Nimue Brown's Blog, page 255

Heart Vision – a review

Heart Vision by Michael Orlando Yaccarino is a tarot book designed to go with the Rider-Waite cards. I’m not a tarot user at all, (and was very clear about this when offered the book for review) but divination has been a significant part of my life.

I learned in my teens that fortune telling feels like a game, or too real, and either way it makes me uncomfortable. What I like to do with divination is use it as a tool to figure out where I am and what’s going on for me. Most divination tools open us up to our own hidden thinking- the unconscious, the shadow, and the motives we’re in denial about. This approach to tarot makes self-reading the centre of the process and explores it in some interesting ways. the book includes all the images from the tarot so it is possible to work contemplatively without having a card set.

The section I found most engaging was working through the major arcana as the Fool’s journey. It was surprisingly narrative, and also offered the kind of spiralling, circular pattern I like in Taoism – the idea that when you’ve been through it and mastered all the things you become a novice again and go back to the start, and round you go again. There is no end point of perfection, there is only the journey and how it changes you.

For each card in the pack – and not just the major arcana – the author provides ways of thinking about the cards. They focus on things that can be within a person more than situations a person can be in. Ways of being in the world, ways of acting and thinking, what we carry with us, what we aspire to. Alongside this are the veiled aspects – the self defeating, the destructive cycles, the learned behaviours that don’t serve us. There’s a vast array of human experience here, and a depth of perception about how the same energies can, with only slightly varying how we manifest them, do us harm or good. Every description struck me as relevant, and as I read through I found myself constantly thinking about the ways I could apply it to me own life.

The end of the book offers an array of spreads that are designed for reading yourself rather than the future.

This is an excellent tool for contemplation and developing self awareness. If you’re looking for ways to reflect and gain insight, and I think especially if you’re engaged with shadow work or trying to find your authentic self amidst everything that’s been put on you, this will be a good resource to use.

I read it cover to cover over a few days – this is clearly not the right way to use the book. If you’re inclined to get it, get a Rider-Waite tarot deck at the same time, and work with the content. Do the little exercises – they look really good. Explore the narrative possibilities of the cards, and work with the spreads. I suspect it would work a lot better to take the cards day at a time, reading their individual meanings and giving yourself time to contemplate them. However, that would have taken me months, which didn’t seem the best response to having been sent a review copy.

I find myself at the end of this book seriously considering getting a Rider-Waite pack and going back to the beginning.

More about the book here – http://marchesacasati.wixsite.com/heartvisiontarot 

Sacrificing Virgins

Having been ‘out’ as a Pagan since my teens, I have always attracted questions from people who know nothing. “Do you dance naked?” and “Do you sacrifice virgins?” (no, and no).

My guess is that the idea of Pagans sacrificing virgins comes from bad horror films, B movie Satanists and the lurid dreams of people who want to shut Paganism down. I think for a long time, Paganism functioned as a kind of shadow self for Christianity – if you think about the ways people imagined witches, for example. Naked, having orgies, smearing themselves with strange substances, snogging devils and so forth. The idea of witchcraft has created an emotional space in which incredibly repressed people could think about sexy things without having to feel guilty, so long as they kept telling themselves they were horrified by it.

I see similar patterns today in tabloid ‘news’.

The obsession with virginity is a Christian thing, not a Pagan one. I think many of our more permissive Pagan ancestors divided women up only in terms of whether they had birthed a child or not – no child makes you a maiden. This is a pretty easy state for an observer to figure out, and making mistakes about it doesn’t matter when it’s not especially loaded with cultural implications anyway.

Virginity is a concept deeply linked to patriarchy. It is woman as property, unspoiled by the touch of another ‘owner’. It is reproduction as the property of the man, and female inexperience enables male ownership. Virginity is a construct, not a reality, and for many young people, gaining experience is a process, not an event. The idea of virginity tends to be focused on straight penetration and to miss out the experiences of gay and lesbian people. Sexual experience should be about exploration, not focused on this antiquated notion of ‘deflowering’. Virginity itself is a concept that doesn’t reliably hold up well in a Pagan context.

Human sacrifice has always been a popular thing to accuse your enemies of. It’s also been something many cultures have practiced. The Romans were deeply opposed to human sacrifice, considering it a barbaric custom and a reason to conquer a tribe. At the same time, Romans crucified people to make political points, and celebrated the deaths of countless people in the gladiatorial arenas, with death as a popular spectacle. Christians who burned/hanged Pagans and heretics did so ostensibly for the good of the sinner’s soul, but it still looks a lot like human sacrifice to me. The lines between punishment, ritual and spectacle are often blurred and uneasy when we look at the past.

Sacrificing virginity when it means the taking it for ritual or magical purpose just makes no sense in this context. People who practice sex magic are looking for the power and energy that can be raised through the act and for that, you need confidence and experience.

Why do people think Pagans want this kind of thing? I think it says far more about the people who ask the questions than it does about us.

Illness, ambition and thwarting

I had a lot of plans for 2018. Some of them were bold and ambitious in their own right. More were about the trajectory I want to take. The things I want to lead on. The stuff I want to be more involved with. Mostly it’s not gone to plan.

Back in November 2017 we did a week in a gallery and a night at Stroud book festival and I had what was probably bronchitis. It took me weeks to recover, and we didn’t go to Steampunks in Space because I wasn’t equal to it. And I’ve never really got back on top of things since then. Nasty colds, the flu, beaten up by the menopause, leading to bouts of insomnia, gut fails and now some kind of virus that really has it in for my glands. It’s been relentless. Also a lot of low level depression and anxiety.

So as the months have progressed, I’ve had to put aside all kinds of plots and schemes. I’ve not enjoyed letting them go, it’s been frustrating. Many of them can be revisited, or I can try for them next year, instead, but even so. There are things I wanted to be doing now, and I’m not. I feel that if I’d been able to get on with things, other unforeseen possibilities would have resulted.

This of course is the thing about unforeseen consequences. There is no way of knowing how this would have played out if I’d been able to go for it on all fronts. I have no reason to think it would have all gone my way. I could be looking at burnout now instead of feeling thwarted. There is no knowing. I’ve done the best I could with the resources I’ve had, and that’s all there ever is.

One of the things this time spent being relentlessly ill has given me, is serious space for reflection. I’ve taken long, hard looks at what I want and why. Things have emerged from this that maybe wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise. Whether they turn out to be better things, I will never know.

I could choose to give up in face of this – on some or all of the ideas I had. I could choose to ignore the setbacks and push ahead with everything, regardless. I could make it a life lesson about ego and ambition and nature teaching me a stern lesson. I could make it a story about heroically overcoming setbacks. The story we choose to tell will shape our actions and results – sometimes more than any other aspect of a situation.

On the whole I don’t have the energy or inclination for making big stories out of being thwarted, not at the moment. This is also a choice with implications of its own.

Creative Community

I have never liked the image of creator as lone genius, up in their ivory tower, making Art away from the influence of nasty commercialism, nasty popularity and actual people. For me, this is an image that goes with elitism, wilful obscurity, pricing most people out of the market and creative irrelevance. I’m equally not a fan of disposable, industrialised pop culture where people make pretty much the same thing over and over for it to be consumed by other people who don’t much care about it.

There are of course other ways.

At the moment, I am blessed with a creative community. There are people whose work I am involved with to varying degrees, and who are involved with my work. People who pass me their first drafts, and who will read mine. People I trade reviews with. People I go to poetry nights with. People I can learn from, and be influenced by and test myself against. People who inspire me and who sometimes, to my great excitement, are inspired by me.

I find it always helps me to know who I am creating for. Much of my fiction work is written with a few specific individuals in mind. I can’t write for everyone; that makes no sense to me. Writing purely for myself feels too indulgent and narcissistic.

Being part of a creative community means finding out what other people are interested in, reading, looking at, watching, listening to. I may not be much engaged with mainstream entertainment, but I am engaged with things that other people in turn find engaging.

Creative community means support for what I do, and people I want to see thrive. It’s easier to get your books in front of people when someone else can say they are worth reading, simply. It’s good not to feel alone as a creator, and community helps offset the crushing qualities of the industry.

There can be a downside to all this. A small and inward-looking community can become a bubble of dysfunction. It can give people illusions of importance that stop them from doing things that would help them. I’ve seen it happen several times in different contexts. Creative cliques breed arrogance and obliviousness. The solution to this is to be part of an extended network that maybe has some tighter knit groups within it. There’s no real gain in finding a small pond in which to be a large fish.

There’s a romance to the idea of the lone creator that some creators have played up as part of their marketing strategy. The truth tends to be more complex. Stand-out famous creative people tend, when you look more closely at their lives, to have people around them. Wordsworth, for all his claiming to wander lonely as a cloud was actually out on a walk with his sister, and used her diary account of the day to help him write the daffodils poem. The myth of Solitary Great Men abounds, but in creative community we can find natural, healthy antidotes to this where we can all be excellent people in relation to each other.

Daydreaming

So many self-help, spiritual and magical practices tell us to focus on our intentions to get what we want. Will your desires into the world. Positive think your way into manifesting what you want. But how do you know what you want? Willpower with no real direction can’t give you much. At the same time, those sources will also encourage you to be mindful and live in the moment, not worrying about the future or regretting the past.

For me, daydreaming has been a deliberate process for most of my life. I imagine things, and I play with them, trying out the variables, looking from different angles, considering possible trajectories. Most of my fiction emerges from this deliberate daydreaming.

By revisiting the past and examining regrets, and thinking about how things might have been different, I develop a better understanding of myself. I learn lessons that I can apply in the future. I daydream a lot about the future, and this allows me to figure out what my priorities are. It helps me see how to move towards the things I want, and how to avoid old patterns I want to change. It can help me identify faulty thinking in the present. Daydreaming about how things could be helps me identify things right now that don’t suit me and need to change.

My daydreaming is unstructured. I don’t approach it with discipline or with allotted time frames. I drift there when I need to. It doesn’t separate me from where I am, either. I can daydream while walking and still see a great deal of wildlife and feel very engaged. I think this is in part because I know when I’m doing it. I don’t wander off in some kind of trance, I trance very deliberately from where and when I am.

Our fantasies and desires are a big part of us, and often have the steering wheel as we navigate life’s journey. If we hide them away so they only happen unconsciously, we don’t always know what’s driving us. If we make room for them, we learn. Some of those desires aren’t the most noble, some may be toxic to us. They may hold us to ridiculous standards or damagingly unrealistic expectations. They may undermine our joy in what we have now, if we let them.

A healthy relationship with our desires, where those desires are allowed space and can be explored, stops them from being unconscious motivators. That makes space for better choices. It is better to know and acknowledge our most unappealing inclinations. It pays to look at where those urges would take us and whether we want to go there. It can be cathartic, too, mentally playing out the jealousy, anger, resentment – it can help let it go, without letting it interfere in life in other ways. If I let myself see me wanting to be horrible, I can deal with it. Sometimes it’s best to treat your unconscious a bit like a toddler – just because it’s quiet doesn’t mean everything is fine. Leave it unsupervised and it may try to glue the cat to the inside of the washing machine…

 

Becoming a Druid by doing other things

I think it’s good to have a framework, and the time I’ve spent studying Druidry itself has given me some useful points of reference. However, I have a growing feeling that what makes a person a Druid is not the study of Druidry, but doing a whole host of other things. Increasingly, I see Druidry as an emergent property from approaching a whole array of subjects and practices with an open heart and mind, willing to be changed by them.

Living as close to nature as you can, will change you. Working with the seasons as you experience them will change you. Forming a relationship with your landscape, learning about what lives on it and making connections, will change you.

We can practice disciplines of the mind – philosophy, meditation, contemplation, gratitude, activism, prayer, and these experiences will impact on us. I think any study, any learning has a place here. By doing them, letting them permeate us, we become more than we were.

You can work with embodiment, in whatever way that makes sense for the body you have. Walking, wild swimming, sitting out, running, dancing, drumming. Any thoughtful interaction between body and world can be an incredible teacher. We can learn what to safely eat, how to grow plants, how to work with trees.

We can practice creativity in all its forms, and expose ourselves to the creativity of others, and to the creativity and history of our ancestors.

There’s more here to explore than any one person could do justice to in a single lifetime. And so each of us is free to follow the paths that appeal to us, to dig deep when we feel so moved. So long as we all have elements of wildness and civilization, embodiment and mind in our practices I think we’ll always find Druidry as an emergent property. It happens to us because we do the things. It lives in the doing, and in the way that acting in these various ways shapes our minds and bodies. It is not something to try and control, but something to open into and to allow to happen.

Gaslighting with Terry Gilliam

Gaslighting is a deliberate tactic used by abusers to destroy the confidence, even the sanity of the victim. It can take many forms, but the intent is to leave the victim doubting their own memory, judgement, ability to chose, and sanity. There are lots of good articles out there, so if this is an unfamiliar term, hop on a search engine. At time of writing, the Terry Gilliam interview I’m talking about is also easy to find.

In a recent interview, Terry Gilliam criticised the #MeToo movement in a way that to me says ’gaslighting’, so I’m going to take some of the statements he made and look at them closely.

He told us that this is the price you pay – a night with Harvey in return for career opportunities. First up, this is an attempt to normalise the abuse, to treat it as just a regular thing that happens. Secondly, it suggests a trade; that it is a fair price to pay for a career. It normalises the idea that men with power can demand sex from women who have no power and that we shouldn’t see a problem here. Women who protested just didn’t get as good a deal as they wanted, or are capitalising on the attention now that can do them more good. We are to understand that women are the manipulators here, Harvey’s just a regular guy, doing nothing weird, unfair or creepy at all. The implication is that the abuse was no big deal, and the victims are making a fuss about nothing. This approach encourages victims to think they shouldn’t have imagined there was a problem or made a fuss.

Gilliam describes that’s happened as ‘mob rule’. Women who have spoken up about sexual abuse are explicitly compared to the kind of torch and pitchfork gang that turns up to deal with Frankenstein in movies. This is an image that suggests both power and violence. Mob rule, says that the gang is incharge here, making the decisions. What we’ve seen are women being heard and taking seriously and people not wanting to work with abusers. That’s not mob rule in my book, it’s healthy and necessary. But, cast it in a different light, make those who protest sound powerful, violent and the certainty about who is a victim and who is a perpetrator is supposed to be less clear.

The line of logic goes: Victims are not victims. Victims are a mob. Mobs are bad. Mob rule is bad. What’s happening is bad.

Following on from this theme of re-imagining violence, he said that Matt Damon was ‘beaten to death’. Matt Damon was criticised for saying something uninformed, and when he realised, he apologised. This is not quite the same as being beaten to death. But again, we have the violence and power of the mob rule than can kill a man. Now, this suggestion goes further than the others. It hides behind the possibility of being a metaphor while telling victims something happened that did not happen. If a person raises it, Gilliam can say that of course he wasn’t talking literally, you silly women. What’s wrong with you to take that literally? What are you trying to prove? This is what gaslighters do if you call them out – they blame you. Or they say they never said it. Why would they say something so ridiculous? Of course they never said that, you imagined it. You’re making things up just to get at them.

A one off like this just looks crazy. But, if you hear this kind of thing every day, it does (trust me on this) really destabilise your sense of reality. Nothing seems firm, or certain, or reliable, including you. This makes a person easier to abuse because after a while you can abuse them, and tell them they imagined it, and that they’re having disturbing fantasies and ought to get help, and they wonder if you’re right.

This is probably the only time we’ll hear from Terry on the subject, but he’s reinforcing what Liam Neeson said, and what a lot of guys have always said to hide abuse. In a society that lets men respond to abuse accusations in this way, we create a culture of gaslighting. Mistrust the victim. Blame the victim. Make the victim doubt their own judgement. It is an evil thing to participate in.

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Kingdom of Clockwork – review

Kingdom of Clockwork is, you realise after just a few pages, not set in the past as it first appears, but set in the future, after the fossil fuels run out. It’s a steampunk novel in a speculative era when coal powered steam is not an option. The story is driven by political machinations, as clockmaker Nielsen finds himself lured into the plots and schemes of his king. The king in question may in fact be mad.

The story itself rattles along to good effect, taking the reader in directions I think most people won’t anticipate. The surprises are delights rather than feeling like rabbits out of hats. Each new twist and turn builds a greater sense of how this future world works. The main character and first person narrator, Nielsen, is an innocent out of his depth, and thus able to take the reader with him easily. He’s also a clockwork geek. Now, I’m not a technically minded person and if asked, would have said that the fine details of clockwork would not intrigue me. However, the clockwork in the story I found totally engaging and it really drew me in. It’s very well written.

Charming though the plot and characters are, what made this book a standout for me is the way the author uses the future to speak to the present.

In this imagined future, much information has been lost about the Age of Electricity. The way in which the history is talked about, re-imagined, feared, mythologized and misinterpreted is wonderful. There’s lots to think about here in terms of how we imagine the past – a very Steampunk concern as well.

Billy O’Shea is able to look at our present from a perspective that is truly alien to it – a real feat of the imagination. It enables him to write about how things are now in a way that casts it all in a very different light. His future people do not share our ideas, values and beliefs, but they are influenced by them, and living in a civilization that follows ours. I can’t say too much or there will be spoilers, but I thought this aspect of the book was total genius.

This is a story you can read for the plots, devices and epic adventures – it has much to offer on that score. If you’re the kind of reader who loves layers and extra things to ponder, this is a good book to get your teeth into. I shall be reading the rest of the series if I can – this one stands alone, but it opens up plenty of possibilities for future tales.

Here’s the book on Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00LXGSP8Y/ref=series_dp_rw_ca_1  

 

Guest blog from Jason Lewis

Jason contacted me by email to ask if I’d host this post. It’s interesting stuff – I think we should be doing more to explore the social impact of religion. I don’t think you need to believe anything specific to benefit from many of the things a religious practice can do – themes I’ve explored in Spirituality without Structure and When a Pagan Prays. I think what Jason says has relevance for all faith groups and its interesting to think about how we might apply this to a Pagan context.

 

This Is Why Seniors   Should Attend Church

Whether you’re ultra-religious, simply spiritual, or somewhere in between, church can give you perspective on life’s ups and downs in a safe environment. While people of all ages can benefit from a weekly prayer session, it can be particularly helpful for seniors — here’s why.

 

Mental Health

Due to life circumstances that may be unique to their age or health concerns, elderly people often confront a variety of emotions or mindsets that may be somewhat debilitating and hard to bear. These include a sense of isolation, loneliness, boredom, and grief, as well as others. Seniors need activity in their lives to help ward off isolation and depression, which can lead to risky behavior like substance abuse. Studies show that seniors who regularly attend church have greater mental health than those who do not. In fact, depressive symptoms improved and they were able to cope with illness better later on in life.

 

Preventative Care

Seniors who regularly attend church are more apt to stay on top of preventative care such as flu shots and cancer screenings. Those struggling with medical costs will benefit from church-sponsored health fairs that offer service like those listed above and more. Church communities tend to promote ways to live a healthier life.

 

Social Life

Research suggests that when seniors retain some semblance of a social life, they can decrease — or slow down — the rate of cognitive decline. It’s likely that they’ll make friends who they’ll see outside of the church environment. Even acquaintances can be beneficial as there’s the possibility of meeting someone younger who can help with lawn work or occasional errands.

There may even be an opportunity to contribute to the community, which can give the elderly a sense of purpose that could help ward off depression. Going to a place of worship gives seniors a safe place to get support through good times and bad.

 

Cognitive Health

Between participating in church services (singing, reciting prayers, listening to a sermon, etc.) to socializing with other members of the congregation, the church environment can help prevent dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other cognitive disorders.

 

Longer Life Span

Studies indicate that attending church can lower stress levels, which reduces inflammation that increases the risk for disease — it actually may reduce mortality rate by 55 percent. Religious attendance is also known to boost the immune system, decrease blood pressure, and possibly change bad behaviors such as smoking, excess drinking, and promiscuity.

 

Increased Optimism

Though it’s not exactly clear why, there’s a link between optimism and attending church. Seniors who attend more than once a week are 56 percent more likely to have an optimistic outlook on life in comparison to those who never go. Churchgoers are also 22 percent less likely to experience depression.

 

Physical Health

Having a reason to get dressed and leave the house may be just what a senior needs to keep moving. Findings show that leaving the house every day — even a short trip — can help seniors live longer. Staying indoors regularly can contribute to physical and mental decline.

 

Improved Coping Methods

The golden years can be an emotionally challenging time because seniors live to see the passing of friends and family while experiencing their own illness. Going to church can help seniors cope through sad and stressful times by encouraging mindfulness.

It doesn’t matter who or what you believe in as the benefits that come from attending a place of worship are the same. Don’t worry if you never regularly attended church in the past. There’s never a bad time to incorporate spirituality into your life.

 

Photo Credit: Pexels

Presence and process

Spiritual activities call for presence. They ask us to be fully there, in the moment, mind quiet, heart open, totally engaged. In practice, this can be difficult to achieve. My experience of running rituals, vigils, and meditation groups, as well as my own firsthand experience suggests that presence is a challenge sometimes.

When you turn up to the thing – be that public ritual or private practice, your mind may be full of stuff. Issues from the day, worries for the next day, deeper ongoing problems, things you need to remember, things you regret… the conventional wisdom is that to do the spiritual stuff, you need to switch this off. The older I get, the less convinced I am of this.

The noise in your head probably isn’t trivial. It likely pertains to the real things going on in your life. Turning the noise off changes nothing, solves nothing. It’s a neat skill to be able to do it, and it can be handy in the short term, but doesn’t help in the longer term.

Our lives can be very fast, information dense, over stimulating, problem laden and stressful. We need to deal with that. It is easy enough to do – it just requires some time when you aren’t massively stimulated or required to interact, and you can unpack your brain. Let those thoughts run. Investigate them. Find solutions where you can. Write down things that need doing. Work out what you can safely let go of.

I do my best processing either walking or sitting. I do my least helpful processing if I have to do it in bed at night. If the issues are too large and emotional to tackle directly, I process them by drawing, or dancing, or singing. I have learned that hefty positive experiences need as much processing time as apparent problems. If I don’t make deliberate space for processing, my head is a mess and I get stressed and don’t sleep well. If I make deliberate time to process things, my mind clears naturally, and it much easier to find the mental space for engagement with other things. Not just spiritual things, either. Life is easier when you clear your brain out regularly.

It doesn’t feel very spiritual to have a head full of the stuff that was on twitter, what the cat did, why the colleague said that and what to cook for tea. But this is life, and life is not separate from spirituality and not the enemy of it. The problem is not that we’re stuck in the mundane stuff, the problem is that we’re not giving ourselves enough time to deal with the mundane stuff properly. It merits having time spent on it. Lessons can be learned, plans made, answers and strategies figured out.

If you find calming your mind to meditate difficult, consider that you may need more processing time, and try doing that instead. It will confer the benefits of a calmer body and a clearer head. Developing a clearer view of our lived experiences brings all kinds of gifts, and will in time help a person slow down, cope with stress and make better choices.