Nimue Brown's Blog, page 287

Searching for owls

Being elusive night creatures, owls are not the easiest beings to see in the wild. However, May through to mid-June is the best time in the year to see them. Here’s how to do it.

Owls are nesting at the moment, which means they’re based in one location. I have no idea how owl territories work, but the rest of the time they clearly move about. We get them in a nearby tree intermittently, and unpredictably. Through the rest of the year I will hear tawny, barn and little owls at night – and they won’t be calling from reliable locations. If I see one it will be pure luck. But while they’re nesting, they keep showing up in the same place. If you can hear them, it is well worth keeping going back to that spot to try and see them.

Owls emerge around sunset, often at that point where the light is, for a few minutes, strange and magical. I gather from Elen Sentier that this is called owl light. This is the best time to see them. On emerging for the night, an owl will often call a few times, pairs may do a call and return process.

Tawny owlets emerge from the nest before they can fly. I suspect other owls do too, or will emerge long before they can hunt for themselves. The owlet will hop about between branches, testing wings, learning to glide, to flap… they are ungainly and this makes them easier to spot. They alert their parents to their presence by continually calling, which again makes them easier to find. As they rotate their heads and call in multiple directions, be aware that sound coming from just the one place won’t always sound like that from the ground.

With a growing owlet to feed, owl parents emerge earlier in the evening, because they need more time to hunt, so later in May and early in June the hunting time extends, and the odds of seeing an owl increases.

If you don’t hear owls, the best places to look have trees in, but also good rodent hunting nearby. My two best owl-spotting locations have been the canal, and a cycle path. In both cases there was a slim band of trees, or the odd tree at points on the canal, and then plenty of hedgerow and grass for hunting in. Barn owls do indeed tend to nest in buildings, so old buildings in rural locations are worth keeping an eye on.

Owls aren’t readily disturbed by humans – especially if you’re on a footpath, but don’t get closer to them. My experience last year was that both parents and chick were untroubled by an audience, indeed the young owl was as curious about us as we were about owls. With us on the path and the owls in the trees it was possible to be quite close without bothering them at all. If there’s a footpath, stay quietly on it, because footpaths definitely help wildlife feel more easy about human presences. It’s when we’re unpredictable that they are likely to panic.

If you’ve no owl experience, it may take a while to build enough knowledge that you can see them. However, if you listen for owls through the year, if you can get out in the dark at all, you may find you have owls in area, and then you can build on that to increase your chances of seeing them. You don’t need wilderness, you just need trees and places that mice can live. City parks, edges of towns, canals, cycle paths and other such green corridors can and do support owls. Even the grassy side of a road may be a hunting ground.

How to heal

Over the last few years I’ve noticed that there are a lot of underlying factors when it comes to healing. These apply to both mental and bodily health – which henceforth I shall just describe as ‘health’.

Most importantly, if you are going to heal, you have to not be living with the thing(s) making you ill in the first place. Otherwise all you can do is tackle symptoms. This is often really hard to achieve, because work life balance, family responsibility and where you live are most likely implicated if your health issues aren’t caused by accident, cancer, virus or bacteria.

Healing requires a good diet. Illness may be caused or exacerbated by poor nutrition. It is important to note that for people in significant poverty, this is often hard to fix because protein is expensive. You need it to heal brain chemistry as much as you do to heal skin or muscle.

Healing requires rest. Rest requires time, peaceful spaces to be in, and being free from the demands of others.

Healing has to be a priority. You need to be able to put it ahead of most if not all other considerations in order to achieve the points I’ve raised above. If you can put your healing first, it is much easier to heal. If you have to prioritise other things – work, family, someone else’s needs… your own healing may take longer, or may be set back.

If these kinds of resources are available to you, then it is easy to get on with the work of making yourself well again – or as well as you can be in the context of what’s made you unwell. At this point, deploy your positive thinking and do what needs doing, and you can get results. However, if your life does not allow you to prioritise healing, if you can’t afford to eat well enough, if you have no way of getting out of the toxic workplace or the mould-filled flat, or the demands on you won’t ease off… healing is difficult and slow if it’s possible at all. All the positive thinking in the world cannot replace what rest, space, good food and the such will achieve.

On the alternative side, we’re too quick to look at the power of positive thinking and we aren’t talking enough about the privileges involved in being able to stop and sort things out. Given the way in which disability increases a person’s risk of financial poverty, there is potential for some truly vicious circles here. Poverty makes you more vulnerable, which increases the odds of not getting over a health setback, which will make you poorer, and more vulnerable to poor health. Illness, accident and health-destroying experiences will, if you don’t have a safety net of some sort, throw you into poverty which reduces your chance of being able to recover. There’s no reason it has to be like this, the choice is purely a consequence of political decisions and priorities.

Against tyrannical clothing

Let me start by saying that I have no problem with gear needed for health and safety reasons, because health, and also safety. I have no problem with anything a person chooses to wear, or with people not wearing clothes – your body, your business. I am willing to accept that uniforms are helpful in some circumstances, both for practical reasons and for ease of being able to see at a glance who is doing the things. These are not tyrannical clothing issues.

Tyrannical clothing is about imposing unreasonable clothing on people so as to emphasise the power difference. There’s no practical aspect to it – in fact it is often profoundly impractical and designed to make the wearer uncomfortable so as to keep them constantly aware that they have no power. Using the power imbalance to force clothes onto people that are unsuitable, uncomfortable, humiliating, is all about disempowering the victim, and it has to stop.

I’m thinking primarily of two items here in conventional western use – the neck tie and the high heeled shoe. I was obliged to wear a neck tie as part of a school uniform, and many people – especially men – are required to wear them at work. In hot weather, they are a source of misery and discomfort. They serve no purpose. We perceive them as smart because we’re told that’s what they are, but they are just a dangly bit of fabric. Woolly neck scarves, and tying lace around your neck is not considered smart, because there is no inherent ‘smartness’ in the bit of fabric. It’s just a tool of social conditioning.

The high heel is far worse because they can and do cause harm to the feet, the hip joints and in women who are still growing, you can get bone deformity. In old age you can have bunions. Most of us can’t walk any distance in a high heel, we certainly can’t run apart from some very talented exceptions. High heels make you feel precarious and vulnerable if they aren’t your thing, and yet some ‘uniforms’ require them of female workers.

We could also afford to look at double standards – work and educational spaces that allow women to wear cool, lightweight clothes in the summer while the men have to sweat it out in shirt, trousers and tie. Workspaces and educational places that let men be warm in the winter but require women to freeze in short skirts, tights and impractical shoes. There is no practical gain here, only those in power ignoring the needs of the people who have less power.

If a uniform item serves no practical purpose, and instead causes discomfort, it should not be legal to enforce the wearing of it.

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Politics for the common good

Imagine for a moment how different things would be if the whole point of politics was to serve the common good. Clearly there are, around the world, parties, leaders and individuals who very much care about the common good, but far too many care about their own power, and the preferences of rich lobbyists.

What would politics for the common good look like if we imagine that on a world scale? An end to war. A fairer planet, free from slavery, exploitation, poverty and hunger. An end to oppressive regimes. Taking care of the Earth and making sure we don’t pollute the air, or the water, or over exploit resources, or mistreat other living things.

At a country level, it would mean putting quality of life for all ahead of profits for the few. It would mean everyone with a roof over their head and no one going hungry. Free healthcare and education for all, access to leisure, sports, culture and community for all. It would mean freeing ourselves from the politics of hate and fear to focus on the good we can do for each other. It would mean resources going where they are most needed, rather than to the highest bidder.

All sounds a bit far fetched, doesn’t it?

Except for the small issue that politics is something humans invented, and what’s running it and doing it is nothing but other humans. Why can’t we change it so that it works for everyone? Is it just the fantasy that we too could magically become one of the minority who benefit rather than being part of the exploited majority that stops us trying to turn things around? Is it lack of imagination? Or lack of belief? What’s stopping us? Are we all so obsessed with competing for survival and our own personal greed that we can’t see the massive advantages in fairness and co-operation?

Imagine if politics existed solely to provide and facilitate good things and to manage resources fairly and responsibly. What would it take to make that happen?

In spite of A.A Milne – a poem

The King asked the Queen

And the Queen asked the dairymaid

Could we have some butter,

For the royal slice of bread?

 

The maid asked the cow,

And the cow was not obliging.

I am tired of exploitation,

Is what the bovine said.

 

And while we’re on the subject,

What is it with monarchy

What kind of man can’t sort out

What he puts upon his bread?

 

The cow said, he’s a patriarch

I find him most annoying,

Look how he makes the Queen

Sort all the daft things in his head.

 

And why are you a dairymaid?

I think we should be asking.

The workshy Queen has hands of white

Your busy paws are red.

 

So tell the King we’ve gone on strike,

We will not do his bidding

We want fairness and equality

And better lives instead.

 

If he wants some sodding butter

Well, he’s got so much of everything,

He should try some of his money

On his royal slice of bread.

When you can’t do self care

You watch someone work, and work and burnout, and try to keep going. You try to help them by encouraging them to take better care of themselves, and it doesn’t get through – which is frustrating and off-putting. What do you do? I write this as both someone who has struggled with self-care and someone who has wanted to help others who clearly have the same sorts of issues. There are reasons some people can’t do it and respond badly to being told they need to.

Depression, which tends to cause feelings of low or no self worth, and any other self esteem issues make it hard for a person to feel like looking after themselves is worth doing. The idea of putting yourself first can cause huge feelings of guilt, shame, and failure. Thus a recoiling in horror at the suggestion of taking a day off.

For people living in abusive situations, or who have a history of being abused, it can feel, or actually be unsafe to take care of yourself. Even taking your own needs into account may provoke hostility, verbal abuse, criticism, mockery, being told you are selfish, lazy, useless, not taking proper care of others. You might have someone in your life who will take any excuse to work themselves into a state of anger, and from the anger may come physical violence. What happens if you are exposed to anything like this is you can take on the idea that it is your selfish lazy fault that has caused the perfectly reasonable anger and violence. So you learn to ignore your needs because it is safer to pretend you don’t have any.

For anyone with abuse issues, encouragement to self care can be a panic trigger. It’s really hard to deal with from the outside because it makes no sense to anyone who has not had their right to be a person stripped from them.

The best way to help, is to go in with logic. Here are some tried and tested thought forms.

Burnout is inefficient, if I rest now, I won’t burn out.

I will produce a better quality of work if I am less tired. My concentration will be better.

I am investing in being able to work sustainably and being able to meet more of my commitments.

It’s like putting fuel in the tank so you have something to run on.

A person who is able to stop, draw breath, rest and take care of themselves – even if they think they’re only doing it so as to work better – will slowly improve their self esteem. Once you get off the hamster wheel and aren’t running all the time it becomes easier to think rationally. Exhausted people are not rational, generally.

A person who can’t do self care because they’re in too dangerous a situation needs to realise this and get out. Telling them will not always help much. Support them in feeling worthwhile. Don’t tell them what they should do – that just undermines their already battered self esteem. Tell them that you care about them and want to see them well and thriving, and perhaps they’ll tell you why they are afraid of self-care. Always remember that for an abuse victim, the most dangerous time is the time when they try to leave – this is the time a person is most likely to be subjected to violence or even killed. It is always worth getting advice and support from the police for a safe exit.

The power of street trees

Nothing humanises a human space like a tree. There’s an irony! When we make spaces that have nothing green in them, all we can make is cold, barren, and inhuman. We aren’t meant to live in pristine spaces devoid of other life. One of the best ways to bring life and colour to human landscapes, is by adding plants, because the plants allow so many other life forms to move in too. Being a big vertical space, trees are especially good at this.

Many years ago, visiting a friend I noticed that they were living in a place with almost no birds. It felt like a cold, drab place to me as a consequence. The reason there were no birds was obvious – small gardens boundaried by fences and not a tree in sight. The birds had nowhere to be, nowhere to feed, or shelter. I recall in contrast an otherwise rather empty public space, where there was a tree, and at night that tree filled with sparrows, and the space filled with the chattering songs of sparrows.

There is plenty of evidence out there that green spaces help with mental health. We know tree time is good for us. We know trees can help cut down noise pollution and that trees are good for air quality. We know that trees add beauty. Why isn’t every urban space planned so that it includes trees? It should be a no-brainer.

There’s a Woodland Trust Campaign to protect street trees – which are too often undervalued and as we’ve seen in Sheffield, can be cut down for really questionable reasons as things stand. http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blogs/woodland-trust/2017/04/street-trees/

The latest Hopeless adventures

There have been some developments this week that I am excited about and want to share…

Anyone who has been with the blog for a while will have likely picked up that one of the things I do is a graphic novel series called Hopeless Maine. It is a setting my other half came up with many years ago, and the essence of the main characters comes from him. He asked me to take on writing the stories and script, long before we got ourselves organised romantically!

Back when we ran Hopeless Maine as a webcomic, and with a weekly blog/newspaper for the island, we had a lot of interaction from people. This year we decided to open Hopeless up to collaboration and play, and the results have far surpassed anything I could have dared to hope for.

For a while now we’ve had pieces every Friday for www.hopelessmaine.com expanding on island life in all manner of glorious ways. This week saw the arrival of a new column that will go out each Tuesday – Tales from the Squid and Teapot – the first of which can be found here https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/%E2%8Bobit-sir-fromebridge-whitminster/

The columnist for Tales from The Squid and Teapot is Martin Pearson AKA my Dad. He’s a natural when it comes to describing the life of Hopeless, and this isn’t really a coincidence at all. The books I encountered as a child, the things I find funny,  the way I think and the kind of phrasing I use has all, to some degree, been influenced by him. He’s always written, but not tended to publish, so it’s a delight to be able to lure him out in this manner.

Our other exciting development is a plan for Hopeless Maine the roleplay game. A new blog has been set up for this by Keith Healing, and discussions are under way about how to turn Hopeless into a set of playable mechanics, that allow creativity and improvising. I feel the need to mention at this point that I played a lot of role play in my teens – mostly D&D (Dragonlance), AD&D a bit of 3rd edition D&D, Some White Wolf (Changeling, Mage and Vampire) some Warhammer, a bit of Star Wars, a few rounds of Shadow Run, and others. I’ve also run games. I was never much attracted to playing magic users because the magic seemed dull, prescriptive, too combat orientated and frankly not that magical. This, will be different, and I’m excited about that. There will also, (take note, steampunks) be something enabling invention. It won’t assume combat is how things get done, but will allow for hitting things with a frying pan in an emergency. Early days, but much potential. You can find more about that here –https://hopelesstraveller.wordpress.com/

Fox rituals

I don’t know how long the fox had been watching us, but he had stopped in the middle of the footpath to observe our approach. We’d been mostly looking up into the trees on the off-chance of owlets, and it took me a while to register the scrutiny, and longer again to spot him in the gloom. We stopped, and he stayed put, a length of fox across the middle of the path, eyeing us up. We said hi. We managed to hold that position for more seconds, and then the fox took off into the trees.

We saw him twice on the way home – each time he emerged from the undergrowth some yards ahead of us, trotted briskly down the path and then disappeared into the gloom. It was clearly the same fox – he’s pretty distinctive. A large male, skinny but clearly in good shape, with some distinctive white markings. We see him regularly – he saunters past our flat some nights, and we see him in the fields a well. Like us, he’s a creature of the borders between town and country. I guess he’s seen, or smelled us about, too.

It struck me, walking home, what a difference there is between saying ‘hail spirits of this place’ in a ritual and ‘hello Mr Fox’ in an encounter. We also stopped to say hi to a rabbit, who also watched us but did not run away. My feeling of being present, of being part of life on the path rather than just an observer or something passing through, was intense. I felt the connection I’d tried to make in ritual. I wonder about the way ritual helps us to engage with what’s going on, but is also a barrier simply because it is an elaborate human construct designed to move at its own pace.

In a Pagan ritual, often what we’re trying to do is connect with the season, and with the natural world. I’ve been walking the same path intermittently for years now – more evenings in the summer, earlier in the winter, the odd night excursion. I know who to expect where and when, broadly speaking. We’ve become creatures who use the path, along with the deer and numerous birds. We stop for them, and they carry on – last night two robins engaged in a strange song and dance routine that seemed very intimate. When they hopped into the leaf litter, their plumage and the gloom conspired to make them into uncanny, magical patterns of movement.

The fox no doubt has his own nightly rituals.

Challenging Apathy

“They’re all as bad as each other, there’s no point…”

Whether we’re talking about religions, politics, corporations, the media, or anything else with power, this kind of apathetic thinking is really problematic. If we won’t call to account the ones who are actually awful on the grounds that nothing better exists, then what we do is give our support to the worst that’s out there.

Alternatives always exist. They may seem like long shots. There may only be small improvements you can push for. Sometimes you may have to choose between a mouldy pear and a rotten apple, but a few good bits have to be better than entirely gone off.

There are those who will tell you that wanting anything better is just naive daydreaming and you don’t live in the ‘real’ world. This of course is just another way of keeping things as they are. If the majority of us rejected this thinking, the real world would rapidly have no place for lazy cynicism.

It is easy to say ‘they’re all the same, there’s no point’. It saves a person from feeling like they have to bother. If nothing can be done, why make any effort? Why bother trying to find a reliable news source, or a party that has some values you could respect, or a religious group that isn’t a money making operation? If nothing can be made better, you free yourself from any possible reason to make any effort at all. This is how what’s worst in the world is allowed to thrive.

As long as we give ourselves excuses not to act, terrible things are given room to flourish. We have a human world made entirely of people. It’s just people doing stuff. Anything and everything can be changed if there’s the will. We don’t have to let apathy make us complicit.