Nimue Brown's Blog, page 21

The Sea Spirit Festival

(Nimue, review)

Book 3 in Claudie Arseneault’s The Chronicles of Nerezia is out on the 9th of September. I reviewed the first two books over here – https://druidlife.wordpress.com/2024/05/02/fantastic-fiction/

You do need to read these in order, as the story unfolds and world building develops with it. The characters are all growing, learning and deepening their relationships, too.  This is uplifting fantasy fiction, centred on a mobile, queer platonic household. Thoughtful, warm, affirming, imaginative and a really good comfort read. It’s not a demanding book, but at the same time will give you a lot to think about.

The third tale takes us into an unfamiliar costal city where the Sea Spirit Festival is under way – a mysterious ritual that happens about once a decade, and that raises far more questions than it answers.

If you like fantasy where the solution is not always about violence, then this is for you. There is action in this series, there are fights, but the answers have to be found other ways. Community, helping each other and cooperative answers are very much at the heart of this, which is what makes it so cheering to read. There’s a strong underpinning plotline that we’re being fed slowly – a huge mystery about the history of this world, and the apparently dangerous ‘fragments’ that haunt it.  But, the telling is character-centric, and all about individuals finding their way through the challenges together. I really like the main character, who is trying to figure emself out, and whose deep goodness gets them into trouble rather a lot.

If you fancy some time in a world where civilized people think sharing your pronouns is just polite… if you want friendship-centred fiction, imaginative adventures and plenty of fantastical elements, this is for you. I very much enjoyed it and am looking forward to the next instalment.

You can find out more on the author’s website – https://claudiearseneault.com/the-sea-spirit-festival/

The magic of kindness

(Nimue)

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on the power of kindness to heal and transform. Rather than write something more like an essay, this one emerged as a poem.

Kindness

Kindness softens me

Gentle rain on parched ground

Melting into vulnerability

Frost beneath spring sun.

*

Yielding to life

Blackberries ripen into sweetness

Willingly defenceless

A leaf lifted by the wind.

*

I will not be a fossil

A memory of life echoed in stone

No rigid rock-held ghost

Unable to move.

*

One breath at a time,

Peeling off the old life

A dragonfly tears from nymphhood

Restrictions disintegrate.

*

Kindness easing drama into peace

Dries butterfly wings in the sun

Discarded eggshell bright against soil

Always opportunities to begin.

Body, identity, Druidry

(Nimue)

One of the things I noticed recently when I was ill was how lack of activity impacted on my sense of self. My body identity has shifted in the last year – I’m overall much more at ease in my own skin. However, after a few days in bed, that progress evaporated for a while, leaving me deeply uncomfortable with my physical self.

I notice that primarily I experience my body through what I’m doing. Time outside, walking, being in water, dancing, and playing music all have a strong positive impact on me. Physical affection has a huge impact. When I experience my body through joyful and affirming activities, I feel good in myself. Times when I have been physically limited and when I have experienced my body primarily through pain, I have also had a really poor self image.

I suspect it won’t just be me. Lack of body confidence and a poor self-image undermine confidence and make it harder to do all sorts of things. Being in your body in a cheering way can help with that, I’m finding.

While all sorts of activities might help with this, there’s an obvious case for Druidry. Ritual activities in particular offer us the opportunity to show up bodily in a good way. Solitary ritual has plenty to offer, but standing in circle with other people is especially powerful. Looking back at my own history with ritual I recognise that those group spaces have been good for my mental health and body confidence.

Feeling accepted is really helpful for body confidence. Being in a wilder place can help with that – the natural world does not judge, shame or ridicule. Nature is full of diverse shapes, and being immersed in that can help us be more at ease with ourselves. Harsh judgement of human bodies is very much a human issue. Spending time on Druidic activities can give us room for kinder and more natural approaches to ourselves.

Being a Druid in the world means being present and embodied. Nature is in us, and this invites us to be more at ease with ourselves. As natural beings, we have every right to feel comfortable in our own skins. It’s human cruelty that results in humans suffering with low self esteem and lack of body confidence. This is something we can dismantle in our own heads, and in the wider world.

Positions for meditating

(Nimue)

The most common advice out there is that to meditate, you should sit in an upright position with your back straight, and avoid any positions where you might fall asleep.

First up, if you try to meditate and fall asleep then clearly what your body needed most was sleep – so that’s fine. Sleep.

The question to ask is – why are you meditating? If it’s all about discipline for you, and you want to be all firm and rigid about it, then by all means sit in a way that supports your intentions.

For a lot of us, meditation is about relaxation more than anything else. It’s about easing the body and soothing the mind, and that has spiritual dimensions too. If this is you, then what you do with your body during meditation should involve the following considerations.

What makes you feel comfortable? What position is best for your body and allows you to relax most effectively? What’s the best position for avoiding or minimising pain? What makes you feel safe and at ease? What makes you happiest? Whatever best answers those questions will give you your best meditation positions – and it could well be plural. You may find that sitting or lying in one position for any length of time doesn’t work for you. Be led by what your body needs.

It’s all too easy with spiritual practices to get caught up in other people’s ideas of ‘doing it right’. There’s no one right way of doing any of this. What matters is figuring out what you need from  meditation – or any other practice – and then working out what gives you that. People who suggest you have to do things a certain way often have very specific things they want to get out of a practice and that they think everyone else should want too. It’s worth being alert to this, because your needs may well be different.

Poet in residence

(Nimue)

This weekend, I’m going to be poet in residence for Heart Festival, in Dorset, UK. This is the first time anyone has asked me to be a poet in residence. I’m going to spend the weekend collecting fragments, phrases and whatever inspiration arises in the moment. Next week I’ll be focused on trying to turn that into something for people who attended the festival, and maybe to go out more widely.

I’m fairly good at working quickly and off the cuff, but I’ve never tried to write on these terms before and I have no idea how I’ll do. It will at the very least be an interesting experiment.

I don’t really expect people to take me seriously, so being asked to do this was quite a surprise. It’s obliged me to look at how much time I spend being surprised by people taking me seriously, and to recognise that I need to rethink some of this. As a Druid, as a writer, musician and even as a poet, I do get taken seriously a lot of the time and I could afford to trust myself more. I may have been getting in my own way in the past with my own attitude to what I do. Maybe it’s good enough, and worth taking seriously.

I won’t have any internet access over the weekend. Blog posts are set up to go out, but I won’t be able to reply to any comments until Monday evening at the absolute earlier – maybe not until Tuesday. Your patience is appreciated.

Brigantia

(Guest blog from Chris Mole)

Firstly, a big thank you to Nimue for letting me take up some space here – given that she provided the foreword for Volume 1 and the strong pagan ties of the story, I thought it’d be appropriate to try and reach out to you.

Some necessary pre-amble and context for anyone unfamiliar: Brigantia is the comic book story of a pagan goddess from pre-Roman Britain, thrust into the modern day by the machinations of her nefarious brother Veteris and tasked with restoring hope and light to a country largely bereft of it. The story draws on the limited historical record we have for pre-Roman Britain (largely centred around the Brigantes tribe, based in what is now Yorkshire) and combines it with bits of Celtic mythology and a healthy dose of fantasy to tell a hopefully compelling and right-feeling story about the power of belief. I’m the writer of the series, and I’ve been pushing this train along for a solid 8 years now – we launched the first issue in 2016 and collected the first three issues into a full volume in 2022 (with a foreword very kindly provided by Nimue). The second volume, which collects the last three issues and completes the story, has now launched on Kickstarter!

A disclaimer: I’m not a pagan myself, at least not in any official sense. My partner Limnaia Areia (also the pagan consultant on the series) has described me as an ‘atheist pagan’, in the sense that I think there’s something deeply spiritual about the natural world even if I don’t indulge in any specific, formalised rites or rituals or identify with any particular path. The closest I get is going for a walk in some forested woodland and soaking up what I call “vitamin tree”. That means my primary motive was to tell a powerful story which centres the importance of the natural world – it’s established fairly early on that Veteris’ misdeeds have upset the balance of nature (a suitably obvious metaphor for the 2000 or so years of human development which have caused massive harm to the global climate) even as he’s turned the people of Britain against each other, stoking the fires of hatred and division. 

The lodestone of the story, and the solution to all this is, quite simply – hope. The power of keeping a light burning inside yourself, trying to do the right thing, not letting yourself succumb to despair and misery. Believing, either in an external power or simply in yourself, is the key – the thing that gives you the strength to keep going even when everything seems utterly hopeless, that helps you get up every day and try to make the best of things. I think that stories can be a powerful motivator for keeping that fire burning – they show us that wonderful things are possible, and that we can make our world better.

At its core, then, Brigantia is a story about hope triumphing over fear. About an ancient goddess who thought she’d lost everything finding new friends and a new purpose. About staring into the jaws of doom and pushing back, standing up, saying ‘no’. I hope that it hits the mark when people get to read it, and that we’ve done the Goddess proud. If just a few people who haven’t heard of Brigantia look her up after reading the comic and feel that spark of belief flickering into a flame, well – that’s good enough for me!

Thank you for reading – and please check out the campaign and consider pledging if you like what you see!

Magic of the unconscious mind

(Nimue)

I’ve had a few lovely exchanged with Marie in the comments recently about unconscious thinking and creativity. I thought it might be a good topic to pick up for a post.

The human mind absorbs far more information that we can consciously process, and does a lot of thinking at levels our conscious minds cannot see. When ideas bubble up unexpectedly, this is where they come from. This is really important for anyone seeking inspiration, or trying to solve problems. Our deliberate thinking is often not as good at these things as our unconscious thinking.

Much of it is to do with how we make connections – the unconscious mind handles far more information and can pull far more together to create new possibilities. While this kind of thinking can be treated as irrational, it’s actually very sensible stuff, and what comes up as ‘gut feelings’ or ‘intuition’ is often perfectly rational and just based on an unconscious processing of the available information.

For the creative person, being able to tap into unconscious thinking is often the route to opening up our most imaginative responses. There are a number of ways of doing this, including (but not limited to) paying attention to dreams, making time for daydreaming, letting your mind wander, doing unstructured things like doodling or playing with words or tunes. Experimenting creatively in a not too structured way can result in things bubbling up. You have to make space for it and invite it if you want this kind of inspiration to be available to you. If you’re just waiting for it, you aren’t prompting your unconscious mind to deliver anything in particular.

As a creator, it’s worth spending time exploring the relationship between structure and unconscious outpourings in your work. We all need some structure, but too much structure can limit our thinking and cut off the potential of the unconscious mind. They key is to find ways of working that let enough inspiration in, but also allows you to be deliberate about what you do. There’s no one right way of doing this, the important thing is to find the balances that work for you.

The power of believing each other

(Nimue)

One of the most powerful things we can do for each other, is to believe each other. This is especially important around differences of experience. Listen to people when they talk about prejudice, racism, sexism – that you haven’t seen it might be because you have a wildly different experience of the same spaces. Believe people when they talk about how illness impacts on them. Believe people when they talk about their needs and feelings.

It doesn’t mean having to take action. Simply being heard and feeling understood is powerful. Being allowed to do things your own way so that its viable for you, Is worth so much. Having slack cut where you need it can make worlds of difference. More than anything else though it’s the power of being believed and taken seriously that really helps.

I spent years asking for what I needed and being disbelieved. The grounds were that what I needed was supposedly to small to explain my ongoing emotional distress. The burden of disbelief  added to my distress. I’ve since established that the things I thought I needed were exactly the things I needed. Being heard and being believed has made me feel a good deal less crazy and dysfunctional, and has opened the way for considerable healing.

Just being heard can be restorative. It can give a person back their sense of dignity. Being treated like you don’t know what’s best for you is disempowering and often infantilizing.  Having people assert that they know what you need better than you know yourself is profoundly uncomfortable. It’s even worse when they are wrong about that. Being taken seriously, when you’ve been denied that in the past, can of itself be a healing experience.

The risk, when we believe each other, is that the trust will be abused in order to scam or manipulate. However, treating people like you believe them doesn’t have to translate into action. If someone’s stories lead to wanting money, unpaid work, unfair advantage etc then those red flags need taking seriously. If someone simply wants to have their story heard and to be treated with respect, there’s no reason to think they are trying to manipulate you.

If someone else’s truth makes you uncomfortable, it’s worth taking some time to ask why. It can be difficult looking at experiences that are different from you own – finding that something you are part of is a difficult space for People of Colour for example might be unsettling. That’s the kind of discomfort we have to take on board if we don’t want to double down on our own privileges. It’s ok to be uncomfortable. Sometimes its necessary. Don’t mistake your own healthy discomfort for someone else treating you badly.

Our own experiences of the world are not much of a guideline for how anyone else might experience things. For the person dealing with chronic fatigue, your simple task might be prohibitively difficult.  Your happy space may be overwhelming for someone who is neurodivergent. When we listen to each other, and believe each other we can build understanding and a more flexible view of the world. My experience is not going to be the same as yours, but if we hear each other out, and take each other seriously, we can figure things out and avoid invalidating each other.

How hard should relationships be?

(Nimue)

The idea that relationships – and particularly marriages – are hard was with me from early on. It’s an often said thing, a generally held wisdom. Marriages are hard. Relationships are hard. You have to work at them. So I went in to adult life willing to put in the work.

This last year and a bit has led me to a significant re-think. We’ve had some hefty challenges, but the relationship itself has never been one of them. When things come up for us, we talk – and listen to each other. We figure out what’s needed, and then we act on it. That takes a small amount of effort, but really not very much. As we’re both invested in making each other happy and wanting to take care of each other, the desire to find the best way of doing things, is strong.

All of that calls for trust, for good communication, willingness to be vulnerable. We’ve had a lot to learn about each other. Being together has changed both of us, so were constantly learning and adapting to each other. It takes attention but it’s not actually work, it doesn’t feel difficult. That’s been quite surprising.

In the past, lots of relationship things have felt like work. Trying to understand someone who didn’t communicate their thoughts and feelings was hard work. And further back, trying to get things right for someone who constantly shifted the goalposts was hard work. Trying to explain to someone who is not inclined to listen, is hard work. Being the only person willing to try and adapt and change is hard work. There can be a lot of work in a relationship if only one of the people involved is actively trying to make it function.

What I’m finding now doesn’t feel even slightly like work. It feels like an adventure.

I find myself wondering how much of a difference it would have made if I’d started with a better story.  If I’d grown up being told that relationships are an adventure, requiring open heartedness and trust, would I have made different choices? Probably. The expectation of hard work was so engrained in me that I didn’t question it. That’s the power stories have over us, informing our expectations and our sense of what’s normal. The stories that we don’t even notice can have huge power over us.

I have a better story to tell now, about mutual support and adventure, and what happens when someone actively wants to understand you. How good it is being understood and accepted as your true self, not having to pretend or compromise. How much good can be made from a willingness to cooperate.

Life is full of challenges. Love does not have to be part of the burden we each carry. It doesn’t have to be one more struggle, or a place of wounding and difficulty. How we choose to relate to each other makes worlds of difference to the kinds of life experience we have. Kindness is so incredibly powerful. In some ways it seems ridiculous to me that I’ve come to this knowledge so late in life. At the same time I know it isn’t just me, I see so much online and so many stories that go with the perspective I used to have.

The art of contemplation

(Nimue)

I regularly frame posts with the word ‘contemplating’ in the title, but what oes this mean in practice? I thought I’d share a bit about what I’m doing on that score.

I’m constantly reading, learning from others and exploring ideas. Every so often a particular issue or concept looms large for me and I invest time in it. This often means deliberate reading around, and time spent reflecting. I can have this going on for weeks in the background before I’ll feel ready to write about it. I find it helpful to take my time when I’m grappling with an idea and bringing together different aspects of my own experience.

For example, the recent co-dependency post owes a lot to a conversation with a friend back in July, and then seeing other friends using the term in different ways of Facebook. The first conversation led me to doing some reading around, to establish both the common usage of the term and that it isn’t a formal diagnosis. I spent some time reflecting on how that all related to my own experiences. To get to a blog post there’s an additional stage of sifting through what I’ve learned to see if there’s anything I might usefully share here.

Often, the questions I ask are very personal during the contemplation process. I’m doing it because I’m trying to figure something out that relates to my own life. It’s rare that I end up playing with ideas in a more abstract way – usually there’s some specific application. Whether I share the personal elements of the journey varies – often I think it’s too personal and not likely to be useful, so I try and extrapolate to come up with something more broadly useful.

The co-dependency question was actually ‘am I co-dependent?’ It related to a previous relationship and the possibility that I had some unconscious reason for perpetuating a harmful situation. On reflection the answer was no. Given half a chance to create healthy and functional environments, that’s what I do, and I have plenty of evidence to support that. This has been part of a wider questioning about who and how I am, what I choose, what I am and have been responsible for, and how I might reconsider the past.

I find contemplation a necessary part of my learning process. I read a lot of non-fiction and I find it is necessary to spend time with ideas so as to consolidate what I’ve learned. The more complicated something is, the more time I need to spend absorbing and reflecting on new information. From what I’ve picked up studying psychology, this is normal for learning – that we need to work with material in order to embed it.

I often take quite a free form approach t contemplation – going over what I’ve learned in a way that allows new ideas to arise, and connections to be made with other things I’ve picked up. I look for patterns, and see what surfaces as potentially relevant in my own body of experience.

I don’t think it really matters how you approach the business of consolidating learning and contemplating experience. Doing it certainly does matter – this time is essential for processing experience and input, and integrating what we hope to learn into our minds so that if goes forward with us.