Nimue Brown's Blog, page 29

Living History

(Nimue)

There’s nothing like trying to do something to give you a sense of how it works. Here we are on Hadrian’s Wall with Keith being a Roman and me being Iron Age British. I did have Roman kit, but Roman women don’t have sleeves on their overdresses, and the Brit overdress is wool not linen, and it was VERY  cold.

What I’m wearing is what is assumed to be ‘Celtic’ female attire. It’s difficult because the Celts didn’t leave us much information about themselves. Things about clothing can be inferred from the archaeology, but these are educated guesses.

As soon as I put the outfit on, I knew it was wrong. I have a linen under-dress that is like a nighty and you can see the overdress. There is no easy way of accessing my breasts. That means there’s no way of breast feeding while wearing this dress. It amazes me that no one seems to have considered this. How can you possibly have a default dress for women in which there is no way of breast feeding a child? We know Roman ladies and Viking women had dresses pinned at the shoulders, so it would be easy enough to unpin one shoulder. You’d need either an opening in the under-dress, or a loosenable drawstring neck for access. Mediaeval dresses had laces either at the front or side, which would have worked. The Saxon re-enactment dresses I encountered some twenty years ago had the same issue as this one.

To breastfeed, you’d have to take the dress off, and that would be bonkers. There must have been fastenings of some sort.

History is written by the victors. It’s also often written by men, and when it comes to the lives of women, there’s often far more absent than. It’s a bit ironic, because when history is at its most sexist it depicts woman as only being in the domestic sphere, having babies. Yet a dress like this erases the reality of having and raising a child.

People Watching

(David)

My daughter Heather and I took her two young ‘uns out for tea, down in her favourite child-friendly restaurant beside one of the harbours here in Plymouth. Ours were the only little ones in a pleasant place packed with splendidly tanned yachties, most of them basking in the evening sun outside with a few homeward bound-ish office workers drinking inside.

One table of diners caught my eye. Older than the rest, around 70 to 75, they looked and sounded rough but financially comfortable. Blinged up like ultra-confident old gangsters. I’m convinced that’s what the two men were, especially as when their women went to the toilet together the men leaned their heads together for a murmured conversation. One of them then took two calls on his mobile, one in English and one in Spanish, although his end of it consisted of no more than two or three single muttered words, while the other paid their bill from a thick wodge of notes.

Heather smirked at me across our G&T trifles. “You’re writing them into a story, aren’t you?”

I think I probably was.

Food: nothing to write home about

People watching: good

Summer haiku

(Nimue)

I like haiku as a form – both in terms of the focus and the seasonal aspect. Trying to capture a moment in so few words creates interesting challenges and possibilities. Two are stronger on the seasonal side than the others, but we don’t have the kinds of indicators Japanese poets use, which makes it harder.

These haiku came out of a recent poetry class. Two come from gazing out of the window, two from sitting out.

Summer rain ends

Fat droplet hangs shimmering

Soon to disappear

Bead eye stares challenge

Head tilt beak bright questioning

The absence of seed.

Spring’s first pipistrelle

Flits ungainly elegance

Moth hungry tango

Tremulous fast flight

Only a shape against sky

Maybe kingfisher.

A super easy way to be green!

(Nimue)

You’re on the Druid path, you want to live a sustainable life, but you maybe don’t have the time, the money, the energy or the health to do all the environmentally friendly things you want to do. So, here’s a really easy thing you can do that costs no money, and makes a huge difference.

Don’t use AI.

AIs use a huge amount of energy and water for every prompt or question. That makes them incredibly damaging. But, there’s no reason at all to use them for fun, we don’t actually need them and they add no real value to anything.

If you have the time and energy to go a bit further, then point out to your friends that AIs are environmentally damaging and it is best not to use them.

One easy way to help counter AI use is to make a point of praising and sharing real things made by people. It is getting harder to spot AI content, but time taken to check so you aren’t sharing AI images is a meaningful offering to whatever or whoever you hold sacred. Resisting AI honours the true and sacred flow of inspiration.

Not engaging in any way with AI content is also a good choice – especially if you don’t have the energy to argue with people. Simply not responding to it helps reduce the amount of attention it gets and thus helps discourage it in a small way.

One of the ways in which AI is being sold to people is by persuading them this is the only route they have to creative expression. This is a social ill of itself, and also needs countering. Everyone has the capacity to be creative. The real issues are of time, opportunity and resources. That and being persuaded that you can’t. Everyone has the capacity to be creative and no one needs dodgy, content-stealing tech to do it for them. This is something that needs talking about.

(If you are obliged to engage with AI as part of your job, then I feel for you.)

Working with dreams

(Nimue)

There is a lot more to dream work than looking them up in dictionaries. Rather than of trying to make sense of them one at a time, it can be far more useful to look at your dreams as a body information and being alert to any changes over time.

Dreams approached in this way can give insights into our mental states, our mental health and how we are fairing spiritually.

At the moment I’m very happy with my dreams – they are tending to be colourful, imaginative, rich on detail and comfortable in tone. I’m in a good place at the moment and my dreams are reflecting this. A few weeks ago I had a really rough patch with nightmares. As is often the way of it for me, the nightmares were me starting to work through some big issues and getting them to a point where I could think about them consciously.

How do you feel about your dreams? What, overall are they reflecting back to you about your life, and your inner life? Anxiety and stress can show up easily in dreams, as can the things we are missing. I had one period in my life when my dreaming narrowed to a small selection of repeating anxiety dreams. I had a period where the dominant feeling in my dreams was one of deep loneliness and not knowing where I belonged. These related to issues I was trying (and for a long time failing) to tackle in my waking life.

Do you dream of everyday life, or does your mind go somewhere else? How do you feel about that? Do some of your senses feature more than others? Can you control your own actions in your dreams? How does that relate to feelings about power and control in your life? Do your dreams show you things you are not dealing with or trying to ignore?

I think it helps to treat your dreams and nightmares alike as intrinsically helpful. This is your brain trying to have a conversation with itself. Often it seems to be the less conscious bits of the brain trying to communicate with the more conscious self.

Sometimes dreams can feel very different from that. Some dreams have a touch of magic to them, a sense of otherness, sacredness and wonder that needs taking seriously. I think the more attention we pay to dreams, the more room we make for that kind of experience.

If you’re interested in these kinds of approaches to dreaming, I have a book… https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/authors/nimue-brown

Getting it wrong and doing better

(Nimue)

The biggest source of anxiety for me, is the fear of making mistakes. When I’ve got my teaching hat on, I encourage people to be relaxed about giving things a go and not worrying about the outcome. Mistakes are necessary for learning and growth.

Most mistakes are not disastrous. For most of us, most of the time, lives are not at stake if we get something wrong. Innocent mistakes should be easy to fix, especially if you want to fix them. I’m deeply invested in learning, understanding, and doing better.

And yet here I am with a level of anxiety that can be crippling, about what will happen if I get something wrong. The fear of the catastrophic outcome, of the disaster. I didn’t get here by myself. Being blamed for things I’ve had no control over hasn’t helped. Having other people treat problems as disasters is part of it. Dealing with people who treat honest mistakes as deliberate malice, and who punish accordingly has been a thing.

Tangled up in this is a sense that my mistakes come from being an intrinsically terrible person. Again, I didn’t get there on my own. The question that underpins the anxiety is whether I have been misled on this score, or whether the people who have been most critical of me were speaking fairly based on experience.

This is tricky. Everyone has their own perspective and we don’t all view the world in the same way. People acting from undealt-with trauma can get things horribly wrong. How responsible is a person for the consequences of the trauma they have not tried to deal with? At this point I’m fairly confident that there has been deliberate malice in the mix in my life as well. How much trouble have I caused when acting from my own trauma? I’ve not been great at holding boundaries – would things have been better if I’d been more sure of myself and clearer about what was not ok? Impossible to tell.

I’ve tentatively come up with a way of thinking about this. It’s an approach that allows me to be kinder to myself in face of mistakes. I think it will also help me work out where to stay engaged with people and where to back off.

We all make mistakes. Some of us, for reasons of history and wounding, neurodivergence, mental health issues and more have a harder time learning and growing. Getting to grips with things can be slow. So I want to draw a line at trying to do better. Any sign of wanting to understand, learn, improve, heal, and get to grips with life’s inevitable challenges, is where the bar is set. A good person is a person who is trying to get things right and who cares. It’s not a high set bar.

I also acknowledge that you can’t do any of those things without information. The scope to do better is informed by our relationships. If you aren’t getting any insight as to what would work, or improve things, if there’s no help, no clarity then it can’t be wholly your responsibility. There are certainly people for whom there are no right answers. I’ve lived with that. If there is nothing you can do to get things right, then you end up feeling like an utter failure, but at the same time, that’s wholly unfair. Having to magically know how to get things right with nothing to go on, is also wholly unfair.

Give me a chance to do better, and I’ll do better. I now think that’s enough.

Easy Druidry – sitting out

(Nimue)

Sitting out is one of my favourite summertime activities. It’s very simple, fairy accessible and allows a lot of Druid stuff for not a huge amount of effort.

In essence all you have to do is sit outside somewhere, for as long as you want.

I favour being close to home, and sitting out at twilight. Being close to home means building my relationship with my immediate landscape. I’m lucky in that I have trees, running water and other greenery nearby. I don’t have my own garden, but if you do, then those are good and secure spaces to sit out.

As a teen I used to sit out on my grandmother’s doorstep, usually to look at the moon. My twenties involved sitting out on my own doorstep, usually with a guard cat for company. Even on that urban street there was plenty to connect with.

I favour twilight because it’s a good time for seeing wildlife and there tend to be fewer people about. Obviously factor in what’s safest and most feasible for you when it comes to timings and locations alike.

Then you just sit. You can meditate, or just be present. You can let your mind wander, or be focused. If you want to make a little ritual around it, include prayer, or offerings or anything else, then that’s workable. It’s also fine to just sit and be open to whatever happens.

No matter how I approach it, I find sitting out to be peaceful and restorative. There  is always something to connect with – the earth and the sky are always there. I often see bats. Sometimes foxes pass through, owls and deer call from nearby trees. Sometimes cows are vocal as well. All manner of birds pass over at twilight as they head to their roosts. It’s inviably an opportunity to experience beauty.

Adventures in Folk Horror

(Nimue)

I’ve never actually written a folk horror novel. The Hopeless, Maine books have elements of it in the mix, but aren’t quite it. This year I decided to give it a go and I mean to start writing this summer. I have the ideas in place, and will have a structure before I start (13 chapters) but I don’t have a title yet.

I have an academic friend (no name dropping at this point) who is a folklorist and who has a lot of issues with the folk horror genre. How ‘the folk’ are themselves the source of the horror is high on the list, along with how folklore gets represented. This spring I read and pondered a number of his essays on the subject – which he helpfully sent me. My ambition is to write a folk horror novel that would work for him.

It’s an interesting challenge, aiming to stay inside the framework but also to subvert it. On top of that there’s the issue that I am prone to comedy horror and there’s a distinct risk I’ll end up with something more Hot Fuzz than Wickerman. But there we go.

One of the problems I have with folk horror is that it tends to be singular. The murder village will usually have one story about one thing – one god in the woods, one weird entity, one place we must never go, one ghost story… and folklore isn’t like that at all. Landscapes are often full of stories and many of those stories are not connected in any other way. Folk horror so often depends on knowledge of the terrible secret, and a whole lot of people being willing to go along with it. People don’t reliably work like that either.

Plurality is definitely going to be a theme. Like a lot of places in the UK, my landscape includes pre-historic, Iron Age, and features from thereafter. The folklore is diverse and intertwines with the history in some interesting ways. We have some pretty weird local customs – most infamously the cheese rolling, an annual sacrifice of ankle joints to the bemused gods of a very steep field.

I’ll be drawing on my landscape for this book, but also inventing the village. Mostly because I’m not going to come right out and name one of the local villages as a murder village. Which obviously none of them are. And if they were, it clearly wouldn’t be wise to mention it!

Writing as self-help

(Nimue)

I’ve said, in semi-jest on many occasions that blogging is cheaper than therapy, so here I am. With therapy you can in theory benefit from someone else’s insight and guidance. What little experience I had wasn’t that great, but talking can help, and writing works in much the same way.

Trying to explain something involves making sense of it yourself. The process of writing slows down thoughts and requires getting some order and coherence to them. That in itself produces insights and helps a person work through their experiences. I find that making sense of things is a significant coping mechanism of itself. Understanding can be an antidote to loss of power.

Being able to tell the story of what happened is empowering. Being able to share your version of events, and to apply your own meanings to an experience can give a lot back in face of something shitty. When the story is yours, it’s easier to feel less like a victim and more like a survivor. We all need to be the central character in our own tale, so simply expressing the experience can restore that if something has happened that makes you feel powerless.

Emotional processing can be difficult. Poetry can be a helpful form because it allows us to come at things from different angles. Writing poetry invites us to say what something was like, and to set logic aside for a while and get to grips with the way an experience landed. It’s a way of thinking that allows a person to make a different kind of sense of things.

For me there’s usually an extra stage. Some of the things I write to vent I just ditch. Usually what I’m trying to do is turn experiences into something that someone else can make use of. I find this helpful too – if sharing what I’ve been though can make life a bit easier for someone else in some way, that gives me something meaningful. It’s another good antidote to feeling powerless, as well.

Silence enables suffering. Silence hides the truth and lets injustice continue unchecked. When we share our stories, we start to create social change. We raise awareness and mutual understanding. We start to find that we are not alone with our issues, and that others care and want things to be better.

Writing invites inspiration. It creates a space where ideas and solutions might present themselves. Processing experience is necessary, but life is better when you can find a way forward. In the work of making sense of things, new ideas can emerge, and answers can be found. That can be magical and transformative.

Entitlement and victimhood

(Nimue)

We should listen to victims and take them seriously. However, not everyone who thinks they are a victim really is, and that’s what I want to talk about in this post. For me, justice is a really important part of Druidry. That means not ignoring people who express distress, and not imagining that doing nothing is a morally neutral position. Doing nothing is a response that supports and enables injustice.

This is an issue that relates to privilege. People who have power and privilege often feel really entitled, and will assume they are being victimised if anything doesn’t go their way. If they present with hurt feelings that can be misleading. They may describe being attacked, bullied and mistreated when that isn’t a fair assessment of the situation. It isn’t always possible to establish the context, though. Here are some typical examples of things that are not abuse, that entitled people will claim is abusive when it happens to them.

Not being given a platform, or an audience. The audience not being obliged to be nice to them.

Being held to account for bad behaviour, hate speech, bigotry and cruelty. Also being held to account for actual crimes, actual abuses, violence, lying, fraud, etc etc.

Being given a clear no – especially around unwanted sexual attention. Being told not to touch, not to invade personal space and that they are not being offered sex is not abuse, being told you are not entitled to use or access other people’s bodies is perfectly fair and reasonable.

Having privileges pointed out.

Not having their power/authority respected – or people not going along with their assertions of authority and entitlement.

Being declined special treatment or a free pass.

We see all of this far too frequently around celebrities and politicians – people who often think that their social status and wealth should give them the freedom to do what they like. Challenging this kind of power is not abusive, but it does make them really uncomfortable. They should be uncomfortable. Unfortunately they are likely to use their power to further attack anyone who questions their victimhood.

Of course this can happen in other contexts too. Abusers of power can be an issue anywhere power is held. Those who handle power badly will use that power to defend themselves from fair criticism, and calling abuse if someone questions what they do is sadly not unusual. I’ve seen it in so many different contexts over the years. Power does not corrupt people, but people who feel entitled do not use power in good ways.

Call someone out and you run the risk of being the next person they will announce has been abusing them.

When you are caught up in this kind of mess, it can be hard to know what to do. It can be very difficult establishing what’s going on. My general advice is to avoid punishment, and look for answers that create safety. Be alert to who is able to wield power – those who have most power have most responsibility. Look for the kindest solutions, and think carefully about the prices people are asked to pay to move things forwards.