritual at least some of the time. The heart of our magic is inspiration and for many people its also found in the transformative power of ritual. This is the kind of magic where to keep talking is more powerful than to keep silent. We all benefit from ideas shared and knowledge passed on.