Nimue Brown's Blog, page 311

Worm Magic

To call someone a ‘worm’ is usually an insult. If you ‘worm your way’ into anything it tends to imply that you aren’t entitled to be there and that your method for getting in was dodgy. Linguistically, worms get a rough deal, but out there in nature they are tiny powerhouses and worthy of our respect.

In terms of the life of the soil, worms are essential. They aerate it as they pass through. They help break down debris, alongside the micro-organisms and fungi also at work. Worms will draw plant matter from the surface down into the soil, eat it, poo it out as soil, and thus add to the fertility of the land.

Worms provide food for a lot of other beings. They are eaten by a number of birds – although I always think of blackbirds as the main worm eater. Moles of course eat worms, and so, more curiously, do badgers. Given the size difference, it may seem like an odd menu choice, but scruffluing up worms to eat is a big part of what badgers get up to of an evening.

Taken as an individual, a worm isn’t much. It’s just a squishy, mobile stomach. Things go in one end, and come out the other. One worm more or less doesn’t change anything much. Taken collectively, the value of worms to the rest of the living world is vast.

As humans, we make up a lot of stories about the triumph of the lone individual. Most of us will never be the lone, standout hero, and condemn ourselves to a life of feeling jealous, mediocre, unsuccessful, irrelevant. We could learn a lot from worms. As with worms, small actions from large numbers of people have huge effects. Our one small bit, more or less, doesn’t seem very relevant, but what we do as a whole has considerable consequences. At the moment, those consequences are grim, but it need not be so.

If we all took ourselves a bit more seriously as one chewing worm amongst many, perhaps we’d be a bit more careful about what we put into the soil. If we learned to see the power of small things, like worms, we might better be able to see pour own power, and to use it effectively. We might be less afraid to worm our way in to places of power and influence rather than believing we don’t belong there. We might be less tolerant of the way those bigger humans, with power and resources, use labels like ‘worms’ to discount the masses. We might see the power in numbers, embrace our inner worms, and make some real changes.

When we are hard to promote

One of the reasons book genres exist, is they make it easier to sell books. The understanding is that readers read genres, and can be persuaded to pick up things in their niche, and that you have to be able to tell a person what a book is ‘like’ for them to want it.

As a reader, I struggle with this, because what I want above all else is to be surprised, and the more tidily a story fits in a genre, the less likely it is to surprise me. I like to experience wonderful, imaginative, insightful things. I want to be played with, taken on a journey to an unfamiliar place, shown something I would never have thought of. That’s not even slightly a choice-of-genre issue.

As an author, it gets worse. I’ve tried writing genre fiction, for the being sellable, but of course because I don’t enjoy it as a reader, I’m not great at it as an author – I can’t stay inside the boxes, or what I write feels forced and I get miserable, and it all seems a bit pointless anyway.

I’d like to tell you about my new novel. It’s speculative. There are lots of trees in it, and a steam powered car, mad technology, some taking the piss out of New Age self help books, something a bit goddessy, a very curious sort of slow apocalypse in progress, Kafak-esque authority figures, V-esque revolutionaries, and a really arsey goat.

(It is so much easier plugging other people’s books, I never know what to say about my own).

My test readers gave such a mixed response that I still don’t know how to pitch it. My son laughed all the way through – which may just be proof that he inherited my dark and twisted sense of humour. One test reader found it ‘a bit grim’ while a third came back and said ‘how do we make this happen and when do we start?’

If you’ve ever thought that more trees and fewer people would be good, you might like this book.

If you’ve secretly cherished ideas about the one, big, tidy apocalypse that will wipe out the people who annoy you, leaving you and your friends improbably intact, then you may well like this book.

If the idea that a novel with a paradox at its heart is bound to be a bit confusing doesn’t entirely put you off, you may like this book.

And of course if you’ve read any of my other novels, and are still showing up to the blog, there’s a distinct possibility you’ll like this book.

Otherwise, consider it the ideal gift for a relative you don’t especially like!

More about said book over here – snowbooks.co.uk/

Not Getting On With People

We’re all peace and love and light, yes? The idea that we are, and that we should be, causes no end of trouble and I think sometimes adds to conflict. The reality is that there are many people in this world who do not get on with each other. It need not mean that either party is a terrible person (some people do terrible things though, this is a real issue). Sometimes, some of us rub each other up the wrong way. Sometimes we’re too similar to find each other bearable. Sometimes we bring out the worst in each other.

If we don’t feel obliged to be all peace, love and light, it’s possible to just acknowledge the problem and step away from each other. Distance is a great cure for friction. It doesn’t even take much distance – a little facebook unfriending, a little staying away from each other’s blogs, a little physical distance in other situations.

I spent years struggling with the mad belief that I should be so lovely, so infinitely flexible, accommodating, helpful, patient etc etc that everyone would like me. Everyone.  Never mind how inherently nauseating that would be if I managed to pull it off – the human equivalent of a beige carpet with the inevitable stains covered up by equally beige rugs. The day I realised it was fine if people didn’t like me, my life got a good deal easer. I don’t have to please and appease everyone. I may be a people-pleaser by nature, but I can choose how and where to do that.

Giving myself permission not to like everyone has been liberating. I do not give myself permission to hassle, troll or otherwise give people a hard time though – with the exception of politicians and other people in places of real power who may need calling to account now and then. Other flawed, messy people doing their own things might not be to my liking. I allow myself to move away from them. The endlessly dull people, the mean spirited, the controlling, the self-important, the uncooperative and so on and so forth.

I have learned to walk away and try to make as little fuss as possible. When the focus of my irritation responds to me in the same way, its fine. We might even be able to grudgingly respect each other from a safe distance. If they stay out of my face, they can expect I will do the same, because conflict is exhausting and I don’t enjoy it in the slightest. I would rather have a quieter life.

Of course it’s not always that simple. Some people enjoy a fight, and the frisson of conflict. Some people get a kick out of drama, and the scope for being centre stage. Some people need others in their lives to act out specific roles for them so that their stories continue to function. Being cast as someone else’s villain, someone’s oppressor and abuser is awkward if you really don’t want to play. Refusing to put any energy into a conflict is often the most productive way, because the person who feeds on drama and needs a fight doesn’t get much out of the person who isn’t really doing that.

Would that I were an ocean of smooth calm, unsusceptible to waves, but of course I’m not. I have buttons to push, I can be wound up, harassed to the point of losing my temper. If I feel I’ve been treated unfairly, I don’t always manage to go with the conflict-reduction methods. I know from bitter experience that simply removing energy from a situation can mean setting up someone else to be the next victim of the same process, and I don’t always feel at ease with that. Sometimes I get cross, because anger is a necessary part of holding boundaries.

Getting angry with a situation allows us all to hold a sense of self intact and place the problem squarely outside of us. It can be a vital survival skill. Holding the edges is a good thing, but it’s so easy to let defending the boundary turn into attacking the (perhaps imagined) aggressor, and from there it isn’t such a huge leap to doing unto others before they can do unto you, and becoming the problem.

It is ok not to like each other. Another person’s dislike does not invalidate any of us as people. It’s what we do with the dislike that counts.

Recent reading

Web of Life – Yvonne Ryves

This is a fascinating little book that offers a way of exploring a Pagan path that is both grounded in tradition, and innovative. The Web Yvonne Ryves describes is a flexible tool that any reader could adapt to suit their own needs and practice. You could use it as a focus for meditation, as a form of divination, as a focus for other work, the basis for an art piece… it can become whatever you need it to be.

The book is ideal for someone fairly new to their path who has already figured out that they need to be Pagan on their own terms, but could still do with something to help guide them on their journey.

More about the book here – http://www.moon-books.net/books/shaman-pathways-web-life

 

Worlds Apart, by Jenni Shell.

I can honestly say I’ve never read anything else quite like this. It’s a mix of autobiography (Jenni Shell) and something more like biography (her mother). Jenni’s mother had serious mental health problems that dominated the author’s childhood and shaped many of her life choices. The need to understand, and the longing to help are central to the book. What comes of the quest is a complex spiritual journey that took Jenni towards teaching spiritual things. I found it a fascinating read – knowing nothing about the author. The books throws you in at the deep end repeatedly with life changes and sudden introductions of people, it’s not the smoothest book ever, but that didn’t put me off, just bemused me now and then.

There are two threads I really want to comment on – one is what Jenni has to share about mental health, and the nature of reality, and what happens to those of us who may deviate from consensus reality. Without any spoilers, what happened to her mother really challenges the idea of how and why we label people, and I think that’s very important. When we deny someone their truth and their reality, we may make them more ill than they would otherwise have been.

The other thread is one of ancestry, and how issues, events, stories and skeletons can have an impact for generations to come. Our relationship with our ancestors fascinates me, and what Jenni has written is a clear case study of how we can end up living out the consequences of other people’s lives and stories.

I don’t think this is a book for everyone, but if autobiography, family drama and spiritual questing speak to you subjects, then I recommend checking this out.

More about the book here – http://www.orderofthewhitelion.com/worlds-apart.php

 

Cafe Suada, Jade Sarson

I picked up the first issue of graphic novel Cafe Suada at Asylum in Lincoln as author/artist Jade Sarson was there with a table and it looked like the kind of thing the entire household would go for. It is, so we followed through by reading everything on the webcomic site. This is a charming, funny, silly, warmhearted, human, tea laden bit of loveliness. It is the book equivalent of sitting down with your favourite brew and putting your feet up. Although of course you can get the book and put your feet up with tea, and that would be about perfect.

On the technical side, (excuse me while I geek out about technical comic things) this comic has some inspired layouts, and the visual use of text is brilliant. I’m also a huge fan of the incredibly nuanced facial expressions, which come alongside gloriously overblown and deliberately ridiculous facial expressions. There’s also a lot of whimsy – much of it involving a duck, a koala bear and the little chicken things you can see on the cover. There’s romance, and tea war, preposterous families, improbable business strategies… I could gush pretty much indefinitely. But you don’t have to take my word for it – read the webcomic!

Graphic novels here – http://teahermitcomics.bigcartel.com/product/cafe-suada-teaset-cups-1-5

Webcomic here – https://tapastic.com/series/Cafe-Suada

(gush)

How to take over

Earlier this year I was accused of worming my way into positions of power and influence. ‘Accused’ in the sense that the observation was not meant as a compliment. As there’s a lot of truth in it, I thought it might be productive to expose my methods and philosophy, and the outcomes. Much of what I do could be done by anyone with a mind to do it, and there is certainly both the need and the space, although I’m by no means the only person working in this kind of way.

Philosophy

I look for groups, events, organisations and individuals who I think are doing something valuable but show signs of needing more help. I choose based on where I can most usefully give help, what most interests me, and what I think will do most good. I move on when the job is done, or I’m bored, or think something else is more important, and suchlike. My primary aim is that there be more good stuff.

Methods

I rock up and offer to help. I take on jobs that aren’t fun, glamorous or self promoting – I steward, tidy up, pick stones out of allotments, litter pick, paint fences. I also offer my particular skills – public speaking, blogging, writing, marketing, networking, media, creative thinking, performing, organising… and other things. One of the consequences of doing this over many years is that I know a lot of awesome people who are willing to pile in and do things, and who are working in gift economy and favour exchange, and who can be asked, and awesome people who can be booked.

Results

Often what I do is put awesome people in touch with each other, resulting in more awesome, and more scope to do this sort of thing. I spend a lot of time working for free, on things I believe in. I get the pleasure of seeing things work. Sometimes there are direct personal benefits – opportunities are created, sometimes paying work comes off the back of volunteering, or other scope for self advancement. I am not ashamed of this, and actively encourage anyone doing good stuff to accept the gifts and favours that come with working in a gift economy. It’s easiest to grow good things when people are generous but not self-sacrificing. Work that is entirely about giving is hard to sustain and more likely to burn people out.

Conclusions

This is not a career strategy by any conventional standards, but I have to say that work-wise, Tom and I benefit greatly from this way of doing things. Favours become opportunities. Helping out creates enduring networks of friends. We make valuable contacts. More good stuff happening means more good stuff for us to be part of. We greatly enjoy what we get to do.

If you are interested in exploring this way of working, then you need to be clear about your goals – not in the sense of personal achievement, more what you want to invest in to see more of. You need to know what your skills and strengths are and not be afraid to offer them as things of worth. There is always more that needs doing than there are people willing to do it, so once you get started, you have to be mindful of what’s sustainable because people will ask you to do more (I’ve messed up repeatedly on that score).

There are of course people who will look at this work, and these groups, events etc and see the scope for a power base, and who will want the power base, not the ‘more good stuff’ or the effort of doing the work. They can be an obstacle to productively getting things done. Where there’s a lot of ego, the scope for good stuff is greatly reduced, while the likely effort required increases. People who want to be important can be jealous of people who are effective at getting things done, and the results are seldom pretty. The best places to volunteer are where the people running things are intent on ‘more good stuff’ and not self aggrandisement, and the best volunteers to take on are those who are far more excited about the work, than about the scope for personal advancement.

Fully taking over, I should note, tends to mean carrying the legal, financial and practical responsibility for a thing, and that’s not as much fun as it sounds.

All Ages Communities

Being in the school system tends to culture us into associating with people who are within a year of our own age. For a lot of people, this habit continues through life, creating generation gaps and a lack of social cohesion. There are assumptions about what different ages and life stages mean. As a consequence, most social activity is either child free, or revolves around amusing the kids. Teenagers are expected to go off and do their own thing. Older people aren’t even present, much of the time.

Some events and locations will try to get round this by providing crèches and amusements for the younger folk, freeing up their parents to do the things. This of course still means dividing people by age.

All of this is very much on my mind because I’ve just come back from Lincoln’s Asylum – the biggest steampunk gathering in the country. It’s an all ages activity, in the sense that people of all ages can actively participate (some of the evening things are 18+ but given how many things are totally  accessible to younger folk, this isn’t a problem).  Kids really get into it, with costumes, and enthusiasm for many of the events.

What really affected me, was talking to older women who were not steampunks, but who were eyeing up attendees at the event. One woman said to me, “This is amazing, I’m 60 and there are people here who are older than me, and they’re dressed up and clearly having a fantastic time.” Of course Victorian based attire looks great on older folk in a way that modern clothing doesn’t. The assumptions about what older people can and should wear, in all other contexts, are both dull and restrictive, but steampunk elders can be as punked, glamorous, outrageous, playful and innovative as anybody else.

In most contexts for women, there’s a lot of pressure to appear young (while not falling into the ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ trap). We’re supposed to be sexy if we look young enough, and to cover up if we don’t. But not too sexy, so as to avoid the ‘slut’ trap. When we are older, we are to hide sags, wrinkles, grey hair etc as best we can. We are not to celebrate our aging. I love that in steampunk spaces none of this applies. The results are varied, wild, unpredictable and deeply inclusive of all kinds of ways of being female. There’s also an abundance of space to play with gender representation and identity as well, which is incredibly liberating.

It seems mad to me that we so often have so much age-based segregation within our societies. Communities gain breadth, depth and long term stability when they can accommodate people at all life stages. It’s a very different thing being in a space you know will always have room for you, rather than being conscious of an obligation to grow out of it at some point. It’s good to be in a space that genuinely makes everyone who wants to be there welcome, so long as they uphold the one rule – be splendid. I love what happens when the default is inclusion, and look forward to the scope for getting older disgracefully.

I suspect that no matter how old I get, I will always be a filthy urchin at heart, so I‘m going to need the spaces that won’t try and shoehorn me into a twin set and a sensible haircut.

The mechanics of exhaustion and emotion

In recent months, I’ve had the opportunity to observe the effects of exhaustion on my own mind and reactions, and to learn from other people with similar experiences. This is what I’ve learned.

Exhaustion distorts reactions. It doesn’t even matter if the exhaustion came from doing a good thing that you felt really positive about, it still has the same effects. It becomes harder to control the emotions, and outbursts are likely – tears become impossible to control, most notably. Everything seems bigger and more threatening than it would otherwise be.

My first thought was that exhaustion makes us over-react. On reflection, I don’t think this is it at all. How we respond to a crisis, or even what looks like a crisis in the first place, depends a lot on whether we have the resources to deal with it. If you can deal with something easily, it’s hardly a disaster. If you have no means to tackle it, you’re facing a serious problem.

It’s not the scale of the event that shapes our responses, but whether we can deal with it. Exhaustion means having little or nothing in reserve, and no resources to tackle even small things. What can seem petty from the outside, can be unbearable from the inside because there is no way to bear it on top of everything else.

When we’re watching someone else’s reactions, the temptation can be to judge the appropriateness of their response by what we’d do when faced with the same challenge. This misses out that way we all face challenges differently, with entirely different resources and vulnerabilities. Thus we can end up thinking someone else is over-reacting or making a fuss, rather than recognising that their situation is undermined by problems we don’t have.

Yes, of course there are people who over-react and make a fuss, but this comes from factors of personality and circumstance, and is part of where they start from when dealing with a problem. If you’ve never seen a mountain, you might be more intimidated by the proverbial mole hill. The worst thing you’ve ever dealt with, is the worst thing you have had to face, regardless of how it compares to other people’s experiences. This is really noticeable watching children get to grips with setbacks.

It can be hard, when your problem looks like a mountain and the next person is wailing about what, to you, looks like a mole hill, but we all have our own hills to climb. Spending time getting cross with other people over how they deal with problems is a waste of time and energy. We will all have to make choices about what we can help with, and what we have to ignore, but in recognising how different experiences may be, we can make life a bit easier all round by not getting frustrated about it.

Reputation

Who we are in the eyes of the world is something most of us care about. How we are seen, valued, judged and whether we are accepted. In theory, a reputation should be the consequence of who we are and what we do, and thus something we have control over, but in practice it is seldom that simple.

The easiest place to point for examples is the arts. Look at any breakthrough creator who changed things radically – Beethoven, Van Gogh – they were criticised far more than they were loved in their lifetimes. Even The Beatles were considered rowdy bad boys when they first appeared, and it’s only after decades that they’ve become something more ‘establishment’. The first impressionists were mocked. The reputations of many creative people aren’t defined until after their death, and there many ‘greats’ who, during their own lives, were never recognised.

On the flip side history is also full of people who were massively popular at the time, and have faded into obscurity since. Name a composer of Music Hall songs, or the kind of gothic romance author Jane Austin was mocking in Northanger Abbey, or any of the chivalric novels Cervantes took the piss out of with Don Quixote. Ten years hence, most of the ‘pop idol’ reality TV show folk will have been forgotten. Some reputations are vastly inflated for short periods – undeserved (to my mind) attention went to Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray recently, but they’re already slipping into the shadows, and I doubt in a hundred years time, anyone will have heard of them.

Reputation, therefore, is not always deserved. It’s also not something we can control, no matter how good our PR. Most of us of course will never have PR, never have to worry about posterity, or how history will judge us, and that too is a sort of judgement. Most of our ancestors are not in the history books.

Regardless of how many people we’re dealing with, reputation is a key part of how we interact with others, and reputations can be nothing more than a web of lies with a sugar coating of sparkly misdirection. We all make up stories and myths about ourselves, and other people make their own stories about us, too. Reputation is the unnatural child of these stories.

Those in the public eye can spend a fortune trying to manage their reputations and appearance. The rest of us may be no less obsessed, but less well funded, and with a smaller audience to play to, we have to make our own fun…  Social media may have made us far more conscious of how we construct our public personas, but it doesn’t put us in charge.

There is a part of ourselves we may never truly know, and certainly can’t do much to control, but which will influence our lives and options in countless ways. That aspect is who other people think we are, what of us they latch onto, what of other people’s stories they choose to believe, what they forgive, and don’t forgive, what they think was deliberate, and what they think we did by accident, or by mistake.

Or we can do our best to meet each other without assumption, to take each other at face value, to deal with the reality of what’s going on, not second guessing based on what we think we know

Speaking your truth

We have a duty to speak our truth. It’s a thought I’ve run into from a number of sources – fabulous Kris Hughes has been talking about it, and it’s a key part of Cat Treadwell’s work.  Throw into the mix the Quaker virtue of speaking truth to power, and good old Iolo Morganwg with The Truth Against the World and it’s clear that truth, personal truth, has to matter to a Druid.

One of the things about personal truth is the implication that other people’s personal truths will be different, and just as valid. If our truth suddenly looks bigger and more important than other personal truths, we’re on the road to dogma, one true way and generally feeling a lot more important than is good for a person!

But what is personal truth? It might be a number of things – it could be the truth we experience in the moment, or the product of long hours of deep contemplation. It might be the code we live by, the way we make sense of things, our beliefs about the sacred, the divine, or what it means to be human. Our truth could be political, anarchic, all about activism. It could be driven by a sense of duty or a longing for freedom. It may come to us in a flash of inspiration, and our truth may be all about awen.

We have to do more than speak our truth in the sense of making big statements about it. We have to speak it every time we speak, and act with it every time we act. Or at least, try to. We’re all flawed and fallible, and capable of not fully manifesting the things we think matter most.

And when someone else’s truth seems to grate against our own, or threaten it, or compete or conflict or any of those other things we might feel unsettled by, that’s ok, and we need to be ok with it. Their truth is not our truth. Their path is not our path. Their difference is not a criticism of our truth, nor is it a threat to it.

What is my truth? It’s a question to ask, and ask again because the answer is bound to change. What is it in this moment, this day, this year? What have I learned that has changed my truth? Who am I becoming? Who do I want to become and what do I want my truth to be? Described like this it may sound a bit vague and woolly, but the answers are always going to be substantial and informative.

I write this at a time of both deliberate, and of unsought change. Change is thus part of my truth right now, and the scope for change and the need for it. I question my sense of self, and wonder how to know what the truth of me is. Is my truth what I think? Can I discover it in the words of the people who value me most, or the words of the people who like me least, or somewhere in between?

My truth is the joy I take pouring time and energy into good projects, supporting awesome people, seeing great things happen. My truth may be that writing non-fiction books doesn’t suit me very well. My truth is whatever’s inspiring me right now, it’s how I’m interacting with the people I love, and it is the deliberate choice to walk away from the people who bring me down and who don’t like what I do. My truth is that I need to be in spaces where I am valued, and where the work I am drawn to do has a place and is valued. My truth is that I’m more tired than is good for a person, and I need that to change. Many stories, pulled from the air today. Tomorrow, I would say something different.

What’s your truth, and what do you need to do to speak it into everything you say, and carry it into everything you do, and what happens if we do that?

Miyazaki Meditations

I’m not the world’s most visually minded person, which, I confess, makes visual meditation hard work. I’m also, sometimes, a really stressed and anxious person. When you’re lying there at night with a thousand worries rampaging across your brain, it can be hard to switch that off to go to sleep. I’ve been meditating regularly for a good twenty years, but I still find there are times when my brain is triggered into frantic and counter-productive activity.

Meditating when it’s easy is all very nice, and probably very good for us, but it tends to be when meditation is hardest that we need it most. So, how do you even start to meditate when your brain is full of angry weasels?

I like pathworking, but the trouble with pathworking is that you need something to hold the path. Lying in bed at night (where meditation in self defence is an issue) a pre-recording won’t work, and getting my stress-fest of a brain to organise anything is at best a long shot.

What I’ve taken to doing, is using journey sequences from the films of Hayao Miyazaki. I’m especially fond of Spirited Away, where you can walk down the tunnel, out into the landscape, over the river and towards the bathhouse – it’s the perfect opening for a pathworking. Miyazaki films are visually intense, and I find them to be good soul food, so making myself go over a journey sequence helps to calm the brain weasels, while being unstressful, and inherently settling.

Any strong and familiar visual imagery would of course do it. Any sequence from a game, or a film, that gives you strong visual imagery to work with can be borrowed as the opening to a meditation – whether you’re working along the edges of sleep, or not.

Inside our brains, we form pathways in a fairly literal sense. Panic, anxiety and other unhelpful things can become the paths we walk, and the more often we walk them, the more we wear those paths into ourselves. Taking a different path is restorative, it can break cycles of fear and depression, and gives us a chance to go somewhere else, in every sense.

I have a book on meditation,and there are other excellent meditation books at Moon Books – more info here http://moon-books.net/blogs/moonbooks/meditation-books/