Nimue Brown's Blog, page 326

Magical thinking for logical people

The trouble with magical thinking is that it can look distinctly irrational. Why would a few whispered words, a candle or a sprinkling of herbs change the outcome? And if there’s reason to think it did, there’s no way to prove it did.  However, to write magic off as irrational, is also to hold a set of assumptions about what reality is and how it works.

Cause and effect are not simple, mechanical procedures and we know this because the future is not predictable. Intention – human and other – is part of the mix. How we feel about things informs how we experience them. There are elements of unpredictability – weather systems being a fine case in point.  It’s the uncertainty that creates the feeling that other forces beyond our knowing could be involved, and with it the sense that we could take control.

We can take control of the insides of our heads, although most people don’t. Knowing what we want rather than being buffeted about by repressed desires and unconscious urges gives us a shot at being deliberate co-creators of our lives. We are shaped by our environments – to the degree of switching on and off genes. The person who deliberately shapes an environment has control of themselves and a significant influence on others. We become our choices. The more knowing and deliberate the choice is, the more control we have over who we become, how we feel, and how we experience life. Obviously the less control you have over a dreadful environment, and the less scope you have to escape it, the less true this becomes.

Intention shapes action. The clearer our intentions, the more able we are to deliberately follow through on them. The more open we’ll be to the things that take us in the right direction because we’re better placed to recognise them.

There is every reason to think that a spell operates inside the head of the caster – shaping, affirming, defining intent, clarifying, focusing, making way for possibilities. There’s nothing irrational about thinking we can use our thinking to change our lives – the conventional mental health intervention – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – is no different from this.

If we start from the belief that physical matter is the essence of reality, then the application of willpower is only relevant in so far as it lets us direct our bodies to interact with physical things. If you think about the nature and behaviour of atoms, the way forms of energy move, there’s certainly an argument for saying that energy and not matter, is the primary thing. Does matter lead to consciousness, or does conscious lead to matter? We can’t prove it either way, at the moment. Matter is certainly influenced by consciousness – you only have to look at what placebo effects (belief) and depression do to the body.

Of course if you do a spell, there are no guarantees, but that’s just as true of launching a marketing campaign or propositioning someone you fancy. Ours is never the only intention in the mix. Other intentions, other energies, other balances of probability are involved. If your magic aligns with a lot of other intentions and probabilities, your odds are better. The more unrealistic your magic, the less likely your chances. Again, this is just as true for the marketing pitch and the chat-up line.

Perhaps sometimes magic is better understood not as forcing your will upon the world, but being able to fit in with the world well enough to get what you want out of it. Akin to creating a product people may want to buy – always the easier sell, and chatting up the person who was already interested in you.

Easter Pilgrimage

What is Easter doing in a Pagan walking calendar? It’s a time when my son is likely to be off school. It’s close to the equinox, but I’ve never quite known what to do with equinoxes. It’s a massively important Christian festival and many of my ancestors were Christian. But the real truth is, it joined my calendar by accident.

I suffer from depression, and the relationship between mental health and walking is something I’ll explore in more detail later on. I was in a desperately bad state, and made the decision to spend a day walking with my husband, to try and take me out of myself, to create the space to feel differently. We walked, for hours, through woods and hills, on a route I’d not done before. Two Iron Age hillforts, at the Cotswold edge, huge skies, and then down into the city of Gloucester, with leg muscles tightening, feet sore, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, we came to the cathedral. And I realised it was Easter. I was almost in tears. This was the moment when the whole idea of pilgrimage started to make sense to me. I had not set out to make a pilgrimage, and yet at the same time knew I had definitely done that.

I have a longstanding relationship with Gloucester cathedral, and I have a story about my great grandmother seeing a ghost there. It’s a place of deep ancestry for me. Walking in, exhausted, and sitting in the cool quiet of the space, and letting the space fill me was a powerful experience that cannot easily be described. I was mind-blown from the enormity of the journey, wide open to the place, and profoundly affected.

We tried a second version of the walk the following autumn, with my son, and without one of the hill forts, and while that too was a powerful journey, the absence of a hillfort was clearly an issue.

We set out for the third time on what was explicitly an act of Easter pilgrimage, taking in both hillforts. Our route introduced us to an incredible oak tree, we met a lot of wildlife including a breathtaking close encounter with a deer. Coming into the cathedral my body and mind were, despite the challenges of preceding weeks, clearly in far better shape than they had been on my first Gloucester pilgrimage.

The cathedral used to be a major focus point for pilgrims – the tomb of Edward the Second (murdered just down the road at Berkley Castle) was the major attraction. These days very few people walk as we’ve done, and most people in the cathedral are there as tourists. There’s a strange irony to coming in as a Druid pilgrim to sit reverently in the cathedral while all around the tourists take photos and chat. One of the things I love about the cathedral is how it takes all sound and changes it into something like music.

It’s worth noting that historically, the lines between pilgrimage and tourism have always been blurred. Religious sites have made a lot of money out of pilgrimage, as well. It is not a thing set apart, but a thing of this world.

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Drowning, Lying, Waving

“You know what your problem is? You’re too proud to ask for help.” This was some years ago. I was burned out, exhausted, crying and my then-baby had just thrown up in a really unhelpful way even by the usual standards of baby vomit. Oddly, these words did not uplift me or inspire me to feel more able to seek help when I needed it. Quite the opposite happened.

Of course this event was one amongst many, and they all turn up in my head in moments of dark depression when I desperately need help. The times I most need care, comfort, support, a friendly ear, companionship and distraction are the times I am least able to mention it. Based on observation, this is true of a lot of people struggling with depression and anxiety. When we are drowning, we lie, we pretend we’re waving really. Ask us and we’ll tell you we were waving even as the water fills our mouths.

Some of this, no doubt, is to do with the very nature of depression. You look around and there’s all these other busy people with important things to do, and all these manifestly more worthy people with bigger problems, and how can you ask anyone to prioritise your small malfunction? So you don’t mention it. Pride may enter the equation sometimes for some people, but I’m prepared to bet most of the time it’s not the main reason for silence. Unfortunately silence makes it easier to stay in the bottom of the hole and increases the chances of wanting to die. Breaking the silence is hard. I can’t talk about it when I’m in the bottom of the hole. Only at times like this, when my head is in a passable state can I talk about the mechanics of what goes wrong.

Some of it is to do with why we are depressed in the first place. Like a lot of troubled people, I have a head full of other people’s voices. Things that were said to me that demoralised me when I needed support. Don’t make a fuss, don’t be such a nuisance, stop feeling sorry for yourself, lots of people are worse off than you are, stop playing the martyr, stop with the crocodile tears and the emotional blackmail. Pull yourself together. And if we haven’t heard it directly, we’ve picked up that vibe form how our government treats the sick, or we’ve run into the positivity brigade telling us the only real problem is our own attitude. It feels safer to be silent. Speak, make the misery visible, and there’s every chance someone will tell you something they think is helpful – like the quote I started with – that will leave you feeling more inclined to top yourself.

And then, the people who do break and take their own lives, lead to comments about why did they never ask for help, why didn’t they tell anyone? If you think saying ‘I feel suicidal’ will get you a ‘stop being so melodramatic’ then you don’t say it. If you think it will be treated as ‘a cry for help’, or a way of manipulating someone to get your own way, you don’t say it.

If you can, find allies who have the strength of heart and guts to hear you without judging.

If you’re on the outside of this, of course the questions go, is this person seeking attention, trying to manipulate me, lying, some kind of drama queen. They could be – it happens. However, if you’ve got to step back, try and do so gently, because these things take their toll. I’ve been the melodramatic fuss maker for a lot of people in my life, and that judgement of me has made it considerably harder to seek help when I needed it. I’m sure the people making the judgements were confident they were right, and that it was fair to not just refuse help, but also to give me a metaphorical slap, for just these reasons, but it is a bloody awful thing to be on the receiving end of when you’re already down.

The ethics of trespassing

Sometimes I trespass deliberately, often it’s a consequence of not being able to tell where the official footpath went. Often if you are walking in the UK, stepping off the path means trespassing, but it’s not a law that tends to get enforced much unless there’s also criminal damage in the mix. The thing about walking is that if enough people do it for long enough, a footpath can exist, a space can become a village green, and scope for legal protection for that access becomes a possibility.

I am offended by land ownership that limits access. To be clear here – I will respect the privacy of a person’s home and the land immediately around it (unless the footpath goes through their garden, which is always weird). I will respect private property and not damage fences, or anything else that someone has put in the landscape. I am respectful of crops and mindful of livestock. This seems both fair and reasonable to me. I will also stay off land if there’s a wildlife consideration – wildlife also deserves privacy and the freedom to do things quietly and on its own terms without me making a nuisance of myself.

My default as a walker is to want to pass through a landscape without inconveniencing anyone – human and non-human who might also want or need to be using the space. Nothing makes me want to climb over a fence like a big ‘private keep out’ sign. They aren’t always true, either. Footpaths are ‘lost’ or hidden, where landowners would prefer not to have them. When they tell us not to trespass, sometimes they are lying, sometimes we have the right and they do not.

One of the worst examples of this I have thus far found, was on the Severn Way. Come at the path from one side, and you were clearly walking the Severn Way – it had little signs on it and everything. However, at one point the path brought you out through a lane where signage said there was no path, no access, and there might be people out with guns shooting waterfowl. This is one of the reasons it can be worth carrying a map. I’ve also seen locally, places where council signs have gone up to confirm the existence of a right of way, clearly in answer to attempts at hiding or blocking the path. Not all councils would take this seriously, I suspect.

In the UK, we have some of the most uneven distribution of land ownership in Europe. It may be due to the Norman conquest. Wealthy land owners own a lot of the ground, and the right to walk, to ramble, to get out on the grouse moors and the mountains has long been fought over. Especially lovely areas may now be owned by the National Trust, the Woodland Trust, or the Forestry Commission, but with government inclined to sell off everything for private exploitation, we cannot afford to be complacent about access to land.

The right to walk, to see, to move through a landscape should be a given. The obligation to walk responsibly, close gates, avoid upsetting livestock or trampling crops should also be a given – we can’t have rights without responsibilities. The right to own vast swathes of land and keep it inaccessible should be questioned.

I’d go further. I think that a great deal of inequality owes to the fact that a few people own land and most do not. This is the ghost of feudalism, still with us. Land is basic and intrinsic to life. Without land, there is no food, and there is nowhere to live. Land ownership, when you trace it back, has a lot to do with ancient fights, historical politics, royal favour. Outside of Europe, ownership of land has rather too much to do with colonialism, theft, and the forced displacement of native peoples.

Trespass should not exist as an issue, but while it does, we should consider it an ethically sound undertaking.

The disturbingly biochemical self

Emotions are chemistry. I know this as theory, but it’s only when my body chemistry has broken down – something I’ve experienced more than once – that the extent of it is visible to me. My emotional reactions are, to a large extent dependent on the chemical responses my body is capable of and inclined to do. I know at a brain level, that’s all messages passing electronically and chemically through the system, and habits of thought form pathways which we easily follow.

Burnout has stripped me of my capacity to create endorphins. I’ve had more than a week of being sorely limited in my scope to feel good. In the past I’ve lost my ability to create adrenaline when needed. I’ve lost other things that affect mood, passion, sense of self. My feeling self can be stripped away by chemical imbalance. My mental self could be stripped away by injury or illness, or corrupted by habit or circumstance.

‘Me’ may mean nothing more than a habitual set of chemical interactions.

And yet, even when my chemical self is compromised and I don’t recognise my own reactions, I still hold a sense of self that I cannot reduce to biochemical explanations, and that seems stronger than the mechanisms. In the depths of depression I may not have much of my usual passion, but I can still hold and believe in the idea of it, I can still identify with it. The ‘me’ in all of this can create deliberate changes to the biochemistry, with different foods, rest, exposure to sunlight, activity levels, choice of environment and so forth. I can craft the context that shapes my chemical self, and I can engineer myself round to being able to think and feel in the ways that are more in-line with my intentions.

I have spent years using meditation and CBT techniques to get my fear responses back where I want them. I’ve learned how to manage anxiety by managing my own thought processes. There is, for all of the chemistry of self, a big role for choice in all of this. How I choose to live shapes the chemistry I have which gives me my emotional life.

That in turn raises the question of who or what is doing the choosing. When I choose to become something other than my situation, something different from my current chemistry, when I set out to modify my reactions and change how I am in the world, some aspect of ‘me’ is taking the entirety of ‘me’ towards being someone I previously was not. It’s easier to think of higher self and soul as being in charge – easier because these words and concepts are at my disposal. I remain fascinated by the way in which consciousness is able to imagine itself into new shapes and able to deliberately create the situations that will get those new shapes.

The general wisdom is, that consciousness is a consequence of physical reality. However, there is a school of thought that the reverse is true, that consciousness creates reality. The more I look at my issues of identity and chemistry, the more convinced I am by the second approach.

Art and the Druid

Scan of an original page from The Raven’s Child, drawn by Tom Brown.

On radio 6 recently Mark Radcliff claimed that only 0.7 % of the British public own an original work of art, but in France it’s more like 73%. I have no idea if this is true. Many of us will own prints, posters, mass produced knick knacks and other interior decor. It tends to be cheaper. Why would we pay more for a work of art?

First up there’s the question of the kind of world you want to live in. Do you want the spaces we inhabit to be prettied up by mass produced banality? Without original artists somewhere in the mix, that’s what we’d get. Often what you find as a poster or print is a piece of someone’s art, or photograph, duly copied and licensed. Popular, famous work involves artists who are dead and no longer subject to copyright. It may be that you’re fine with the driven starving artist model, where people spend their whole lives working unrecognised, Van Gogh style, only to make other people vast wads of cash after they’ve died. It’s not a model I’m a fan of.

We are affected by our environments. That includes the soundscapes and visual experiences we have on a daily basis. Mood, emotion, sense of self, even which genes are switching on and off, is informed by the space we are in. How we feel about that space is an important part of the mix. When you feel emotionally invested in what’s around you, it’s different to being surrounded by things you don’t really care about.

I have four pieces of original art on the walls – 2 pieces of my grandmother’s, 1 Andrew Wood, 1 Grizelda Holderness. I also have a limited edition Walter Sickert print (Army of Broken Toys Walter, not dead might have been Jack the ripper Walter). I have art prints from Matlock the Hare, and a Dr Geof poster. I have art postcards bought directly from local artists whose originals are out of my league. Each of these involved conversation, exchange, engagement, so when I look at the prints, they feel very different to other prints I’ve owned in the past. They feel personal. Beyond this, I have a small collection of Pete Brown (no relation) pottery, A Matlock the Hare Dripple, a handcrafted Hopeless Maine doll made by a young artist, a giant goth moth, small artefacts made by arty friends a pottery dragon, and a dragon made out of a coconut shell. Other people’s creativity is an everyday part of my life.

My living space is populated by things I care about, and representations of people I care about. Now, if you’re thinking in terms of spirits of place, on in animist terms that allow for objects to have spirit, art has implications. Here is someone else’s awen made manifest. Here is someone else’s soul poured into an act of creation. Here is a gift of creativity between friends. Bought or given, the object or image someone else has made with their own hands has a different feel to something mass produced.

I firmly believe that art should be affordable for everyone. For twenty five of your English pounds, Tom Brown will carefully roll an original page from Hopeless Maine or The Raven’s Child into a tube and post it to you. For £45 you can have two and we’ll throw in a poster. If you’re outside the UK, postage is a little more expensive. Original pages (as with the image in this post) are hand drawn in graphite, and are unique – each one having gone on to be a page in a book. They aren’t quite the same as art intended to hang on a wall, but they are most certainly art, and also very cheap, even by the standards of comics pages. Leave a comment if you’re interested and we’ll email you.

Reclaiming Attraction

There are quite a few people I’m attracted to. I know what a loaded statement that is, and in this culture that is both sexualised and prudish at the same time, to say ‘attraction’ is to imply sexual attraction. To imply sexual attraction is to suggest following through with action. Attraction becomes a hazardous thing, perhaps even a threat to the person it’s a reaction to.

I think attraction is something we need to reclaim for broader and heartfelt use. There are so many things to find attractive in other people. Their ideas and beliefs, their passions, obsessions, creativity. And yes, faces, bodies, physical presences but even that can be non-sexual and we could allow room for it. With those in place, allowing sexual attraction to be one form of attraction amongst many, it might be possible to openly hold relationships with all kinds of shapes.

Attraction means a desire to move towards. A yearning to be closer, a keenness for the company of the one who attracts. A catalyst for action of some sort. We have evolved to be social creatures. We are designed to interact with complex networks of some 150 people, we are meant to be attracted to each other in all kinds of ways. Attracted to skill, to leadership, to ideas, to companionship, kindness, warmth. The pulls of attraction thread together communities, if we let them.

Try and talk about it, and all too often it’s seen as troubling, or weird. My attraction causes repellence sometimes, like two north ends of magnets. All too often, we’re only allowing each other to act on all those many forms of attraction if nobody talks about it. As soon as something is named, a kind of fear enters the mix, and a backing away. I’ve experimented repeatedly with an assortment of people of various genders over a lot of years. My conclusion is that almost any relationship shape is feasible so long as no one admits to it. Honesty is usually more difficult. This, I do not find attractive.

Fear of vulnerability, fear of giving too much away, fear of being misunderstood, fear of the power of attraction itself. Having no safe language with which to honour the pull. Feeling an element of sexual attraction to the other person and being ashamed of it. There are lots of reasons a person may not want to be honest.

On the other side of this, I know people who are able to be honest and open hearted about attraction. Some do it with more grace than others, but it’s not necessarily predatory or promiscuous. It can be a warm, affirming thing to encounter, even when highly sexualised in nature. It can be a gift. To enjoy and admire another human being, to treat them as attractive can be uplifting, if the recipient isn’t afraid of it, and if the one expressing it is good at issues of boundary. Attraction as something given, rather than an attempt to take from the ‘object’ of desire.

I have people in my life who have owned all kinds of attractions – mutual attractions. When it can be held honestly, without fear, it becomes something else entirely. Even when there’s a buzz of chemistry that you don’t want to follow through on. Not being ashamed of it, not hiding it, giving it room to breathe, it becomes something else. Not an affair, not a hazard to emotional wellbeing, not a point of tension or weirdness but something warm and worth having.

I speculate that attraction is far more common than most people admit to. I think there’s a lot of it out there, unvoiced, unexpressed, held in fear and in shame. I don’t think we need to be ashamed of feeling pulls of attraction to each other. I think if we were all more honest about it we might all be happier. I think non-sexual attraction is something that deserves a lot more thought and attention, and that sexual attraction is something to stop shaming people over. Perhaps if we could hold attraction more openly, we’d be able to have deeper, more fully consensual, safer and happier relationships with each other, in and out of bed.

Sex in Paganism

Sex is life. It’s a simple truth that came up in a conversation recently. We are here because of sex, for many it’s a powerful, magical thing to hold sacred. Many of our deities, especially the female ones, are depicted in distinctly sexy ways, and the wheel of the year is often expressed as a narrative of reproduction.

I tend to resist all of this. Not least because sexual expression amongst humans is a lot broader than reproduction. Some of us are celibate, or unhappily single, some of us are non-sexual, and some of us have histories that make the celebration of sex pretty much impossible. How a person feels about their own body, their own desire, what scope they have for expression and acceptance – is all part of this mix. Some desires should not be expressed or accepted; anything that involves the non-consent of a participant.

Fertility is a tricky issue too. We could do with a collective slow down on human fertility. In many parts of the world, we’re living longer, child mortality is down, and our populations are expanding. Human fertility puts enormous pressure on the planet. We manipulate and control the fertility of other creatures – largely the mammals we eat – to work for our benefit, and we’ve changed wheat to the degree that it cannot naturally self seed – it cannot reproduce without our participation. Sex can be both one of the most natural, and one of the least natural things we get involved with.

Sex can be power – if you think about who is allowed to have sex, and who is allowed to enjoy it, the issues of power balance are considerable. For a lot of history, sex has been a part of male power over women, with ignorance and shaming reducing the scope for women to enjoy it. The ‘lie back and think of England’ advice from Queen Victoria offers us sex as something women must endure, not enjoy. Sex is incredibly political, and it’s only relatively recently that the law recognised that rape in marriage was even possible. A wedding ring, we’ve finally decided, is not consent to anything at any time forever. What does it say about us that for so much of human history we’ve been happy to make rape part of the institution of marriage while being horrified by women who express and enjoy their sexuality? And there are plenty of places in the world where that’s still happening.

Sex is a big concern for religions. Who is allowed to do it, and under what circumstances. If you look at religious laws, what it often comes down to is a way of controlling women’s sexual activities so that men can be confident about who the father is. Any religion that encourages people to deny the flesh for the sake of the afterlife tends not to be very keen on sex at all, and will tolerate it only between man and wife for the purposes of producing children. The pleasures of the flesh are often represented as being at odds with spirituality, so in a fair few traditions, dedicating to a spiritual life means celibacy.

The theme here for me, is allowing some people to dictate to other people what their relationship with sex ought to be. Whether it’s ‘you have to have sex to be initiated’ or ‘you cannot have the sex you want and be acceptable to god’ there are issues of control. We don’t have to have sex at Beltain. As Pagans, we should not feel obliged to do anything sexual, nor obliged not to. Consent is everything. If we’re not harming, or abusing someone else, then what we do, or don’t do, should be our own business. We can honour the energies of life without having to enact them. We can enact on our own terms should we choose to.

If sex is not celebratory and magical for you, then you need to start from where you are. Feeling pressured to react in a certain way is no kind of liberation, and if Paganism means to hold its head up as a sex-positive spirituality, we must also have room for those who say no.

Life on the teapot

I read this piece when Lou Pulford posted it to Facebook a few days ago, and requested it for the blog, and she kindly said yes, I could share, so, here we are…

In my head, the world is like an enormous teapot; the little people are sheltered by the bright threads of its tea cosy, sustained by the amber nectar which flows abundantly from its slender spout, warmed by the gentle heat which emanates from deep within its belly. Whenever the pot begins to run dry, it is swiftly refilled by the loving hands of some eternal sky-deity, pouring forth the holy boiling water from their grail-like kettle.

In such a world, where all are cosy, warm, wrapped in bright threads and sustained by tasty tea, each person is at ease and free to go about the important business of being nice to every other person on the face of the teapot. There are always enough hugs to go around, there is always time to listen, time to chat, time to rest or play or lend a helping hand because the important things like sustenance and shelter are already provided freely for all by the teapot. In my head, there is a plate of jammy dodgers beside the teapot and those who have the misfortune to fall off (for everyone falls off the pot eventually) simply fall into the marvellous plate of jammy dodgers where they can gorge themselves silly for all eternity.

Sadly I am a mentally unstable and highly deluded individual and life is not like this at all.

In reality, the teapot is not completely covered by the tea cosy. There are areas where people are forced to subside without the bright threads, either burning themselves on the scalding barren surface of the pot, or freezing to death upon the handle.

Sadly, many people live far from the life giving spout, and those who do live near it tend to guard it jealously, charging phenomenal prices to those who wish to sip or denying access to the life giving amber nectar entirely.

In reality, there is war on the surface of the teapot. People war over the threads of the tea cosy, they war over which threads belong to who. Sometimes they enslave eachother, force these slaves to gather up all the threads and then try to sell the threads to those who are already suffocating under the weight of their own thread piles.

Sadly, while everyone’s back is turned, some sneaky bastards have slipped up to the lid and polluted the blessed golden blend with copious amounts of filthy Assam. (A little Assam is of course necessary in a good blend, but too much can be fatal) Now even the greedy guzzlers at the spout begin to die and, although some do mutter under their thread piles about the suspiciously malty taste of the tea, their mutterings are soothed and silenced by the surreptitious addition of more placating pollutants to the mix; namely milk and sugar.

Sugar is of course addictive. More war breaks out over the sugar. Some people try to ban the sugar. Others try to grab all the sugar for themselves. Many die in a sticky heap of mangled sugar and threads while still more starve having never tasted sugar or felt the warmth of thread upon their skin.

This is the reality and this is why no one has time to go about the important business of being nice to every other person on the face of the teapot. This is why there are never enough hugs to go around, never time to listen, time to chat, time to rest or play or lend a helping hand because the important things like sustenance and shelter are not actually being provided freely for all by the teapot. They never have been and they never will be.

In reality, there is no plate of jammy dodgers beside the teapot and those who have the misfortune to fall off (for everyone falls off the pot eventually) simply fall onto the hard work surface of an over burdened domestic goddess and are swept into the cosmic garbage bin without a second thought.

Now I know what some of you are thinking, I know because it was my first reaction to this awful epiphany too but please, put the knitting needles down gentlemen, we cannot knit our way out of this – not this time. I know every fibre of your being is straining to try and knit a bigger tea cosy that covers the entire pot but, trust me, it cannot be done. You will die in the attempt and your tattered fingers will shed blood like tears to stain the tea cosy and even darker shade of crimson. No I’m sorry but for once there is a problem that is too large to be solved by a pair of knitting needles.

And I know what others of you are thinking, because it was my second reaction, but please, put down those home-made energy ray pistols ladies, I’m sorry but no amount of violent vigilantism is going to help us this time. If you start rampaging about the streets in your mask and cape, attempting to ‘take out’ the greedy perpetrators of world injustice you will end your days incarcerated in a padded cell. No, I’m sorry but for once capes and masks are not the answer either.

I did have a last thought which has perhaps occurred to some of you as well, that of attempting to leave the teapot entirely by means of some mad, ingenious invention… but then I remembered that I am not a genius. Only mad, and this is no help at all.

I am however starting to grow my own tea. In old baked bean tins. In discarded wellington boots. In yoghurt pots on window sills and in cracked and broken coffee mugs. (I may not have sugar or milk, but good tea does not need toxins added to it to enhance its flavour.) When I see a friend or family member in need of tea, I am pouring them a brew and passing them some seeds and a little pot of earth. This process of growing tea has taught me something – we can be tea to ourselves and to eachother.

I know you love that concept as much as I do so I’m going to say it again,

“We can be tea to ourselves and eachother”

And what I mean by that is that we can begin to see one another as fragile, porcelain cups (oftentimes cracked and weeping) holding varying amounts of amber nectar. We can see ourselves like this too and when we start to look at everyone and ourselves of cups of tea we can judge whether a person is able to give us a sip of their time, their resources, their help… essentially a sip of themselves, or whether we need to be helping them to be refilled. We might see ourselves as pretty empty and that might well be true, but I suspect we don’t have the right to drink someone else dry just to save ourselves.

This small change in perspective from one small group of slightly insane and tea obsessed individuals will not save the world. But in some small way, in this small space, for one small portion of time, it might mean that there are a few more hugs to go around, a few more people with time to listen or to chat, a little more opportunity to rest or play or lend a helping hand because we are making it our responsibility to shelter and sustain eachother as well as ourselves.

As for the plate of jammy dodgers, well, everyone has to have dream don’t they? I suppose I’ve not given up hope on those just yet…

Magical reading for people who like to think

Blood on Borrowed Wings, by Darren Stapleton

There’s a saying that genre fiction means loads happens and no one thinks about it, while literature means nothing happens and everyone thinks about it a lot. That this is too often true is one of the reasons I struggle to find books I want to read. Blood on Borrowed Wings has that perfect balance of action and introspection. Set in a grim future, with political intrigue, dark secrets and modified humans who can fly, the main character thinks about what’s happening to him. It’s not just about solving the plot and finding out what’s going on, it’s also about finding out who he is and deciding who he is going to be.

I found it a gripping read. The setting, and some of the characters truly enthralled me. There’s dark humour here, and the kind of thoughtful word-crafting you’d expect from a literary author, but with the kind of plot you’d expect from a summer blockbuster movie. That balance of humour and darkness, sharp dialogue, insight, action and intrigue put me in mind of Mark Lawrence.

I gather this is book one of a series – it leaves me wanting to know what happens next. It is dark and violent, and what’s suggested is darker and more violent again than what’s shown, but it’s also key to plot and characters, not there for the sake of it. If you are craving clever speculative fiction, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Find out more about the book here – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blood-Borrowed-Wings-science-thriller-ebook/dp/B01BGYNXSE/

To Be A Young Witch, by Siusaidh Ceanadach

The author suggests at the beginning that this is a book for 16 to 18 year olds, but I would cheerfully put it into the hands of any younger Pagan who has some adult support. It’s written for the young Pagan to read, with adults on hand, not to read for them, so the main issue I think is how literate your proto-witch is. Beyond that, it’s an accessible introduction to what witches do, and the way reality starts to look if you adopt a witchy outlook on life. Siusaidh uses stories as part of her teaching – a great way of expressing ideas and making them available, and a way for the reader to see themselves, and their own potential reflected back. The book is nicely illustrated. The content is sensible and responsible, no one is going to get themselves out of their depth or into trouble working from this book. Of course it represents a world view, a take on history and practice and whether that aligns with your take is another question, but if the image of the traditional British Witch as wise person and healer speaks to you, this is a good book to work with.

More about the book here – http://www.millhouse-publishers.com/#!product/prd17/4469855381/to-be-a-young-witch

 

Ghostbird, By Carol Lovekin

In two cottages that have belonged to one witch family for generations, live a mother, a daughter and an aunt. It’s almost a fairytale set up. However, as the daughter of the family comes into her own as a teenager, she starts feeling able to ask more questions – what happened to her father, and to the sister she’s not allowed to speak of? What happened to her mother? Why are they living like this? There are dark secrets in this family, held by years of pain and silence, and young Cadi must either make sense of it, or be swallowed by it herself. This is a beautiful, haunting story, full of myth and magic, and the journeys from despair to hope. It’s a fantastic piece of witch-lit – with its focus on the lives of women, a compelling expression of witchcraft, and some fantastic magical realism, it’s everything a Pagan fiction reader might want from a book. The author isn’t a Pagan, but she certainly gets it. I loved it, I cannot praise it highly enough.

More about the book here – http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781909983397