Nimue Brown's Blog, page 167

Pagan Portals Aphrodite – a review

Pagan Portals Aphrodite by Irisanya Moon is a new introductory title from Moon Books. It is a small book, easily read and digested and designed for the non-expert who would like to find out more about this Goddess and how to work with her. If that’s you, this is a good book to pick up.

If you’re established as a follower, dedicant or priestess of Aphrodite, this book is not for you. And that’s fine because you don’t need it!

I have a confession, and it is something I’ve not really talked about directly. I’ve had an attraction to Mediterranean Goddesses of love and sex ever since reading Jane Meredith’s excellent book, Aspecting the Goddess. I picked up this book because I am reading around this topic and actively seeking inspiration. It’s part of a personal process to try and heal. I was taken with the way Irisanya talks about Aphrodite as a Goddess of heart healing.

What affected me the most was the content in this book about beauty. There’s a lot of exploration of what beauty means and how it might manifest in our lives and how we might work with that. Not beauty in the narrow, conventional ways in which mainstream western culture defines female beauty. Something wilder, more expansive, loving and inherently magical. This book has caused me to ask some serious questions about the role beauty plays in my life and the changes I need to make. I’ll be back on this topic.

I still don’t know whose temple I would dance in if there were temples I could dance in. I’m still looking for a name, a sense of connection, a deity associated with the landscape I inhabit. I may never find that, but the looking is important to me all the same. This book has been a useful part of my journey. It wasn’t written for me, I am not seeking a relationship with Aphrodite, but even so it has given me maps I can use on my own journey, and it has taught me things about love and beauty that I really needed to hear.

More about the book here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/pagan-portals-aphrodite 

Unconditional Love

I’ve always liked the idea of unconditional love, and I’ve always wanted to offer it. I don’t want to put limits on how I love, and my heart always wants to say ‘no matter what’. The problem with this of course is that if you run into someone who means you ill, then unconditional love is a really dangerous thing. Too much acceptance and forgiveness can put you in danger. It’s the sort of thing that really enables abusive relationships.

I’ve spent a long time looking for the right way to balance this. What I’ve come to at this point might be right for me. It might change over time.

There is how I feel, and there is what I do. Unconditional love in terms of how I feel is a thing I can do, and keep doing. It’s not quite a ‘no matter what’ – there are two people in my history who I truly loved for years and, as a consequence of their actions towards me, no longer love. In both cases it took some pretty serious shit to get me to that point. It is possible to break my heart such that I am no longer able to love in response to a person. I’m still not sure how to place this inside the story I want to tell myself about love.

Then there’s what I do – and I accept that what I do with someone I love will be informed by what they do. It’s not entirely my choice. I can’t do anything with someone who does not want my love, my time or my attention. I can’t enact love in a meaningful way when dealing with someone who really doesn’t want me to do that. I also can’t sustainably manifest love for someone who exhausts me and wears me down. I can love from a distance, and I can do the things in a partial way, but what I do cannot be wholehearted unless there’s a context where that works.

I’m finding this a useful way of looking at what I do, what I offer, and who I am. My heart says yes. My heart says yes when yes is not always a good idea for me. I can stay with that, and honour it, and recognise the limits on what I can do with those feelings, and maybe this will work.

 

Druidry and Despair

One of the things I really appreciate about Druidry is there’s nothing inherent in it that will kick me when I’m down. There’s no ‘like attracts like’ philosophy. There’s no sense that suffering and difficulty are a result of bad karma, past life activities or lack of spiritual effort.

There are two places a Druid can look for spiritual guidance. There’s the literature pertaining to the Celts – the folklore and myths of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and arguably also England and France. There’s the natural world. Both of these sources will demonstrate to you that life can be a bit shit. There isn’t always any justice, people do not get what they deserve. Tragedy happens. The Gods do what they do and cannot be counted on to make life easy for you. Death, decay, misery and suffering are part of nature, these things will happen to you. Cycles are natural, and that means not everything can be great all the time. There’s also the history we get from the Romans, and there’s nothing in that to suggest any kind of toxic positivity in ancient Druidry.

Feeling despair means I am not feeling Druid-fail. I can dwell on all the stories in which people do terrible, stupid things and/or have terrible and stupid things happen to them. It’s not just me. Rhiannon faced loss and terrible injustice, so did Branwen. Blodeuwedd and Macha do not get good deals.  Follow any story far enough and everyone dies. The question is not whether things will be awful and tragic – because they will, sooner or later. The question is whether we can manage to be heroic, poetic, glorious, and unique regardless, or because of the things that will cut us down.

My Druidry reminds me that if I feel I have nothing else, there’s always the option of strapping myself to the stone to keep fighting. If winning isn’t an option, there are still important questions to be asked about how you want to lose, and how you want to be seen as you go under. There’s always the scope to inspire and encourage others by putting up a fight, and by trying to do something glorious, poetic and heroic with the hand you’ve been dealt, no matter how shitty it is. And sometimes, figuring out how to fail heroically is as good as it gets, and it is better than failing in sad, boring and mundane ways.

I’ve lost my way this week. I’ve lost my sense of trajectory – a fledgling thing I’d only found this year. Epic things had been happening to me that were shifting my sense of self and I may have lost that too. I have lost inspiration that was essential to me, and I may never get that back. I can’t tell if this is a small setback, or a tragic ending that would be entirely recognisable to my ancestors of tradition.

The thing about strapping yourself to a rock to keep fighting, is that it imagines keeping fighting does some good. While you can stay upright, rescue remains possible. Something could happen, something could change. Even while expecting defeat, it’s an action that invites other possibilities, right up until the last breath.

Despair is not an obstacle to carrying on as a Druid. Defeat is not an obstacle – the Druidry the Romans defeated survived to at least some degree in story and myth. Something remains. Something lives on. Dying away is part of the cycle, I can enter those spaces, Druidry and all. I do not have to be happy to continue as a Druid. I do not have to be hopeful or brave, or believe anything much so long as I am prepared to keep going with something. This week has taken me to some difficult places, and the awareness that I might have to accept living there for an uncertain amount of time. Potentially for the rest of my life. I will tie myself to the rock and keep standing for as long as I can.

What does it mean to unpeel a monster?

The title of my latest poetry collection – How to Unpeel a Monster – reflects something that has lifelong significance for me. It comes from a story about a child born with too many skins, who is monstrous and must be unpeeled to reclaim their human self, and the first poem in the book reflects this.

I’ve spent most of my life feeling monstrous. Too much, too difficult, too demanding, too cold, too sensitive, too emotional, too unemotional – I’ve been called all of this and more. I’ve spent much of my life feeling that I do not properly qualify as a person. As a consequence, I often see myself as someone rigid with defensive layers. I find it hard to trust, to soften myself, to open up to people.

During the period I was working on these poems, my relationships with a number of people changed in significant ways. There were several friends who started making deliberate efforts to come in and unpeel me. Offering safe space and support, accepting me as I am and not finding me monstrous, they helped me change how I think about my monster skins.

I’m still working on that. I don’t know that I need to be entirely unpeeled to reclaim some more acceptable shape. There are days when I feel good enough as I am, and days when I even enjoy being me without feeling that I need to do a lot of work on fixing and improving myself. There are also days when all I can see are my own savage teeth and claws and my unreasonable, unacceptableness.

What do any of us need to change? And are those changes for our benefit, or to comfort, ease or appease someone else? How much pressure is there to take off the unacceptable aspects of self based on what other people will allow and not who you need to be? What if there could be room for me to be all of the things? Hard and soft, furred and feathered, red in tooth, claw and tenderness, monstrous and fragile, strong and vulnerable, broken and unbreakable…

The journey into dealing with what I find monstrous about myself is increasingly a journey of finding that I just need more room for who I am. More spaces where more of me is acceptable. More people who are excited about the aspects of me that people in my history have found too difficult. I need the people who can hold those spaces of acceptance for me. I know I have them. I’m starting to see what it might be like to be able to live as my whole self, unashamed of how messy and complicated some of that can be.

All of my skins are equally real and valid. It’s just a case of what I want to share, and who it makes sense to share that with. Unpeeling is always an option. So is putting on a new and different skin. A tough and protective hide is just as acceptable as a soft, tender underbelly. I have to make space for all of it, and I do not have to make space for the people who might want me to be smaller than I am.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey, unpeeling the fear and making room for the skins.

More about the poetry in this post – https://druidlife.wordpress.com/2020/08/08/how-to-unpeel-a-monster/

Community Solutions

When the problems are yours and yours alone, there may be no answers. You may well not have the knowledge, skills, resources or clarity to deal with whatever is going on. So often, we’re under pressure to find individual solutions and not ‘burden’ other people with the issues. This is especially true around mental health problems.

No one gets into trouble on their own. There’s always a context. In matters of mental health, sources of stress, anxiety and trauma are certainly part of the mix for many of us. How can we fix alone what was done to us by others?

Certainly, there’s a macho component to this. The idea of the heroic self having to stride out there and fight the demons single handed. And when you can do that, it can be empowering. But sometimes, it’s not feasible. Often it’s not feasible in my experience.

We’re more resilient when we share resources. We don’t need as many resources to get things done. Our lives are better when we take care of each other. Being able to help someone else is heartening, and everyone benefits. Why should we keep re-inventing the wheel at the worst moments in our lives when the wisdom and experience of others might enable us to cope better?

When you’re in crisis, it is difficult to think well. It becomes hard to assess what is the panic speaking, and what the real issues are.  It can be very difficult to see the bigger picture, to plan, to hold any kind of perspective. Crisis can freeze you up, at which point, rescuing yourself from it is bloody difficult.

This has been a really tough week for me in a number of ways. Personal crisis things going on, plus the horrible impact of sleep deprivation on my body. Lack of sleep increases my pain levels, and beyond a certain point is also really triggering. Stress and heat have combined to mess up my digestive system. I’ve not been able to think properly. This is not a situation in which I can do much to help myself. I am however blessed with wise and kind friends, who are quick to offer support, reassure me and share wisdom. It has kept me going and stopped me from entirely falling apart. I could not do this on my own.

I’m not good at asking for help. When I’m depressed, I struggle to believe that help could be available. This is not an irrational response, there are things in my history that make it entirely reasonable. However, it’s an out of date response.

A while ago, I ran into some pre-history content about how we decide we’re dealing with modern human cultures. One definition, is when we see evidence of people taking care of each other – injuries that have healed are a good indicator of this. To be civilized, arguably, is to take care of people who have become unable to take care of themselves. Sometimes it feels that we, as a species are becoming deeply uncivilized on those terms. There’s always scope to push back against that, by taking care of each other and recognising that cooperation and community have a great deal to offer us all.

A good death

She was old, her time had certainly come. She died at home, quietly and in her own time, in the company of people who loved her. It was a good death. We did well.

I don’t think we talk enough about good deaths. We’re quick to offer condolences when people die, but we don’t congratulate them on having done a good job for their families, and loved ones, and I think we should. I’ve started doing it.

That’s led me to thinking a lot about what constitutes a good death. First and foremost it is the freedom to die on your own terms. That often means getting to do so at home and with the people you love. Not always though – best not to assume. When we’re talking about death, we should talk about whether people got to die in a manner that they would have found acceptable. It’s a good thing to ask – that you hope they had a good death on their own terms.

When a person gets to die is obviously a big issue. When accident and illness takes someone who is too young, it can be hard to accept that as a good death. It may in fact be a bloody awful death and need identifying on those terms. Not all deaths are good. To honour the good deaths we must also acknowledge the terrible ones. To suffer greatly, to experience humiliation to be undignified and denied what you want at the end of your life is to have a really bad death. To go suddenly but to leave well has some redeeming features.

What we’ve done in our lives to that point, no matter how old we are, will frame our deaths. To live well is a significant contributor to having a good death. To have lived fully, to have loved and done good things with whatever time you had, to have been loved, to have had rich experiences – no matter when you go, with this kind of life, you can die well.

She was nineteen, which is old for a cat. Some cats like to go off and hide, but she didn’t, she was very clear about wanting us with her. As she started to fade in the morning she was still calling out to us for fuss and responding to being stroked and cuddled. We stayed with her, taking it in turns to sit with her on our laps. James sang her the many songs he has mangled to turn into cat praise songs. She faded gently, and was in no pain so far as we could tell, for most of that process. When death came, it was quick and she was on Tom’s lap.

It’s the best we could have done for her. Tiggy had a happy 2 years with us, and a good death. We will all miss her greatly, but there is nothing to regret in all of this.

Processing grief

There’s a violence to grief that surprises me no matter how many times I go round it. This is not simply an issue for grief around the deaths of loved ones. It comes up around other things and people that I’ve lost. There is a force to it than rams into me like a punch in the gut, and that can come out of nowhere.

Grief is at its most powerful, raw and predictable in the immediate aftermath of loss. You expect it then, there is a degree of preparedness and the people around you are likely to know and be supportive.

However, with life-defining grief, it can come back at any time, a sudden body blow that may put you on your knees in entirely literal ways. There are still days when the death of my grandmother hits me like a blow. There are friends whose absence can suddenly and unexpectedly reduce me to tears. There are cats I have mourned for twenty years and more. Usually this is quiet, and invisible, and sometimes it isn’t.

I’ve never liked the idea that grief is something we have to get over. A terrible loss is not something to forget or put aside. It becomes part of who you are, and you learn to keep moving as best you can while carrying it. Grief is deeply intertwined with love, and it is the memory of love without being able to ever see the beloved again that brings the body blows.

The worst kinds of grief are laden with regret. Those are the hardest to keep carrying, and often the most violent. It’s the things that can’t be said, or fixed or changed that hurt most, I have found. It’s a different negotiation to learn how to carry on when full of the grief of regret. It’s as much as anything, a process of self forgiveness. Processing the regrets isn’t easy, and is best not done alone – it can be hard to get a decent perspective on these things when you are overwhelmed.

Grief that is rooted in love becomes bearable over time, because we learn to carry the love and cherish the pain of loss as a measure of that love. Grief rooted in regret offers no such consolations and making peace with it is a harder process.

The Tigerboy grows up

Those of you who have followed my adventures for some time, will be aware of the Tigerboy – the young human in my life. Today, he is 18, and legally an adult. He hasn’t been the Tigerboy for some time now, and instead has been growing into the somewhat more adult persona of James Weaselgrease – this is his steampunk identity and the name under which he performs and MCs.

I’ve tended to be careful with him online – there’s nothing on this blog that would show up under his legal name, should anyone go looking. I’ve also always consulted with him about anything going on here relating to him – blogs specifically about him, and about my experiences of parenting. He does read these posts (sometimes) and seems comfortable enough with how I’ve talked about him along the way. No doubt it helps that I have a high opinion of him and respect him greatly. He’s grown up to be a fabulous young man and I’m very proud of him.

So many things are so uncertain right now. Probably this autumn he will be off to university, and I will miss him. I’ve never been the sort of person to feel sad about children getting bigger and not being small and dependent. I’ve raised him to be an adult, not to be a child forever, and alongside that he’s retained his playfulness. He’s a very entertaining chap and his comic timing gets better all the time.

I feel very fortunate to have been part of his life for the last 18 years. I look forward to wherever the future takes us. I have nothing of my sense of self pinned to any ideas about success for him; I just want him to be happy, and if he is able to live his life on terms that work for him, I shall be delighted. He is very clever indeed, and I have no doubt he will have all kinds of adventures and do many interesting things.

Land Songs and Master Jack – a review

Land Songs by Kris Hughes is a collection of 11 poems. For such a small collection, it manages to bring together a very large amount of myth, folklore, landscape and spiritual insight. It was a pleasure to read and is the sort of collection you can comfortably sit down and go through in a single sitting – there’s a sense of relationship between the pieces that very much enables read it in one go.

I am, I realise, always going to be excited about people writing poetry about non-exploitative relationships with the land. There are some landscape love affair poems in this collection, and that delights me. Some of the myth-based material might not make much sense to a reader who is not familiar with the Pagan heritage of the British isles, but, you can always look up the names and fill in the gaps, so it might in that way prove to be an invitation to dig deeper. There are some notes at the front of the collection to help you navigate this material, which is a good inclusion. It’s never easy to be sure whether to let work stand as it is, or to explain but in this case the notes definitely enrich the text.

I can recommend this collection for anyone interested in poetry, I highly recommend it to anyone on the bard path for both the inspiration in it and what you can learn about writing as a bard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Master Jack is a short story with strong folklore themes, and a dash of the supernatural. It’s written with deep understanding of folk tradition, and the people involved in it, and with a love and respect for living tradition that delighted me. It manages – as folk traditions often do – to square up to death and difficulty while being fundamentally warm and affirming. It’s a lovely read. As someone who has played creatures in mumming sides, I found it really resonant. I’ve never worked with a horse skull, but I’ve always wanted to.

You can find Land Songs and Master Jack on Kris Hughes’ website – http://www.godeeper.info/shop.html

 

#AmReading Poetry: How To Unpeel A Monster by Nimue Brown

My hope with any piece of writing is that will touch someone else, help, or lift or encourage them in some way. getting reviews like this is, quite simply, what keeps me creating and feeling there is a point to what I do.

CM Rosens is a fantastic author who writes about monstrosity in a way that I find deeply resonant. There is comfort in not being the only monster, in knowing there are others who are also too much and too difficult and whose scales, teeth and claws are not socially acceptable. So, here is a review of How To Unpeel a Monster, and a recommendation to hop over and look at the blog as a whole, there’s wonderful stuff there.

C. M. Rosens

How to Unpeel a Monster

How to Unpeel a Monster by Nimue Brown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A brilliant anthology that deeply resonates with me. I just got this and spent yesterday curled up crying with it for a while because some of the poems here really connected and expressed things I have been trying to get at within myself, and isn’t that what poetry and art is for?

Nimue Brown has a strong, relatable voice with a lot to say that’s worth saying. The anthology goes through facets of life and personality, covering mental health, politics, community, spirituality, relationships and the essence of interpersonal connection, ageing and more. I think this is one I’ll be returning to a lot.

View all my reviews

Take off a skin. Take down a defence.
Take a risk, trust a little.
Soften that hard, uncompromising hide.
Take off the skin that…

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