Nimue Brown's Blog, page 313

What people always say to Writers.

So much truth here, and a charming blogger and author you may enjoy reading his work. I always find him to be both a bit of a giggle, and reliably insightful.

Idle blogs of an idle fellow

It was recently said I look like a writer, which I tried to pretend wasn’t shorthand for appearing socially inept, malnourished and skint. They then asked me what genre my novel is.

It’s a regular question, and in light of people invariably asking the same things upon hearing that you are a writer, it would be a good idea to have well-prepared answers, which makes my lack of them even more inexplicable.

The most common is, ‘Are you published?” like it’s something that inevitable happens to every writer. Of course you want to grab them by the lapels and scream ‘D’you have any fucking idea how hard it is to get published?’ It’s not something you choose as an option at A-level . If I was published I would be (even more) unbearable, and you’d not be able to enter my house due to piles of unsold copies of the novel…

View original post 592 more words

Grasshopper stories

There’s a classic capitalist fairytale about how the grasshopper sings all summer, and dies of hunger in the late autumn, while the busy little ant saves up a store and is able to survive. We are to be busy little ants. It’s a fairytale that could use a little debunking.

Let’s start with the practical bits: Grasshoppers lay eggs, and the eggs survive the winter to hatch when temperatures rise. An adult grasshopper lives 51 days, give or take. Ants lay eggs that turn into larvae and pupate before becoming adult ants, and eggs are laid for a colony by the queen rather than by individuals as with grasshoppers. Queens can, according to Wikipedia, live for up to 30 years, workers from 1-3 years. Every creature out there has its own lifecycle and relationship with the seasons. These are strategies evolved over vast stretches of time. If all creatures tried to occupy the same niche, many would be less effective. For lots of insects, the adult is active in summer and dies when the seasons turn. It’s not about a work ethic, it’s about your species and what it does.

The moral we are encouraged to take from the story is to be afraid of the coming winter, and to work hard to prepare for it rather than wasting our time lounging about in the sun and doing something as pointless as singing. It is precisely this set of fears that keep us overworking, overproducing, and making unsustainable piles of detritus that we somehow convince ourselves are going to keep us safe.

Grasshoppers have a life expectancy you can measure in days, once they hatch. Ants may live for a couple of years. Humans get a number of decades, apart from those of us who don’t. Money may buy us a year or two at the end. Money invested carefully in living well throughout our lives will buy a few more years than that. In the end, no matter what we do, we die.

People are not grasshoppers, and we aren’t ants. We do need to provision ourselves a bit for the future, in most parts of the world. We do also need to sit in the sun and sing our songs once in a while, and this is just as important. A life spent trying to ward off the worst things that can happen is a life that may not have much actual life in it.

The Hero’s return and alienation

One of the things that struck me when reading Adam Curle Radical Peacemaker (proper review here) is the insights that came out of his work with former prisoners of war after WW2.

Some years ago, I spent a while on a course called The Freedom Program, which helps survivors of domestic abuse get their heads, and lives back on track. One of the things the facilitators said, is that people coming out of domestic abuse situations have the same kinds of symptoms as people coming out of war zones – they were mostly referring to the PTSD side of things, but it may be a relevant thought.

What Adam Curle talks about in his work, is the way in which returning former prisoners experienced alienation from the rest of society, even from their own families. I’ve heard similar things said about soldiers in all kinds of context, and by former soldiers – that going back to people who have no way of understanding what you’ve been through, is alienating. There’s no way to speak of what happened, and the gaping chasm caused by the experience separates the survivor from the ones who have not been there. Based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I think the same things can happen to domestic abuse survivors, survivors of any other kind of abuse or violence in any context, and people who are returning after breakdowns in mental health. It may also be true for people coming back after long periods of bodily ill health.

Compare this to Joseph Campbell’s work on The Hero’s Journey, and Martin Shaw’s more recent work developing that narrative. Coming back is part of the journey, and in his books ‘Snowy Tower’ and ‘A Branch from the Lightning Tree’ Martin Shaw talks a lot about how problematic the return is. I think this is all part and parcel of the same thing.

Sometimes we have experiences that are alien to most of the people around us. Somehow, after those experiences, we have to come back and work out how to be part of a community, a functioning member of society. From the outside we may seem ok, may appear to be doing a decent job of it, but the feeling of alienation is something that goes with the return, and is part of the challenge of returning.

What do we do with this? I’m not sure. Be aware that anyone could have made the kind of journey it is difficult to return from. Listen to the stories and make room for them. Acknowledge the differences and the potential for feeling alienated. Don’t assume we know where other people have been or what it means.

Coming back is necessary. Bringing back something of what happened is necessary. The negotiations between the one who returns and the people they return to, can only be handled on an individual basis, and how we do that, as people who are returning, and as people witnessing a return, is something we’ll all have to figure out for ourselves.

Retraining your emotions

Emotions turn up quickly, with a force and direction of their own that makes them feel like unassaible features of who we are. In many ways this is so – invalidating a person’s feelings is a sure-fire way of trashing their sense of self and causing them great discomfort. How we feel is a big part of who we are, but what happens if how we feel isn’t how we want to feel?

Emotions can be changed, responses can be altered over time. I know, because I’ve done it. While it’s possible to change how you think in a relatively short time frame – weeks are generally enough, the emotions can take months, or years to retrain. Panic triggers are a good example here. (Nothing triggery is coming up). Panic triggers happen when we experience something that brings a memory of trauma too close to the surface. If we aren’t in danger, we can still panic because the body responds with fear. That fear can be unlearned.

My main method (and there may be others, I don’t know) is to get myself somewhere I feel safe, and to think about the emotion I want to change. This can involve visualising the situation I react to, and working on telling myself how I want to feel about it. For example, go back a few years and a kiss from a friend would panic me. It took me months of deliberate work to change this, and while I’m never going to want random people kissing me without permission, I can now comfortably kiss and be kissed by close friends.

Where the thinking mind leads, the feeling part of a person will eventually follow. What works best for me is to think my way into imaginary situations that would provoke a response I don’t want, and to use a mix of thinking and feeling my way through, over and over again so that I can change how I feel. This can also be done by working in actual ways with other people – having very safe and supportive spaces has allowed me to feel easier about other people telling me what to do with my body (thank you Vishwam!). Working alone in my head can be quicker than waiting for people who can help, but there comes a point when you have to dive back in to actual situations and see what happens. Having supportive people to help that happen safely is invaluable.

Changing emotional responses brings up questions about sense of self. There are a number of emotional responses I can generate that cause other people problems – I get upset easily, I feel things keenly. There have been times when I’ve felt under a lot of pressure to tidy up my emotions so as to be more convenient for other people. I don’t recommend it. The time to try and change emotional responses, is when you don’t feel that how your body reacts is in line with your authentic self. This is a call only an individual can make, no one can or should try to make it for you. If your grief, or your anger, your distress or your fear are not manifesting in ways that sit well with who you think you are, then work to change it. These are probably maladaptive survival strategies that worked in some context, but mostly don’t work and are not, in fact, you.

It’s important to remember that our emotional reactions are not a manifestation of pristine nature. They are not a wilderness we have to protect. Our emotions seem very natural, but we have all been conditioned to react in certain ways – what we’re punished for, or rewarded for, what’s ignored, what’s taken seriously – the families and communities we grew up in have taught us patterns of acceptable feeling, and those feelings may not sit well with who we really are. Consider the many men who have been taught not to cry, but who have been allowed to shout. Consider the religious communities that bring up their LGBT people to hate who they are and feel guilty and worse… we do not learn to feel in isolation, and sometimes what we have learned needs to be unlearned.

I decided a long time ago that I would believe that my most authentic self is the person I choose to be, the person I work towards being. It may not be the answer for everyone, but when approaching dysfunctional emotions, I’ve found it a useful place to start.

Book review: Adam Curle Radical Peacemaker

Adam Curle Radical Peacemaker is published by Hawthorn Press. It’s an overview of the life and work of Quaker academic, and peace maker Adam Curle, and includes some of his most important and influential writing.

Adam Curle’s first contact with peace issues came through working with returning prisoners of war after WW2, but has taken him, over the following decades into many of the world’s most troubled zones. His writing comes therefore from a rare mix of firsthand experience, spiritual belief, and considered academic thinking. What he has to say about peace, is fascinating.

Too often, we allow peace to simply mean an absence of obvious conflict. Adam uses the term ‘unpeacefulness’ to talk about situations where there may be no overt violence, but nonetheless what’s happening is likely to lead to violence and is causing harm. Oppression, prejudice, injustice, any kind of cruel or degrading system creates a breeding ground for violent resentment. Anyone interested in genuine peace has to be willing to tackle unpeacefulness wherever it manifests.

I found it very powerful that this book recognises that sometimes it’s very hard, or impossible, for a group of people to go from unpeaceful relations to properly peaceful and constructive relations, without first having some kind of dramatic upheaval. You can’t negotiate for peace if you have no power. At the same time, the more violence there is in the transition, the harder it is to build genuine peace in the aftermath. Adam Curle is a great advocate of Ghandi’s methods – non-violent disruption, non-cooperation, and civil disobedience can be tools for radical change.

This is a book with a message that can be applied at all levels. From issues of international politics down to how we operate our individual households, peace is not the absence of violence, but a deliberate project. It’s something we can do. It’s something we can all do. As a peacemaker, the author has a lot to say about bridge building (conciliation) and mediation work to help opposing sides rethink their relationships and renegotiate for something more beneficial. He illustrates how angry narratives can become self perpetuating, but if both sides are saying ‘we want peace, but the other lot will never give up’ then there’s room for a third party to do some real good.

Some of the writing in this book dates back to the 1970s, and uses male pronouns to describe people who are doing things. There’s a certain irony here, talking about oppression and alienation and so forth in a language that explicitly excludes half the population. However, if you can grit your teeth for that bit, and chalk it up to the shortcomings of the period, what the author has to say is well worth hearing, and as we go along, the language evolves into something much more inclusive.

This book is many things. It’s a history lesson, a biography, a philosophical piece, and almost a ‘how-to’ manual for becoming an active peace practitioner. It’s not always an easy read, some of the ideas are challenging and the language is quite dense in places, but it is absolutely worth your time and effort. Highly recommended.

More about the book here – https://www.hawthornpress.com/books/social-ecology-and-management/adam-curle/

Halo Quin

Today I want to do a shout out for fellow Moon Books author Halo Quin. You can read my mini-review of her book ‘Your Faerie Magic’ here, and below is a video of Halo doing a book reading.

 

Halo has an enterprise called The Goblin Circus – I’ve seen her do the introduction to this performance and am really keen to see the whole thing, it looks like an absolute hoot. She did a guest blog for me about the goblins, which you can read here – https://druidlife.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/faeries-and-goblins/

And a flavour of the Goblin Circus may be found here…

 

I’ve done two Druid Camps with Halo as part of the mix, she’s an absolutely lovely person, so please do check out her work. Her blog is here – https://haloquin.net/

 

Three Drops of Inspiration

This piece is somewhere between a chant, and a shanty. I wrote it with the intention of finding something it would be easy for people to pick up and join in with, and having tested it – this is so! It also tolerates harmonies, which is good for group singing.

My son James is singing the melody line, I’m singing harmony, as is my husband Tom. I don’t always look quite this tired!

Although there aren’t many words, those words are loaded with implications, so here’s a quick breakdown.

The drops of inspiration come from the cauldron of Cerridwen in Taliesin’s myth. The three drops confer knowledge, insight and magical gifts. In the Taliesin story, the young boy Gwion is set on a transformative journey to become a great poet, by the three drops, imbibing a magic that was not intended for him.

Into the forest… because Druidry is so much about trees, so you can think about ogham, Druid groves, and the such. Druidry is sometimes described as being like a vast forest through which we make our own journeys.

Fire in my head – a reference to Yeats going into the hazel wood with a fire in his head. This image has been absorbed into modern Druidry as a symbol of being inspired, having the poetical fire burning in your head (Taliesin has a shining brow). This is the Awen at work.

Drink from the cauldron – we’re back to Cerridwen again, brewing inspiration in a cauldron, although magical and transformative cauldrons and cups crop up in lots of stories.

Salmon in the well – another inspiration story in which nine hazels grow around a sacred well, dropping nuts which the salmon eat, and the salmon become super-wise, so eating a salmon from there will bring you great gifts. There’s a parallel story to Taliesin of a young man cooking a salmon for someone else and getting the hot fat on his hand, and all the wisdom of the salmon goes to him. I suspect this is why Yeats was going to the hazel wood.

Dancing my way back

I’ve been feeling a bit lost of late, perhaps for some time – I’m not sure when it started. As a consequence I’ve been looking for the things that help me feel more coherent and recognisable to myself. As a young person, I danced a lot. Ballet lessons from age four to fourteen (I couldn’t handle the point work) tap lessons, ceilidh dancing through my teens, goth night-clubbing and jumping up at down to bands. I danced a lot, and I could, and would, dance all night. Slowly, the spoon shortage (which also began in my teens) kicked in. Pain, tiredness and lack of opportunities have combined for some years now and I stopped being a person who dances.

The year I was pregnant, I carried so much water I could barely waddle, and as the inflated mother of a young child, the scope to dance disappeared, and I let it go. There have been odd occasions of dancing, but it stopped being a reliable feature.

This winter, dancing was on my new year’s resolutions list. Thus far I’ve not done a vast amount – I danced a bit at a Roving Crows gig and it was clear that my older, stiffer, under-spooned body could no longer tolerate jumping about like a demented pixie for hours at a time. I was going to have to relearn, and do something different.

I’ve been experimenting a lot with how I move my body. In the past, I mostly danced from the feet, a lunatic faux-Irish-jig if you will. The rest of my body following where the jumping and stomping led. So I’ve started thinking about all the areas of my body that can dance – knees, hips, spine, arms, hands. I don’t move my head about much, as there are balance issues there. My moshing days are clearly over, and anyway that stuff hurts too much. If I let go of the idea of dancing as rhythm, and treat it as making shapes sympathetic to the music, everything opens up for me, and I can move in ways that don’t wipe me out after the first song. If I want speed, my arms can express that.

With a background in ballet, and a few terms of studying Tai Chi in my distant past, I have some habits of movement. It’s all about soft curves, and there are all kinds of rules from those traditions that I default to, so I’ve been challenging myself to move differently. I wouldn’t previously have stuck any part of myself out in an angular way – elbows and knees, stomach and arse. I’ve previously danced with soft hands, but I can use fists, flat palms and spiky gestures for expression, and again this opens up the range of movement available to me, so I can make it interesting. If my body is very stiff, then a less smooth approach is easier.

I’ve found running harmony singing groups that one of two things can happen. Either you get safe, comfortable, affirming harmonies, or you get spiky exciting ones. It’s dawned on me that the same is true of dance – that I can have safe, graceful flow, or the challenging spiky stuff, but nothing wrong, nothing bad. Being taught to dance, for me, meant growing up thinking about moving my body as something for other people to watch and judge, but that simply doesn’t have to be the size of it.

Not only am I re-dedicating to dancing, but I’m shooting for once a month now. I have a better sense of self when I dance, it releases me emotionally, and I feel like someone I can make sense of. It doesn’t have to hurt, or exhaust me, and, it turns out, I can go into a dance space already sore and tired, and move in ways that do not leave me feeling worse. It’s a set of discoveries I’m very excited about.

The books that shouldn’t sell…

I love books, but the publishing industry itself frustrates, depresses and infuriates me much of the time. This is a reblog from Niff Soup, home of Matlock the Hare. Matlock the Hare is a fantastic series (3rd one out this autumn). It is everything I want books to be, whereas much of what I find in bookshops, isn’t what I want to read. So, do hop over to the blogpost (I know, I know, but you’re going to forgive me because I’m a bit sleep deprived…)

Niff Soup

“What readers need,” a portly editor from a major publishing company told me many years ago as he confidently struck a pen through great swathes of my manuscript, “is peril.  Plenty of peril. A lot less of all this ‘character and emotion’ nonsense. Ideally, it’s a woman in peril. All the drama you need in just those three words – woman in peril. Saves readers having to believe in a character, see?”

The truth was, I didn’t ‘see’.

“How about,” he suggested, scribbling over the first line of the manuscript, “we start it with – ‘She woke up to a knife at her throat’?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, gathering the remains of my work before asking, “Do you think Gulliver’s Travels would have been published today?”

He blinked back, confused. “The bloke who gets tied up on a beach by some dwarves? No chance. Where’s the peril in…

View original post 780 more words

The trouble with Fun

I become uneasy when people start brandishing the word ‘fun’ about, from experience it’s seldom good news. So, for your amusement, here are some fun phrases with possible interpretations.

“It will be fun” It will be fun for me and I expect you to go along with this.

“It’s just a bit of harmless fun” I just did something horrible – racist, sexist, cruel, trolling etc, and I’m fine with that. I will also say this to defend things like fox hunting and rape jokes, and to dismiss the victim.

“I thought we were just having fun.” I just had casual sex with you, I may have said a lot of things I didn’t mean, to get in your pants. I want you to go away now and I am not responsible for how you feel.

“Can’t we just do something fun?” I know you’re deep in personal crisis right now, I know the climate is changing and species extinction is happening but I’d rather not think about any of that or have to feel responsible in any way, please take your problems/do gooding someplace else.

“You aren’t any fun to be around.” You are depressed, anxious, hurt, and I don’t want to be overtly un-PC by mentioning this. You have real problems and I have no desire to help. I don’t like it when you cry. When I did the things that were just a bit of harmless fun and you didn’t like it and cried, I felt uncomfortable and I’m blaming you for that.

“Person X is far more fun than you.” I want you to compete for my attention, and I hope you feel insecure and like I might be going to spend more time with them and less with you.

“We just went out and had some fun.” I spent over fifty pounds on booze, threw up on a stranger, undertook some random acts of vandalism, I’ve lost one of my shoes and am itchy in a way that makes me wonder if I caught an STD, but I don’t really remember having sex.

“We had to make our own fun.” I lived somewhere with nothing to do and as a consequence spent my formative years with underage drinking and sex being my main hobbies. I have amused myself by doing things that I know it is advisable not to mention in public, either because they’re illegal, or shockingly dull.

It’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s a flavour. I’ve had variations on a lot of these conversations along the way, (although that last one owes a lot to my teens) and I’ve learned to recognise ‘fun’ as a hazardous word, and when people start using it this way… it’s no fun at all!