Nimue Brown's Blog, page 218

Revisiting a landscape

Going into a landscape for the first time tends to be exciting. Humans respond well to novelty. The excitement of a new place can have some of us making our way around the world – a habit that does not do the world itself any good at all. Novelty can break us out of our own disinterest. A distant and exotic landscape can impact on us in ways a familiar one won’t. Not because the landscapes closer to home aren’t beautiful, but because we can become complacent about them. We’re not always good at properly seeing what’s right in front of us.

In the drama of encountering a significant landscape for the first time, it’s normal to have a lot of feelings. If there are a lot of stories attached to a landscape, those can shape our responses and feelings of significance. However, we don’t inhabit those stories and they are not inherent to us – not when we’re in an unfamiliar landscape. It’s all tourism at this point.

When you revisit a landscape repeatedly, you build a relationship with it. If there are stories about the landscape, you deepen your understanding of them. A story can be as simple as a few lines about who once had a temple here, or how folklore re-imagined the bumps as treasure mounds… After a while, there will also be stories that are about your relationship with the landscape. These may also be very short – the field where we saw the huge and really shiny fox. The lane that was full of tiny frogs. A story doesn’t have to be long or complicated to be part of your relationship with a place.

Revisiting places and building stories of relationship, you bring the place into yourself. You craft relationship over time and through revisiting. Seeing a place in different seasons, your understanding of it will deepen.

Over time and revisiting you also build a body knowledge of place. A physical sense of how it feels to move through the landscape. A body knowledge of the distance between one key feature and another. A sense of where the wildlife is, or where to stop, or where to avoid. The trick at this point is to stay alive to the land and not start seeing what you think is there. It’s important to stay open when revisiting a place – as open as you would if you’d never been there before and have no idea what to expect.

Any landscape has the potential to enchant you. The question is not whether the place is new and exciting enough to move you. The real question is, are you ready to treat each experience as new, and to be properly open to it?

Spring Views

In a landscape dominated by deciduous woodland, the views change with the season. Once the leaves are on the trees, it can become harder to see any great distance. Views are caught occasionally, through the gaps.

We have a history of cutting down trees to create views. The eighteenth century notion of the picturesque landscape had landowners creating views by cutting down trees. This movement has informed landscape art and is part of the story of what we tell ourselves a good view means. We expect distance, drama, and plenty of scope for looking at it. Where the views are to be enjoyed, and where the trees are to grow for being viewed distorts the landscape itself. If we’re trying to make it something pretty to look at, if we want to see the dramatic shape of the land, we take out nature to replace it with human ideas of beauty.

We may see beauty in landscapes that are ravaged. If we come to them not knowing what should be living there and how they might look if we’d not pared them back to a few inches of closely cropped grass, we may perceive the drama and not the damage. The Lake District in the UK is an example of a close grazed landscape revealing the drama and views of big landforms. It is a landscape that should have a lot more trees in it. That we want to have a certain kind of experience when looking at it has an impact on the land.

Seeing a long way should, I think, be treated as a seasonal activity. It’s a pleasure available in spring before the leaves emerge and in autumn after they are gone. We can have the trees and the views, if we don’t insist on having the views all year round.

The next installment of The Bardic Chair Tradition Demystified

Another fine video from Mark Lindsey Earley exploring the modern bardic chair movement.

Grief and religion

One of the things that religions have in common is that they offer answers to human suffering. It may be in the form of strategies to relieve that suffering by living in certain ways. It may be through stories of divine oversight, grand plans, or afterlife recompense. This is one of the ways in which I’ve always found organised religions problematic. Not least because so often, those consolations don’t turn out to be that helpful for people experiencing grief and trauma.

When you have to ask why your God wasn’t there for you and why terrible things were allowed to happen, you either undermine your faith or start having to believe that terrible things are somehow part of a grand plan for your own good. It’s a bigger issue for omnipotent Gods who are supposed to be benevolent.

We suffer in so far as we care. Love and grief are two sides of the same coin. Everything in our world is finite, and will end, or die and if we care about that, or about ourselves we are bound to be hurt by this. To care is to be vulnerable to loss.

In my late teens, I first encountered existentialist thinking, which responds to the grief of life and the apparent meaninglessness by owning it. We may have to make our own meaning. There may be no other meaning. It was the first approach I’d found that genuinely comforted me and it did so because it let me own what I was experiencing. This may be all we have. There may be no grand plan. Everyone dies. If you care, it hurts.

Rather than follow a path that has anything to offer by way of more conventional comfort, I’ve lived with this on my own terms. I see loss and grief as part of life. I see them as intrinsic parts of my caring and loving. I’ve not sought a path that would free me from pain, rather, I’ve tried to embrace it as part of what it means to be human. I find more comfort in the idea that there isn’t a plan, that terrible things happen for no real reason at all sometimes, and that we certainly do not get what we deserve. I think it’s kinder not to assume we get what we deserve.

When we try to protect ourselves from pain, we may close our hearts to what’s around us. We may delude ourselves. We may not do today the things we will no longer have chance to do tomorrow. When you live knowing that everything and everyone is going to die and you let that colour your world view, it becomes more necessary to live fully. It becomes more important to tell people you love them. It becomes more important to try and sort things out here and now, and get them right in the first place.

I’m never very sure what I believe when it comes to deity and afterlife. What I am sure is that it works better for me to live as though there is nothing else but this life and this body I have to experience it with. To love as much as I can and to accept what that means and to embrace grief as an aspect of love makes the most sense to me.

To be rich in wildlife

Today I’m picking up a principle from The Tree Charter – Sustain Landscapes Rich in Wildlife. You can read more about it here – https://treecharter.uk/principles-nature.html

When there’s scope to make money for humans, we’re all too quick to cut down trees, grub out hedges and remove wildlife corridors. We have not recognised rich landscapes as a good in their own right and we haven’t even recognised that rich landscapes are better for us.

There’s a really good article here about American studies into the benefits of urban trees – https://www.warwickdc.gov.uk/info/20323/trees/577/the_benefits_of_urban_trees.  We are better people when we live with trees. We treat each other better. Trees make us better humans, while sterile, human-made but actually inhuman landscapes make us into our worst selves.

I haven’t picked up any links for this, but I gather from the Woodland Trust’s Broadleaf magazine that studies are under way into what happens when you have more trees around crops – and the answer is that you sustain the insects who predate other insects, and you get a more self-sustaining system. Richness and diversity in the landscape means viable eco-systems which in turn means a better environment for us. There’s nothing self-indulgent or ‘hippy’ about protecting the environment and all that lives in it – this is self preservation. A sterile environment will not support us.

The word ‘rich’ is important here, I think. Humans tend to think of richness in terms of money. A human-centric view focusing on something that is of no use in itself and that only works if it can be traded for something usable. However, environmental richness cannot be amassed as a private resource in the same way. The richness of insect populations and of birds, the richness we gain from clean air and water – these are essential. The richness of life itself is something that should be available to all of us to enjoy, and that should not be destroyed for the short term profits of the few.

If we invested in the idea of environmental richness in the same way we, as a species, have invested in the idea of financial richness, we would soon stop making such a mess of things. We’re squandering bounty because we can’t see its worth. The richness of the soil when it is full of micro-organisms. The richness of oceans teeming with fish. The richness of insect life. This is real wealth. It is the wealth that could sustain us all, and without it we cannot flourish. Invest in landscapes if you want real riches.

 

The narratives of meat

Diet is a very emotive subject, so let me be clear – this is not a blog post about food choices, this is a post about the stories we tell around our food choices. It’s about a set of perceptions that are so normalised, so taken for granted that we might not even notice them. We tell stories about what it means to eat meat, and those have a powerful effect on us, even though we have more up to date stories that suggest high meat consumption isn’t good for your body or for the planet.

Meat is high status food. It costs more to produce, and always has, so we can go all the way back to the Celts and the hero’s portion at feasts. At any period in history, the poor have tended to eat little or no meat while the rich have eaten a lot more of it. Meat equates to wealth, meat consumption equates to wealth. Eating meat is part of the story our culture tells itself about what it means to be wealthy. It is feasts with whole roast swans, still with their feathers on, or Henry the 8th throwing bones over his shoulder for dogs to pick up.

Meat is seen as macho – red meat especially. So eating red meat is to be seen as masculine. To not eat meat is often seen as effeminate. Meat consumption is associated with sexually powerful heterosexual masculinity. It’s also associated with muscle building and physical strength, even though you can do that with any kind of decent protein sources. I think some of this has to do with the way our feudal history has constructed both masculinity and hierarchy. We’re back to that Henry the 8th image again.

Part of that macho red meat narrative taps in to ideas of man the hunter. Now, most men are not hunting down wild cows in order to get their steaks, but even so, there’s an emotional association that suggests to people that if they are eating red meat, they are the sort of person who could have hunted it. It’s an emotional effect that links feelings of power, competence and mastery with the consumption of meat, perhaps especially potent when the person in question has done nothing to earn those feelings.

How we feel about something often has more impact on us than logic or evidence. What we eat is part of our sense of self. The stories we tell ourselves about what our food means reinforces our food choices. The stories around eating meat are stories of strength and power, of dominance, and importance. I suspect that the less actual power you have, the more affecting those stories are.

Vegetarians and vegans tell stories about being healthy, living kindly and having less impact on the planet. There’s a different kind of power here, it’s about the power to make change rather than power over other beings. These are stories that help a person feel kind and virtuous, and worthy – all of which is also very attractive.

I find it interesting the way ideas of what is ‘natural’ enters these stories as well. As far as I can make out, everyone views their food choice as natural, but does not necessarily think everyone else’s food choices are also natural. Everyone thinks their own food choices are good and appropriate, but may well not hold the same beliefs about other people’s food choices. Food choices that supposedly make you powerful can result in some very fragile and defensive behaviour. Food choices that supposedly make you kind can result in some pretty aggressive and unkind behaviour. Our food stories can divide us into tribal groups, feeling conflict with those whose stories are different.

While we stay focused on the stories and the emotions, we aren’t looking properly at the science, the evidence and the climate impact of how we live.

Adventures with Ankles

Most of my joints will bend the wrong way(s) under any kind of pressure. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve grasped that this is a thing with considerable implications. It explains much of why I hurt, and why I get tired a lot. The tissues supporting my joints are softer than normal, so everything takes more effort, and I’m more likely to injure myself, including micro-damage. When I was first dealing with fatigue issues in my teens, I’m not sure anyone was aware of this sort of thing. No one asked about my joints.

My ankles are especially bad. I spent my childhood falling over a lot, running was scary and difficult. But, I’ve persisted, kept moving, walked, danced, swam, did what I could with this body and tried not to hurt it too much. I hold pens and chopsticks the ‘wrong’ way to alleviate hand pressure. I hold bows the wrong way, I probably type wrongly as well, but I get by.

A few weeks into learning Tai Chi it became apparent that I couldn’t get the knee and toe positions right for most stances. It’s a small knee bend. My teacher talked a lot about not bending knees the wrong way – clearly used to a lot of older students with dodgy knees. I started exploring what was happening between knees and ankles and realised I was loading the joints badly. Thus started a massive program to re-think how I stand and walk.

My ankles default to rolling outwards in response to any kind of pressure (i.e. being stood up). This probably makes me more likely to fall over, and I suspect it puts pressure on my knees and thighs. One of my hip joints is very loose as it is and often problematic. To correct my ankles I had to get more weight onto the inside of my foot. I focused on my big toes. I did it when practicing Tai Chi, and also when walking, and at first it really hurt, and gradually it’s got easier.

This in turn has got me looking at my toes. I’ve never been a serious wearer of pointy, heeled shoes so my toes aren’t much distorted by that, but they do all roll towards the middle. Getting my weight in the right place has meant training my toes to spread out a bit more. I need to build toe strength! When learning new moves I have to figure out how I’m going to get my ankles to the right place, and this can be tricky with bigger steps, but I’m getting there, and my teacher has been supportive and helpful.

I’ve learned a lot about my body in recent months. I’ve learned things that I wish I’d known when I was a child, struggling with sports lessons. I wish my teachers had known. I wish my doctors had known when I started having fatigue issues. I spent so long with body pain being treated like an over-reaction, fatigue being treated like drama, the poor co-ordination that goes with hypermobility being treated like a personal failing or lack of effort. It’s hard to ask for help when you’ve been convinced that your body is fine and your mind is the problem. I’m getting there now, and it’s changed how I feel about myself and what I do with my body.

I’d internalised so much of that sense of my body issues just meaning that I am a crap person in some way. Having a clear sense of the mechanics has been empowering, and allows me to feel better about myself. I get tired more than the average person because everything takes me more effort. I hurt more because I take more damage. It was never all in my head. And now that I’m dealing with it as a thing happening in my body, I might even be able to improve the situation for myself.

Walking my Druidry

Walking has long been a key part of my spiritual life. It’s how I connect with the landscape and engage with the living world around me. There can be enchantment in moments of beauty, and close contact with wild things. There can be inspiration from all of that, and also from the way the rhythm of movement loosens up my mind. Time with trees, sun, wind, water and sky has beneficial effects on my mental health, calming and soothing me. It won’t always fix everything, but I can count on it to take the edge off.

There is a process that only happens if I’m out and walking for a long time – at least four hours, maybe more. It’s not something that’s always available to me because I don’t reliably have the energy for the massive walks and I can’t do them in very cold or wet weather. However, when I can, I notice distinct shifts in my mental states. Over time, the landscape opens me up. It opens my heart, takes down my defences, makes me soft, tender and open to everything around me. It is a euphoric feeling and brings with it a sense of great kinship and involvement. Stripped back in this way, I feel like part of the landscape, not an observer of it.

The defences come from dealing with people. There is nothing in a landscape I need to protect myself from. Yes, there are things that could hurt my body, and I need to be careful, and mindful of hazards, but that’s very different. I can move at my own speed and act on my own terms. I usually walk with my husband, and so we talk as we walk, but that’s also gentle and open and spacious. There is no effort involved. Thoughts and conversations arise and flow as they will, and sometimes we have nothing to say and that’s also fine.

Being in the landscape in this way has taught me a lot about what I want from my human relationships. I want to be able to hold that same open awareness. I want to be soft and unguarded and relaxed about being affected by what I encounter. It’s much harder to do that with people, and much less safe. But at the same time, I’m starting to feel that if I can be more landscape-led in what I do, and treat the human risks with the same untroubled respect I have for steep banks, slippery surfaces and sunstroke, I might be able to do things very differently. If I can find ways to listen more to the land without having to spend hours peeling off armour, perhaps I can find better ways of going into human space.

Working hours and mental health

One of the things I worry about, because I suffer from assorted physical issues and poor mental health, is not being able to work like a ‘normal’ person. This can mean pushing harder to try and do at least as much as I think a person in regular employment would do. Whatever that means.

Last autumn I established that I can do 40-50 hour weeks. I sustained that kind of workload for about five months. I watched it undermine my physical health and wipe out my mental health. On reflection, I don’t think is purely because I was fragile to begin with, but because long working hours are detrimental to mental health.

A long day leaves a person with no energy in the evening – or what’s left of it. You can only recover. If you can recover. You can’t do anything much to lift, cheer and sustain yourself. It is difficult being sociable or physically active when you are exhausted. The same thing happens with weekends – if you can take them. Being too tired to do anything much and not even having the energy to try and think of something it might be good to do.

In a counterpoint to this, I’ve seen a few articles floating about online regarding companies who have cut down to four day weeks without cutting pay. Productivity and enthusiasm go up. Sick days are reduced. Happier and more motivated staff turn out to be better workers.

When you are exhausted, it is harder to make good decisions. It is harder to plan for the long term or to take the time to examine your work life balance. Exhaustion as your normal state, is a toxic condition to live with. It sucks the joy out of life and turns everything into a chore that will take energy you can’t afford. Exhaustion makes it harder to engage with others, harder to care and harder to give. When you feel under-resourced, you are more easily persuaded of scarcity and the need to make sure you are protecting yourself from others. Exhaustion makes us easier to control.

When you have energy and time in which to deploy it, you can make more informed life choices. You aren’t just fighting for the next breath or staggering towards the next sleep. People who feel well resourced feel more able to share and give and are less likely to be frightened or persuaded by emotive, unevidenced arguments promoting hatred and division.

As the UK has shuffled towards the brexit cliff edge, I’ve noticed how many people I know are simply exhausted. I hear myself saying ‘just make it stop’, conscious that torture works by getting people to the point where they will do anything, say anything to make it stop. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. Exhaustion works in much the same way. We don’t make our best choices when we are exhausted, and when we would do anything to just stop suffering for a little while.

The Bardic Chair Tradition Demystified

Here’s the next Bardic Chair video from Mark Lindsey Earley.