Nimue Brown's Blog, page 176

The Way of Wyrd

This is not a book review. Having found my magical map recently, I’m on a deliberate quest to seek re-enchantment. I decided to start by revisiting books that opened doors for me when I was young. I think I was under ten when The Way of Wyrd was read to me. I read it to my own son at about the same age, it’s a wonderful book to share with a Pagan child.

Re-reading I realised that this book was a formative experience for me because of the underlying reality it describes. The web of wyrd, the interconnectedness of all things, became a key part of both my sense of reality and my notions of how magic might work for me. I think, on re-reading this, that author Brian Bates was also drawing on Taoist thinking. When I got to concepts of the Tao, it all felt familiar and a very natural match for my sense of how things work. At the time I didn’t consciously make that connection, but I was a curious teen and I wasn’t tracking my own processes. I didn’t need to.

Reading The Way of Wyrd opens up two further texts that I now know I need to revisit. Clive Barker’s Weaveworld may not seem like an obvious candidate for a formative spiritual experience, but I have a feeling it was and I want to go back and see.  I also need to re-read the Tao Te Ching with all this in mind. That’s a book I habitually re-read in various different translations.

The books that shaped me as a young explorer contemplating magic and spirituality, were fiction. I know it’s not an unusual experience. It’s something I need to think about more in terms of my own writing – fiction and non-fiction alike. It may not be an accident that my current fiction project – Wherefore over on https://www.youtube.com/NimueBrown has a lot in it about weaving magic. I started that theme weeks ago, long before I considered a deliberate quest for re-enchantment. It could of course just be coincidence, but it doesn’t feel that way, and the significance of creating a character who is a weaver and works with the fabric of reality, is something I need to spend some time with.

Wherefore is an unashamedly silly project, most meant to charm, distract and amuse. But at the same time, it keeps resulting in some of my most important (to me) spiritual work in a great many years. Being too serious doesn’t work for me. One thing is for certain – that laugher and merriment and the desire to cause happiness in others is part of my spiritual path and if I can do the things while giggling like the mad pixie I am, I will do a better job of it all.

A Selkie Poem

Storing a Skin

 

Not everyone who hides a selkie skin

Has stolen the soft seal fur

To trap a lover on the land.

 

Sometimes the skin is given.

 

Protect this skin for me

This secret self I cannot be

For now, this memory of

Water loving salt and playful

Swimming diving self.

 

Keep my skin safe, hold it

So that when I can bear

To wear it again

When my heart can encompass

The sea again

 

I may put on my seal self

And return to the ocean.

 

Embracing the negativity

It’s a common thing in supposedly spiritual spaces – advice about how to free yourself from negativity, and how to avoid being affected by the negativity of others. It’s one of those things that at first glance looks like wisdom. Negativity doesn’t sound very spiritual, transcending it does. But let’s break that down a bit.

Who and what is negative?

People who are critical – and sometimes that is worth avoiding, but these can also be people who are trying to help and avoiding negativity because you don’t want to hear you’ve messed up, is not a path to growth, wellbeing or enlightenment.

People who are sad. People who are in pain and grief and depression, who have been wounded by life, who have no hope or confidence or the means to help themselves. These are people who often need help, warmth, companionship and compassion. Vibrating ourselves off to some higher frequency where we do not participate in that pain, is horrible. There’s no spiritual good to be found in protecting ourselves in this way, it is a selfish, privilege  rejection of the suffering in the world. None of us can fix everything, but we can be open, we can bring love and care, patience and gentleness where we can. A spiritual path that has no time for the distress of others, is a route to being inhuman, unkind and self absorbed.

People who are angry. Anger is a hard emotion to deal with, in ourselves and in others. Anger directed towards the self can feel threatening. But if we aren’t prepared to look at why that’s happening, we can’t learn, or improve. If people are angry and we make no effort to understand them, we may miss out important life lessons. If someone is maliciously angry all the time, seeking those higher vibrations to avoid negativity won’t really help, it may even serve to keep us trapped in dangerous situations.

People who don’t care. I admit this is the one I find hardest. It is perhaps the most subtle form of negativity. The people who don’t care, don’t respond, do nothing – they can quietly suck the life out of just about anything. It’s something I want to avoid, because I find it exhausting. But at the same time, these are people who maybe need lifting out of themselves inspiring, cheering and encouraging. It’s good to be able to show up for that at least some of the time.

When positivity is relentless it becomes toxic. It isn’t a force for spiritual good beyond a certain point. We are meant to feel more than just happy all the time, and the rejection of great swathes of what it means to be human does not make us better people. If you are somehow happy all the time, to be closed to those who are unhappy is not a spiritual outcome. It means being less compassionate. Love is a messy, complicated thing, spiritual love included and if we do not deploy our spiritual love to embrace those who are manifesting negativity, then what even is the point?

How to create well

One of the unexpected blessings of lockdown has been an opportunity to rethink how I live and work. Not having the lad in school has changed the shape of the day because I don’t have to get up early. I’ve also changed how and when I sleep – something I’ll blog about another day. The result is much greater flexibility, which I’m enjoying.

It’s clear there’s all kinds of upheaval coming for me – which I’m looking forward to. With much of the future uncertain it struck me as a good idea to look at my priorities and preferences. I can’t plan much, but I can be ready to make the best of what comes along.

One of the things that has become obvious is that if I want to work creatively, I have to rethink how I deploy my time. If all of my available energy and concentration in a day goes on paying work, it’s not sustainable. There comes a point where I can’t do any creative work because I’ve run out of resources. This should be blindingly obvious, but the pressure to be productive and economically effective is high, and the things I really need to be doing don’t look productive.

I need time to read for pleasure and also to study. I need time to experiment, mess about, practice and explore without having to worry about creating a viable finished product. I need to spend time doing things that cheer and uplift me and engaging with the people who delight and inspire me. I also need time when I’m not doing anything much with my brain – to daydream and wool gather, to ask what if and why, and wherefore?

I don’t have my best ideas by pushing for them. I have my best ideas by making space for them.

I can be structured and professional about the writing, but it only works for the long haul if I also get enough playtime.

I don’t think this is just a writing issue. I don’t think it’s just a creative industries issue. I think it’s going to be about the same for everyone. No matter what you do, too much focus on productivity will be unproductive in many ways. The space to live and grow is essential. I think it’s ironic that if you want to be the most effective working human being, the odds are that slowing down and not trying to work so much are the keys to success. It takes time to live a life that is inspired. Not having the pressure to succeed and produce is actually really helpful when it comes to success and output.  And even if that wasn’t the case, this is still the better way to live.

I’m now aiming for four or five hours of productive work every day and four or five hours or investment time, plus time spent living.

Art and intention

The images in this blog post are inspired by pre-historic art. The hands come from cave pictures where pigment has been blown around hands to leave the shape of them. The surrounds are taken from rock art styles. In the normal scheme of things these two arts would never meet, but I’m not doing this for reconstruction.

I started this quartet because Dr Abbey Masahiro asked me to draw the four of us. I’m not good at literal representation, so the idea of drawing around household hands appealed to me and let me play with the pre-historic imagery as well. Tom had to draw Dr Abbey’s hand from photos so that one came out differently, it doesn’t have quite the same shape as a hand pressed down onto paper and drawn around.

Dr Abbey has been bringing magic into my life for some months now. I’ve been cautious about what to say online. But, he’s very much co-dreaming the future with myself, Tom and James at the moment and it felt like the right time to move from alluding to him, to naming him outright and claiming him.

Also, I did these pieces with my grandmother’s paper and oil pastels. Today is the 100th anniversary of her birth. It seemed like a good day to post this.

[image error] This is my hand – the left as I mostly draw right handed. The background is inspired by Irish rock art that I saw referred to online as being flying saucers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tom’s hand came out a little chunkier than it is in real life. The background for his was inspired by Newgrange rock art and is my favourite of the backgrounds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[image error]James’s hand. My very large Tigerboy, often alluded to here over the years, now all grown up. He has the same thumb shape as me. I gave him geometric rock art because he’s the one with the maths and science skills.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[image error]Abbey’s hand with a background taken from cup and bowl rock art. We had to guess relative hand sizes – his hand is about the same size as mine here. There’s none of the shape distortion that comes from pressing down. It was a strange and emotional process for me, working with the shape of a hand I have not touched, but will.

Druidry and rescue

This is a tested approach for dealing with someone in emotional crises. In an ideal situation it would just be a case of grabbing some professional help, but mostly there isn’t any of that to be had, so if someone close to you is in crisis, you may be all they have.

This approach needs handling with the calm authority you would bring to leading a meditation or a ritual. That means you may well use your emotional range to get things done, but you have to do so from a place of love, strength and confidence.

Make non-threatening physical contact. It helps focus attention. If someone has disappeared into themselves, and isn’t functioning, touch is a good way of getting their attention. Put a hand on their shoulder, hold their hand, that kind of thing.
If you don’t know what’s happening, ask, and listen without judgement. Say nothing that will undermine them, or invalidate their feelings. You may not agree with what they are feeling and why, but if you bring that up now you will only make things worse. Don’t criticise, avoid anything that could be taken as you saying these feelings are not reasonable or valid – you have to start from where the person is right now. No one is ever rescued by being made to feel that their emotions are somehow wrong. Your understanding is essential.
Validate their feelings. Tell them you understand why they feel as they do. Recognise the context in which this is happening to them. Empathise with them. If they don’t talk or you don’t need to ask, verbally empathise. Tell them as much as you can about what you understand of what’s happening and why it’s a reasonable response.
Using your empathy, you need to persuade the person that you are inside this situation with them. Not that you feel exactly the same, but you are in there, feeling what is happening. You may need to cry for them, but be careful not to make it about you.
Refuse to leave them in this place. Tell them you are with them, and that you can get them out. Believe that you can walk them out of this place. One breath at a time. One step at a time. This is where your pathworking/ritual skills really come in. You have to walk them out. Keep it in the present tense, don’t talk about the future too much. Take a ‘this is what we’re going to do right now,’ tone. Keep it simple. Reassure them that they can get through this. The rest you will have to make specific to what’s happening, but it is your empathy and your being in there with them that will enable you to pull them out a little way. You do not need to fix everything right now, you just need to get your person to engage with you and consider that things could be better. Your love, determination and compassion are key here. Don’t use emotional blackmail. It is ok to say ‘I need you’ or ‘I don’t want to live without you’ but don’t say ‘stop doing this to me I can’t bear it’ because that kind of thing will push them deeper in. Make it about them and what they need. They probably do need to feel needed, but not wholly responsible for you.
As soon as you have them engaged with you, make some physical interventions. Do things that will be grounding and physically supportive – hot drinks, food, a blanket, getting them to bed, or under a shower, or into a bath and fresh clothes. Brush their hair, massage their feet, make them a hot water bottle, get them outside for some fresh air, or to a window. From this point onwards, focus on physical care – it supports mental health, is a good expression of love and support and creates space in which they can keep talking. Encourage them to keep talking, but don’t push hard, talking is often exhausting when in crisis. It may take a few rounds to deal with what is happening.
When things are stable, consider the underlying issues and what can be done to tackle them. Do not try and do this when the person is in crisis, they won’t have the resources and may be overwhelmed and intimidated.

Lockdown and mental health

It has worried me from the start that politicians aren’t factoring mental health impacts into their choices. I thought today I’d talk about some of what I can see happening, in the hopes that if any of you are experiencing this, there will be some comfort in identifying the mechanics. This is UK based but may apply other places.

We’re social creatures, so being asked to isolate is really hard. Doing it heroically to save lives is feasible, most of us can get behind that and sustain it. Doing it when economically based contact is allowed, but love is not, is brutal. We can go back to work, but we cannot go to family, friends and lovers who do not live in the same house as us. We are allowed our economic relationships, but not the ones that matter.

None of this ever made any sense. The biggest source of spreading is households. If one person gets it, everyone gets it because most of us don’t have room to isolate from our families. We should never have been asked to do this. Ill people should have been isolated in medical facilities, keeping their nearest and dearest safe. If you have vulnerable people in your household the advice has been to go to work and isolate from them at home. Technically difficult, and emotionally harrowing. We should be able to cling tight to the people we love, and be confident we can keep them safe.

Big events with hefty financial aspects were allowed to go ahead when they should have been cancelled. Plane loads of people from virus-afflicted areas were allowed in unchecked. We were put at risk, all of us, for the sake of money. This kind of treatment will impact on your mental health. We’ve been lied to and blamed, over and over. This is gaslighting, and it makes people mentally ill.

The whole thing has been organised the wrong way round from the beginning. We should have been protecting close relationships and getting people away from numbers of strangers. We’re safer when we can assess our risks together. The friend I can talk to about how we handle this is far less hazard to me than the stranger who coughs on me in a supermarket. Not being allowed to keep the people we live with safe has massive mental health implications for many people, as well as the hideous virus implications.

Usual mental health advice is all about staying connected with people who can support you. We know what people need to be well, but that knowledge has been ignored throughout this crisis. If we put mental health first, we give people resilience. If we had protected intimate relationships and sacrificed economic ones, we’d be better off. If we had done this the other way, people would have felt less need to push back against the rules.

Usual mental health advice also tells us to get fresh air and exercise. The mental health of people with no gardens, and people living in cramped conditions is not being talked about. It should always have been ok to sunbathe at a distance from others. It should never have been ok to force non-essential, usually low paid workers to keep working and commuting. One of these things runs the real risk of spreading disease and the other, simply does not.

Faced with political choices where you and your loved ones are at risk, and you can’t do the things that might sustain your mental health – little wonder if many of us are suffering. We should always have been putting life ahead of money, and mental health is a key part of life, not some kind of luxury extra for the better off.

Finding the magic map

A few days ago I blogged about the unexpected way in which my disenchantment had been replaced by a sense of magical possibility. Since then, I’ve found a magical map. One of the things that has made it impossible for me to rebuild is that I’ve been unable to see how to do it. How can I go from this demoralised, disenchanted state to some other way of being? Without some capacity so feel enchantment, there was no way forward.

The magical map occurred to me over the weekend. A territory with doors that might take me somewhere. I became able to see it because I’d been prompted to read a book that had a lot of content about ancient Egypt in it. I grew up heavily exposed to folklore, fairytales and myths, but Egyptian magic was the first kind of magic that child-me wanted to learn about and sought information on. I had forgotten just how much I knew, and having those memories rekindled was powerful all by itself.

It also reminded me of all the many things that functioned as portals in my young life. All the things I read and did, and that were important to me. These are the things that inspired me and shaped me. I can’t go back. I can’t be the person I was at fourteen or at twenty before I lost so much of myself. But those doors all still exist, and I can revisit them. I don’t know what will happen for doing that, but it strikes me as good territory to explore.

If I’ve learned anything in the last few weeks it is the power of letting go and trusting to the process I’m in, so I’ll do that. I have a map made of the memories of all the things that have been important to me along the way, and I will re-walk those paths, and remember, and rethink and see what of my magical self I can put back together.

I’m not good at trust, so the trust part of this process is really important. I’m not good at belief, but I’m not being called upon to do much of that, only recognise what is happening to me in this process, and to build on it. I am repeatedly startled and mystified by the way in which pieces of myself are being given back to me, and opportunities to heal wounds I’d long assumed I would just have to live with are occurring. Some of this is because I’ve done the groundwork to get to the point where this is possible. Some of it, without any shadow of a doubt, is simply happening by magic. A gift, a blessing, a spell, an enchantment, a wonder that is happening to me, conditional only on my willingness to accept it and let it change me.

Dealing with burnout

Everything is harder at the moment. Everything takes longer and requires more effort and almost everyone I know is struggling with concentration, with energy levels and with feeling overwhelmed. These are all ingredients for burnout. Things that would not normally put a person on their knees might do so in the current crisis. People who are not used to experiencing burnout may find it happening to them.

Having a long history of routinely burning myself out, this is something I’ve learned the hard way how to deal with, so I thought I’d share some insights.

Firstly, what not to do. Toughing it out. Stoicism. Fake it until you make it. Trying harder. Leaning in. Pushing through it. What these kinds of approaches do, is drive you deeper into burnout. If you are spinning out of control and heading into crisis, pushing through will not save you. Equally, if you’ve got through something by pushing, it wasn’t burnout, it was a bad day and there is a lot of difference.

It can be tempting to hide it and pull away from other people. Much depends on what works for you. If peace, silence, solitude and rest are the best things to heal you, then dealing with it privately may be your best bet. If you need holding, witnessing, cheerleading and supporting then you need to talk to your closest people about what’s going on, and ask for their help and support on whatever terms make sense.

One way or another, you need to recharge. Sometimes this is literally about rest and sleep. Sometimes it means needing to move your body more, or take better care around food. You may need to recharge your mind and dig in with nurturing things. If you don’t have go-to nurturing things for bad days, it is now urgently important to find out what will sustain you.

It can be tempting to escape into something mind numbing. If your primary need is for rest, this will help you. If your primary need is for nourishment, this can make things far worse. It may not be obvious, if you are new to this, what you need most.

Burnout, for me, has always been to some degree impacted on by my relationships with people. A habit of giving more than I can afford, of not saying when I’m in trouble, and of not asking for help. I have a lot of issues around expecting my relationships to be utilitarian. But, this time, I didn’t do that. I asked the people who are closest to me to look after me, and they did, they piled in without hesitation. On Thursday morning I started crying in what, for me, is classic burnout style. In the past, I’ve got into those and random crying and overwhelm can go on for days, weeks thereafter. The people I asked for help pulled me out of the nose dive. I was not instantly ok, but the space appeared to start looking after myself and to get back on top of things.

Ingredients for a spell – a poem

One face. Apparently good enough.

 

One body – sore, awkward

Also dancing, creative

Recently re-imagined.

 

One heart, much scarring

Bloody, raw

Easily broken.

 

Hands, two, open.

 

Words. All the words

To write a new life.

 

Love. (This is not a love spell)

Love is a key ingredient.

 

Time, trust, courage.

A spell to change everything.

 

I cannot tell

If I am making this spell

Or if it has been

Cast upon me.