Nimue Brown's Blog, page 160

Druidry and Crafting

I know many Druids are crafters, working with all kinds of materials. For me it’s mostly needles of one sort or another. I thought it might be helpful to write about why crafting can be a good way to manifest your Druidry as part of your regular life.

The most obvious aspect is creativity – crafting puts your inspiration to work, so brings you into contact with the awen. Crafting is as much a home for inspiration as any other creative activity you might undertake. It is a way of making beauty. You can of course add explicitly Pagan or Druidic aspects to a craft project, but even if you don’t, it still works.

Crafting puts your body in communion with raw materials and tools. It can be an animist conversation as you work collaboratively with other beings. It can be a way of being present in your body and present in the world.

Many crafting techniques are repetitive, and once you get the hang of them can have a meditative quality. If you struggle with conventional meditation approaches, you may find that repetitive creative action will open some of that headspace for you. Crafting creates really good thinking space, and can be an excellent way of also making time for reflection, contemplation, wool gathering, day dreaming and the like. This kind of brain time is great for letting inspiration in, for relaxation and being open to possibility.

When you work with materials and invest time, you have a different sort of relationship with the finished item to something you bought. Crafting is a good way to counter the way throwaway capitalism impacts on us. I only make for people I love, and it’s part of how I do gift economy. I also upcycle and re-use a lot, so crafting can be a way to keep serviceable things out of landfill.

Making things is a joyful process. Ending up with something unique is self expressive and again a good antidote to one-size-fits-no-one throwaway culture. It’s a great way to walk your talk, to put your philosophy where other people can see it.

Here’s a recent example from me – fabric salvaged mostly from shirts that were too tatty in places to continue as shirts. Resulting in a bonkers item of clothing that cheers me greatly.

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Meditations, Quotes and Affirmations – a review

Author R.D. Cain is someone I’ve known for a very long time, and like most of my book reviews, I don’t feel like objectivity is something I’m especially capable of. R.D. Cain’s new book of Meditations, Quotes and Affirmations is something I very much appreciated – it isn’t perfect, but it is bloody good.

The contents are offered for reflection, contemplation, inspiration, aspiration – you can use this however you want. There are accompanying photographs and pages for writing your own pithy wisdom statements, or journaling.

Philosophically it is a very good body of work. I usually find affirmations stressful, but these aren’t a difficult stretch and are much more about what a person could do rather than what they might claim to already be. It’s wonderful finding a body of wisdom statements that aren’t overloaded with privilege, either. The vast majority of what’s here is usable in crisis, and doesn’t become a mockery in disastrous circumstances. It’s also pleasingly broad to the point of being contradictory – there are Buddhist statements about letting go of dreams to live in the present, and there are much more Druid-aligned statements about the importance of dreams for enriching our lives. As the introduction makes clear, take what works for you at the time and ignore whatever doesn’t.

I read the whole thing cover to cover in a couple of sessions. I found that uplifting. I intend to keep this book around and dip into it at need – it is something I will find helpful for repeat use.

There’s one major way in which I wish this book had been different. It really should have been larger and lush, with a tactile cover and really nice paper, and high resolution full colour photographs. It should have been the sort of book you cuddle, and carry round. But, you only get to make books like that with a publisher who can afford it, and this has been put together by a cooperative of creators, so forgive it for not being the act of extravagant beauty it could have been.

Buy the book from http://www.3mpub.com/cain/meditations.html

High Functioning Depressive

For a long time, I believed that the depression I experienced wasn’t that serious on the basis that I am able to keep going and do stuff. One of the classic measures of depression is that it shuts a person down – can’t think, can’t concentrate, can’t even get out of bed some days, no energy, no anything. I’m deeply grateful to author Craig Hallam for gifting me with the term ‘high functioning depressive’ because it’s reframed my whole experience of being depressed, and changed my sense of self.

I’m good at hiding things. In most ways I’m a very honest person, but when it comes to how much I’m suffering, I lie with every part of myself. It means people can know me pretty well and not know what kind of distress I experience. I’m good at keeping going. But then, I’ve been dealing with fatigue since I was in my teens. I’ve lived with pain, exhaustion and depression my whole adult life and I’ve learned to work around it. I have a huge amount of will power, a vast amount of discipline and self control, an unusual amount of determination and these combine to make me look fairly normal and functional. It is often less expensive to hide this stuff than explain it when I am in trouble.

From the outside, it is hard to see what anything is costing me. Blogger and author Merry Debonnaire suggested that I start measuring the costs in terms of distress and exhaustion. Partly to get this in better perspective for myself. Partly to help me explain to other people what I’m dealing with. There are mornings when sitting at the computer to work is as exhausting as a ten mile walk on a more functional day. There are days when getting to the bathroom is like trying to climb a hill. There are times when doing ordinary things is like trying to do the last mile of a twenty mile walk that has broken my body already. It’s a useful re-framing.

There are very few people I will spend time with when I’m in trouble, and who I feel safe letting see that. I also get a lot done. That means from the outside, it is really hard to measure how depression, anxiety, pain and fatigue really impact on me. For some people, that’s going to be confusing. For some people, it will make me seem fake, or attention seeking, or fuss making. The notion that you can look at a person and determine that they ‘don’t look ill’ and judge accordingly is a really suspect one. The idea that what a person can do on one day is a fair measure of what they can do on another also needs flagging up as problematic.

On a good day I can walk fifteen or twenty miles. Days that good are rare. On a good day I can work for eight or ten hours and I have phenomenal concentration. On a bad day I still have a longer concentration span than most people. What one person can do when they are well or ill is no measure of what it’s fair to expect from another person. We’re all different, and in unique circumstances. What one person can do on a good day isn’t a measure of what happens on a bad day.

Depression is often framed as an invisible illness. It isn’t invisible. It’s there to be seen if you look for it. There to be understood if you listen. It is however an illness that can be very easily dismissed and ignored, by anyone who finds it more convenient or comfortable to deny that there’s a problem. A person not conforming to expectations is not automatically a person who is well and lying, or making a fuss.

Parenting reflections

Parenting is mostly guesswork. You may have theories, based on your experiences and observations. You might try and read a lot of books and articles. You may just unconsciously perpetuate whatever is normal in your family… and how that works in practice you likely won’t know for a lot of years.

This year has been tough for young humans in the UK. My son had his final school year disrupted, his A levels were a confusing, stressful time and he’s gone to university only to face isolation. He’s home now, to my great relief. I have been struck, repeatedly, by his maturity and resilience as he’s dealt with everything this year has thrown his way. I’m going to chalk this up as a great deal of parenting win, although much of it must be ascribed to his own nature, efforts and good thinking.

There are theories I had which, in hindsight, I think were a very good idea. I never did arbitrary authority – he was always entitled to question me and I was clear that he was always owed an explanation at the very least. His opinion always mattered – even if I couldn’t do anything with it, he was always heard and had a chance to comment on things. If I wanted to pull an ‘I know best’ I took the time to lay out my evidence and thinking. I never said ‘because I said so.’

I started on this as soon as he was talking. I answered any and all questions to the best of my ability with the most age-appropriate language I could find. I never lied to him. This wasn’t always easy. I’ve been open about having mental health problems and how best to navigate that. I’ve shared difficult emotions. He is one of the most emotionally resilient and open hearted people I know – so I feel that my emotional honesty has done him no harm at all. Likely the opposite.

Here we are, as he steps into his adult life. He trusts my judgement, and he knows he can query me on anything. He knows he can talk to me about anything and expect me to be honest with him. He knows he is heard and respected and that his opinion matters. He is going to be living with me as an adult for the foreseeable future, and that’s going to be fine, and there will be no great challenges because of the underpinnings we already have in place.

I’ve done a lot of things along the way that other people – including professionals around child wellbeing – have considered inappropriate. It is normal to lie to children and to tell them what to do, and I’ve been in some very odd situations over my refusal to do that. During the family court period, I dealt with a lot of disbelief around the idea that my son could have his own opinions that I respected, and that his opinions were not simply what I’d told him to think. What I’ve learned parenting is that if you treat children like they are people in their own right, this actually works well.

Druidry, language and imposter syndrome

How often do you see a creative person talking about imposter syndrome? Too often. Because we’re not really supposed to blow our own trumpets, be proud of what we do or confident about putting our work into the world. Why is this a Druid issue? Because boasting was part of what our Celtic ancestors did. Because language matters. Because creativity and inspiration are part of the modern bard path. A culture of encouraging people to feel like imposters isn’t healthy.

If you create, in any way, you are a creator. If you write, then you are writer. If you draw or paint, you’re an artist and so on and so forth. The measure of being the thing is whether you do it, and you are also allowed to have breaks from doing the thing without that undermining your identity. If you are doing the things, you cannot be an imposter.

It’s not about how good you are. No matter how good you are, there will always be people who don’t like what you do and people who think you are a bit shit. They are not the measure of your worth.

If you don’t do the things, and claim the title, then feeling like an imposter might be a reasonable issue to have. If you call yourself a Druid but never do anything you can identify as druidic, that would be a problem. If you call yourself a bard, but have never learned a song, or a story, or a tune, never make anything, never do anything to bring beauty and inspiration to the world, then you may in fact be an imposter. The answer to this is to do something.

The other answer, is praise. This again is a very bardic activity and it goes with the boasting culture. Praise extravagantly, praise often, praise with passion and conviction. Get in there and tell people how great they are. Visibly admire stuff. Actively support the people who are able to say good things about their own work. Talk in positive ways about your own work so as to model this for other people. Take pride in who you are and what you do in ways that will help other people feel able to do the same.

No one who is doing the work should feel like an imposter. No one should feel that they have to say they feel like a fake – we really need to avoid having a culture of people not being allowed to respect themselves. If you do need to express discomfort, find other and better words. It is ok to be having a shit day. It is ok to say this piece of work isn’t going the way you want it to. It is ok to say you haven’t done the things in a while and this is impacting on your sense of self. It is ok to be uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable does not mean you are invalid.

Women’s technology in prehistory

These aren’t wholly original ideas.

I have seen for myself plenty of examples of pre-historians talking about prehistoric stuff that could be charting the moon. The assumption is that our ancestors needed to keep an eye on the moon for whatever they were doing. But why potentially lunar markings are divided up in ways that don’t seem to relate to the moon, is anyone’s guess, apparently. Except of course that the same monthly cycle has huge implications for female fertility.

The people in pre-history who most needed to be tracking lunar cycles, were fertile women who needed to be in control of their wombs. And who maybe also wanted to be able to educate younger women about how to do that.

When it comes to tools, there’s a tendency to focus on things with cutting edges. Partly this is because stone is what survives most reliably from the Stone Age. But, there are things to infer. Humans don’t hit the ground running the way baby horses and deer do. We aren’t furry in a way that makes it easy for babies to just hang on. Depictions of pre-historic women with babies tend towards the nearly naked, with the baby clutched to the mother any way they can.

Small babies wriggle. If you get you and them wet, they are almost impossible to hang onto. If you are holding a small baby in your arms, it is nigh on impossible to carry much else and the only thing you can do is carry the baby about. I refuse to accept that the majority of pre-historic women spent all of their time trying not to drop wet, wriggling babies. Also, babies get cold really easily, and not having a baby die of cold when it is naked in your arms all the time is going to be hard.

Our ancient ancestors were hunter gatherers. We know from modern hunter gatherers, that it is the gathering that makes up most of the diet and that gathering tends to be women’s work. You can’t gather much if every woman of breeding age is trying to do it while holding a baby in their bare hands. You can’t move around effectively if anyone under the age of two is walking. You certainly can’t run away. You can’t navigate any kind of complex terrain if both your hands are occupied with a baby.

The obvious inference, to my mind, is that one of the oldest pieces of human technology must in fact be the baby sling. Once you’ve got sharp edges, you can do things with skins, so it’s not a far-fetched idea. Women carrying babies in slings have their hands free for gathering and getting about. The baby, or small child in this arrangement is warm, safe, and easy to move about. You can’t have humans as mobile hunter gatherers if you don’t have baby slings. Our getting into colder landscapes and travelling any distance depends as much on the baby sling as it does the stone tools, the wearing of skins and the getting to grips with fire.

Suicide, utility and recovery

I’ve been dealing with suicidal feelings since my teens. After a particularly awful round last week, I was able to sit down and make a list of the persistent thoughts occurring to me around why I should kill myself. This was not an easy process, and when I’m not very close to these things I can’t readily access them and mostly don’t want to go there.

The list had themes, and I only saw them because I’d written them down. A few of them were about pain – physical and emotional and not being able to take any more. I’m fine with that. On its own, I can deal with pain and I also feel that wanting to die in face of a pain overload is a perfectly reasonable response. The thing to work on, if I can, is the pain. Most of the reasons were about utility – that I am not good or useful enough to be entitled to live. Some of them were stacked on that as issues of how I fail as a human being.

I note that every time I’ve kept going in the past I have done so on the basis of not hurting or letting down anyone else. It works in the short term but feeds the narrative that the worth in my life is my utility for other people. I need to stop doing that.

Philosophically, this outlook is bullshit. It’s not what I believe, it’s not my value system and I wouldn’t apply it to anyone else. It isn’t me – and I’d never really seen that before. It represents a way of thinking about people, worth, and life that I do not believe. It is not something of my making. It is, I realise, a consequence of what’s been done to me. After more than twenty years of living with these thoughts, this is a significant breakthrough. It changes who I think I am, and it changes what I think is happening when I fall into these patterns of thinking.

To be worthless as a person depends on having a way of measuring a person’s worth that isn’t simply that they exist. It raises questions about who is supposed to benefit from my life and what I am supposed to be for. Narratives that make a person all about their utility are intensely de-personning.  We live in a culture that does a lot of this, especially to the poor and disabled and to anyone disadvantaged.

I’ve also realised that these thoughts come up as panic responses, not as depression issues. Depression is just a miserable grind, but it’s not the thing trying to kill me. The dangerous stuff is what gets set off by high levels of panic.

I think it probably isn’t just me. I wonder how many people who end up wanting to die do so because their sense of self has been cripplingly injured.  How many people feel there is no point in living because they’ve been taught to measure their own worth in terms of utility to others? It’s also really hard to ask for help when you feel that you are suffering because you are worthless and useless. It’s hard to believe you deserve help, or that you are entitled not to feel awful, when the thoughts driving the experience are all about what a waste of space you are.

No one gets here on their own.

Seasonal poetry

Falling

Carpet of gold laced red and green

Autumn in glorious death throes

Each leaf a perfect single self.

Head down, muscles locking stiffness

Barely walking and heart weary

I admire the lovely demise

The forms and colours of dying

The specificness of each leaf.

All the while I am winter bound

Dreaming snow drifts of the future

Of a world remade and pristine

Where you might lay down a body

Too wounded to walk any more

Imagine the feather softness

Where cold becomes the sweetest warmth

Pain becomes melting glad release.

To be wrapped in beauty at last

Held to mother nature’s bosom

In a longed for desperate embrace.

When she holds as snow, as river

As earth or grave or fire or flood

She never lets you go again.

Rain held my body, long and chill

The cold of it held me tightly

Somehow today I am alive

Pen in hand, limbs aching, heart sore.

Not a leaf to end in glory

This is the dying time of year

And it is hard to want to live.

(Before anyone worries too much about this, I’m still here, I survived the weekend, I am coming back along a hard road with notes. It seemed important to record what I could of the territory.)

Hungry Business – a review

Hungry Business is a short story by Maria DeBlassie that manages to be a surprisingly large number of things very effectively all at the same time. It’s a creepy zombie story – with a neat premise about how being a zombie works and what you have to do to avoid it. At the same time, it’s a clever piece of social commentary where the being-a-zombie works as a metaphor for certain kinds of modern experiences. It is somehow both a sinister horror story and very funny, often both at the same time. It’s also a romance, and a story about the nature of romance and the importance of romance stories.  

Author Maria DeBlassie has all of these things going on, but none of them get in the way of it being a charming and entertaining read. Impressive! Do check it out.

Body Shape Stories

I grew up with the story that ‘thin’ was the only acceptable body shape. There could be no beauty without thinness. As I was not thin, I was not attractive and it was unlikely that anyone would love me. I was told explicitly on one occasion (I was probably twelve or thirteen) that no one would ever want me because I was so fat. These stories informed my sense of self, and my sense of who I should be.

I spent my teens failing to be thin. I have the kind of body that gets efficient under pressure, and stores hard in a crisis, and my attempts at dieting looked too much like a crisis to my body. At some points I was down to one meal a day. The story of trying to be thin was more important than any other story. Even though it was never what I truly wanted for myself.

What I really wanted, was to be strong. From late childhood, I rather wanted to be Batman. This body was never going to run fast or climb ropes or leap between buildings, but even so, Batman was a much better story to tell myself. Had I been supported in going with my Batman story, I would have spent my teens trying my hardest to be fit and strong. I would have eaten good food to support my body in being as Batman-like as it could be. I would have been a happier and healthier person.

I’ve spent my whole life fighting against a story that says female beauty is thin, delicate, fragile, down to the bones and looks easy to break. That story has lived in my head, even though it doesn’t match my sense of self. I still want to be Batman. Or Vasquez from Aliens. I want to be strong. And in many ways it is a better investment, for now, and for the long term.

I don’t like it when people read stories into my body about who I am and what I might want to do. I don’t like it when people I don’t know at all want to engage with me on the basis of how my face looks. I don’t find bone thin fragility attractive in other women either, it just worries me. I’m conscious of the way the emaciated ‘beauty’ notion comes to us from the Victorians fetishing women who were dying of tuberculosis. I don’t like the awareness that women who take up less space are preferable in some environments.

The older a person gets, the less scope they have to be ‘pretty’ as society likes to measure it. However, the thin, fragile, delicate older woman is vulnerable in so many ways. I don’t want to age with fragile, brittle grace. I want to be strong. I am not, in my later life, going to get to be Batman, I accept that. But, if I am strong, I will do better. I will be healthier, and happier, and have a body story it is possible to live with, not a body story that would kill me if it got the chance.