Nimue Brown's Blog, page 191

What does poverty look like?

You can’t see it, not reliably. Not if you don’t know what to look for. Many working people are in poverty. Many young people trapped in expensive renting situations and unable to get mortgages, are struggling with poverty. For many, it’s not where you end up all the time, just something you fall into the month there’s an unexpected bill or a setback. A person can have a good coat and not be able to afford to eat this week.

Our stories about poverty are often othering. They’re about people who are not like us, who live in almost Victorian conditions that they have brought upon themselves – it’s a mad sort of story, but there we are. People horrified by refugees and homeless folk with mobile phones, because they don’t fit the story. People oblivious to the folk around them who are marginalised, because when you sound educated, you don’t fit the poverty story.

We need to be kinder to each other. If we put down our assumptions about how poor people look, dress, and spend their time, we might more readily see what’s around us.

Midwinter ravens

I recorded this little film for the Pagan Federation online festival this winter. It was done at short notice and I’d not been well so I do not look great, but there we go. I’m very much in favour of being able to share your face when you don’t look like a photoshopped twenty year old!

A few thoughts about ritual at midwinter, and a story about ravens…

The role of a Druid

What should a Druid be doing at the moment? What does Druidry have to bring to these strange and troubled times in which we find ourselves?

I am reminded of Iolo Morganwg’s “The Truth Against The World.” Let’s skip over Morganwg’s messy relationship with truth for now. We’ve seen years of effort internationally to undermine the very concept of truth. We’ve seen people demanding to have unfounded opinions taken as seriously as evidenced theories. We’ve got fake news, and a political culture of lying. We live in an age of bots, where fake people promote fake stories at the expense of reality. Sometimes, I look at what gets spread that way and I find I don’t even know where to start. We live in webs of misinformation, illusion, gaslighting and denial.

It may well be the work of a Druid to speak the truth, but it’s difficult when so many people don’t want to hear it.

Many people seem hungry for simple solutions and are happy to blame someone else rather than deal with complex realities. Reality is complicated. Simple ‘truths’ that divide the world into good/bad, and us/them, do us so much more harm than good, but it’s hard to pitch something nuanced when you’re in a climate of gross generalisations and a disinterest in detail.

Perhaps it will make little or no difference to speak the truth. Perhaps it will change nothing to defend research, evidence, experts and reason. But I think we should do it anyway. Because for me, Druidry is in part about doing what is right and what is honourable even when that might not get you anywhere. It’s the importance of what we do for its own sake, not just the focus on achievement. Perhaps we are all going to hell in a handcart, but in the meantime, it makes sense to point out the nature of the handcart and the hell we trundle towards. And maybe sing as we go, about what might have worked better.

Dealing with fear – some advice

For many people who already feel marginalised, the current political situation is causing a great deal of fear. I’ve lived with anxiety for some years now and I’ve learned a lot about what helps and what doesn’t. This post is primarily for people encountering someone else’s fear and wondering what would be helpful.

Just because you aren’t afraid of something doesn’t mean it is unreasonable for someone else to fear it. They will have reasons. Dismissing the fear doesn’t reduce it for the other person or help them at all. Taking them seriously will mean they feel validated and supported, which will help a bit, and in the meantime, you can learn how things impact on them.

You may want to offer comfort. The trouble is that when someone is deep in a state of fear, attempts to jolly them along, or make light of it don’t help. It just feels like being ignored and dismissed. Ask yourself if you want to make them feel better, or if you want them to seem better so that you could be more comfortable yourself. That’s not an easy thing to look at, but, it makes a lot of odds if you can. You may be trying to protect yourself by not wanting to take seriously the things they fear. This is understandable, but likely it won’t be helpful.

Many people are afraid not simply of what will come, but of what’s already happening. This is important stuff to hear. It is often not speculative fear, it is coming from a place of things being awful already and being afraid simply of it carrying on, not changing. Whether we’re talking about lack of mental health provision, climate change, poverty, lack of jobs, cost of housing, work insecurity, pressures on the NHS, (or medical costs if you’re somewhere that’s an issue) social breakdown, racism, threats to minority groups – these things are all happening. It’s not irrational to fear they may get worse, but there’s plenty enough to fear in just keeping the current levels.

If you are better resourced than average, you may feel more secure and more insulated. You may be confident that you have the skills, intelligence, education and opportunities to keep you and those you care about safe. That’s nice for you. But, most of us are in reality only a paycheck or two from disaster at any time. Most of us could be put on our knees by the misfortune of a serious setback. It may be more in your interests to stand in solidarity with people who have been unlucky and to sympathise with their fears.

There isn’t much that can be done to alleviate fear right now because there truly is a lot out there to be afraid of. What we can do is take each other seriously and show each other care and respect. We can have different anxieties and priorities and still be on the same side – wanting things to be better and more hopeful than they are.

Crisis Tactics

One of the things it is common to lose to abuse is a sense of where your own edges need to be. Abusers will work to erode your confidence and self esteem, because when you don’t feel you can say no, you’re more vulnerable to their predations. Standing my ground, defending myself, flagging up problems and expressing distress all still put me in a place of expecting to be knocked down harder than I was by the initial problem. It’s hard to hold boundaries when you fear that protecting yourself will invite twice as much trouble.

I’m not living in that kind of environment any more. However, that knee-jerk reaction remains. If I need to express distress, then fear of what that will bring is with me. Until I’ve tested something like this, I don’t know how anyone will react to me – will they double down? To navigate this I’ve given myself a set of rules. Having established this rule set means that under pressure and feeling emotionally vulnerable, I have a set of defaults to work with.

One. I am entitled to say no to anyone for any reason and I am not obliged to justify that decision. If someone hurts me and I want to just back off and not deal with it, I am allowed to do that.

Two. If I express distress then there are a number of acceptable responses – anything with an element of care, concern, apology. Anything that accepts my response as valid even if it wasn’t where I was supposed to end up. Anyone kindly explaining why it wasn’t meant that way. Any kind of ‘oops’ or ‘oh shit’ noises. I may need further conversation to sort things out, but any of these responses are worth working with.

Three. If I express distress and am met with blame, criticism, mockery, dismissal, being told why I shouldn’t feel like that, being told why I ‘made them’ do it or why their position is justified, or anything else of this shape, I am entitled to end the conversation and step away from the person.

Four. How much slack I cut is totally up to me. How much I am willing to forgive is totally up to me.

Five. How much I love a person is not a reliable measure of that person’s inherent worth. If a person does not value me enough to care when they have upset me, then they do not merit the gift of my care and attention. I am allowed to feel that I have made a mistake in investing in them.

Six. How a person treats me when I am upset is not a measure of my worth – although it may well be a measure of my worth to them, which is not the same thing.

If it is not too much to ask – a poem

Bring me your excess and your unreason.

Bring me your broken hearted devastation

At the state of the world, your passionate desire

For something better, your idealism,

Your most irrational hope and wildest optimism.

Show me the places where you are

Almost unbearably tender, already shattered,

Wounded and healing, dripping sweat and tears

Show me your scars. The ones the world inflicted

The ones you made in your own skin

Out of grim necessity, the need for art,

The quest for some kind of meaning.

Tell me the outlandish stories of how

You came to be here, tell me the preposterous

Dreams that define the path you mean to take.

Share with me the warmth of your hands

On my hands, the warmth of you leaning against me

The sacred, magic circles of arms and holding.

Share the rites of passage, the rituals of meaning.

Give me the parts of yourself you are most afraid of.

Give me the weight of your shame, your loneliness.

I am hungry for these things in ways almost no one

Understands but perhaps you are one of the few

Who can cough up jagged truth like owl pellets

And breathe the flames of your most unacceptable self

Into my life. Bring me your unspeakable longing

And your existential fear, tell me what is

Worth dying for, and harder still,

What is worth living for.

And perhaps I can kiss the part of your soul

That was always unkissable and perhaps

I can bring my too raw, bloody and dangerous

Tenderness to the parts of you that you fear

And perhaps there are enough of us we can

Devise new ways of being in the world

With our tendencies to bleed to death when wounded

And scream in pain and ecstasy

And set fire to ourselves

And love everything too fiercely

And ourselves not sufficiently.

Perhaps we can talk about it all night.

We can make sense of it a little,

Make welcome what we keep hidden in the dark

On the inside.

Bring me your excess and unreason

That I may promise fantastical things

And weave life out of that dreaming.

Unspeakable loneliness

How can you speak of it when it implies criticism of everyone you love? How can you say ‘I am lonely’ if you have a partner, or friends, or family, or all of those? But you can have people in your life and be lonely, and I think it needs talking about.

In any given 24 hour period, Tom and I spend something close to 24 hours together, waking and sleeping. We work at the same table. But, we work alone, usually in silence, each engaged with whatever we’re doing. Working in the same space isn’t time spent together, and it took us a while to learn that.

We both suffer from depression and anxiety. This means there are times when both of us need someone with the energy and ideas to break through our numbness and take us somewhere else. When we’re both ill, we can’t actually do that for each other. It is also a lot to ask that it falls only to your partner to wade in and rescue you when you have been kidnapped by the monsters in your head.

Depression and anxiety both, in their own ways, make it hard to ask for help. If you are feeling gloomy and worthless, how can you ask someone you like to spend time with that? How can you show up socially without a mask firmly in place to spare others? And if you socialise while masked, you will feel incredibly lonely. If anxiety is gnawing at you, then the fear of how anyone will respond to you making it visible is also going to be part of the mix.

Mental illness means you can be in a room full of people and totally unable to connect to them. It can mean you won’t let anyone see you as you are, and you experience the profound loneliness of being related to as you are not. It can mean being unable to go out at all, unable to speak, unable to reach out. So you may have hordes of lovely friends and just not know how to approach them when depression has its teeth around your throat. You probably don’t want to put them through seeing you like this. Maybe you don’t want to sabotage your own dignity by letting people see you when you are broken.

There are many potential causes of loneliness – and for many people isolation is central. But, a person can appear not to be isolated, and still be feeling really cut off. It may be very difficult to hear about loneliness from someone you think should feel close to you, but if anyone does talk to you about it, this is a sign of tremendous trust. Try not to be cross with them over how you might feel, because if they’ve come to you it’s likely because they think you are one of the few people who might not hate them for feeling as they do.

Seasonal Pagan Colouring

A bit of a plug for Michael Daoust…

‘TwoLoveBirds and the Festival of Yule Coloring book’ is a charming coloring book that features 25 unique pictures that will enchant both adult and child alike.

But what is the TwoLoveBirds project? The TwoLoveBirds is a pagan-run project that aims to create pagan-themed material for parents to use as educational tools. It features the adventures of two little birds, Tcheep and Pit, as they explore their very pagan world together.

Amazon book link: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1710315431

Authors Smashwords page: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TwoLoveBirds

Author Instagram:  twolovebirds245

Author Twitter: mdaoust245

Author on Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/user/MichaelDaoust6

Taking Mrs Beaten out in public

Mrs Beaten is a character from the Hopeless Maine project. She’s judgmental, obsessive, is probably in part an automaton (I’ve not yet clarified this) and has a messy personal history to say the least. Some of which comes up on this story…

Stroud Short Stories runs twice a year, picking ten readers to share their stories in an evening. I’ve read once before, judged for it and helped put together the first anthology of stories. I’m introduced in this video by John Holland – who runs the whole thing and who is a prize-winning short story writer himself.

Over to Mrs Beaten…

Reducing Plastic

The trouble with a lot of advice about reducing plastic is either it’s very basic – take your own shopping bag level of stuff – or there are privilege issues. I’ve been giving some thought to ways of reducing plastic that don’t depend on your health or your income too much.

Avoid overpackaging. It’s not always easy to tell the first time you buy something if it will turn out to have layers of plastic on the inside, but once you know, these are easily avoided. Overpackaging is most often a feature on snacks – multipacks of crisps, cake bars, sweets and whatnot. These are hardly essential. If you’re desperate for snacks, there are options with less packaging.

Carry a water bottle or a thermos flask – this has the bonus of saving you money. If you can’t afford a fancy water bottle, re-using bottles is workable. Keep your bottle cool to reduce the risk of it leaching plastic into your water. If you have to buy a drink, there’s a lot to be said for a re-usable cup in a cafe if you can afford it. Failing that, fruit juice in tetrapacks is worth a thought – better than paying someone to extract and bottle water – which is a preposterous thing. You can then re-fill the pack with water – I’ve done this at events.

Re-use packaging – jiffy bags, bubble wrap and all that sort of thing can be re-used, saving you money at the same time. If you end up with a lot of it, give it to a charity shop so they can re-use it when people buy breakables.

Check the price for weight on fruit and veg. Unhelpfully sometimes loose stuff is sold by the item not the weight, so you may need to give it some thought. Sometimes the loose stuff is the same price, or occasionally even cheaper than the bagged produce. Also consider the food miles though – loose mangos and pineapples may not be as good an idea as apples in a bag…

Clothes made from synthetic fabrics release plastic particles when you wash them. Try to wash a bit less frequently and/or on gentler cycles, or going over to handwashing (I do this, synthetics are easy to handwash).This will reduce the amount of plastic you put out. It also increases the life-expectancy of your clothes, which saves you money, and saves you money on water, electricity and laundry soap – which also improves your sustainability. Win all round.

Car tyres are another source of plastic particles in our environments. If you have to drive, then going at lower speeds, cornering and braking to reduce wear and tear on your tyres will save you money on replacing them, and save you money on fuel consumption and that all helps with being greener as well. If you can do without the car of course that’s even better from both an environmental perspective and a body health perspective. For those of us who can, walking and cycling is healthier.

Picking up rubbish is a good way of helping if you have the time and energy. Plastic bags and other detritus end up in our water systems, and then get out to sea and into the bodies of marine creatures. Plastic breaking down in wild places can strangle and choke wildlife. It doesn’t solve the existence of the plastic in the first place, but you can at least reduce the harm.