Nimue Brown's Blog, page 23

Ancestors of awkward choices

(Nimue)

Piracy may seem like an odd topic for a Druid post, but stick with me here… Pirate Mary Reed has a fascinating history, including a lot of gender complexity. The story goes that she made a pro-hanging speech at her trail. I’ve tried to track down the text, but the internet is a bit shit these days and I’ve not managed to find it.

According to the story, Mary Read spoke in favour of hanging at her own trial for piracy on the grounds that if piracy went unpunished, good men would starve and she was not ok with that. Found guilty, she died of fever in prison before anyone managed to hang her.

I’m not in favour of the death penalty, but this story is one that I find resonant. It’s about standing up for what you think is right even when that’s not even slightly in your interests. It’s also about doing so with style, boldness and flair, which I admire.

Quite some years ago at an event, I was faced with an accusation of bullying – there’s a long and complex back story here. I was absolutely guilty of being inconvenient to the person who made the accusation, and the basis of the bullying accusation was that I’d sent them a review book they did not like. The people running the event did not seem – to my mind – to be taking it seriously or dealing with it appropriately.

Which is how I ended up saying a lot of things about the importance of listening to victims and taking bullying accusations seriously. Because I believe that, and I stand by that belief even when I’m the person facing the accusations. My accuser went on to try and get me fired from my day job. Here I am talking about it again, conscious that this was not a moment of glory for me, and that there are still people who may well think I’m awful because of what happened. Sometimes you have to say things because they need talking about and there’s something to be said for not trying to look perfect all the time. I certainly acted in a way someone else found problematic. Whether the accusation of bullying was a fair response to that is a whole other question.

Often it makes more sense – in terms of personal gain – to go along with things and not make a fuss. Having values that you are dedicated to doesn’t always fit nicely with this. I don’t tend to go along with things that I see as problematic. I take issue. I speak up. It’s not always gone well for me, but I do not regret my choices.

I’m no sort of pirate, I can’t imagine I’d ever be in a situation where I’d be telling a court why they ought to lock me up, much less hang me. Even so, I do take inspiration from Mary Reed’s outrageous choice, and the sheer bonkersness of what she did. It’s brave, and wild, and powerful stuff. I think of her, every time I step up to say something because it needs saying, but is not going to put me in a good position.

Druidry, AI and keeping it real

(Nimue)

This week I saw that Druid blogger River Crow is leaving WordPress because of the introduction of AI. For a while now, WordPress has been offering AI to bloggers. I’ve not touched it, and will never use it. As a reader I have no interest in looking at machine-based re-hashes of other people’s ideas. I want to read genuine content that other people have actually thought about.

I can’t imagine how WordPress thinks this is going to benefit anyone. Adding AI content will reduce quality, reduce trust and undermine the platform itself.

This whole situation got me thinking about what I can do to make sure this blog is self-announcingly written by a human. I think sharing personal stories help with that. Using a plagiarism device might make it feasible to ‘write’ about Druidry in a vague and generic way. AI content tends towards the vague and generic. I can focus on the precise, specific and personal. I tend to do that anyway, but I feel that it’s going to be more important moving forwards.

I’m inclined to write more poetry simply because if my blogs are being scraped to feed into other blogs, this might be a way of being really unhelpful about that. I don’t want to create work that a machine can easily steal and rip off, so there are interesting questions to ask about how I can be as unhelpful as possible.

I hate AI, it encourages people to devalue their own creativity in favour of generic, worthless pap. It also uses far too much energy – we are already in crisis, we need to use fewer resources, not pump ever more CO2 into the air to fuel this drivel. It takes away far more than it gives, and makes finding genuinely valuable content harder than it used to be.

Druidry is deeply at odds with using AI – the environmental impact is central to that. If you value justice, then the theft of original content to ’train’ AI is unacceptable. If you value truth, then the lie that these machines learn and create is unacceptable – they just re-hash. If you hold inspiration as sacred then this business of encouraging people to make shoddy re-hashes based on stolen material, rather than being genuinely creative, is sacrilegious.  AI is an insult to the awen, at the very least. A few years ago I would have said that blasphemy wasn’t a relevant concept for Druids, but I am coming to rethink that.

Contemplating the grain

(Nimue)

The beginning of August brings us festivals associated with grain harvests. It’s an interesting time to think about the role of grain in human history – while it’s unclear whether we took up agriculture for the beer, the bread or both, grains were very much part of our shift away from being hunter gatherers.

I don’t think it’s inevitable that moving to agriculture leads to feudalism and colonialism. At the same time, I don’t think you can have either of those things without the grain. Being able to feed a population fairly cheaply in terms of time and labour frees up people to be soldiers more of the time. It’s more feasible to grow your population with settled agriculture, and grow it in a way that creates a demand for more land.

Going down this route has resulted in impoverished workers who mostly eat grain, and whose efforts support people whose lives are leisurely and whose diets are much richer. You could have grain without such inequality, but I’m not convinced you could have this level of inequality without the grain to underpin it.

As Brendan Myers pointed out in his book on civilization, once you have a grain store, you have a resource that can be owned/guarded by a few people with weapons. That gives you much more scope for power imbalance in your society. Again, it’s not inevitable. Power imbalances on the scale we’ve come to see depend on owning and hoarding, which you can’t do on the same scale when you live a mobile life.

Grain is problematic. These days its grown in industrial ways, using herbicides and pesticides that are clearly a threat to insect populations and to human health. Ploughing releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. Grain based diets are narrow, and not optimal for health. We do better when we eat more diversely, and the land does better when we don’t grow massive monocultures.

To radically rethink how we live and move towards sustainability and viability, we’d have to rethink our relationship with grain.

If work was based on science

(Nimue)

The eight hour working day, the five day working week, and the shift patterns we have are not well evidenced concepts. They owe more to people trying to get some basic rights around not being worked to death, than they do any research into what’s optimal.

Imagine how different life would be if our approach to work was based on evidence about what’s effective. Imagine if our working lives were structured to maximise our effectiveness and health.

Studies on four day working weeks have shown repeatedly that this is more effective. Pay a person the same amount of money for a four day week and they become more productive, more effective, less likely to quit.

We don’t actually know what the most productive approach would be. We do have some evidence that people are not effective for a lot of the time they spend at work. There’s some evidence to suggest that typically in office jobs, people only do about three hours of effective work in a day. There are issues about how long anyone can concentrate for, and how much more effective we all are when we get time to pause and gather our thoughts, or to let our minds wander so as to find solutions.

Humans are not machines. We do not thrive in environments where we are supposed to be relentlessly grinding out work hour after hour, day after day. We don’t work well on those terms. Our physical and mental health suffers.

It seems remarkable to me, given how much study we do as a species, that there hasn’t been more exploration of this. If we understood ourselves better, and looked for optimal approaches, the changes would be radical. No more wearing people down with over-work or job boredom. Exhausted and unengaged people make more mistakes, and don’t make the best or most inspired choices. People who have time to think are better able to come up with genuinely new ideas and to solve problems. We know this about ourselves, yet we aren’t invested in finding the best ways of organising ourselves.

Instead, we slog on with old models of work that waste a lot of time and resources. So much good could be achieved through a commitment to making work work.

The magic of sleep

(Nimue)

Exhaustion makes everything worse. Whether we’re talking about mental health, bodily wellbeing, emotional resilience, ability to cope, or any other aspect of human functioning, being well rested makes worlds of difference. There are a lot of necessary, restorative things we can’t do without rest.

Sleep and dreaming are fascinating aspects of human experience. I’ve long been intrigued by the science of these things. There is evidence to suggest that sleep and dreaming play a significant role in learning. It also seems to be important for all kinds of body regulation.

I’ve had over a year of sleeping reliably and well, after a lifetime of struggling with insomnia. My partner has a similar insomnia history, and is making similar progress. Personal experience suggests that being relaxed and happy makes good sleep feasible. This shouldn’t be controversial, but it does go with having to recognise how stressed and unhappy I’ve been in the past. Feeling safe, welcome and accepted is probably also contributing to this process.

Not being tired all the time is amazing. The power of sleep to restore the body, and re-invigorate the mind is something I’m keenly aware of at the moment. There’s a remarkable pleasure to be had in waking up feeling refreshed. It brings enthusiasm and a sense of joy to the day where waking up feeling no better very much does not. This is an everyday magic, and everyday joy that I celebrate every time I experience it.

Sleep is something to take seriously. In terms of our own wellbeing, investing in sleep is one of the best things we can do for ourselves. If you want to get fitter or be able to better manage your food choices, being well resourced through sleep makes that so much easier to do. It’s hard to do anything well if you aren’t sleeping well.

Taking care of each other around sleep is also a powerful thing. Being kind to each other, and considerate, not making a lot of noise and not making unreasonable demands is all part of this. Respecting what those around us need in order the sleep, and not being dismissive of that. We don’t all have the same experiences around how much sleep we need and the circumstances that we require for good sleeping. Being alert to that allows us to support each other in our most basic needs, and that’s always going to be a good thing.

Robin Hood and economic illusions

(Nimue)

You know how the story goes – terrible King John taxes the peasants to breaking point, Robin Hood steals it back and redistributes it. For a lot of history, the money owned by the state really was in bags and boxes, and if you stole those coins there were real consequences. It doesn’t work quite like that anymore.

We are encouraged to think about country level economics as though it’s exactly like a household. Politicians talk about ‘difficult political choices’ as though they too, like King John, find it makes sense to tax the peasants into oblivion, as though this is the only way to get coins into the treasury to pay for stuff. You don’t have to study economics for very long or in much depth to know this isn’t how things work. I’ve read a few books, that’s to all. Standard economics doesn’t support the political narrative we’re seeing.

Money is just an idea. Politicians seem to find it easy to imagine there’s enough money for wars. They struggle to imagine enough money for feeing people or keeping them well. These are choices, simply. This is bonkers on its own terms – if you want a thriving economy then a healthy population is better able to deliver it. Crushing the peasants doesn’t make for a strong economy. It can lead to massive wealth disparity and sometimes historically that has resulted in violence.

Tax does not raise the funds that governments use. Tax is how you limit the size of your economy to make sure it stays healthy, If you think that tax is how governments pay for things, you’d see a case for taxing those who have most. By allowing a small number of people to accumulate obscene wealth, you take money out of circulation and that undermines your economy.  Our Robin Hood model has some relevance on this score.

Robin Hood is a story about someone who believes in looking after those who have least. It’s a story about investing in the poorest in society, and not accepting having them made to pay for the excesses of the wealthy.

We need a bit of that energy right how. While on one side we need to dismantle the lies abut how economies work, we do also need that spirit of fairness and redistribution. How we imagine and use money at a country-level is a political choice, and not a necessity. We’ve proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that cuts and austerity just make everything worse. It would be nice if we could collectively accept that evidence and start doing something different.

We should be investing in ourselves, in a sustainable future, in our health, education, basic infrastructure and quality of life. If we did that, we could build something radically different. As individuals there are limits to what we can do here, but we can challenge the misleading stories, and we can try and keep that Robin Hood spirit alive.

Identity and the changing self

(Nimue)

Being on the Druid path is a commitment to change. We aren’t aiming to find a final form, where we can stop and become some rigid and fixed thing. We’re here to learn and grow, and that means the person we will be in the future is not the person we are today.

There’s a charming meme that goes ‘don’t be so open minded that your brain falls out’. Clearly there are balances to find between being open, and having enough sense of continuity to be coherent to yourself. A person can change a lot and still feel that they have inner integrity. Equally, a person can drift about, responding to things they encounter, changing to fit in and not really having much coherence of self at all.

Every experience we have changes us, if by no other means than simply adding to the sum of our experience so that we  are more than we previously were. When we’re growing in ways that are good for us, it feels like becoming more yourself. If the changes bring a greater sense of being the person you truly should be, then you are heading the right way. That doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else, or represent a simple trajectory.

Sometimes it’s good to experiment with identity, to try on different ways of being and presenting yourself to see if anything works better for you. Many people handle that by going into new spaces where others have no prior experience of them, and therefore no expectations. It can be a useful strategy, especially when trying to break out of limiting patterns, or to escape from an identity that has been forced onto you. In experimenting, it’s important to be able to back out of things that don’t work.

There may well be people who resent you changing, for all kinds of reasons. It’s an especially delicate issue when it impacts on people who have been close to you. Sometimes growing involves growing apart from someone. Not everyone will be with us for all the versions of ourselves that we might discover during a lifetime. They too will be changing as well, and you can care about someone a lot but not be on parallel paths.

If you find yourself jumping from space to space, recreating yourself but never settling into someone who makes sense to you, this can be disconcerting. For some of us, fluidity itself is the coherence. I’ve found this is true of me around how I relate to gender, particularly. For some of us, the underpinning coherence is around the need for novelty, adventures and exploration. The need to learn, discover and explore is a form of coherence that can also make your surfaces seem fickle and erratic. It’s ok not to want to stay put and be the same thing forever.

Fickleness can itself be a personality trait. Some of us are nomads by nature. Authenticity is not about being easy for other people to describe, it’s about how you experience yourself. Some of us will build our nests in the rookeries we grew up in. Some of us will take to the air and seldom even touch land. The only thing to guard against is an inclination to discard your sense of self in order to be what someone else wants you to be. If you aren’t the ideal person for someone, let them carry on and find someone who is, rather than clipping your wings because they wanted something smaller than you, or pretending you can fly when you were never that sort of creature in the first place.

Am I the bad guy?

(Nimue)

CW psychological abuse

It isn’t always easy to tell. If you are a person who feels compassion and values their integrity, then you will take onboard negative feedback and try to do something about it. What do you do if someone starts telling you that you are a bully, an abuser, exploiting them, mistreating them, acting dishonourably…?

It’s a popular tactic with abusive people, to blame the victim and call the person they are mistreating an aggressor. This can happen overtly, and it can also be achieved with more subtle gaslighting techniques. If a person always responds to you as though you’ve attacked them, they may have you questioning your own judgement and trying to fix problems that don’t exist.

All of this can be both distressing and disorientating. So, how do you tell if you need to do better? How do you tell if you are the problem?

If a complaint is genuine, it should make some kind of sense. It should be possible to identify exactly what the problem was so as to tackle it. In a healthy situation, if a person calls you out over something they should be reasonably clear about what the issue is. If you’ve triggered them then you may have to wait a little while for clarity, but that clarity should be available, especially if you’re asking them to explain in a way that is not of itself threatening.

Handling other people’s triggers can be tricky and challenging, but it is possible. If a person communicates their needs to you, then you can take that onboard and act on it. If you’re doing that, or totally willing to do that, then you’re ok. We all mess up. If you can own it and genuinely try to do better than that’s as good as any of us can hope to be.

Of course abusers can’t give you a clear explanation of what went wrong. They will keep it vague. You are bullying them. You are unreasonable, rude, uncooperative, unkind – broad attacks and never enough specifics that you can work out how to do better. If you ask for clarity they will make out it should be obvious, and that your failure to see the problem is a you-issue.

Well-meaning people will try and fix things when something goes wrong. It doesn’t matter which side of it you are on, that holds true. If withholding information about how to fix things gives the other person more power in the situation you should probably assume this is deliberate.

It’s worth being alert to this as someone who might see such situations from the outside, too. While it is a good idea to start from the premise that we should listen to and believe victims, it’s also important to be alert to the ways in which abusers often play at being victims. Always consider the power dynamic in such situations, and if in doubt, act in a way that will support safety. Don’t be tempted to attack someone on someone else’s behalf, because you may well be on the wrong side of the situation. In genuinely unsafe situations, attacking the abuser will increase the risk of them further harming the victim.

Breathing and meditation

(Nimue)

It’s very common for meditation to start with a focus on your own breath. This is something I’ve used a lot. It’s in my Druidry and Meditation book. At this point I know more than I did then about the issues of working with breath – it’s always the way, you never stop learning and existing books do not magically keep up.

There are a number of situations in which a focus on breathing really doesn’t work. I’ve had ailments that have made breathing hard work, and found that focusing on it makes that worse, and more unpleasant, rather than helping. I also find that if I have a lot of body pain, a focus on breathing can make me too aware of the pain in a way that undermines whatever I’m trying to do with the meditation.

Sometimes it is easier to get your body to relax by distracting yourself from it rather than focusing on it.

The whole embodied aspect of being a Druid generally inclines me to try not to tune out and ignore my body. That said, it’s something I’ve also something I’ve done a lot of, out of necessity. In such situations, more intense visualisation work can be good. Envisaging yourself as a tree, or a bird, or going on a guided meditation can be a helpful way of meditating when you need some respite from the realities of your own body.

If I want to be present but not overly focused on myself, my current go-to strategy is to listen. I’m fortunate in that my immediate soundscape includes a stream and usually a lot of bird song. I can meditate comfortably on what I can hear, which keeps me feeling present and engaged with the world while not having to be focused on myself. If you don’t have an environment that allows this, then playing something soothing may also work, although it won’t deliver you the benefit of engaging with what’s around you. Working with a physical object can be a good focus too, if that suits you better.

There are many ways of meditating and there’s a lot of advice out there – of variable quality. The most critical measure of a meditation practice is whether it works for you, and only you can decide what terms most matter. If you find something helpful, use it. There are many reasons to meditate, and many things you can seek in doing it – not all of them will suit everyone, so it’s fine to pick and choose. No matter how dogmatic anyone else is about what you ‘should’ be doing, the best choice is to be guided by what appeals to you, and what benefits you most on your own terms.

Folk horror in the forest

(Nimue)

Some books are easy to review. This is the other sort because it is brilliant and at the same time it definitely won’t be to everyone’s taste.

We all know Sherwood as a place of camp, swashbuckling adventure. Sherewode, on the other hand, is a mysterious, dangerous forest where old Gods walk, and many of the monsters are human. Called by mad stag goddess Caerne, The Hooded are rising to fight the forces invading the forest.

This is definitely a folk horror novel. It draws heavily on folklore, and it’s both violent and unsettling. There’s a lot of death, and the constant threat of sexual violence, but there’s nothing unbearably graphic. However, the story is not folk-horror shaped. In many ways, it is the people who are the source of the horror – as is normal in the genre. But there are no innocent outsiders here, no Pagan traditions impinging on a modern world. Everyone is complicit in some way, and the dark, violent horrors of the forest are of everyone’s making.

The cast is massive and there are a lot of different perspectives. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, don’t venture in. You have to spend a while trusting the book as it hops around between the huge cast and trusting yourself that you will be able to keep track of them all. To further complicate matters, while these characters echo familiar folk from the Robin Hood stories, they are not as you know them. This is deliberately unsettling and disorientating at times. There’s an intrinsic uncanniness to it.

The writing style is often like an early epic – like The Tain, or Beowful, or something of that ilk. The language and phrasing is poetic, and often stark. The deeper we are in the forest, the more mythic the writing tends to be, and that also means that we don’t spend a lot of time exploring people’s feelings and motivations, that we just get the raw encounter with action.

Each one of the many characters believes in what they are doing. Their motives vary – revenge and greed are dominant forces, but care, protection, religion, and all the messy things religions inspire people to do are in the mix. While the old gods are present and unsettling, it is without a doubt the things characters do in the name of Christianity that are most disturbing. This is a vey mediaeval take on Christianity – full of burning people for the good of their souls, and seeing the forest as the enemy.

The main reason I know this is folk horror, is because of the way it will make you want to move in, if you’re that sort of person. If you’re drawn to the murder village, or looking for Cabal, if you’d welcome the bloodied stag girl with too many sharp teeth, if in your darker moments you would take out people who destroy forests for personal profit, then Sherewode will speak to you. If you identify with outcasts, with folk at the margins then you’ll feel at home here. That’s what folk horror does best.

This book is part of a series. You don’t need to have read any related material to jump in, and I will be reviewing the others – I have two more to read at present.