Nimue Brown's Blog, page 140

Learning to Speak Cedar

A guest blog from Roselle Angwin

I imagine that all children know – at least if they have access to the rest of the natural world – that animals and birds, plant and trees all speak to them. It seems both normal and natural, and just the way the world is. How different our lives, and our relationship with the more-than-human, would be if that was a quality, an enchantment, that routinely continued into adulthood.

As a very young child, I used to leave out ‘potions’ of pulverised rosehips, herbs and rainwater in acorn cups for ‘the fairies’, whom I knew lived in plants and trees. Sometimes I would see a glimpse of a woodmouse, or a bird, who’d sipped my brew – and that was OK too; in fact it was magical (considering the delight I feel, even as an adult when birds come to the doorstep without fear, not much has changed there).

I remember when I first learned to speak Cedar. My cousins in Cornwall had a ‘home field’ on their farm where the orphaned lambs would be, needing bottle-feeding several times a day. In between, we would climb onto a long horizontal limb of the Cedar tree in the field. One day, up there on my own aged about five, I heard the tree whispering, and realised that I could understand its language.

Around the same time, I used to climb up into one of the pair of cherry trees either side of our home front gate, and delightedly knew as I faded into the canopy that no one could see me for blossom.

That was probably the beginning of my lifelong relationship with trees. However, there was a more significant event as an adult. I worked part-time for Kindred Spirit magazine back in the 90s, and one of my briefs was to conduct a transatlantic phone interview with shaman Eliot Cowan, who had just written Plant Spirit Medicine. I knew about shamanic practice and plant medicine; had read my Carlos Castaneda; had experimented with psychotropic plants; had even written a book on subjects that included such things from my own practice. But something subtly shifted for me after that interview.

Not long afterwards I booked myself a week’s solo retreat in a tiny cottage near Cornwall’s coast. The cottage was in woodland, and within the shelter of a triple earthwork, complete with its own Iron Age fogou. I’d come specifically to work with trees, and to do a week’s writing. I imagined I would connect with the magical Rowan and the ethereal Silver Birch (sometimes known as the ‘poet’s tree’). I’d dumped my luggage and headed off down through the woodland towards the sea. I knew the area well, and was confident that I would find Birch and Rowan close by – and I did. 

I knew that trees love to be met, anthropomorphic as that sounds. We seem to have a natural close relationship with trees; indeed, some first nation peoples believe that humans are descended from trees. 

However, I hadn’t bargained for the abductive qualities of the Willow – that slender, gentle and tender-seeming tree under which Ophelia permanently floats in her death-song in a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. So I was taken hostage by a particular Willow in a watery grove of them. Benign though the tree was, it was also extremely insistent, in a way that startled me.

I never made it to the other trees; instead, I spent a rather trippy few hours under Willow’s influence instead, and that journey has continued. (It was only later I learned that Willow has a reputation in folk lore for ‘stalking’ people.)
Since then, I’ve become ever more aware of the deep synergy between humans and plants, in particular trees, and it led me to marking the wheel of the year with my version of the Celtic Tree Calendar, and then  devising courses, ‘Tongues in Trees’, that would enable me to lead participants into a deeper relationship with the tree family. I’ve been leading these for many years, now, and have more recently offered this course as a one-year online intensive.

I spend part of my year in an ancient mythic forest. Quite apart from everything we now know about the gifts from trees, whether to do with climate change, the hydrological cycles, preventing soil erosion, offering habitat, food, medicines, timber for shelters and fires, and new findings about the immense ‘wood wide web’ that underpins a forest, we have a deep psychic resonance with the idea of the Greenwood, the Wildwood. 

There are always two forests: one is the physical wood and forest we encounter ‘out there’. The other is the abiding forest of our imagination: an inner pristine wildwood, an Enchanted Forest, the one we encounter in myths, fairy stories and legends.
When I walk into a physical forest, I walk into a liminal place, and a deep, receptive and attentive humming silence, a benign presence. There’s something about entering a forest that is both healing and disorienting (in my forthcoming book I speak a lot about this). In the forest we lose horizons, and perspectives, and enter firstly a green underwater-type world, and secondly a kind of mythic consciousness, as our European fairy tales attest. 

I know this particular forest quite well. I arrived in it a few years ago after a particularly traumatic time in my life, knowing that it would offer me some kind of healing, and it did – AFTER tripping me up and breaking my arm so that I had to be still – an almost foreign experience for me.
But the biggest shift was my fond idea that I’d write about trees here; but in fact I ended up learning from trees – as it’s said our Druidic ancestors did. That changed the way I wrote my book. 

And – years on – I am still learning from trees.

Roselle Angwin

Roselle Angwin’s new book A Spell in the Forest – tongues in trees will be published by Moon Books on June 25th 2021.

www.roselle-angwin.co.uk

www.thewildways.co.uk

Gender and Domestic Abuse

Mild content warning, no graphic details.

This week, Mel B talked about her experiences of domestic abuse, and around this, I saw someone point out how seldom male victims speak up about their experiences. It struck me that this is really important. The majority of domestic abuse victims are women.  I know there are men who think the data isn’t being recorded to reflect the true scale of abuse of men… but… about three women a week in the UK alone die at the hands of their partners, and that’s not a subjective thing or a reporting issue. The same figures do not exist for male victims. Domestic abuse is an awful thing, even if it doesn’t kill you.

It is often the case that any attempt to talk about the way gender impacts on domestic abuse will bring out the whataboutery. This isn’t really about concern for male abuse victims, it tends to be a way of derailing the conversation. But the flip side of that is that it must be making it harder for guys who have been abuse victims, who also take the abuse of women seriously, to talk about their experiences.

Talking about domestic abuse is really important. The more people understand how it works, the harder it is for abusers to keep doing this sort of thing. The more people understand, the more support there will be for victims. When we pool experiences, patterns emerge and it becomes easier to see what might be supporting and enabling abuse.

When it comes to the abuse of women by men, this is clearly underpinned by sexism. It’s held together by a couple of thousand years of being told that men are better than women and should be in charge, that the man is king in his household and that women should serve and obey. Getting ‘obey’ out of the marriage vows is pretty recent.  A feudal-patriarchal history of treating women as property and giving them no rights in law has shaped our culture and informs abuse. Add to that, that we treat women in many contexts – medical, professional, personal – as irrational and likely to make a fuss. This makes it easy for abusers to laugh off criticism – she overreacts to everything, she’s such a drama queen, she’s mad, she’s making it up…. Cultural expectations help us accept this and ignore abuse.

When women abuse men, they aren’t able to draw on the same cultural context in quite the same way to justify it or hide it. So, what is going on there? What are the mechanics? What are the beliefs underpinning the abuse? We aren’t talking about this enough, so far as I can see.

I’d like to offer this space to men who want to talk about experiences of domestic abuse without having to worry about whataboutery or derailing an existing conversation. I’d like to better understand what happens around this, and I’d like to facilitate a conversation. Get in touch with me if you want to be involved.  I offer safe space, and anonymity for anyone who needs it.

Enchanted beech leaves

They unfurl as delicate, pale greens. There is something about the way light passes through a beech leaf in May. Something otherworldly, and unlike what happens with any other tree. Beech leaf filtered sunlight seems to come from somewhere else, from a different time, a better place. The light that falls through them is softer, and full of possibility, and the leaves themselves glow with it.

A beech wood in spring is a magical place. If you were going to see a unicorn anywhere, it would be here, amongst the bluebells, in the beech leaf light. If you were going to step into a fairy tale, these springtime paths would be the ones to carry you off.

As the year turns, the beech leaves darken and no longer let the light through. The beech wood will become, for a while, rather like any other wood – wonderful in its own ways, dappled and inviting, but not as suggestive of magic.

In the autumn, it will become a place of extraordinary colour again, as the beech leaves yellow, and then turn towards remarkable copper hues, and blaze for a while.

A survivor – fiction in progress

“She is a slave of victims.
Who knows how she forget all.”

We’ve talked of victims before – this is a story set in the aftermath of war. Everyone is damaged. To some degree, everyone is a victim, or sees themselves as such. When Abbey shared this image and the text above, it was the first time he’d suggested slavery as part of the mix. But, slavery so often goes with war, and the use and abuse of power is very much what war is about.

How does she forget? By looking for seeds amongst the ruins, and planting whatever she can. Nurturing new life with water and patience. Small acts of rebellion, to make something that is hers and hers alone. At least for now. Little patches of dirt opened to the sun, and gifted with any seed that might survive. There are no weeds in her mind, no distinctions between cultivated plants and wild ones. She grows whatever she can.

When you do not know how to heal yourself, healing something else can be the best way forward.

I see her as a figure alone. The people who enslaved her for a while have moved on, and had no further use for her. She has no idea if it would be safe to leave now, and nowhere to go if she did. But there are seeds to find, and plant and nurture. They give shape and purpose to her life.

If you’ve not seen anything of this before, I’m sharing bits and pieces from the world building I’m doing on a project with Dr Abbey. It doesn’t have a proper working title yet – early days – but I thought it would be interesting to share ideas as they come up. This is not at all how I normally work, which is also fun. We’ve been quiet with this for a few weeks, due mostly to how much other stuff is going on, but you can find more of it in the ‘creative’ category.

What if we ditched GDP?

Gross Domestic Product is used to measure wealth and growth. It focuses us on what we produce in terms of goods and services, while ignoring the impact of those things. It is massively problematic as a thing for governments to focus on because it goes with the idea of perpetual growth. We have economies built on the idea of perpetual growth and yet with finite resources this clearly isn’t going to work. Taking GDP as a measure of success also assumes that anything creating money is inherently a good thing.  This clearly doesn’t work either. What we measure and focus on informs policy and decision making. The speed of movement of money isn’t that useful a thing to obsess over.

What might we measure instead to establish how well a country is doing? Carbon emissions would be an obvious one, as we urgently need to reduce those, the more attention paid to them, the better. We can easily measure health, and this is a much better way to think about how well a country is delivering for its people.  Wellness is a meaningful measure of quality of life, especially when you include mental health in that. Happiness is a difficult thing to measure because it’s so subjective, but when you put people self-reporting on happiness alongside health considerations, you might have a meaningful sense of how people are doing.

Biodiversity would be an excellent thing to measure and monitor and put at the centre of decision making.  In the UK, tree cover would also be a thing to consider. Green spaces – and being able to access them – goes with good mental and physical health.

All of these things would shift us away from imagining that money/production for its own sake is a reasonable measurement of something.  By focusing on GDP, we priorities a notion of wealth creation over the actual wealth that is health and happiness. Money and product is of limited value when it costs your wellbeing. As the gap widens between the very rich and all the rest of us, money as a measurement of a country’s wellbeing becomes ever more suspect. Although it is worth noting that billionaires are the enemy of GDP – GDP is in many ways a measure of money moving around. Money hoarded by billionaires has been removed from the economy and is of no use to anyone else.

Ditching GDP would take us into the difficult territory of re-imagining our economies. We are either going to have to let go of eternal growth as a theory, or societal collapse will force that onto us anyway. We have to let go of the idea of always having more of everything, and replace that with ideas of sustainability, and staying at a level. If we focus on wellbeing rather than on making stuff and the movement of money, we might be able to see ourselves progressing in other ways, and that might make it easier to let go of this rather toxic narrative about what a successful country looks like.

Scientific Analysis of Bees – Illustrated Booklet – a review

This is a small, brilliant, illustrated book and I hurt myself laughing over it.

Dr Geof is a steampunk genius, a lovely human being, a maker of comics, and a bit of a bee fancier. In this book he sets out to prove that bees are better than anything else, using science, and also maths.

Aside from being adorable, it’s also a rather splendid bit of satire, poking fun at some aspects of science, how we use numbers to quantify things, and how easy it is to be persuasive with numbers. Fake news and conspiracy theories will show you diagrams, graphs and figures, but unless you know how those figures were reached in the first place, they aren’t worth much. Sometimes it’s just a case of picking the right numbers to get the result you were looking for.  And so it is with bees versus pirates, and bees versus windows…

You can find this small act of total loveliness over here – https://doctorgeofshop.co.uk/products/scientific-analysis-of-bees-mini-comic

Will anyone save you?

At this point I’ve seen far too many internet memes about how now one is coming to save you, and you have to save yourself.  This is bonkers, and promotes excessive individualism and may actually make a person feel more powerless, not less so.

Firstly there are people whose job it is to come and save you. Firemen and lifeguards, mountain rescue, lifeboats, doctors and paramedics, first aiders, and in some circumstances, the police. Social workers, all kinds of advocates, support workers, people from charities. You would be hard put to get into a situation where it isn’t someone’s job to help with that. Whether you can access that help is another question, and how quickly you can get help is an issue. In theory, someone should be coming to save you, or at least be able to signpost you ways forward.

Rescuing people seems to be getting a bad rap from the people who tell you that no one will save you. Rescuing is too often portrayed as controlling, or manipulative, co-dependent, as some sort of mental health complex, as being a white knight… But in practice people rescue each other all the time. They give and loan whatever’s needed. People save each other by making spare rooms available, paying off debts, buying food, sharing experiences, listening, hugging… there are many ways in which we can rescue each other. We don’t have to know each other or like each other to be willing and able to rescue each other.

In terms of emotional distress, I know people who have been saved by dogs, and cats and horses.  Books save people. Films rescue people. Songs, and works of art and other manifestations of beauty can help rescue people and keep them going.

Rescuing isn’t the same as fixing. We can’t fix each other, we can’t make each other heal. But we can provide safe and supportive spaces where healing is possible. We can rescue each other by creating the time and opportunity to fix ourselves. We can share knowledge and resources.

It’s not down to an individual to save themselves from all perils and setbacks. We need to stop telling each other we’re on our own with life’s difficulties, and instead invest in whatever we can do to save each other. A kind word, a smile, an offer – it doesn’t have to be heroic to have dramatic effects.

And if you truly feel like no one is going to help you, it doesn’t mean there’s no one out there who would care or help. Sometimes it takes a while to find the help you need.  Sometimes what you have to do to save yourself is get to the place where someone can help you.

Mental Health Awareness

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week. One of the things I wish to make people particularly aware of, is that for many people, mental health problems are not some kind of tragic accident. There are people for whom wonky brain chemistry is to blame, but for many of us, mental health problems have causes.

Trauma causes mental health problems. This should be pretty obvious. Consider (or look up) the figures for domestic abuse, and sexual violence. Have a look at some of the definitions of borderline personality disorders and ask how those might relate to traumatic experience.

Work stress causes mental health problems. You can’t run people like machines and expect them not to break down. Inhuman work practices (Amazon, I am looking at you) destroy mental health.

Poverty causes mental health problems. Firstly because poverty and insecurity are immensely stressful. Secondly because if you are poor, you’ll have less access to resources that might help you. There will be no money for sport and fitness – activity often being recommended to help with mental health problems. You’re less likely to have a garden or to be able to access green space. Your poverty diet will undermine your physical and mental health. You may be socially isolated as a consequence of poverty. In societies that punish poverty, your self esteem and confidence will be harmed by the stigma of being poor.

If you are disabled, your long term condition may well also be undermining your mental health. Further, being physically disabled radically increases your chances of being in poverty, see above.

We have seat belts and safety rails, lifeguards, firemen, laws about smoking, workplace health and safety to reduce accidents. We take the protection of bodily wellbeing reasonably seriously. We don’t have the same attitude to mental health. We treat it like an individual problem, and not like something that could be damaged by the crimes and negligence of others.  We treat poverty as a personal failing, not a societal one.

Please be aware that mental health problems are not tragic accidents suffered by the unfortunate few. It’s not weakness, or lack of resilience. Unless we take stress and poverty seriously, we’re going to make ourselves ill. Until we deal with abuse in our societies, we will make people ill. When we shame people for being poor, we promote poor mental health.

Druid Poetry

Some years ago, I donated some of my poetry to The Druid Network – it’s still there, with ‘Bryn’ on it as a name. Bryn is my first name (Brynneth, for long) – I mostly use Nimue when I’m writing (my middle name) because Bryn Brown doesn’t quite have the right swing as an author name. In everyday life I use both names interchangeably and am happy to have people call me whichever they prefer.

Recently, I had a contact via the Druid Network from a fantastic Druid chap who found some of that poetry and has recorded some of my work. I love his reading, and the richness his voice brings to my words.  So, over to Davog Rynne…

Snow White and other problems

Content warning – consent issues.

Recently there was a controversy over a Disney ride including a depiction of the non-consenting kiss at the end of Snow White. I’ve watched this with interest. I note that for people who are ok with it, the notion of love and romance is key. That he kisses her to save her life, that the kiss is ok because she wakes up and isn’t horrified.

As an aside, the prince kisses Snow White when he thinks she is dead, and having never known her as  a living person. I prefer versions that change these details. Yes, it’s very normal to kiss your dead loved one, less so to kiss a corpse when you’ve never spoken to the living person.

It’s romantic because he is young and good looking and she isn’t horrified. What would happen to this story if the kiss came from an older, less desirable person? I have a suspicion that if our prince wasn’t an attractive young white guy, the interpretations of romance would be undermined for some people. Through this story, we teach children that being kissed by a stranger is ok, in the right context. We suggest that love follows violation – and this is a theme that comes up far too often in stories that purport to be romance. Girls who fall in love with their kidnappers and abusers are on my list of stories I think we’d be better off without. There are still places in the world where children are made to marry the men who rape them.

So much hangs on the idea that the whole setup is ok because Snow White falls in love with the Prince. But, we’re not talking about a real, autonomous person here. We’re talking about a fictional character, and it worries me how often that’s ignored. She doesn’t have autonomy, she isn’t choosing, this isn’t true love. It’s a story suggesting that a certain pattern of actions are ok. I see this other places too – male comics artists defending highly sexualised depictions of women on the grounds that the female characters are expressing themselves. It’s empowering, apparently, for a fictional woman to wear highly sexualised clothes and pose a lot in positions that draw attention to her sexual qualities. As though these were real women able to make real choices on their own terms, and not the creations of men.

Just because something is old, doesn’t make it right, or good, or useful. It’s also important to remember with fairy tales that these aren’t fixed. There are versions of Rapunzel where the young lady falls pregnant before her boyfriend is discovered. There are pregnant versions of Sleeping Beauty, with all that implies. I prefer the Snow White story when it’s handled as a 15, what with the eating of hearts, the attempted murder and the implied necrophilia. And I’m not convinced we really need to tell children stories about how women might want to kill other women in order to be considered the prettiest one.

It may be tempting to think that the story is ok because yay, the kiss brings her back to life! But once again I point out that this isn’t a real person, this is a story, in which a person has been put in a pretty unlikely situation precisely so that the tale can have this sort of ending. No real people get to live because of this non-consenting kiss, but quite a lot of real people seem to have been persuaded that non-consent is fine, in the right circumstances. It might be fun to imagine being kissed to life and wakefulness by a beautiful stranger… but what if they aren’t the gender you find attractive? What if they aren’t beautiful? What if you don’t open your eyes and fall instantly in love with them? It doesn’t take much for the dream to look like a nightmare.