Nimue Brown's Blog, page 265

Inspiration and grind

Creativity depends more on effort than it does on inspiration. There’s the work you need to put in to develop your craft and study the forms you want to work in. There’s the effort it takes to go from original, brilliant idea to finished piece – planning, researching sketching, drafting, editing, revising, learning, practicing – depending on what you do. Without graft, that first spark of inspiration isn’t worth much at all.

But at the same time, without the spark of inspiration what does the grafting do? To my mind, when its just graft, what I’m doing is developing my skills, not creating something new. Sometimes that’s a very good thing – as with practicing a song, or looking at other people’s work in order to learn.

It is of course possible to set about something in a deliberate, workish way, and then have the inspiration turn up because you’ve made a space for it. Some people may find this an effective method, for others it won’t work as well. I find it works well for me to play with ideas in my head when the spark of inspiration turns up, and get it to the paper when I have time. I don’t have to be all fire in my head for the writing down part of the process, just for the ideas stage.

Some things don’t need full on fire in the head creativity. This blog doesn’t. Not every day. Today I’m working with what I have – habit and craft – rather than a flash of wild creative thinking to get things moving. There are quite a few things I can do from this sort of headspace. I can edit and work as a colourist, and I can write articles if someone chucks a topic at me.

I have in the past tried to write creatively when I’ve felt no real inspiration but just wanted to feel like I was still a writer, or had a deadline to meet. That approach doesn’t work for me. It leaves me feeling hollow and weary. The creative writing I produce when I’m just knocking it out is not work I tend to like at all. I do not get to access my best thinking, and there may be some very solid technical reasons for this.

If I use my conscious mind to knock out a piece – well, that’s fine for nonfiction, where putting together facts and ideas in an organised way is the main point. What I think inspiration means, when looked at mechanically, is that the less conscious bits of my brain have absorbed an array of things and put them together out of sight of my conscious, and it is now all ready to roll. If I’m working consciously, I will tend to do things that are obvious, less original, there won’t be that underlying flow of ideas moving me onwards. It all feels a bit constipated.

Very conscious, deliberate, planned writing allows a person to stick to traditional story shapes, and I assume traditional methods in any other art form. Creating unconsciously from inspiration rather than a plan can allow all kinds of previously unthought and unthinkable things into the mix. Often a balance of the two is called for, bringing skill, knowledge and discipline in to balance up the delirious outpourings.

Do without Doing

The idea that you do without doing and all shall be done comes from the Tao Te Ching. This concept fascinates me, and I’ve been exploring it for some time, trying to understand it. I’ve read various translations of the Tao Te Ching now, and the impression I have is that the person who has entered into the Taoist way isn’t just sitting around meditating, they are present in the world and the things that need doing, are done, but effortlessly.

I am currently experiencing what may be the illusion of understanding something here. So, I’m sharing it.

We can be really invested in looking busy, looking like we’re working hard, really sweating for our results. This is because there is a myth that hard work is a virtue, and another myth that hard work is what brings success. Your background, and your parent’s wealth remain the best indicators of your likely worldly success, not how hard you work, but it is a comforting lie to think we can make it to the top. Put that lie down, and appearing to work hard may seem less attractive.

There is wisdom in knowing what actually needs doing, what matters, what is truly essential. Doing the things that need doing rather than the things we think we should be seen to be doing saves a lot of time and effort. Not worrying what people will think if we aren’t working hard all the time, really opens things up.

I have noticed in my own work that if I am stressed, panicking and flailing then a job takes more time and effort than it does if I come to it calmly. Panic takes energy. If I can avoid situations that panic me – tight deadlines, uncooperative colleagues, being asked to do jobs and not given the resources to do them… it’s easy. If I spend my time doing the things I can do, for people who don’t make life harder for me, the work is simple and almost seems to do itself. If I am happy in my work, and inspired by the work, then the work seems to do itself.

Currently, I think that’s what ‘do without doing’ means. It means doing things in a relaxed and natural way because these are the things that make sense and need doing. No extra arm waving, no stress, no work for the sake of appearing to be working. The more I move in this direction, the happier I am and the easier my work is. Not being time pressured turns out to be especially important for me. I suspect we will each turn out to have things that particularly trip us up and things that are less of an issue and that there’s not a one size fits all solution here.

I’m increasingly interested in my quality of life. It is something I have to seek on my own terms, and worrying what other people will think of me, and what I’ll look like from the outside is clearly something to let go of.

Justice for the dead

If terrorists killed 120,000 British people, the UK would be trying to bomb them out of existence.

If another country killed 120,000 British people, we would be at war.

In both of those scenarios, the right wing press would be screaming for blood and retribution.

It is equally true I think that if a private company, a food, a procedure or anything of that ilk was linked to 120,000 deaths there would be public outcry, investigations, prosecutions. The perpetrators would likely be shut down.

The British Medical Journal has explicitly linked government policy to nearly 120,000 deaths in the UK, with the over sixties and those in care being hit worst. More details here – http://blogs.bmj.com/bmjopen/2017/11/15/health-and-social-care-spending-cuts-linked-to-120000-excess-deaths-in-england/

The BBCs didn’t really run with it as a story, for reasons. I have no idea what the reasons were. To the best of my knowledge, there is no criminal investigation under way. No one in government has resigned over it.

The dead deserve justice. I don’t see any difference between killing people via terrorism and killing them via government policy. Not when those policies are designed to harm and obviously going to hurt and clearly putting the most vulnerable at risk for political reasons. Terrorism is violence with a political agenda. Austerity is a political agenda that kills. Unfortunately we’ve no mechanism for dealing with political violence when it comes from the establishment and kills on this scale.

Unfashionably Green

Fashion depends on the idea that we throw things away as soon as they are out of fashion and replace them with newer, trendier things. It particularly applies to clothes and accessories, but the logic of it permeates our lives – how our homes look, what’s in our kitchens, our gardens, and all the rest of it. If you can buy something, then you can buy it newer and more fashionable.

Pre-industrial revolution, fashion was mostly the concern of the wealthy. Most of us made do with what we could cobble together and kept it going for as long as it would last. Mass production introduced the idea of fashion to the population as a whole. Mass media exposes us to images of what the wealthy are doing and wearing and seeds in the rest of us the desire to have what they have, live as they live. This is part of the mechanism that helps keep the poor driving the economy, helps keep us in debt and always running to keep up.

Imagine how different the world would be if we didn’t celebrate consumerism in this way. What if the media routinely critiqued the unsustainable excesses of the rich? Would we be so keen to emulate them if they weren’t celebrated so much? Fashion doesn’t reliably give us beautiful things, or for that matter useful things. What would happen if we sought beauty and utility rather than a sense of being on trend? What would happen if we were more interested in durability and sustainable sourcing? Everything would change.

I think some of what we have at the moment is the cultural backlash that came after the rationing and the aftermath of the Second World War. A cultural desire for easy good things and not having to make do and mend. Perhaps understandable, but not liveable with.

In recent weeks I’ve seen some media acknowledgement of how grossly wasteful the fashion industry itself is. We throw away an obscene amount of clothing each year. It doesn’t help that cheap mass produced fashion isn’t made to last – it wears out and falls apart at depressing speed. Being in a position to compare the longevity of modern clothes with older clothes, I notice a vast difference. Items I’ve had twenty years and more endure while things bought recently fall apart. As someone inclined to make do and mend, I find modern fabrics are very hard to keep going.

Fashion is a story we have told ourselves about what’s desirable. We could have other stories. We could value originality more than keeping up with the crowd. We could value use and durability more than this year’s must have look. We could buy things that are better able to last and not be afraid to keep wearing them for years afterwards. We could be more creative.

One of the things I’ve noticed while pondering this blog is how bland most people look. Supermarket clothes, in fading fabrics and banal styles certainly have a ‘timeless’ quality in that they always look boring and always will. I see my nearest supermarket suggesting we freshen up our wardrobes for Christmas, while offering the same bland sort of shit, plus ridiculous jumpers. I think we’ve got to the point that what we’re being told is the new look isn’t even that, it is as old and tired as anything we bought last year. If what the people around me are wearing is anything to go buy, fashion is an idea that has already past its sell by date anyway.

Being attention hungry

I tend to be critical in my posts on drama, and attention seeking behaviour. I find it exhausting to deal with and I don’t feel much empathy for people who need to generate drama in order to be in the middle of things all the time, so I have challenged myself to try and look at this from some different angles.

Being attention hungry is a real thing. It can have deep roots going back into childhood. The need for affirmation can be all about low self esteem and lack of confidence. My answer to this comes from parenting – which is to reinforce the behaviour you want to see. Validate someone when they aren’t doing drama and you can change everything. Give people space and opportunity to prove themselves in other ways and they may not need to do drama at all. It definitely works with small children.

There’s an emotional intensity to drama. If life seems dull, thin and narrow, then drama can be an antidote to banality. People can end up creating it because they crave interest and excitement. That same intensity and excitement can draw people in who claim not to even like drama – I’ve certainly been that person. The answer is to find real stimulation and value, because drama tends to be empty, hollow and unsatisfying.

Just because it looks like drama to me, from the outside, doesn’t mean I’m right. I may have a poor grasp of what’s going on. I may not understand the significance of events, someone else’s triggers, how much they had invested, how much is at stake and so forth. I should not be too quick to discount other people’s problems. It may be more honest to say that I’m sorry but I just don’t have the spare energy right now, rather than making my inability to help the responsibility of the other person.

It may be that the person I’m dealing with feels very small and very powerless, and whipping up drama they are in the centre of is how they cope with this. If I support the drama, I may reinforce the idea that only drama makes them important or powerful. I should look at how I am treating them outside of drama situations and see if I can improve things there.

It may be that the person doing drama has learned growing up that this is the best way to get attention, or get things done. They may have learned habits of thought and behaviour from family members, or soap operas. If I get cross or upset with them over the drama, I can only feed into the drama and keep it attractive. I may be able to protect myself by very quietly withdrawing my energy from the situation. If I’m dealing with learned behaviour, then I need to model the behaviour I want to see rather than enacting the drama and then wondering why it won’t go away.

The problem could be one of perspective. People who have spent their lives in relative ease, privilege and comfort can get upset about things the rest of us find it hard to make sense of. If you expect life to be hard sometimes, then you just knuckle down and deal with the tough bits. If you expect it to all go effortlessly your way, then you may have no ability to cope when it doesn’t. Fragile egos, first world problems, and no perspective can have people whipping up drama around minor incidents because they don’t know how small their shit is. People who say they are triggered when they are uncomfortable, and so forth. Sucking up time and energy because of privilege isn’t cool, but education can be a slow process, and often an unwelcome one.

Winning at winter

For the second year running, winter is not being the awful, miserable grind I have previously found it to be. Depression and anxiety are with me, but they are at bearable levels. Some of that is about progress I’ve made with my head. Rather a lot of it has an economic angle. Some of it has a social angle. So, here’s the list of things I’ve identified that are helping me win at winter rather than being crushed by it.

Better diet and hot food in the day as well as the evening meal.
Better heating.

Being cold, and not eating well enough have in the past made me tired, more vulnerable to winter bugs, and just grind me down. In the UK we have far too many people choosing between heating and eating and worse yet, able to do neither. The strain this puts people under is awful.

The dehumidifier. No more black mould – a problem of small and under-heated spaces without enough airflow – again this is a poverty issue and widespread. The dehumidifier cost money to buy and money to run, it isn’t an option everyone has. It has also removed the stress of winter laundry, which has been a nightmare for most of my adult life. It is cheaper to buy and run than a tumble drier, more eco-friendly and takes up less space.

Mould in homes causes illness. Damp in homes does properties no good at all, and people no good at all. Chilled, damp bedding does not make for a good night’s sleep. Being unable to keep your clothes clean because you can’t dry it does people no good at all.

A social life that doesn’t depend entirely on going out at night.

Winter can be especially isolating. It is physically harder to get out, more demanding and you need more gear – boots, coat, maybe a car. Being able to socialise in the daytime takes a lot of pressure off, as do earlier evening social activities.

Getting outside whenever there is sun.

This is good for vitamin D production, improving health and mental wellbeing. It’s also not an option if you have to work in the day or don’t have the outdoor clothes to make it feasible. One of the huge perks of being self employed is being able to structure my day as I please, to a fair degree.

Winning at winter costs money. You need the right gear to be comfortable and well. You need to be able to heat your home, and having hot food has a big impact on morale. There are low or no cost things that can be done with time, energy, ingenuity and a woodstove, but if you don’t have those, it isn’t easy. As winter comes round every year, government strategies that routinely leave the poor and vulnerable unable to deal with it well, are appalling and inexcusable.

Checking in

I’m a big fan of regularly taking stock of what’s going on. It’s the sort of thing you can do on your own, but which often works better when you have someone to check in with. I find it relevant in all aspects of life, and useful for making sure things are going as I want them to. It’s an antidote to getting distracted, losing your way, running out of ideas and getting overwhelmed.

When we check in with each other, it’s a process that affirms and builds relationship. For this to work the ‘how are you’ of standard greeting has to be meant. You have to have room to say, and hear more than an empty ‘fine thank you’ and it has to be balanced. If people really care, and listen to each other and speak honestly, that process of checking in can be really effective. Being heard, recognised, understood can do a lot to alleviate discomfort. It may lead to help or advice. It gives us all the chance to be there for each other.

We can give the same attention in non-verbal check ins with places, creatures, tools. A pause to see how things really are, and how we feel and what we’re bringing in can make a lot of odds.

Rituals provide a very natural space for a Pagan check in. In smaller groups, giving people time to say a few words about where they are and how life is for them can help that transition into ritual mode, and also help people bond and support each other. In bigger circles, inviting people to offer one word that says what they’re bringing gives people opportunity to check in with themselves and have something heard.

Any formal social gathering can include check in time. We used to do it when the contemplative Druids sat each month and I found it really helpful for getting things into perspective. Witnessing for each other also helps us make sense our own experiences as we put them in a context bigger than personal experience.

It doesn’t have to be about spiritual practice, either. I’m looking at developing a space for writing and works in progress, and I think the check in may be a good ingredient there. Having time to reflect on where you are with your work and how you feel about it can be really useful.

When there’s a lot going on, we tend to talk about it – it may take over. The check in can help keep that in balance. When there’s not much obviously going on, we may be quieter, but reflecting on the fallow patches can be enlightening in its own way, and opens us up to seeing bigger patterns in our lives. The experience of other people’s struggles and victories, busy times and quiet times helps put our lives into perspective.

We can of course do this for each other on social media, with no other framework at all.

We can also do it privately, without input from anyone else. A little solitary ritual or meditation space is all it takes to check in with yourself and ask how you are doing. If you don’t want it to be too much about you, then you can check in with something else – a house plant, a pet, or just reflecting on how things appear to be going for the people around you.

I think a reflective life is a life lived more fully and with more awareness. Conscious reflection on what’s going on, what we want, where we’ve been and where we are going is how we keep on track. It’s important to take a step back fairly regularly and look at the bigger picture of your life, and at your life in the context of other lives.

Something novel and full of magic

Those of you who have been with me for a long time may recall the Nerdbong podcast and a 22 episode serialisation of my novel Fast Food at the Centre of the World. Many of you have started following this blog far more recently, so this may be news. Twenty two episodes of a strange and speculative novel, read and recorded by me. The British amongst you will discover that I sound like a West Country yokel. For you Americans… I have one of those sexy British accents! (I never cease to be amazed by how much Americans seem to like my voice, because to me I sound like girly Hagrid).

Fast Food at the Centre of the World is based on a handful of ideas and characters Tom Brown came up with but does not have the time to do as a graphic novel. The premise is that a sorcerer called Dunsany discovers the magical centre of the world, buys it, and sets up a restaurant. That of course had me asking questions about why a restaurant, and why fast food. I rapidly discovered that Dunsany’s idea of fast food is an apple and that he lives in a place and time with a worse food crisis than our own. That’s Gary in the image. Gary is a demon. He likes making pastry.

When I started writing fast food, food banks were not a big thing, first world hunger was much less of a thing, and I was angry about licensing laws for music. I wrote about poets, but there were very few actual poets in my life at that point and far more of them now, which makes me feel a lot more exposed sharing this. Although I gather that during the Nerdbong period, the book caused someone to start writing poetry, which is an awesome outcome.

I shall be putting Fast Food onto bandcamp every Wednesday until all 22 are there. Part of the reason for using this platform is that you can listen to each episode for free if you do so on the site. You can also choose to buy and download. I’ve kept it cheap – episodes are fifteen to twenty minutes, and I’m charging about the normal price for a song. I want to make things as accessible and affordable as possible, which is very much in keeping with the ethos of the book. If a few people buy copies then I can justify doing another book next year.

I’ve seen other authors putting up free blogs and then making whiny noises about how much effort it takes in the hopes of eliciting money, and this is not what I’m about. I believe in gift economy, I want to offer access to my work for free. I don’t want money to be a barrier for anyone. If those who can afford to and want to buy something or drop something in the hat now and then do so, I stay viable and it’s all good. I’ve got a patreon for that. In the meantime, please enjoy the free things. It’s a massive validation to me to have people engaging with and enjoying my work, and as ‘professional author’ is increasingly something professional authors (as with Philip Pullman recently) are saying it is now almost impossible to make work, I figure I might as well focus on how to make this work creatively and not get trapped by the money issues.

Here’s episode 1 – https://nimuebrown.bandcamp.com/track/fast-food-at-the-centre-of-the-world-part-one

Wild Fire – a review

Wild Fire is the third book in Anna McKerrow’s awesome Greenworld trilogy. That’s a tricky reviewing setup right there, because reviewing the third book without spoilering the first two means I can’t talk about the story much at all. Further, you don’t want to start here, you want to start with Crow Moon which I reviewed here – eco-pagan-mythmaking/ and then read Red Witch – reviewed here ways-to-live-a-trio-of-reviews/

The Greenworld is in the southwest of the UK, a small country led by witches, hived off from the rest of the world as said rest of world plunges into fuel wars, environmental degradation and chaos. A little bit of utopia set against a very dark background. Except that, like most utopias, it is held together by things that don’t work so well for everyone. Book one – Crow Moon introduces us to the Greenworld through the eyes of Danny, and Danny isn’t a fan. His journey into becoming a witch opens up the setting. I liked book one, I enjoyed having so much Paganism in a novel, and ecotopian thinking is a good thing.

 

 

 

When I read book two – Red Witch, I thought it blew Crow Moon out of the water. New book, new perspective, and time inside the head of Melz, one of the young witches we first met in Crow Moon.  Melz rocks. Melz is the sort of person teenage me wanted to be, and wasn’t. She’s complicated and brilliant and learning to stand in her own power. The story takes her out into Redworld, and casts everything I thought I knew from the first book in an entirely different light.

 

 

 

Then along comes book three, Wild Fire, and a new perspective (and I can’t tell you who without spoiling some things for people who haven’t read book one yet!). I love this narrator – flawed, romantic and cynical at the same time, painfully self aware… This is in part a story about forgiveness, and when it needs doing and when it doesn’t. Wild Fire takes the small UK scene of the first two books and blows it open onto the world stage. Things that had been background details before – like the fuel wars – suddenly become a good deal more important and in the foreground.

There’s a message in all of this, and it is that we cannot hive ourselves off from the world and build little private bubbles. We all of us have to deal with the totality of what’s going on. It will not go away if we ignore it. We will be affected whether we choose to engage or not. It’s an essential message for our times. I spent much of the last few chapters of Wild Fire crying, because it had hope in it, and I honestly did not expected that.

All three books have a serious pace on them. There’s no mucking about – events come thick and fast, with the scale of the action increasing at every turn. The characters are messy, complicated, often confused. They make mistakes, but they build on what they learn from their mistakes. They learn to forgive themselves, and each other, and the adults who have never been enough. They learn who not to forgive as well, and that’s important. These are stories about what we do in face of fear and difference, who we include and who we shut out when banding together to overcome difficulties.

It’s really, really good stuff. Engaging, hard to put down and likely to stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.

These books are ideal for Pagan teenagers, and for anyone else who is happy to have Pagan teens as the main characters in a series. Highly reccomended.

find out more about Anna McKerrow’s work here – annamckerrow.com/books.html

Drama and Anxiety

I hate drama, but anyone who has ever dealt with me when I’ve been panicking could easily assume that I love it. I expect I’m not alone on this, and that talking about the mechanics might be useful for people who find they are dealing with other people’s anxiety.

Anxious minds generally haven’t got there by themselves. The fear of failure, the need to psychically know and guard against any mishap, even the ones you could never have imagined… Experiences that mean you know exactly how it could spiral out of control leave anxious people hyper vigilant. We’re looking for trouble, for threats, for things that could go wrong because we’re trying to make sure they don’t go wrong. We may feel unreasonably responsible for making everything ok, and again, people who get to this point often don’t do so alone, they’ve been made responsible for things they have no control over, which is a damaging experience.

The anxious mind may be looking for the small, controllable thing that could be changed to avert the big disaster. Put that way, it may sound fairly logical, but in practice it means we may be constantly catastrophising. Small problems appear to us as really big problems in the making because experience has taught us to look at things that way. If anything starts going wrong, that threat gets bigger, and at those points I start seeing many, many means by which it could all play out in the worst possible ways. Anxiety plus a vivid imagination is a tortuous mix.

If a person is anxious because of historical trauma, then getting into a fear situation can trigger flashbacks and much deeper fear. It can go beyond being anxious, to being terrified, overwhelmed, being consumed with absolute panic. That in turn can look like some very random flailing from the outside. If you don’t know a person’s terrors, then what they do and say when gripped by terror may not make a lot of sense.

From  the outside, it isn’t easy to tell who is just enjoying being the centre of attention and who is mired in terror and misery. You may rightly not want to get involved with someone else’s wallowing in drama. If you’re a halfway decent person you probably also don’t want to add to the suffering of someone who has been triggered into a state of intense distress.

Look closely, and the anxious person will not be enjoying it. They won’t be drawing attention to their panic any more than they can avoid. They may also be anxious through to terrified about how people are even going to react to the state they are in. They are more likely to apologise (and in the case of people with an abuse history, apologise a lot and for things they clearly have no control over). They may not be able to hear reassurances or accept comfort easily but once they can, they will respond well to sources of safety and calm. Anxious people seek affirmation and safety, although we may use some convoluted routes to try and get there. Drama people seek escalation and attention. Anxious people are exhausted by terrifying episodes. Drama people feed on it.

The anxious person wants to be safe, and they want the people around them to be safe. The person who does drama for attention wants to be the centre of attention. In the heat of a stressful situation it can be hard to decide what you’re dealing with but I think it is possible to tell the two apart. If you ply a drama person with care and support, they will keep having more drama. It can take time to get an anxious person out of the loops and cycles of fear, but it is possible. Over time, a person can heal themselves but it helps if there’s a safe environment in which to do it. Treat an anxious person like they’re just making drama for the hell of it and you can make things a good deal worse for them, silencing them and limiting their scope to ask for help. The drama lover will just seek out a new audience if they aren’t getting the feedback they crave. Unfortunately, seeing what someone does with your disbelief can be the easiest way of identifying what’s going on. For the anxious person, that can mean yet more broken trust, yet more isolation and fear of asking for help.