Nimue Brown's Blog, page 177

Magical Thinking

Rather a long time ago now, I went through some experiences that left me not only disenchanted, but feeling unsafe about allowing myself to think magically in any way at all. My universe was a cold, hostile place and I could not expect it to treat me kindly. Before that, I’d been a person who was not just into but really good at divination. I’d lived with intuition and awareness and felt open and alive. I lost it all. Those of you who have read my books will know that I’ve mostly been doing my Paganism from a maybeist/atheist kind of position.

For some years now, Tom and I have known that we could see no way to level up from our current arrangement. There are things we want to change in our lives – where we live, what we do creatively – but we’ve been unable to get there from here. We’re not affluent or prominent enough and we’ve not got the right connections. We’ve been in a processes of resigning ourselves to this being our lives, while habitually saying ‘and then the magic thing happens’ if we want to imagine something ambitious we can’t see how to achieve.

It was, with hindsight, something a lot like a prayer or a spell.

In the last few weeks, we have instead ended up looking at each other and saying ‘and then the magic thing happens’. Because it turns out that we have invited magic into our lives in a very real sort of way.

It’s been a strange few months, where I’ve had to depend on the intuition I’d stopped using and didn’t trust. With important stuff to do and nothing like enough information, it’s the only tool I’ve had. But every prompting from that has been right. Verifiable stuff with significant implications. I’ve started doing divination again and started paying attention to the world in very different ways – I have been re-enchanted, no two ways about that. Something I had not been able to see how to do for myself, but… the magic thing happens.

What I know right now is that there is magic coming into my life, and that what I need to do with that is trust the process. Let go, and be swept away by it all. So I’m going to trust that intuition, trust what’s happening, trust what will happen and be open to anything and everything changing.

QUEER GALAXY STORM! EPISODE 1: THE DREADED NORMS by Meredith Debonnaire

My good friend Merry is doing a series on her blog – it’s queer science fiction, funny, clever, charming… If that sounds like your sort of thing, wander over and read the episodes already up, and then the rest will be out weekly…

Meredith Debonnaire

QUEER GALAXY STORM!

Will the Queeronauts escape the clutches of the Norms?

CAN NURA FIX THE ENGINE FEED IN TIME?

How will Kaz stop herself from simply screaming at the Norm Captain?

FIND OUT IN THIS FABULOUS EPISODE OF

QUEER GALAXY STORM!

EPISODE 1: THE DREADED NORMS

Queer Galaxy Storm was a fine ship of organic make, one of the few Violet Fives still flying and the envy of all who saw her. Usually.

“Nura! Nura, you get Galaxy moving right now!” Captain Kaz, curled up at the centre of the Command Lobe, yells furiously into the communication vines. Queer Galaxy Storm rumbles in counterpoint.

“I’m knee-deep in plankton, Captain. The Feed’s broken.” Nura sounds remarkably calm, which is a terrible sign.

“Un-broken it!” snaps Kaz, projecting as much reassurance to Queer Galaxy Storm as she can; the ship’s not badly wounded, but that doesn’t mean they’re comfortable.

“We’re holding…

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Temperature and Season

I think of May as a warm month, and my experience of it in previous years has certainly been that way. This year going outside for me means hats, scarves, gloves, jumpers and/or jackets. It is my relationship with the season that has changed, not the season itself.

In previous years my experience of May has predominantly involved being outside during the day. I assume it is warm out there in the sunny hours. My flat is a bit like a cave and tends to remain cool in warm weather, so if I stay in, I do not experience much of the heat of the day. I am of course mostly staying in, so the warmth of May isn’t an experience for me.

I’m walking at night and in the early morning, for the greater part. Even once the sun is up, it is really cold out there. Some places the old can be deep and piercing in the early morning. Gloves are essential.

What struck me, coming home today is that of course the coldness of May has always been there, I just don’t usually partake of it. I’ve done my share of midsummer and summer solstice vigils, I know how cold the summer nights can be. I just don’t usually have that be my dominant experience. Of course most UK mammals are active at night. This is how bats and owls experience this time of year – as cold.

It’s so easy to fall into a simple, single narrative about what something is, or means. But there are always other experiences, other meanings and other possibilities. This year, May is cold for me and I need to wrap up warm to go out. My understanding of what May is, has expanded accordingly.

 

Druidry of place

This post was inspired by Ryan Cronin’s recent post about Druidry which you can, and should read – https://wrycrow.com/2020/05/10/druidry-of-the-real/

It got my thinking about what is unique about where I am and how I do things. The landscape here certainly does have an impact on my Druidry. One of the reasons I don’t do community ritual any more is that there is nowhere in easy walking distance where that would make sense. The wilder places are too windy, ritual shouting doesn’t do it for me. The woodlands are on slopes – again this doesn’t work well for a circle. The flatter outside places are really public, so that doesn’t work.

This has led me towards making walking and sitting out the heart of my Druidry. I make and walk labyrinths, and this is in no small part because I have space where I feel comfortable doing that. It’s something I can do in a park without feeling uneasy about other people. I managed to get one in before lockdown, but it is something I have missed doing.

Walking is affected by how the paths change through the year – where is accessible in winter, in mud or icy conditions. Where is sheltered enough from the sun for summer walking. Which paths flood in heavy rain, which ones feel unsafe in high winds.

One of the curious features of the valleys around Stroud is that where you are has a big impact on how you experience the shape of the day. The hills mean that twilight settles in some places before the sun sets in others. Dawn comes earlier on the hilltops than it does in the secluded valleys. Spring starts earlier some places than others, and across a distance of just a few miles there are all kinds of microclimates. Living here makes it hard to have a single coherent narrative about time and the seasons. I am more plural for living in this landscape.

There’s no grain in the valleys, so either I have to go out to where the grain is, or my sense of the summer grain festivals is impacted by this. We do have sheep and lambs, so my Imbolc is shaped by encountering them. We do have an abundance of hawthorn flowers and bluebells for Beltane.

On top of that, we have a local events calendar which intersects with my personal calendar. My wheel of the year has a book festival, folk festival, a theatre festival and a wassail in it, reliably, and some of the other regular events impact on me as well. Culture should be place specific.

Druids and Worms

Worms should be one of the beings we hold most sacred. They are essential to the life of the soil, and human life depends so much on that vitality. Worms pull plant matter down into the existing soil, and eat it, breaking it down and releasing the nutrients back into the earth. The way in which they move through the soil aerates the ground, and is part of how the structure of the soil is created.

Worms are one of the key the means by which death is turned back into life. They are engineers of this most essential process. Pagans honour the cycles of life and death so we should hold in the highest possible esteem the beings who drive that cycle. And yet, I’ve never encountered anyone celebrating worms in this way.

Worms are suffering as a consequence of human pollution. They are the creators of life, and any threat to them is a threat to us all. We need to protect them in any way we can.

An individual worm isn’t a dramatic entity. They are small, quiet, easily overlooked and living underground, are mostly invisible to us. They do not demand our attention. We don’t have famous worm Gods at whose shrines people might make offerings. We overlook their power and their magic at our peril.

The best shrine you can make to the worms, is a compost heap. Feed them, engage with them, make a home for them that you are fully conscious of. Bring them offerings every day of the food you did not want, the peels and skins and inedible bits. Offer up your rubbish to them, in recognition that they will turn that rubbish into rich food for the soil. You give them the most worthless things you have, and in return, they give you life. It is a relationship that should make anyone feel humble, and that reminds us that power is not always self announcing.

Persephone – a review

Pagan Portals – Persephone: Practicing the Art of Personal Power by Robin Corak is a new title from Moon Books.

I picked it up because there are a number of things that interest me about Persephone. I’m not Hellenic and this isn’t a Goddess I identify with especially. So, to be clear, I am not the intended audience for this book. It’s written for someone who want to follow, work with or otherwise devote themselves to Persephone. If that’s you, this is a good place to start with an array of meditations, historic insights rituals and tools to help you build a relationship with this Goddess.

One of the things this book offers is a re-reading of Persephone’s story. This was one of the things I was particularly looking for. Conventionally, Persephone is presented as an innocent girl who is kidnapped and raped by Hades, rescued by her mum – Demeter – but tricked by Hades so she has to go back to him for a part of each year. However, there are other ways of telling her story, and I’m interested in how different women are doing this. Robin has a Persephone story for us that is about the journey from innocence to experience, and about finding your own way when you seem to have only limiting, binary choices.

Persephone is most assuredly the Goddess of not being limited by narrow identity stories. She is both the spring maiden and the Queen of the underworld. What meaning you take from her story depends a lot on how you relate to two key scenes from it. Do you see her as the abducted victim, or do you see her seeking adventure and opportunity? And do you see her as force fed the pomegranate seeds that keep her tied to the underworld, or do you see her taken them of her own free will because there is no going back to her child-life?

Find out more here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/blogs/moon-books/persephone-practicing-the-art-of-personal-power/

 

Reclaiming Power – a poem

Let my power be

What grace I have,

The sway of my hips

A bolder spine

Defiant chin.

Available as I choose

Open arms

Open thighs

The power to say no

Is the power to say yes

With all my heart.

 

I claim the power to trust

That I will be honoured

My power not misread

As power over or excuse

No patriarchal Goddess

Of Justification, no deity

Of rape culture made to bear

The shame and guilt

Of violent transgression

I refuse this story, this history.

 

My power is in the gifting

Power to share and express

When that essential energy

Meets your generous power

When we are mighty together

For each other

None diminished.

 

Enchant me, seduce me, delight me.

You have no power over me

Except as I freely submit.

Gasp for me, yearn for me

Fall at my feet if you

Would give such power to me

And see your own strength

In the beauty of all

You give away.

 

Let my power flow in my hips

Open arms, open thighs

The willing, triumphant surrender

When it is safe to choose

Powerlessness

Safe to choose

Power.

Owl Drunk

We walked towards the full moon. On the hill, the barrow stretched out, attractive, as though a barrow on the night of the full moon would be an excellent place to lie down and sleep. As though the barrow itself was calling, inviting. I declined politely, only to be almost lost, facing what looked like a high wall. The hill can be tricksy, it has played with my perceptions before. I found the signpost that once, in fog, I mistook for a tower. I found the right path, and we made our way to the wood.

I prefer walking without a lamp, but a leafy wood is a dark place, even under the full moon. Walking by torchlight feels like moving but so little changes that it also doesn’t feel like moving. It becomes unreal quickly. Dreamlike. You walk based on the faith that your body is indeed going somewhere, but the mind sits oddly in the flesh, closer to dreaming than waking.

The woods were full of owls, calling. The undergrowth alongside the path was full of sound, alive with small, busy presences. We saw one of them. Larger creatures moved in the darkness – badger most likely. There were many bats and some of them flew close in front of us through the small circle of light.

Just as the sky was growing pale, we arrived at a local beauty spot and stopped to drink tea and look at the moon. Larks were singing long before any other bird. Here, we had an encounter with a local police officer, who had been checking the site and wanted to make sure we were ok and not intending to walk along the road – we assured her that we had come through the woods and would be safe.

We drank green tea under the full moon, raised a toast to someone we thought would appreciate that, and wished him well. And wished him safely with us.

We walked home towards the rising sun, with the woods slowly filling with colour. Bluebells, wild garlic, wood anemone, dog’s mercury, new beach leaves. On the hill, cowslips, early purple orchids and an extravagance of lark song. Owls were singing along with the dawn chorus and I thought I heard the lone voice of a curlew.

Sleep deprived, giddy, drunk on owl song, intoxicated by the dawn chorus, with a head full of hilltop, we came home. The town was swathed in mist, and the feeling of having walked in a magical realm was with is to the end.

What stories shall we tell each other?

Humans are story telling creatures. We do it all the time in the normal scheme of things. We have our daily adventures, and our people we check in with about how that went. How was your evening? How was your date? How was your day at work? How did the appointment go? And of these small story interactions we affirm and build our relationships with the people around us.

How is your lockdown going?

I notice on social media that there are a lot more people posting and far less is being said. We’ve been doing this for weeks now. We are over the novelty. Most of us are not getting much done because this is all so stressful and depressing, so we aren’t doing new things that give us stories to share. For some people this makes drama and conspiracy theories appealing – they are at least something to talk about, and if you provoke someone else then you have a story to tell.

Relationships depend on stories to share. We need to find each other interesting. If we are bored with ourselves and bored with the people we usually communicate with, this is a recipe for misery.

It’s important not to be living too much in the future, as well. It’s easy to start telling stories about what we will do when this is over. But, those stories further dislocate us from where we are now. They aren’t an answer to everyday stresses. We don’t know when we will be able to do all the things, so setting yourself up to watch the things you want staying unreachably ahead of you isn’t a good long term mental health choice. It is better to think about what you can do now. If there are things you want, it’s a good time to be figuring out how to move towards that and what you can do. Have a castle in the air if you want one, but also work out the means to approach it.

I have several castles in the air at the moment. I want to move, and being stuck in this small flat with no garden makes that a powerful imperative. I have to believe I won’t be stuck here forever. Even so, I’ve taken the decision not to move at the first opportunity. I could get out of here, but I have been offered a truly lovely air castle that can more likely be made real if I stay awhile, so I’ll stay. There is a story to tell, but I’m not ready yet. As a bonus, but not my major motivation, if we can get that to work, one of my biggest and most outrageous castles in the air becomes more feasible – that daydream about setting up a small movie studio.

In need of wildness

I was struggling long before lockdown with the need for wildness. I live in a beautiful part of the world, but the car noise, the careless walkers who leave bags of poo in their wake, the cyclists who treat ancient monuments as obstacles and things of that ilk had been getting to me for some time. I craved a landscape with fewer people in it, and more wild things.

Then we hit lockdown and everything got worse. The main walking and cycling routes close to my home are busier than ever in the day. Not wanting to add to that and finding it stressful, I moved to twilight walking, but as it has got warmer, ever more people are about at the end of the day. I used to spend hours walking, and the loss of time in the landscape has left me depressed and disconnected. On top of that, poor circulation and/or low blood pressure have caused me sleeping problems.

This week I decided to make some radical changes. So, rather than getting online when I wake up in the early hours, I got my walking boots on. Tom and I went out. The first time, we saw no humans. The second time we ran into a couple of people, but compared to how many folk there are out in the day, it was nothing. Narrow paths I would not have risked in the daylight became totally socially distanced. The world that I had lost opened up to me again.

I came home with the dawn chorus, euphoric. I came home able to sleep, both times, which means my sleeping has radically improved, so my head feels clearer. A tension is easing out of my body, that had come from feeling disconnected from the land. With more time outside and better access to the wild, I am more myself again and lockdown is a good deal more bearable.

There is also more wildness at night – foxes and hedgehogs, owls and others. The dawn is full of birds, and there are lots of wildflowers to appreciate as the sun comes up. With almost no other people out there, the landscape seems wilder. In darkness, familiar places become less so – there’s a lot I can work with here.

We don’t have a garden, so an hour of exercise might be considered the proper amount of outside time we can have in a day. Although guidance around how long a person can be out for varies. An hour is not enough for my mental health. I can’t walk as far as I need to in that time and it has really taken a toll on me. But if we set out in the night and see no one, I can’t see it matters how long we walk for.

I’ll keep doing this long after lockdown – walking to meet the dawn has changed my relationship with the place I live. I feel re-enchanted. Being liberated from the presence of people I have no interest in seeing is a great relief to me. In the silence, with the wild things and a most excellent walking companion, I no longer feel so lost.