Nimue Brown's Blog, page 274
September 9, 2017
How we hold each other
They said “it is all your fault.”
And so I apologised, and promised I would try harder. Do more, ask for less. Think more carefully. Make less fuss.
They said “you are an emotional blackmailer and attention seeking.”
And so I hid my feelings, denied my pain. I became ashamed of my tears. Afraid to say ‘ouch’.
They said “you are useless and a waste of space. You mess everything up.”
I said sorry. Again. More. I made a note not to ask for help so often.
They said ‘You are difficult, high maintenance, exhausting to deal with.”
I reminded myself to ask for less, to not burden other people.
They said “it is inconvenient for us if you make a fuss. We don’t want to deal with what’s happening, it is not our problem.”
I admitted that it was not their problem. They owed me nothing.
They said “we will take your work but we don’t want to acknowledge you in any way.”
And on that occasion I managed to say no, sod you all. No.
They said “We don’t have time to talk to you.”
I started saying ‘well in that case, maybe I am not doing this thing you wanted me to do.”
They harassed me, made my life difficult, and while they did it, they said “you are the bully. You are the bad guy and must be stopped.”
Eventually I started to wonder about this.
They have worn various faces down the years. They have always been willing to take the best of me, bleed me dry, and complain if I ask not to be bled to death. They have walked on me, and been offended when I have asked not to be used as rug. It has taken me far too long to consider that I might not be the one in the wrong here.
It has taken me a long time to learn that there are people who do not see my flaws as justification for hurting me. There are people willing to think the best of me, deal kindly, play fairly, exchange and support in return. Perhaps they were there all along, and I could not see them for the feet of the tramplers, and the haze of too much blood letting. I see them now. And they say things that do not take me apart.


September 8, 2017
A Personal Agenda
One of the things I’ve taken to checking up on, is my personal agenda. It’s all too easy to find that what you’re doing and what you want are out of kilter. So, what it the grand plan? What’s the intended trajectory? Where are we going, and how, and why, and so forth.
In my own life, I’m making a deliberate bid to be more economically effective. I have long term goals about where I want to be living. I’m also aware that many problems can be solved by throwing money at them, and I’d like to be better placed to solve more of those problems. I’m still looking for a better work life balance that gives me more energy for fun stuff, but on the whole, I’m a lot happier with my day to day arrangements than I was. I’ve got people to feed, I’m not going to treat economic viability as some sort of sin. I’m looking for work models that avoid exploitation.
I want to support, encourage and enable creativity in other people. I want to make safe spaces where people can have a go at things, stretch and experiment. I want to help people who are professionally creative stay emotionally and economically viable. I’m looking at a number of ways of taking this forward.
I want to help tackle the stigma around mental health problems, share information on causes and ways of coping, and tackle the way in which our culture as a whole is making people ill. At the moment I can only do this on a fairly small scale, and mostly through this blog. I’m keeping an eye out for other options.
I’m a tree activist for The Woodland Trust (part of their Special Branch!) and doing what I can in terms of environmental activism remains important to me. Having done about half of an ecolinguistics course, I’m increasingly inclined to think that I want to deal with environmental activism from the angle of stories, language use, how we frame things, and the like. I’m at the early stages with this and still figuring out where to take it.
I’m very much interested in the kind of power that lets me get things done, but not at all in the kind of power that allows me to control other people. I’m looking around to see who is willing to give me a platform, where I might fit, where there’s enough agenda overlap that we might be functional fellow travellers for a while. I’ve got one significant development in the bag on that score, everything else is going to be a good deal slower.
I’ve a lot of years of service behind me, and often what I’ve done is show up to do the things other people wanted. It was useful as a learning experience, but I’m not playing that way anymore. I’m looking for the spaces and people able to give me the space to do the things I think are important. I’ve also become very wary of the idea that we should all waft about saying ‘it’s all about the service’ because I’ve seen this too often. ‘I’ve got less ego than you’ can easily become the main ego game in town. I’m less self promoting than you. I’m a good little Pagan working hard and not drawing attention to myself. Enough of that! Platforms mean visibility. Changing things means visibility. Anyone who has to pretend they don’t want any attention while trying to do anything significant is getting into something with a whiff of cognitive dissonance about it.
Personal gain and profit are not the only kind of personal agenda available. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need to keep dealing with the spaces that want me to be invisible, unnamed, and unable to get by financially. I’ve been through a few of those, where it’s apparently all about service, but in reality all about exploitation. There should be no shame in trying to be viable, and no shame in working on your own terms, for your own reasons.


September 7, 2017
Druids who do not speak to kings
Where myth and history meet there are tales of Druids who spoke with Kings, and who could stand on battlefields and bid the armies cease in their fighting.
We are not such Druids. May we live to see the day when there are no kings left to speak to. No unelected men with any titles, no such forms of absolute power.
We can speak truth to power. We can do so not because we have a big, shiny title everyone respects (it cheers me how far we are from that) but because truth should be spoken to power wherever power is oblivious to truth.
We can speak to anyone who will hear us.
We can speak for those who have no voices – the land, the creatures, the ancestors, the Gods. However, when we do so, we must be careful that we aren’t speaking for ourselves and claiming to voice something other in order to look good.
When we speak for those who have no voices, we must remember that most people have voices and their problem is about not being heard or taken seriously. If we speak for them, we may only add to this. We can help to amplify them.
Before we speak, we need to pause. To listen to the living voices around us. To listen to the voices of spirit and inspiration that might come to us if we make room. To listen to what we intend to say so we can figure out if it has any merit. Better to listen a lot, and talk less, but talk with insight, with inspiration, with understanding.
And when we speak as Druids, let it be because Druids are called to serve, and not from a desire to have our voices heard over all others, and not from a desire to be important and powerful. There is no need for us to be the Druids who speak to Kings.


September 6, 2017
The menoporpoise
It isn’t a pause. Nothing has stopped, and the ‘pause’ bit technically refers to stopping bleeding, which may be years away for me.
Peri-menopausal is an awkward mouthful of a term, it’s not something I can live inside. It does nothing for me.
So far, the material I’ve found has just flagged up all the bad bits. There’s nothing I can work with. Nothing I feel empowered or encouraged by. I suspect this is because our culture values youth and sexual fertility in women, and not age or wisdom.
As a practical point, my skin now takes offence at everything, including my own sweat. I seem to spend a lot of time slinking off to the bathroom to wash afflicted regions. Water is fine. This leads me to the logical conclusion that I am trying to transform into an aquatic mammal, and this in turn brings me very naturally to the menoporpoise.
I see the menoporpoise as friendly and benevolent, but not always convenient. It means well, but it is in essence a large aquatic mammal trying to swim about inside my life, and sometimes that’s going to be complicated. We will have to learn to get along, the menoporpoise and I.
Our lives and experiences are informed and shaped by the language we use and the stories we tell. How we name things, how we talk of them is important stuff. For easily a year now, my body has been changing. I don’t want the cultural narratives of menopause. But perhaps I can work with a menoporpoise and change into something new.


September 5, 2017
In the aftermath of anxiety
A panic attack can be a rather self announcing thing. It has inherent drama, so it can be possible for people not experiencing the panic to tell that something is going on. However, the aftermath of a panic attack is also a difficult time, and it is far harder to see what’s going on then, so I thought it might be a useful thing for me to talk about.
The physical symptoms can persist. Raised heart rate, tight chest, difficulty breathing – these things can go on for hours, even days after a big panic attack. It feels awful and can lead to the fear that something has gone wrong at a bodily level. I’ve never been clear how you’re supposed to tell between panic and heart attack warning signs. Those of us who suffer panic are told to ignore what others are told to take seriously.
There can be a huge emotional backlash. It invariably leaves me feeling like I’m stupid, irrational and I’m embarrassed by my loss of control. I hate not being able to control what I’m doing. I get anxious that people will not take me seriously, or will think it’s a stunt, a bid for attention, an attempt at emotional blackmail. Often as a consequence I will become withdrawn afterwards, especially when I don’t know how people are responding to me.
Once panic has been triggered, it is easier to re-panic me. This can lead to incredibly vicious cycles where it gets ever harder to stop panicking. Without calm and respite, panic can get seriously out of control.
Exhaustion is a common part of the backlash. Emotional and bodily exhaustion can be severe and can last for days. The desire to just down tools and go to bed is huge. When things are really bad, a massive panic attack can result in the no energy, not coping outcome of a big round of depression.
If you are dealing with a person who suffers from panic, then the best way to find out how to help them is to ask. On the whole, taking people seriously and treating them kindly makes a lot of odds. However, as panic is often related to abuse experiences, make sure that what you do to help doesn’t seem controlling, doesn’t give the sufferer the feeling that they are so useless they can’t take care of themselves, doesn’t patronise or demean them. Those of us who are ok with being touched can be significantly soothed through long hugs, but never hug without asking. Unsolicited body contact can be a panic trigger. Bring drinks, reduce noise, remove threats, talk calmly, give space and time.
Triggers are tricky things. Someone else’s triggers may make no sense to you, and you may feel that the time it takes them to recover is unreasonable. This is because it isn’t your trigger, or your history, or your body, and it is important to bear that in mind when dealing with someone in distress.


September 4, 2017
New books for Druids
Australian Druidry, by Julie Brett comes out this month, while Reclaiming Civilization by Brendan Myers has just been released. Both titles are highly pertinent to anyone following the Druid path and as I’ve read both I thought I’d review them together.
Brendan Myers is a philosopher and academic with a really accessible writing style. I’ve been following his work for a long time. In this most recent book he explores the concept of civilization. Inevitably this means a fair bit of looking at the ideas of our ancient Pagan ancestors. It also means exploring what people think civilization is, and flagging up all the things that aren’t hard wired, or inevitable, and could in fact be changed. For anyone hankering after a different sort of society, this is an uplifting book, and there’s enough in it about how we live as individuals to help any one of us, alone, to start pushing more deliberately towards better forms of civilization. I highly recommend it.
Julie Brett’s title at first glance has no obvious relevance to Druids outside of Australia. But, I want to make the case that this is a book for Druids everywhere. It is to a large extent an exploration of the seasons and the landscape. Now, mostly what Druidry works with is based on solar events and known Celtic festivals. Our wheel of the year was not ancient history, most groups that we know about celebrated some, but not all of the festivals with the equinoxes probably the least celebrated of the lot.
The wheel of the year makes sense (a bit) in relation to the British and Irish agricultural year. However, for the international Druid, there may not be hawthorn in May. Imbolc may well not be the time of first flowering. There may be no harvests between Lammas and the autumn equinox. There’s plenty of information out there for Druids wanting to work with their ancestors of tradition, but not much guidance for Druids who want to work with their own seasons and landscapes.
In this book, Julie shares the methods she used to establish an Australian wheel of the year. In doing so, she’s created a road map that any Druid, anywhere can use to begin working with the seasons on their own terms. Reading it some time ago when the book was still in development, I realised that even here in the UK, there isn’t always a tidy match and that there had not been enough of my landscape in my practice.


September 3, 2017
Negotiated relationships
(trigger warnings, some domestic abuse content)
One of the big problems, as I see it, with straight, vanilla type relationships is that people assume a lot. If you think you are normal, and that your partner is normal, it is easy to assume you want the same things. This results in at best a lack of communication, it can lead to frustration, boredom and at the worst end, people doing things to each other that weren’t welcome or wanted. My impression is that people whose sexual education was watching porn can have some odd assumptions about what constitutes ‘normal’ as well.
People who come from a kink and/or polyamoury background tend to know that what they want might well not be what anyone else wants. I think it’s also true for LGBT folk – who don’t start out thinking they are the default setting, or assuming that the people they encounter will want the same things. Straight people can be surprised when other people turn out not to be straight.
We tell ourselves a lot of stories about what straight monogamy looks like. These stories tend to focus on the establishment of the relationship and then it all gets vague about how you keep it going. Negotiation isn’t a feature. Our culture has stories of power over, or commercial bargaining, but not much at all about relationship negotiation.
In my experience, negotiating clearly is a good idea in any relationship – professional, romantic, sexual, platonic… whatever you’ve got, it pays to talk about it and not to assume you know what the other person thinks or feels.
The thing is that in practice, most of the straight and monogamous people I’ve encountered along the way have not all thought, felt and wanted the same things, even while plenty of them seemed very confident that they were just normal and like everyone else.
One of the great relationship myths is that we should magically know what our significant other person thinks and feels. Most of us don’t. If we don’t say to each other what we think and feel and then get cross with each other for not knowing – that way lies only misery.
Most of us do not fit neatly together. What we think and feel, what we want and desire does not always align neatly. If we deal with this through power, the one with most power forcing their choices on the one with least power, that way lies misery and abuse. If we take a commercial approach – I will do this if you will do that – we find ourselves in situations where people repeatedly do something they don’t want to do. There’s usually a power aspect. I will buy you the winter coat you need if you will consent to be tied up and beaten, is not in fact a fair exchange, or a consenting situation, but this kind of thing happens a lot. It is a way of abusing someone while convincing the victim that they have consented and have no recourse.
Negotiation means finding the answers everyone can be okay with, only doing the things everyone wants to do. It means taking the risk of finding that there isn’t room for what you want. It requires the vulnerability of being honest without taking control to push your wants onto others. It means care, respect, an open heart, a willing ear, the desire to understand and co-operate with the other person. It means wanting an outcome that does not hurt or diminish anyone else. Even if you try that and can’t do it very well at first, the outcomes are far better than any other approach.


September 2, 2017
Magic and ritual
In witchcraft traditions, ritual (as far as I can tell from the outside) is what you do in order that a group of people can do magic together. There’s also an aspect of celebrating the seasons and honouring deity and the natural world.
Ritual for Druids is often more about the celebration, and less about deliberate intent to perform magic. There are groups and individuals who approach Druid ritual for magical purposes, but my experience has been that the majority gather to celebrate, above and beyond all else. It’s one of the reasons Druid rituals are more family friendly, because there isn’t the same demand for deep focus and intensity that collective spellwork requires.
Having said that, Druid ritual has the capacity for magic. It is more likely to be an emergent property rather than something intentioned. I’ve seen that magic take many forms, here are a few examples.
A growing sense of connection and community that changes how people relate to each other.
Empowering participants such that they find their own voices and creativity and are able to stand in their own power.
Connecting people with the land and seasons in a way that radically impacts on who they are and what they do.
Giving power to vows, dedications, offerings and intentions such that a person is more inspired to see it through, more invested and more able. Bringing the sacred to our commitments.
Feeling witnessed, heard, seen and held in the context of ritual space can be an incredible and transformative experience for a person.
Inspiration / awen, shared or individual, arising within the ritual can lead to wild creativity and improvisation, and again can change people in all kinds of ways.
A sense of the numinous can be a consequence of ritual.
If you’ve got any other examples you’d like to add, do please pile into the comments section.


September 1, 2017
Do not ask what the universe can do for you…
Ask what you can do for the bits of the universe you encounter. This is a line of thought inspired by a recent comment on the blog (thank you). Rather than looking at how magic answers can be persuaded to come to us, why not look at how to be magic answers, for other people and for the planet?
Of course this depends on being sufficiently resourced, but many of the things I’m poised to advocate don’t require a person to be silly amounts of privileged. When we spend all our time asking the universe/the gods/angels/crystal dolphins to help us out, we may feel that we are loved by the universe etc. But we may also be teaching ourselves to feel powerless.
Give praise. It’s an easy way of uplifting people who are doing good things. Self esteem courses recommend praise giving because it empowers the giver, too.
Give away things you don’t need. Nothing creates a feeling of abundance like giving stuff away – so long as you can afford it. Even if it’s very occasional, passing something along gives a real sense of power, and solves a problem for someone else.
Listen. There’s a lot of distress that can be eased just by hearing, acknowledging and witnessing people. It costs time and emotional labour, but if we all spared a little of that, the world would be a kinder place.
Every charity out there could do with more volunteer support than it gets. The same is true for pretty much every volunteer organisation out there. The scope to be someone else’s miracle is vast.
A kind word, a small deed of assistance, a gesture of respect and friendship – these things can and do save lives. A little bit of taking care of each other goes a long way towards producing miraculous results.
Make things of beauty.
Speak up for that which has no voice – for creatures, landscapes and ecosystems. Help amplify people who are not heard. Education is essential for solving most problems.
Don’t be afraid to stand out, to go against the flow, or dispute the consensus.
It’s just a small flavour, not an exhaustive list. If you believe in magic – well, magic works better when you give it something tangible it can latch onto. If you believe that like attracts like, then what you do has to be in that equation. If you believe in karma, then your actions in the world have got to matter. If you think the universe loves everyone, be the vector by which some of that love gets out into the world. Be the change. Be the magic you want to see happening.
Personal privilege is not a measure of how spiritual we are. It’s not the advantages you have that count, it’s what you choose to do with them. And I promise, if you want to feel magical and powerful, then doing some discernible good will give you that far more than any ego massage ever could.


August 31, 2017
Beneath the surface
You can’t tell if someone or something is superficial by looking at its surface. (Yes, this is the post-Asylum steampunk blog post!). It’s easy to look at the kit and play in steampunk and decide the whole thing must be very silly, trivial and pointless. As Pagans we cheerfully do this to each other, we look askance at the ones who wear a lot of velvet, and the ones whose pentagrams are too big…
Seeming superficial doesn’t make something superficial. It’s only by looking more carefully at what something does that we can work out how to value it, and that valuing is itself a subjective process.
If something is superficial, it changes nothing. There are no significant consequences.
Of course how we spend our money has massive implications, so a Pagan who is all about the bling may be contributing to the Pagan economy by supporting original creators and makers. Equally they might be buying cheap tat, made by slave labour and thrown away too soon. Here are spiritual implications for superficial practices.
It is good to play, to mess about, have a laugh and do things for the sheer pleasure of it. That can look silly from the outside, but for the goth decked up to the nines, it can be a matter of soul and emotional expression that gets them through the days when they are obliged to tone down, fit in and seem normal. There’s a lot of creativity involved in dressing outlandishly, and the bard path is all about creativity. How we look has as much potential to be a meaningful art form as any other art form.
Too much seriousness can make us stuffy, egotistical, self important and anally retentive. It’s good to be able to muck about, to be able to risk other people not taking you seriously.
There are deeper layers to this, too. Visually manifesting your identity can help people feel a sense of belonging. It’s good to look around and know that, just for a little while, you are with ‘your people’. Be that a comics con full of folk cosplaying superheroes, a steampunk event full of hats, a Pagan gathering full of cloaks or anything else of that ilk. These things can affirm our sense of belonging. For many of us, day to day life is short on that kind of affirmation, some time on the inside of a group can be powerful.
Apparently silly things can have the power to transform people. I note from steampunk gatherings that people are empowered, encouraged and inspired by the experience and this often has consequences long after the event is over. These kinds of activities open the door to friendships, explorations, creativity, feeling able to make yourself seen and heard in other contexts.
On the whole, I think one of the most superficial things we can do is Pagans is waste our time putting down other people based on the surface we’ve seen. All that can do is make someone else a bit sad, or a bit angry for a while. Perhaps the person doing it gets a brief hit from being smug and superior, but if that’s where you go to feel powerful, you really have issues with a lack of power that won’t be dealt with knocking other people down.

