Nimue Brown's Blog, page 236

Field Trees

Ancient trees in fields are wonderful – I found a number of them at the weekend. In a field, an ancient tree has the space to really grow, and as a viewer, you have the luxury of being able to see it well from all sides.

Field trees are not the norm in agricultural landscapes because they make it harder to move big machinery around. In a landscape with the hedges grubbed out to allow the movement of big machines, there will be no ancient trees standing in the middles of fields.

Field trees are more likely to remain where animals are farmed – providing shelter and shade through the year. For an ancient tree to have survived the medieval period of grubbing up everything to plough the land, it likely needs to have been part of an estate. Large trees are often found in the parks of the wealthy – later on they were grown for their picturesque qualities. An estate might also cultivate large trees for building material. Sadly, a tree, or a woodland is most likely to survive when someone considers it useful in some way. If the land owners wanted a hunting preserve to play in, the wood survives.

Sometimes field trees exist because they were part of a farming style that deliberately mixed tree cover with animal husbandry. This might include pollarding the trees to provide food for livestock. A former pollard will have a broad trunk and then a cluster of branches at above head height.

Some field trees are lone survivors of former woods – you can spot them because they tend to be less spread out and taller. Sometimes former field trees can end up surrounded by woods- again, the shape gives them away and the trees around them will all be obviously a lot younger.

Fields of monocultures, devoid of hedge and tree are little more than industrial units. Nothing much lives there that does not directly serve humans. A tree is a sign of diversity, of life, of there being more going on in a landscape than human business.

 

Seasonal walking

One of the reasons I’ve done very little seasonally-orientated walking this year is that the summer itself thwarted me. I don’t do well with high temperatures and this year, the British summer was unusually hot.  I need to work out more routes I can walk in the darkness so as to have options in future years, but even so, I don’t think night walking will make sense or be safe enough for longer routes.

I missed out on spring walking because I was ill for much of it.

As a consequence, here we are in the autumn, and I have missed a lot of what, for me, is my primary means of communication with the land and its wilder inhabitants.  I’ve been walking for transport all year, and that brings me into contact with all kinds of beings, but it’s not the same as a long day moving through the countryside.

However, being out all day in the hills can be physically demanding. One of the things I’ve found is that I need to stay really hydrated to avoid getting locked down by lactic acid in my muscles. I get very sore, really fast if there’s any anaerobic work to be done. Staying really hydrated translates into needing to pee a lot. During the summer this is less of a problem, but when there’s less undergrowth, there aren’t many options. I’m putting public toilets, pubs and cafes into walking routes. Yes, it would be nice to be away from human concerns all day, but it’s not feasible. I’m fortunate that I can now afford to put a pub stop into a walk.

Walking is an act of creating relationship between my body and the land. For that to work, I have to be realistic about what my body can take. If I try and walk too fast, or too far, or over too many hills it won’t go well. A walk dominated towards the end by pain and fatigue can be memorable, but it doesn’t create meaningful relationship, I’ve found. If I hurt too much, I’ll be too aware of my body to pay attention to anything much else.

Despite this year’s various health setbacks, I’m hoping to be well enough to take on my favourite autumn walk – which goes along the hill edge and through the Woodchester valley. I will however, be going on a day when the cafe and loos are open, because it greatly improves my chances of getting around.

Lord of the Wyrde Woods – a review

Escape from Neverland and Dance into the Wyrde are two books but between them are one story so I’m reviewing them as a pair – their collective title is Lord of the Wyrde Woods. You have to read them in the right order and the first one doesn’t stand alone.

It’s been a while since an author has so completely captured my imagination. Neverland is a rundown area, with a facility for young people who have already fallen through the cracks. Narrator Wenn is one such young person. She’s had an awful life full of monstrous betrayals and setbacks, and she is as bitter and angry as you might expect. One of the threads in this book is the story of her learning to trust again and open her heart. It is the woods that she first lets in, and then the people associated with the woods. The story about learning to become a fully functioning human when reality has beaten you down, is a powerful one.

Going into the woods offers Wenn respite from the miseries of her daily life. What she finds there is enchantment. Most of this is the kind of enchantment any of us could find by getting out into greener places around us. There were obvious parallels to be drawn with Mythago Wood, but where Holdstock’s vision tells us the magic is largely unavailable, Nils Visser does the opposite. He invites us to see our surroundings in these terms, too. These novels are an invitation to magic, and to personal re-enchantment.

The story itself weaves folklore and history together around a series of locations. There’s a fair smattering of radical politics, and a fair amount of paganism, too. The story places human narratives in a landscape, and does so to powerful effect. The tale itself is full of magical possibility, but it’s also startling, sometimes devastating, haunting and full of surprises. If you enjoy the kinds of things I blog about, these books are for you and I think you’ll find much to love in them.

This is a story about how important it is to have stories about your landscape. It is through stories that we stop seeing places as so much scenery and start to have a more involved relationship with them. Those can be mythic and folkloric stories, they can be historical, and they can be personal. They can also be the stories we imagine of what would happen somewhere like this.  The process of learning and creating stories, and storying yourself into a landscape is a powerful one, beautifully illustrated in this novel.

I loved these books so very much. I heartily recommend them.

You can find Nils’s work on Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nils-Nisse-Visser/e/B00OK5RMSY

The painter’s daughter

This is a short story from Penny Blake’s beautiful collection Mahrime.

Once upon a time, when you and I were naught but pips in the core of the great cosmic apple, there lived a painter. You might chance to meet him still, wandering the shore line as the sun rises over the blushing surf, counting the grains of sand or shuffling the streets at dusk, studying the cracks in the paving stones, calling down and listening for a voice.

Back in his studio, his tumbledown beach hut, he paints each grain, each echo. He paints the light and the shadow, the rising and the setting, the dance and sparkle and the soaking up and the deep. His eyes are full of dreams and his dreams are full of shades and glamour.

One day, the painter’s daughter bare-foot tip-toed into that secret space.

And gazed at all the many muchness of towers of tins of tangy turp-scented rainbows.

And wondered what it would be – to touch, to taste, to take in and become such wonders.

One drip.

One lick.

In goes a flinger, smooth and slick.

Gloopy and gorgeful.

Smick  smuck  smack.

Blue, yellow, indigo,

Purple,

black.

She tasted blue – A taste of salt sea and pillow cases, stained glass and new slippers, skinned knees and berryjams and Monday mornings and shaggy hillsides damp in November fog.

She tasted yellow – A taste of custard of course. And a taste of bathrooms and tiled floors and a caravan holiday in 1975, old stiff newspapers and curled up cats, the dust that gathers on lampshades and dims the whole room and a taste of skin and bone and the streets of Rome in July.

She tasted green – A taste of coal and iron, old sandals and ploughed up earth, toadstools and pine woods and rain low down in the valley of the Dove.

Every colour in the universe she drank it down. She gorged on glamour and shade, on dances and sparkles, on things soaked up and deep. She swallowed down the soul of every colour until her limbs felt clogged and cloyed with the weight of them.

One small pot of black she saved for last, – a taste of burning and drowning, of being squeezed out and sucked up and exploded into stars, a taste of being held for eternity and the aching emptiness of an eggshell cracked too soon.

 

This black, she smuggled it away in her pocket, off to her little box bed beside the woodstove. There, when she was feeling dizzy with the reel of the rainbows spinning through her veins, she would sip

Sip

Sip

At the comforting black.

From that day on, every time the painter’s daughter opened her mouth, out spilled thick , oily paint in puddles and spewks that stained the folks and the things all around her in violent assaults of crimson,  viridian, amaranth and egg yolk.

She stopped opening her mouth.

Her limbs dragged heavy as a rag doll and every breath, every step, every heart beat was a drudge and a drain. So much colour inside. So much sparkle and depth. So much echo and shade.

Walking, talking, even breathing seemed mountains too steep to climb with all this weight inside.

She sat on her bed, day in day out, and sip

Sip

Sipped

At the comforting black

Until it spilled out of her eyes in puddles that pooled upon the patchwork quilt and cast back mocking rainbows.

That is how the little bird found her one day. He hopped upon her window sill and cocked his shining eye – the way the bird folk do – and then he fluttered down onto the eiderdown and whistled.

“Go away,” the painter’s daughter hissed, “do you think I care to see your coloured plumes? Do you think I am impressed? What if I told you that I am so full with the light and dark of every colour in the universe that I ache with it and to look at you does not fill me with joy or wonder, only regret and fatigue until I am sick of it.”

The little bird cocked his eye again – infuriating it is when they do that, y’know? – and he reached his yellow bill in deep amongst his tail feathers and plucked out a needle sharp quill the colour of every blue-green under the sea.

The painter’s daughter shrugged in scorn of him and made to turn away when

Ouvchsh!

The little demon jabbed the quill spike hard into the soft, pale flesh of her arm.

Out leapt a tiny spurt of paint.

Then slowly, and with the girl in thrall,

He dragged the rainbow colours out

In swirls and spirals, tree cassyn pathways to guide the flow of all that weary weight into traces of beauty and scope.

Here was a dream in flesh.

Here was pointillized pain.

Here was inside out for all to see and staining no one but herself; surely, no words would be needed now . The world would smile and nod its head at her, as they knocked shoulders in the street, and whisper

‘ah, so, that is how it is with her, mm, we understand now why she walks so slow and dares not speak. How could a child do otherwise, with so much colour inside?’

So she stepped out.

Stained.

With the bird quill tucked behind one ear

And bold, without fear,

Into a forest of fingers who pointed and blamed and waggled and shamed and prodded and poked and jostled and joked and fat cold palms that pushed her far away.

The painter’s daughter ran.

She ran on and on.

She began to feel very proud of her running.

One dark night, she came to a cave, above a river, above a pool, beside a village and into that cave she crept and lay down to sleep.

When she woke up the smell of sweet meat cooking down in the green valley filled her with hunger and the longing for all the things that human company ought to bring but seldom does.

So she spent the morning gathering leaves,  the afternoon stitching them together and by evening she had made for herself a fine long cloak that hid the patterns on her arms, and a hat with a broad brim to cover her face.

Under the stars, she took out the bird quill from behind her ear and dug it deep into her skin until it was slathed in colour, then she found a broad, flat stone and she began to paint

In swirls and spirals, tree cassyn pathways to guide the flow of all that weary weight into illuminated forms both wild and wonderful.

Here was a dream on stone.

Here was pain projected, disembodied, disowned.

Here was inside out for all to see and staining nothing but this unfeeling earth. And the world would smile and nod and never know where all the colours came from.

As the sun rose over the valley, the painter’s daughter stepped down from her cave, down and down and into the village and by that afternoon the tongues were wagging like wild fire flames; who was the stranger in the cloak of leaves who traded her marvellous paintings for table scraps? Some had seen her return to the cave – a hermit then? An anchorite? A holy one, certainly, a wise healer, a cleric, a teacher, a goddess in the flesh… ?

Every day, more and more villagers made the trek up to the painter’s cave. They wondered at her work – colours and patterns that seemed to describe the deepest parts of themselves. The parts they never let show. How? They asked, with tears in their eyes, how can she know?

They bought canvases. They paid in gold.

Inside her cave, hidden from sight, the painter took her feather quill and emptied herself out for them.

Day after day.

Night after night.

Slowly, as time went by, she began to grow old and paper thin. She had to coax out the paint in crusted oozes from her gummed up veins. Sometimes finding the strength and the will would take hours. Often there was not enough. Not enough colour, not enough energy and too much pain of the flesh and the bone to finish the work. ‘One day,’ thought the painter, ‘one day I will dry up. There will be no way of getting these crusted up colours out of my dried up body any longer. And what will happen then? Will the world understand when I can no longer paint their pain for them?’

The painter smiled and shook her head. She stuck the feather quill behind her ear and pulled off her cloak and hat of leaves. Clotheless under the silver moon, she walked down to the lake pool and stepped right into the comforting black.

The next morning, when the people came up to the cave the painter was gone, but the waters of the lake below, as they looked down into the valley, were snaked with rainbows.

When to give up

Often, the only way to be absolutely defeated is to give up. Where there is life, there is always scope for trying again – however long it takes to do that. There is something heroic about refusing to give up in face of all setbacks – but only if you come out on top at the end. At what point is it wiser to admit defeat and turn your energies elsewhere?

At what point do you say ‘this is never going to work’? I’ve blogged before about the question of what our dreams cost other people. Chasing your dreams can really take it out of those around you, and if someone else has to pay against their will for something you want to do, pushing on is a lot less heroic and a lot more toxic.

Sometimes, admitting defeat can be a beautiful, liberating thing. We tend to treat failure as something awful and to be avoided, but I’ve come to think of it as a much more interesting thing. As an aside, I must thank Mark Townsend for The Gospel of Falling Down, which re-framed the notion of failure for me. Sometimes, giving up is wonderful, releasing energy into other areas of life.

This weekend, the Stroud Five Valleys walk will take people on a gruelling hike around the area, raising money for a good cause. I’ve managed it a couple of times. This year, I’m not trying. I’ve given up. I feel good about that. It feels like a wise choice, putting my bodily wellness first. I don’t need to do this. I don’t need to prove anything by trying to do it.

It’s when we admit failure that we make room for other people to get in and have a go – and quite possibly do better than us. It’s when we admit defeat that we stop pouring energy into things we can’t make work, and might start looking at what we can do more effectively, instead. When we give up, we’re giving ourselves permission to acknowledge that we are tired, worn out, under resourced or otherwise unequal to the task. Owning your limitations can bring great emotional relief. We all have limits, and we won’t know where those are until we’ve tested them. Once tested, we can make informed decisions.

The dreams we have when we don’t know what we can do, or how anything works, might not be our best dreams. Plugging away at a dream we can’t manifest may be stopping us from finding a better dream. Using experience to inform our intentions is a good idea. Going back to the planning stage and rethinking can give us a better plan with better prospects. There is nothing inherently magical or sacred about our ideas that mean we have to hang on to them no matter what.

There are so many forces that are so much bigger than us. Ultimately, life is a journey towards death. It does us good to learn when to yield and accept. Sometimes there is more grace, more wisdom and more benefit in knowing that you are beaten and letting it go.

The allure of lost Gods

Anyone who has followed me for long will know that I’m not much of a polytheist. Partly this is because I have no innate capacity for belief, coupled with very little experience of the divine. I’ve spent time actively seeking the divine and the results were interesting, but vague.  I am not beloved of the Gods. I am not priest material. I do not get UPGs or messages or instructions or anything of that ilk. No one has chosen me, and equally, while I find the stories interesting, I’ve not felt moved to even try and honour a deity for a very long time.

This doesn’t mean I don’t think Gods exist. I am happy to accept the existence of Gods for other people. I just don’t have a life that has Gods in it.

We know that the Celts had local Gods. We know that many of the deities who are now famous are associated with very specific places. Locally we have Sabrina, at the River Severn, and Nodens about where the Severn turns to salt. His temple is on the other side of the river from me. There was a temple on the hilltop here, and there is a massive Roman mosaic depicting Orpheus not far from where I live. The hills themselves are quiet. There are carved images in local museums, but not much to go on.

I was, as a consequence of all these things, rather taken with this post from Robin Collins, talking about Gods in the Cotswolds Hills. Gods with guessed at names, no temples, no surviving stories. Lost Gods. Reading it was the first time I’ve had any meaningful feelings about deity in a very long time. https://stroudwalking.wordpress.com/2018/09/22/2730/

Darkening Days

The day length changes most rapidly around the equinoxes. Shifting day lengths is a constant process through the year, with pauses at the solstices, but it tends to only register with me at certain points. I notice when I start having to get up in the dark – we aren’t quite there yet. On the other side of the year, I notice when I’m waking with the light, and I notice when it gets light too early and I stop reliably waking at or before dawn.

Here we are, in late September, and I’m noticing when it gets dark and how that impacts on my sleep patterns. At this time of year I’m inclined to go to bed after sunset, which is passably realistic. As the days get shorter, this will become less feasible, and some time – a month or so hence, I’ll stop feeling that urge, and will start being comfortable going to bed later.

Clearly my body has an inclination to sleep and wake with the setting and rising of the sun. In practice, the shape of days here when they move towards their natural extremes, doesn’t work for me. In summer I need more sleep than going to bed after ten and getting up about three would give me. In winter I need far less sleep than going to bed at half four and getting up at eight would give me. It’s interesting watching the interplay between body rhythms and light levels.

It’s at the times when I can most be in synch with the day length that I most notice how the day length changes. I also notice that, because of pre-dawn light and twilight, the equinox does not create an equality of light and dark. Light enters my room a little before half six in the morning, darkness falls a good deal later than half six in the evening. The stories we have about nature are not always fair representations of what it’s like in practice.

Gifts of friendship

I’m on a mission at the moment to spend more time talking about positive aspects of relationship and community to balance up the darker stuff I also explore. I’ve been thinking a lot lately of what it is that makes me feel good about a friendship. What do I want from other people?

First and foremost, I want people I can share stuff with. That might be online sharing things we’re enthusiastic about. It might be reading each other’s work, or working together, or spending time in the same space doing things. For me, doing stuff together is what underpins a friendship. The more stuff we do, and the more fun we have doing it, the better.

I’ll also be there to do the tough things as well. There are balances to strike between how much we ask of people and how much we give, but if a person can trust me with their tough times and heartaches I will do my best to honour that. I don’t want to just be the person who comes in to do the mopping up, but so long as I also have other roles, I often feel touched and honoured when people choose to share their troubles with me.

One of the things I really want from other people, is inspiration. I don’t need anyone to go out of their way on that score, just be interesting. I seek out people who are creative, imaginative, deeply thinking, open to ideas, living in interesting ways. I am very comfortable in the company of interesting people whose lives are not like mine. I like having friends of all ages. I want to get a sense of how other people see things and how they think. I value people who share their stories and insights with me, and people who know how to tell a good tale.

I appreciate having people in my life who are, in turn, interested in what I do. People who will show up if I’m doing something in public. People who read my blog, and books and give me feedback, or ask for things. I love it when people ask me to write on specific topics here, it’s always a good challenge. If I don’t go into enough detail on something and you want more, tell me! That’s always good news, from my perspective, even if at first I don’t know how to answer.

There are a lot of things I only do if someone else wants or needs them from me – writing and ritual both fall into that category, as does music. If what I do has a value to a person and they want more of it from me, then that really inspires me to do my best. I feel more enthused about my work when there’s scope to interact with someone through it. The company of people who are enthused about what I do is a massive blessing.

I do value affection, but I’m not very good at it. I’ve always felt more comfortable in more cerebral relationships, but I’m trying to learn how to show up with a body in spaces that have people in them. I greatly appreciate the people who give me time and space in this regard, the folk whose gentle affection has made it easier for me to do that sort of thing too.

Grief and love

Grief is the painful but necessary process of dealing with dramatic changes around love. If that which we have loved is gone, there’s a process to go through responding to that. Either we choose to let the love go as well and move on, or we learn how to carry it. We adjust to loving that which is no longer present in our lives. I’ve always felt strongly that no one should be obliged to get over a loss of someone or something they truly loved.

Learning how to carry the grief of loss is not at all like letting go. It is a process of making that love a part of you, no longer dependent on anything exterior to you. To accept the loss, and refuse to let go of the love. To decide that the love you have is bigger than death, bigger than distance, or destruction. I think it’s a good choice to keep what you loved alive by continuing to love when it is no longer there to directly inspire that love.

Sometimes grief takes another form and of the two, I find this one harder to deal with. If we are betrayed by someone we love. If what we loved turns out to be lies and illusion, if we have been manipulated, let down, led astray. If our love has been accepted only to control us and put us on a leash… And there comes a point where this is visible. The object of our love may be right in front of us, just the same as always. What dies here is our capacity for love. The grief that follows the death of love is different from the grief that follows the death of a loved something or someone.

It may be that the illusions were of our own making. We put our faith and trust in an idea we had, and reality can’t bear it out. That hurts, and is likely to bring a lot of soul searching and distress. Unpicking and understanding the illusion after it has been revealed is tough work. Dealing with the memory of love for something unfeasible can be painful, humiliating. It can be waded through, and it is better to be free of such illusions even if the short term cost of dealing with them is really high.

It may be that we have been deliberately misled and betrayed. The death of love in this way is an entirely human issue. A creature won’t do this to us, nor will a landscape, a house, a musical instrument. They are what we are, and if we love such things for what they are they will never deliberately let us down. People are a whole other issue. Whether we love enough to endure betrayal is something you only find out on a case by case basis. Sometimes it may be a good and noble thing to keep loving in the face of terrible let-downs. Sometimes it may be the bars on your prison that keeps you locked in something abusive. Sometimes it is better if love dies, and you live.

Most spiritual traditions uphold the idea that love is good, and ideal and what we should be working with. There’s not much practical advice out there as to what to do to stay sane and functional in face of serious betrayals of trust. We have plenty of cultural information around us about dealing with the loss of what we’ve loved, but precious little to help a person navigate around the death of love itself. We tell each other that love should be eternal and unconditional, and we don’t tell each other what to do when we find we really can’t deliver on that.

As a consequence, the death of love can feel like a personal failing. Having been monumentally betrayed, the victim of this may be left thinking that they should still be able to love and give and feel compassion for the person hurting and harming them. It may seem that the onus is on them to be bigger, kinder, more generous. I know from experience that if you have what it takes to keep loving someone who abuses that love, they will just keep cutting you down and making you smaller and less able to function. Sometimes the death of love will save your life in a really literal way.

Yes. No. Maybe…You decide

A guest blog from Nils Visser

“Is this Wicca?” Somebody asked me at the Steampunk Asylum in Lincoln, to which I had brought my Wyrde Woods books Escape from Neverland & Dance into the Wyrd.

“Erm, yes, no, maybe…” I was left fumbling as per usual.

Truth be told, both Neverland and Dance (the both forming one story) have defied easy categorisation since their conception. I didn’t know this when I wrote them, knowing next to nothing about publishing fiction, but I was defying all conventional wisdom by producing works which are hard to squeeze into a clearly defined genre. Had I known, I would have probably ignored it anyway, because I mostly wrote Wenn Twyner’s story as part of self-therapy at a time when I was stuck in a deep, dark pit.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that many Wyrde Woods readers cared enough about the story to make it their own, describing it to me as a love story, or books about coming-of-age, mental health issues, ecological conservation, road protests, magical childhood kingdoms, spirituality, regional (Sussex) culture, or witchcraft. I am not about to argue with people’s personal reading experiences, and it’s quite magnificent to have conceived a tale about which readers really care, so their insights are much welcomed. However, if you asked me to tell you what Wenn Twyner’s story is about, I would mention all the above as being essential ingredients, but subordinate themes to the main one, which is one person’s journey from trauma to recovery – something that is by very definition a highly personal and unique experience.

Is the magic and witchcraft in the books Wicca? Yes. No. Maybe. It wasn’t written specifically to be presented as a Wicca book. If I were to claim it was, I’m quite sure even a mediocre pedantic could easily find fault with it, for I have relied on a wide range of experiences, insights, and personal preferences to construct the magic of the Wyrde Woods. Much of that overlaps, but not all.

So how did it all come about?

It begins with my own concept of spirituality, which is quite a melting pot and goes way back to the 70s. I was born in the Netherlands in 1970, but apart from a few fragments, my first memories are of another country altogether. When I was three years old, my father was due to write his anthropology PhD thesis. This included a lengthy stay amongst the people he wanted to observe, so the entire family moved from the Netherlands to a tiny village in the central plains of Thailand.

This wasn’t the luxurious ex-pat existence more common these days, but total immersion. We lived in a hut on stilts near a big river, without any mod cons, just like everybody else in the village. I saw elephants on a daily basis, cars not so much, maybe one would pass by every fortnight or so, at snail’s pace because all of us village children would crowd around it to marvel at the shiny contraption. Not that modern technology passed us by entirely, for we frequently saw US Airforce bombers heading for Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, to give you a bit of historical context. We didn’t have a bathroom. We washed ourselves with water from a bucket, and relieved ourselves in the banana plantation behind the cluster of huts which was home to several extended families as well as our own smaller one. Upon our return to the Netherlands, after close to three years in Thailand, my younger brother and myself caused occasional consternation at home or visiting relatives and friends for a year or so, because we would happily wander into tiny suburban gardens to squat and do a poo, not quite appreciating the Dutch fondness for tiny, cramped, and claustrophobic indoor closets for such purposes.

I attended the village school and – with that knack young children have – managed to learn to speak and read Thai. This is a complex language, with a great many ways of pronouncing vowels, each pronunciation denoting a different meaning. My father wrestled with Thai. One day he was asked to repeat his compliments of a market seller’s watermelons again and again, as more and more villagers were invited to hear him speak, to collective delight, because he was actually mistakenly complimenting the market seller’s wife’s breasts…very nice…round and juicy…you get the drift. He solved this by appointing me as his translator. I was around four years old at the time, and already an anthropology research assistant, my first job!

Part of the research involved religious beliefs, because spirituality pervades everyday life in Thailand to a considerable extent. Although Buddhism forms the central core of Thai religion, it is infused with an old (Brah-maist) Hindu tradition, shamanic animist roots, and ancient folklorist beliefs. The spirit world is closely interwoven with the living world, and everyone in our village had a ‘spirit house’, a shrine where offerings can be made to appease ghosts to prevent them from becoming malevolent. I maintain the custom of keeping a spirit house to this day, by the way, usually one of the first things I set up when moving into a new place.

The generic name for spirits is phi, but this covers a very wide range of beings, from ghosts, to benevolent nature spirits, to an impressively grotesque array of demons. I recall visiting temples, where drawings on delicate rice paper were produced, illustrations of demonic Yamatoots (in the service of Yama, the Lord of Hell) tormenting humans in ways that make your average Hieronymus Bosch depiction of hell seem like a pleasant countryside picnic. Translating all of this for my father, I built up an impressive knowledge of the Yaksha, both the good guardian variety as the evil ones who haunt wild places and devour unwary passer-by’s. I also learned the stories of the Garuda, the Naga, Hanuman, Thotsakan, Maiyarap, Phi Krasue, Phi Krahang, Phi Braed, Phi Lok, Mae Nak Phra Kanong, and many others.

I have vivid memories of a visit to our village by a demon specialised in the abduction of naughty children. With hindsight, it may have been a cautionary appearance by a villager dressed up and wearing a demon’s mask, but that is not how we experienced it. My playmates and I were terrified, but also fascinated, so we stalked the demon as it stalked us, and I remember the whole thing being horrifically realistic and tremendously exciting.

The Christian beliefs back in the Netherlands, generally cleansed of doom and hellfire, seemed tame and lame when I returned, and failed to capture my imagination the way Thai spiritualism had, apart from a few old testament stories like Jonah and the Whale.

A few years after our return to the Netherlands, my father got a job as administrator of a Dutch NGO Third World Development service in Kathmandu, Nepal, and once more we left the Netherlands to live abroad. I lived in Kathmandu for four glorious years, from age ten to fourteen, and could often be found wandering about the magnificent temple complexes of Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, Patan, Bhaktapur, Swayambhunath, Bouddhanath, and Pashupatinath.

In contrast to Thailand, Hinduism was the main religion here, with a very royal dose of Buddhism thrown in for good measure, the whole influenced by deeply rooted shamanic beliefs. Akin to Thailand, spirituality was interwoven into daily life, rather than compartmentalised into something you might do on a Sunday. It was not at all uncommon for a Nepali to use his lunch break to eat at a local temple whilst communing with his (deceased) parents, and to come back to say that his father or mother had said this, that, or the other. Amongst other things, I paid a rupee to behold Kumari, the Living Goddess whose feet must not touch the ground, developed a personal affinity to Parvati and Ganesh, witnessed the ritual sacrifice of more goats and buffalo than I care to remember, watched (and smelled!) open funeral pyres, visited a shamanic witch doctor seeking cures for a wide variety of Delhi-Belly, participated in religious festivals, and collected colourful masks of my favourite gods and goddesses.

Towards the end of our stay, I also became fascinated by the Goddess of Lightning who provided some of my earliest sex-ed. Temples needed to be protected from lightning, you see, and this was achieved by elaborate carvings on the struts supporting the tiers of temples, depicting just about every sexual act you can imagine (men and women, men and men, women and women, threesomes, foursomes, tensomes, a lot of bestiality involving dogs, monkeys, donkeys etc.). The reasoning was that the Goddess of Lightning was a virgin who would naturally shy away from graphic erotica.

One of the most profound experiences I had in Nepal was when I was eleven, on a trek somewhere in the Himalayas. We were high up, above the tree line, so probably about three-and-a-half thousand meters, and took a brief detour to a Tibetan monastery perched atop a ridge of craggy rocks, at the centre of a vast web of colourful prayer flags. The backdrop was formed by the Himalayas, snow-covered giants which towered another three, four thousand meters over our heads, reducing us to insignificant particles with a comparable life-span of a mayfly. Just the sort of thing to put you in a state of mind in which you contemplate the mysteries of life.

We went into the monastery, purchased silk scarves and incense, prostrated ourselves in front of a statue of the Buddha, and then presented the scarves and incense to the Head Lama, who took the incense and blessed the scarves before laying these around our shoulders. As was customary, he then shared some wisdom. Hindsight tells me that he had a standard spiel for this, based mostly on young Westerners on a semi-spiritual walkabout in exotic destinations, but that is not how I experienced it as a wide-eyed eleven-year-old.

The Lama started by explaining the prayer flags we had seen. They are delicate squares of cloth, coloured white, yellow, green, blue, and red, with prayers printed on them. They are unravelled by the wind, and the strands worked loose blow from the Himalayas – the roof of the world –, to the rest of the planet, thus ensuring that the prayers are spread widely. The Lama added that this was a good thing, because it didn’t matter what people called the God(s) they worshipped, or the religion they adhered to, since it was “all the same Light, or the same Darkness, regardless of the shape or name given to the eternal balance between Good and Evil, and the choices people must make between them.”

Those words have formed the firm cornerstone of my personal beliefs ever since.

The Lama followed with a rebuke of sorts, saying that he admired us for travelling so far to seek enlightenment, but that the best place to seek such knowledge was at home. This puzzled the eleven-year-old me, as we weren’t all that far from Kathmandu, which I considered home. It wasn’t until later, that I realised he was really just rattling off a standard speech intended mostly for young twenty-somethings on their (almost mandatory) magical mystery tour before settling down. I think it was a warning, not to consider spiritual enlightenment as something that was just a part of a grand tour of the East, but to see it as something which should be sought for at home, infusing everyday life as it did in Asia.

At any rate, those words too, took root in my mind, and will lead us to the Wyrde Woods in Sussex many years later.

 

 

(Part two of this will be along in a few weeks, as will my review of Nils’ brilliant Wyrde Wood books).