Nimue Brown's Blog, page 152

The importance of hope

When times are hard, hope can get us through. The simplest hope that things can be better, and that this is not going to be the way of it forever, can keep a person going. Often it doesn’t take much.

It is also true that the glimmers of hope can be what hurt you most. They keep you hanging on, striving, trying, and sometimes it would be better to give up and walk away.

When it comes to things like politics, climate crisis, and covid, there is no away. If we give up, there’s nowhere to retreat to where things will be better. It’s not like giving up on a career – where you might find a better one, or admitting a marriage isn’t working when you have the hopes of improving your life by getting out. There is no out. And around these huge issues, hope can be in short supply.

Without hope, it is difficult to see how to keep going, how to change things or what to do. That’s paralysing, and no one makes much good for themselves when they are frozen in this way. No one makes radical changes from a place of feeling like there’s no point even trying.

Hope has fellow travellers, it is nourished and enabled by experiences of warmth and joy, beauty  laughter, delight, and kindness. So if building hope seems too ambitious, look for the small wonders and beauties and try to focus on those. Share them. A picture of a pretty sunset can birth the hope of being able to see the person who took the photo. The promise of a good book to read can create some sense of there being a tomorrow.

Find what sweetness you can, share it where you can. It may not seem like much, but the tiniest threads of hope are enough to keep a person going in hard times. I know, because I’ve done it. The smallest things can make the difference between knowing how to keep going and being entirely defeated.

Not being in control of your thoughts

CW abuse mechanics

There is a popular, but highly flawed positivity concept that goes ‘even if you can’t control anything else, you can control your thought and reactions’. It sounds good. It sounds plausible, and empowering, but it isn’t true.

If you aren’t familiar with the mechanics of conditioning, hop over and read this piece on Pavlov’s dogs – https://www.verywellmind.com/pavlovs-dogs-2794989

Conditioning is a process that trains minds and behaviour. The individual being trained does not need to be aware that they are being taught to react in certain ways. You hear the bell, you salivate.  Reinforced by rewards and/or punishments, conditioning teaches your body to respond without your brain even having to get involved.  If you’ve been taught this way, changing your responses is really hard. You have to first figure out what you’ve learned and what causes your behaviour and then you have to either unpick it or replace it. It is easer to replace conditioning with new conditioning, but the process of making new rules and enforcing them is a hard one.

If you’ve lived through abuse, or gaslighting then someone has trained you to respond to certain situations in specific ways. A lot of work goes into that training, destroying a person’s sense of self, their confidence, their ability to hold boundaries or say no. You can come back from there, but it isn’t easy. You can only control your own thoughts and responses after doing a great deal of work to rebuild your mind.

If you have PTSD then your responses to triggers are difficult through to impossible to control. Trauma impacts on you, and you are unable to escape it.  It may be possible to get some control over this – with time, safety, counselling, and a lot of work. For many people, the triggers never quite go away no matter how hard they try to fix themselves.

It’s hard to change your thinking and responses if what you’ve internalised is everything your culture reinforces every day. It’s hard to think differently without examples, role models, maps. Not impossible of course, but bloody difficult. Changing your thoughts is really hard if you have no idea what you could think instead.

You may not be in control of your thoughts and responses. If that’s true for you, then it is possible to change to at least some degree, but not in the way glib positivity statements suggest. Rebuilding, and retraining a mind is hard work and takes a long time. Dealing with learned responses that happen in your body is slow work, and painful, and the bigger the trauma, the harder it is to get over it.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that we have mammal bodies. We have our animal body chemistry, with the flight, fight, freeze and appease responses wired in. We have urges and hormones, and we won’t always know what’s going on with that. We should be able to control our responses so that those things don’t impact on other people too much, but we may not be able to control what goes on in our heads as the chemistry washes through our brains.

Be patient with yourself, you are a soft mammal, not a perfected thinking machine and sometimes being a mammal is a bit messy.

Lament for a lost folkie

I’ve never unfriended someone for being pro-Brexit – people had all kinds of reasons for supporting the Leave movement, and I still think some of those were totally valid, even though I hate how Brexit is playing out.  I have however, moved away from people on the basis of how abusive they became.

There was one person who particularly haunted me, because he’d stayed at my house, many years ago. He was someone I liked and respected, I’d even learned some of his songs. Some years ago, I watched him become ever more abusive of remain voters on social media, and I had to accept that if someone thinks I’m a moron, we’re not friends any more. He hadn’t said me specifically, but I don’t think he needed to. It was only when I sought out the ‘unfriend’ option that I found we had no friends left in common.

We must have had a lot of friends in common at one point – the folk scene is a friendly place, and he certainly knew a lot of the same people I did. I was the last one to give up on him, I realised. It was a painful moment in all kinds of ways.

I wonder what’s happened to him. I could go and look, but I haven’t.  It would be fair to say that Brexit isn’t going well and that many things labelled as ‘project fear’ before we broke away are turning out to be realistic assessments of things that are now happening.  There are no signs of the promised sunny uplands. Business are hurting, travel will be harder, students will have less scope to study abroad, and for musicians touring Europe has just become prohibitively complicated and expensive.  There’s no visible good at this point, and our government is keen to strip away workers rights and environmental protections.

There will be people who cope through denial. It’s not a strong coping mechanism, and telling yourself everything is great when really it isn’t, takes a toll. There will be people who cope through blame – probably carrying on with the idea that this is all the EU’s fault, or the fault of remainers, or something, anything other than blaming the architects of this plan and the people who helped them. No doubt there will also be people who regret their involvement. I’ve seen a fair few business folk who voted to leave talking about how much it is hurting them.

I wonder what it’s like for people who abused their friends and family members, watching this play out in a way that makes clear those remain-folk were right. I can’t imagine it’s easy. It can be difficult to forgive people for being right, for knowing what you didn’t.  It can be difficult to forgive the people we’ve mistreated and abused – because it is easier and more comfortable to keep blaming them and letting ourselves off the hook. But, it must be lonely for some people right now, and painful, and difficult.

I didn’t lose many people over brexit, and I certainly didn’t lose anyone I was so close to that I’d go the distance to try and repair the relationship. I’m sad about the lost folkie, but I’m not intending to make any moves.  There are relationships where someone is so important that helping them deal with the fallout of their having been wrong is worth the effort. But, most of the time, I would wait for the person who messed up to decide it mattered enough to make the first move. Healing without apology is hard. Reconciliation without recognition of the problem isn’t very workable and on the whole, I think it’s on the person who messed up and acted badly to start sorting things out by saying sorry, at the very least.

Scarcity and problematic creators

I think there’s a scarcity narrative around creativity. The idea that genius is rare, and that as a consequence we must put up with the brilliant people who are also terrible people. We must separate the art from the artist’s shortcomings as a person.

Over the last twenty years or so I’ve spent a lot of time as a reader, reviewer, and editor of indie creations and have spent a lot of time working for small publishing houses. The scarcity story is a lie. We are not short of brilliance and originality. I feel confident in saying that for every problematic high profile creator, there are dozens, if not hundreds of equally or more talented people who haven’t done terrible things.

What would happen if we didn’t keep high profile, disreputable people in their jobs? Would creative industries suffer? Or would we open up space for nicer people? Might we even get an increase in talent and delight as a consequence? I think we would. I would like to see more people given a chance to break through, and I feel really comfortable about doing that at the expense of people who don’t play nicely.

It’s become popular to criticise ‘cancel culture’ on grounds of free speech. But, bear in mind, every time you ‘cancel’ some high profile individual who maybe doesn’t deserve the attention, you open up space for someone else.  It’s not cancelling culture, it’s changing culture. It’s also worth noting that industries are driven by the desire for profit and if they drop an individual it is primarily because they do not think this person is going to make them enough money. If we aren’t so interested in the art of bigots and abusers, there’s less market for it, so companies interested in profits won’t try to sell that to us.  Controversy can sell, but if it doesn’t sell as well as other things, it won’t be a driving force.

For every high profile creator whose attitude stinks, there are many less famous creators with wonderful work whose outlook might also suit you better. It only makes sense to have to forgive creators for crapiness if you think creativity is in short supply. It isn’t. Wealth and fame are in short supply, opportunities and privilege are in short supply, but step outside of the narrow mainstream and there is so much good stuff to be found.

Emotional processing in challenging times

I’ve spent chunks of this last year numb, and unable to engage. I’ve had weeks where crying has dominated everything. Alongside this, I’ve had more trouble sleeping than usual – and usually I have trouble sleeping. My suspicion at this point is that there’s more going on than I am able to process. It probably isn’t just me.

My personal life over the last year has been like some kind of fairground ride with the infrastructure falling apart. Emotional highs and lows that have been unusual even by my standards. That, on its own, would have taken a lot of getting to grips with. But there was also the politics, the pandemic, the isolation, the loss of key things that support my mental health, and more body pain than I am used to. Again, much of this will be true for many other people as well.

It has impacted on my concentration – everything takes longer. Ideas are harder to find, decisions are harder to make. Not being able to process what’s going on makes everything new that happens that bit harder to deal with. It is difficult to find respite through distractions because often I can’t concentrate, and I’ve spent a lot of time stuck in my own head, with my overwhelmed feelings, largely unable to do much with them.

Sleep can be a good way of processing difficult things. Insomnia doesn’t help with that. Physical movement can be a good processing tool, but pain, weariness and lack of suitable space have been issues there.  We’ve been encouraged to stay indoors, sports facilities are closed, dancing is something you can now only do privately if you have the space.

Without any tools to use, the processing takes time. Some days, all I can do is sit there, with my mind scattered and let the distress roll through me. Where I can, I try and turn it into energy for creativity, but that’s actually hard, and often beyond me, and not required. It’s ok to use art for processing if that helps. It can be good to turn distress into action – but it isn’t a requirement, and there’s no failure in being unable to do that.

The thing that has served me most in this last year, is doing nothing. Allowing myself the time to sit, to curl up with my eyes shut, to be under a kitten, under a blanket, unproductive and present. Sometimes all I can do is sit with what’s happening and acknowledge my complete inability to get to grips with it. I have no idea how long this will take, but I am determined not to rack up extra difficulties by being too stoical, pushing too hard or expecting too much.

Witch in a Bottle part 2

A Wyrde Woods Tale

By Nils Visser

Part 2: The Bottle

It was a small, silvered bottle, long-necked and bulbous below. It was sealed with an aging stopper. Joy drew in a sharp breath at the sight of it.

“Nifty, ain’t it?” Maisy asked. “Whoopsie daisy!”

The bottle seemed to slip from her grip, falling down…

“NAUN!” Joy shouted.

…but deftly caught by Maisy’s other hand.

Maisy chuckled at her trick but Joy wasn’t amused at all.

“Bettermost give that to me,” Joy said, her tone causing Maisy to frown but hand over the bottle immediately. Joy held it firmly in both hands.

“What is it?” Will asked.

“Witch bottle,” Joy answered.

“It belonged to a witch?” Maisy’s eyes grew wide. “I may have shook it about some. It ain’t empty, there’s stuff in there, solid stuff I reckon.”

Joy knew well enow what would be in a witch bottle. She had one of her own, carefully concealed in a secret location.

Blood, horn, root, thorn, tooth, bone, wood, and stone.

A witch bottle was an object of great power. Joy shuddered again when she recalled the moment she’d been fooled into thinking it was going to crash on the ground, breaking open mayhap. That…here…in the light of a full moon…would have spelled moil to be sure.

“What does it do?” Will asked. “I’ve never heard of a witch bottle before.”

“It be said,” Joy answered slowly, “that it protects the witch it belongs to from evil spirits and magical attacks.”

“And the witch lived happily ever after,” Will quipped.

“We should open it!” Maisy suggested.

Joy shook her head. “Naun, we dursn’t. There be part of the witch’s soul in there. If we let it out there’ll be a peck of trouble.[1]”

“Blimey! We should definitely open it!” Maisy looked at the bottle eagerly.

“How did you find this?” Joy asked, unwilling to believe that a witch bottle could be so ill-concealed that a casual coke at the crumbling remnants of a cottage’s foundations would reveal it.

“Valkerie found it,” Maisy answered. “She started digging in a corner, went down all the way up to the tip of her tail, then pulled it out.”

Valkerie, back on Maisy’s shoulder now, dooked, seemingly proud of her excavation skills.

Ferrets! Regular little thieves.

“I wonder who it belonged to,” Will said.

Only one person in Tuckersham it could have belonged to.

Joy closed her eyes briefly, fighting the urge to impress her friends with her knowledge.

Unfortunately, Maisy had come to know her all too well.

“Joy! You know, dontcha?”

Joy shrugged.

“Oh, do tell!” Maisy urged. “I’d tell you if I knew, wouldn’t I?”

“Well that ain’t hard,” Will said. “You hardly ever stop talking.”

Maisy glared at him, before turning to Joy again. “Mates don’t keep secrets, do they?”

Joy felt guilty, harbouring a great many of them as she did. There’d be no harm in it, she reckoned, though this wasn’t the bettermost place to be telling it.

“I reckon I ken whose bottle it is,” she admitted reluctantly.

“I thought so, didn’t I?” Maisy said with satisfaction.

“Whose?” Will asked.

“When Tuckersham was still full of folk, afore they were struck down by the plague, one of them was a wise woman, a skilled healer. Her name was Nan Malone.”

A Guardian of the Wyrde Woods.

“Go on,” Will encouraged Joy.

“Nan Malone lived here all her life and knew her neighbours well. She treated their hurts, helped birth their children, and eased the passage of those at the end of their life’s journeys.”

“And she battled monsters!” Maisy added. “Casting mighty spells. Abracadabra, ain’t it?”

Joy shook her head. “Nan Malone were a healer. Howsumdever, there were a monster, of sorts.”

“I knew it!” Maisy declared triumphantly.

“A dark shadow of old, naun seen in living memory for so long folk thought twere a storyteller’s fancy. Howsumdever, it returned to the night sky over the Wyrde Woods, swooping down to seize fowl, sheep, even calves. Folk were afeared it might take to their children. Some went to Nan Malone who counselled that it wouldn’t and twere bettermost to leave the creature be…”

“How did she know?” Will asked.

“She were a Wise Woman, weren’t she?” Maisy said.

Joy nodded. “Justly. The Wise Ones pass on the lore of their people, the tales of the Wyrde Woods.”

She was surprised and a little disappointed that neither Maisy or Will connected this with Joy’s own knowledge of the matter. Mostly relieved though, because she had been sworn to secrecy with regard to the lessons she had started to follow. Lessons of the type not taught at the village school.

“What happened next?” Will asked.

“There were folk who refused to believe her. The Stupes, I call them.”

“Stupes?” Maisy asked.

“Folk who don’t see further than the end of their own noses,” Joy explained. “Happy to deny the obvious, happier to preach the unlikely, and happiest to blame others for their own misfortunes.”

“Oh! I know loads of Stupes, don’t I?” Maisy said.

“So do I,” Will added.

“They multiply,” Joy acknowledged.

It was a concern for the Guardians of the Wyrde Woods. Many of them, like Joy’s own mother, continued to live much as they had always done, in sync with the cycle of the seasons. There was a sense though, that the world was changing fast, with an ever-growing number of Stupes whose limited ability to use their own minds was a liability for all. The warring madman in Germany of how easily they could seize control.

She continued, “One of the Stupe leaders decided to hunt the dark shadow and kill it. He took his two sons with him and the three were never seen alive again.”

“Torn into tiny, bloody shreds,” Maisy said. “Weren’t they?”

Joy hesitated. That wasn’t exactly what had happened, but how much should she tell?

And how much do they ken? They’ve already described…

She glanced at the ruined church, acutely aware of the weight of the silvered bottle in her hands, before speaking again, “Other Stupes chose to lay the blame at Nan Malone’s feet. They twisted her words against her. Claimed she had tried to protect the creature…”

“Bastards!” Maisy exclaimed.

“Zackly,” Joy agreed. “Stupe tongues started wagging, gifty blevers that they were. And the lies grew in the telling, as did the number of folk repeating them. Those who dared speak otherwise were mocked and ridiculed. Tmight have been that they didn’t change their minds, but it were certain more and more kept their teeth-traps shut, frit of being the next Stupe target. Afore too long, it were said that Nan Malone had summoned the dark shadow in the first place, that it were her creature. That she were a witch.”

Joy glanced at the bottle before winding up the tragic tale. “It reached a fever point. A mob chased Nan Malone out of her house, then out of Tuckersham. Tossicated on their own power to do such a thing, they set off in pursuit…” Joy’s voice died away and she examined the bottle once more.

Blood, horn, root, thorn…

Maisy said, “They caught her, didn’t they?”

… tooth, bone, wood, and stone.

Joy nodded. “Ere Nan Malone could cross the bridge over the Taunflow. There’s a gurt old chestnut tree there. They hung her by the neck from one of the branches. A few months later Tuckersham was struck by the plague.”

Both Maisy and Will stared at the bottle in silence.

A scritch owl[2] screeched in the distance, and then repeated its call. Joy looked up in the direction of the Taunflow.

She was alarmed to see lights flickering in the distance. Their consistency was impeded by tree trunks but they didn’t have the beguiling quality of Will o’ the Wisps – which Joy knew how to deal with. Instead, the lights were harshly and artificially bright, as well as accompanied by coarse male voices.

Valkerie uttered a warning hiss.

“There’s people coming this way,” Will said.

“Quick, follow me.” Joy led them through the gap in the low wall that separated the path from the churchyard, and then wove a way through the dilapidated headstones and tombs. 

“The dead walk among us![3]” Maisy pronounced in a low voice.

“With these zombie eyes, he rendered her powerless,” Will whispered. “With this zombie grip, he made her perform his every desire![4]”

“Ha! You would fancy that, wouldn’t you, Brighton-Blighter?” Maisy said.

“Shut up!” Will responded.

“Hush now, the both of you,” Joy told them. She would have preferred not to enter the graveyard, or rather, not to have come this close to the ruined church, but there was some safety in the particular tomb she led her friends to. It was close by a church wall, larger than most, with a heavy slab of stone as lid. The moonlight revealed the chiselled shape of a dragon on it. Ellette Hornsby, one of the Wyrde Woods dragon-slayers, had been laid to rest here. Like Nan Malone, Ellette was counted as one of the Guardians of the Wyrde Woods. It was the safest place in Tuckersham that Joy could conceive of.

They crouched behind the tomb, the cousins no longer needing reminders to be silent as the torch-bearing men were close enow for the children to overhear their discourse. It was mostly grumbling about being sent to lope around at this time of night on behalf of ‘his Lordship’. Daring a peek, Joy recognised them as gamekeepers from nearby Malheur Hall, three men in all, shotguns slung over their shoulders.

Stupes.

Henchmen sent out by Mordecai Malheur to apprehend poachers no doubt, even though any poacher worth his salt would have easily noted their approach and melted away into the night.

Joy relaxed. They’d wait until the men had passed and then call it a night. She hadn’t been sure as to what she’d find at Tuckersham, but Nan Malone’s bottle was ample reward. It was an object of great power and Joy was keen to dive back into her books to discover possible uses for it.

Will sneezed.

[1] The witch bottle from Sussex kept at the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford has a label that says the old lady in Hove who donated it remarked “…and they do say there be a witch in it and if you let un out there it be a peck o’ trouble.”

[2] Barn owl

[3] White Zombie (1932)

[4]White Zombie (1932)

Read part 1 here – https://druidlife.wordpress.com/?p=8186

More about Nils Visser here – https://nilsnissevisser.co.uk/

Everyday Enchantments – a review

Everyday Enchantments by Maria DeBlassie is a lovely read, and was timely for me. I’ve been thinking a lot about what needs to change in my life if I am to be well and happy. This is not some sort of instruction manual for making or finding magic in daily life. It is a series of essays/reflections/meditations  capturing a sense of the marvellous found inside the mundane. It’s a very gentle read, inspiring and often thought provoking. How you apply it to your own life is entirely up to you.

In each chapter, Maria reflects on some part of her life where she finds soul nourishment.  Physical activity, baths, food, rest and blankets all feature here.  Tales from the garden and the market, and the kinds of simple, everyday things that are available to most of us.  If this sounds like the kind of life that would appeal to you, then this book is well worth your time.

The chapters are small – which is really good if your concentration is shot (mine has been). You can just dip in and take what you need, it’s the sort of book you can read cover to cover, or just dip in and out of, or open at random.  Some of the writing is first person as the author reflects on her life. Some of it, more unusually, is second person. This is the author writing to herself, but the effect is that she is describing things as though this is your life being reflected. How resonant or distant any of those scenes feel is interesting. There were times when the content sounded like it was being addressed specifically to me and telling me things about my life that I really needed to hear. And there were times when I was very much outside of that second person telling – but that was fine and still enjoyable.

Obviously, this is a book for anyone  trying to re-enchant themselves and seeking delight in their everyday life.  It’s a good book for anyone trying to climb out of depression, and I can also heartily recommend it for anyone wanting to explore ideas of slower living. For women interested in wild womanhood where you don’t have to abandon the life you already have, this book has a lot to offer. On the Druid side, it has a lot to offer the reader around how we seek and experience beauty, and how we might find inspiration from our immediate environments.

More here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/everyday-enchantments

Imperfect Allies, Flawed Leaders

This week, Jack Monroe was central to the push to get shoddy food packages for hungry children sorted out. Almost at once, Twitter was full of people who wanted to talk about how if Jack was serious about tackling child poverty, she would have supported Jeremy Corbyn.  It’s a typical story – someone does something well meaning and genuinely good and is shot down over something else.  It may be deliberate trolling, it may be a cultural problem, I suspect it’s both and I see it a lot.

There will never be a perfect leader, charity, organisation or ally who does absolutely everything you want in the totally perfect way all of the time. If you wait for that perfection, you’ll never do anything. If you decide that only your perfection will do, you’ll likely run into how imperfect other people find you. Lots of people trying to start their own revolution because no one else’s revolution is quite good enough does not get much done. We need to work together, and to do that we have to accept that none of us are perfect.

How imperfect can we cope with? It’s an important question. If someone is at odds with a key value, you might struggle to work with them no matter how good the work is. The questions of when, where and how to compromise are incredibly personal and specific, there’s no way to map a generalised answer for this.  My favourite strawman for this is the fictional group Nazis for Sustainable Farming. I would not work with them.  But what about the person who is doing amazing, frontline work on child safety but isn’t very good on some gender issues?  Or the person who is a brilliant champion against plastic use, but flies off on holiday? At what point does a flaw become an issue of hypocrisy? It can be hard to say.

It can be helpful to ask whether anyone else is doing the work – if there’s a selection of people/organisations tackling an issue you may be able to find the one that is the best match for you.  If the issue is important and the only person leading on it is problematic, you have to balance how important the work is against how problematic the person is. Also ask who they are – there’s a world of difference between a problematic person working for a cause they are dedicated to, and a high profile person making noise when you aren’t sure what their real motives are.

The movement to save wild otters in the UK had a great deal to do with otter hunting and it was otter hunters who first identified the population decline. This is a good example of a difficult scenario.  People may be allies over one issue but coming to it from such different angles as to have nothing else in common. Can you make that work? Should you? What’s the most important issue?

It would be hard to name an area of human activity that isn’t urgently in need of a rethink right now.  There is so much that needs doing, tripping up people trying to do the work because they aren’t as perfect as we want them to be, isn’t helping. We’re becoming polarised, and we need some degree of compromise and a spirit of co-operation. At the same time we need to think carefully about the issues we’re prepared to ignore for the sake of getting things done, and to consider carefully the balance between means and ends.

Nature in January

My relationship with the cycle of the seasons is weakest at this time of year. I don’t reliably go out every day, and when I do go out it isn’t for as long and I don’t walk as far, so I don’t encounter as many wild things.  But at the same time, this is a response to the season and a consequence of the nature of my own animal body.

January is a variable month – it can be freezing, it can be mild, this year it seems to be shifting between the two.  For me, it always feels like an in between month. In terms of wild things, mostly what I’m looking for is how early things are that I think should be showing up in February – the snowdrops, the buds fattening on trees, the first green shoots at ground level. This year I note tree leaves already opening, primroses in bloom and other unseasonal things.

My body does badly with the cold. I am more sore, and more stiff in cold weather. I layer up, I wrap up, I do all manner of things to protect against this but even so there’s an impact. Being outside when it is very cold takes a serious toll no matter how well dressed I am. That notion that there is no bad weather, only bad clothing is fundamentally wrong if you have body issues and/or a limited budget. I can’t afford to get soaked to the skin in winter. I know that my coat cannot fend off the worst of the downpours. Sometimes, I really can’t afford to go outside much.

‘Get out into nature’ is not a universal cure-all, and sometimes smacks of ableism. Winter can be limiting, not all bodies handle it well. If we are interested in encountering nature, we have to start with how we manifest it – our bodies are nature too. Nature is not always kind or convenient, and this is true of human bodies also.  It’s best not to assume anything about how the nature in a person’s body interacts with the wildness outside of it. 

Please be an intolerant Pagan

I’m an intolerant Pagan, and I invite you to join me.

If we start from the premise of ‘an it harm none, do what you will’ then we don’t need to tolerate people who are just getting on with their lives and their Paganism. Diversity doesn’t need our tolerance – diversity is a good thing. We don’t need to all think, feel, practice or believe in the same ways. Paganism has always been a tad individualistic and we do not need dogma to affirm us. We can argue, or agree, we can accept and reject each other based on whether we get along, but we should never have to tolerate each other.

I like diversity, I embrace and welcome it. I am comfortable with beliefs, practices and ways of life other than my own. If you’re just getting on with your life and not hurting anyone, what you do is none of my business, and tolerance is not part of the mix.

I will not tolerate people who spread hatred and wish harm to others. I will not tolerate people who think they are entitled to force their views onto other people. I don’t tolerate abuse, bullying, racism, sexism, oppression, cruelty, violence, threats.  I’ve got no time for hatred.  At the moment I don’t have a lot of energy for active fighting of anything much, but I will move away from anyone who I can’t tolerate. I will not give them a platform.

The right to free speech is not the right to an audience. It isn’t the right to be heard and it most certainly isn’t the right to be tolerated.

So if anyone suggests that you’re being intolerant by not giving them a place at your table, tell them you know, and that this is because you aren’t a tolerant person. Don’t let your kindness, your inclusiveness and your generosity be weaponised against you. If you find something intolerable, you do not owe it a fair listen. Tolerance is just a way of enabling stuff we don’t really want. I don’t want to live in a tolerant society, I want to live in a fair, inclusive and diverse society free from haters.  Equally, I do not want to be tolerated, I want to be safe.