Nimue Brown's Blog, page 327

Positive affirmations that could really make a difference

Positive affirmation has come to mean little mantras and memes we repeat to ourselves to help us feel better about things. I tend to find them hollow and unhelpful. It’s worth repeating a thought form when I am trying to change myself – it is ok to rest- for example. Too often what we ask positive affirmations to do is replace what isn’t otherwise coming to us. The universe loves me. I am valued. I am good and my life is worthwhile.

I think about the people (I’ve been one of them) who in times of stress apologise for existing. We’re sorry that we take up space and carbon, that we breathe and eat. To feel this way, I have realised, you have to be convinced that you are not entitled to exist. We don’t get there on our own and we don’t get out of it on our own either.

I’ve read two books by Brendan Myers in the last six months or so that have really got me thinking about these issues. (Check him out, he’s a brilliant author). He talks about how we affirm each other and how those acts of affirmation make life good. When we share food, we affirm each other’s basic right to live. Every time people do something life affirming together, they affirm life, and each other.

There are a lot of things we do as a culture that don’t affirm life. Pressure to diet and all forms of body shaming. Denying each other rest in order to work more. Favouring screens over direct human contact. Using sex as a weapon. Increasingly we treat the sick, the elderly, refugees, the vulnerable as figures and not humans. We have a culture of not affirming each other’s right to live and not affirming each other’s humanity and I think it’s getting worse.

No amount of saying ‘I am beautiful’ will counter the effects of living in a culture where that beauty is seen as a commodity for others to use.

The idea that emotional and mental health are personal issues is widespread and I think part of the problem. We are to create our own realities and be impervious to the realities around us – and what a cold, isolating world we would have if we managed it! And how crazy we would have to make ourselves to hang on to tiny bubbles of personal reality like that.

We can choose to go the other way. Not muttering to ourselves that life is good and we are loveable as we are, but saying those same things to other people. You are valued. You are loved. To hug each other as an expression of physical acceptance. To share food with those who are around us, with those who need it. To affirm the right of people to live by rejecting the politics of throwing the vulnerable to the wolves. Avoiding beating each other to death with deadlines. There are so many things we can do for each other, to be kinder, and to affirm each other’s humanity and right to exist.

It means collective responsibility. It means not seeing broken health as the fault of the person suffering. It means making an effort to care for each other, rather than jealously guarding what time and energy we have. It means it is not enough to be personally ok if people around you are suffering. It means having higher standards, and a bit of idealism.

More than this, if we start affirming each other, we affirm that life is worth living. It is a declaration that life is worth having, and that which is alive merits treating with care. As a Pagan, I hold life as sacred. I don’t think I’m alone in this. We can affirm that life itself is worth something. Sure, you can spend time gazing into a mirror telling your reflection that you are beautiful and the universe loves you (I’ve seen it recommended) or you can try telling people they are valued. One of these things will make far more difference than the other.

Lessons from the PTSD cat

I’ve been living with this cat for about six months now, and she’s taught me a lot about fear, and about healing. She’s a long haired kitty, and when she first came to us, the sight of a pair of scissors made her panic. She gets tufts and knots, and she sheds a lot of fur so sometimes a little cutting out is in order. At first she fought us, clearly really distressed by any attempt at tidying her up. Even in the first few weeks we saw a lot of changes, as she became less fearful. We weren’t hurting her, and that knowledge started to replace the evident fear that she would be hurt. We used cat treats and fuss to reinforce the idea that she’s safe, and all is well, and she’s responded to this.

She’s evidently anxious about being left. Early on we had frantic responses to absence – and we’re talking a few hours here. She’s usually waiting by the door when we come in, although she’s calmer about it than she used to be. We never leave her unattended for long enough to cause her physical problems, but even without knowing her history, I could easily infer that she has abandonment issues.

At the moment, we’re working on going outside. She’s been indoors for six months, and I know before I got her she’d lived outside for months. She’s clearly afraid of going out – she seems anxious either that she won’t be able to get back in, or that she’s being kicked out. I take her to the front door, and open it. The first few times she just ran away. She’s now venturing to stand there and look outside. Treats and cuddles for positive reinforcement always follow, and I think by the summer she might be ready to sit out in the sun.

I can’t reason with her or tell her she should feel differently – she’s a cat. The only way to overcome her fear and help her live a fuller cat life, is to help her feel safe and secure and in control. She doesn’t have to go out, she can come back at any time, she won’t be hurt with scissors, she won’t be left for extended periods. The only way to have her feel this is to keep presenting her with a safe, supportive environment and wait for her to learn to trust this.

I think about my own patterns of damage and healing and the parallels are obvious. No one has ever helped me by telling me my reactions are wrong, or that I am silly. I’ve not coped when new situations seem to mirror old ones. It has taken time, patience and learning to trust a new environment to get me not to panic as much. With me it isn’t scissors and the front door, but the patterns are the same.

When fear becomes your state of being, it isn’t a consciously held thing, and it can’t readily be reasoned with. Learned fear is a body thing, an issue of the animal self, and if we want to heal ourselves or other people who are damaged by fear, then we have to heal them as creatures first and foremost. A safe space and the time to relearn how to feel safe is essential. Damaged people need the same patience that rescue dogs do. The only way to break the conditioned responses to the past (cowering before the dangerous scissors) is to replace it with a different reality (after the pain-free scissors, the treats). Recovery is so much easier when someone is holding that safe space for you, and healing is so much more viable when it isn’t a solo project.

Writing Druid, Speaking Druid

One of the few things we know for certain about the ancient Druids, is that they did not write anything of their own down. As a modern Druid with literary inclinations, this is a bit of an issue. Part of the point of not writing everything down was probably to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. It stops your enemies having easy evidence to point at and use against you. It means your own thinking is not tied to what you wrote five years ago. Thus far I’m still ok with the kinds of things I was saying in my first books. Many of my ideas are presented as works in progress not absolute truths so I won’t have the same problems some writers would, if I then change my mind a bit!

It occurs to me that books prior to the printing press and writings of the Druid era, required drudgery. Some poor sod had to sit there and copy them by hand. There’s enough bored annotations from later copying monks to know that this was not a lovely job. Intentional or not, that the ancient druids did not write, no doubt spared a lot of people the tedium of copying everything out.

The spoken word is more immediate. You bring your whole body to the idea, and there’s an intimacy in it that comes from being in the same space and moment. Books of course transcend space and time easily and get ideas to people who would otherwise never see them. Working purely orally, you can’t do that, and you can view that as a strength or as a weakness depending on your own biases.

I’ve been a performer on and off for about 15 years. I sing, I play various instruments (mostly the bouzouki at the moment). I’ve run a folk club, I’ve busked. I do talks and workshops at Pagan events as required. Things happen between performer and audience in such spaces. Things are said that were not thought of before, and will never be said in quite that way again. It’s a living, breathing process of exchange, and because it is intense and concentrated, it can invite the awen in.

As a modern Druid I have options the ancients did not have, and I’ve chosen to use them. Even so, I can’t put in a book what it means to me to sit on a barrow for an afternoon – I can only share that bodily with others, and speak with people who are there too, or not speak, and let the silence do everything. I can also record myself as a talking presence and put that out, which is very different again from writing. I’ve a few new videos up on my youtube channel, which may be of interest. They are all things I could not have done with the written word alone.

How I came To Druidry – https://youtu.be/vK5U6DSUGEk

Druid Tabard – https://youtu.be/RzD4Q8oN2a4

A review and reading from Claire Hamilton’s Tales of the Celtic Bards – https://youtu.be/fqp5u0wu1VE

An experimental life

The only thing we have much reliable control over, is ourselves. What we do, how we think and how we feel helps shape not just how we experience life, but what happens to us. However, changing our ways of seeing and reacting to the world is incredibly hard – even when I’ve known my thinking was faulty, it’s been a fight to identify, challenge and change it. Often we don’t know where the problems are, or why. Self change is something many people use magic to explore, and often it is a big part of a spiritual path. But, how to do it?

Scientific method goes… observe, theorise, test, conclude, and then you will likely take those conclusions as the observations for the next round. It works to take similar approaches in our lives.

Observe: This means paying attention to patterns of cause and effect, and looking to see if they might be correlations instead. What’s happening that doesn’t go the way you want it to? Identify the problems. So, to make this less hypothetical, let me observe that I have a lot of issues around being touched, but that one of them is fear that my body is fundamentally unacceptable to other people and that contact with me could be offensive and that rejection is therefore likely.

It’s worth noting that this observation is full of existing theories – I have a set of beliefs. I might want to unpick them and work out why I have these beliefs, or I could just accept that they may be wonky. Either way, I can safely theorise that these feelings of mine will be contributing to the problem – I avoid physical contact, and when I don’t I’m usually awkward, which could be sending out the wrong signals to people.

To test the theory I have to be more open to hugs from people I know. I have to notice where that might be available. I don’t have to say yes to everything, I don’t always want people to touch me (I may be in too much pain for a start). I theorise that if I could sort my body out to hurt less, that might help. There’s no need for this to be a wholly linear process, after all. If people can be physically kind to me and accepting of me as a physical presence, then I can question the underlying belief that I’m intrinsically repellent. I’ve been testing this for a while, with mixed results but an overall sense that people are often more ok with me than I expect them to be. I conclude that it’s worth pushing outside my comfort zone to keep exploring this.

The testing flags up other issues – that it’s not just about my acceptability, it’s about my need to feel safe, and I feel safer if I think I’m so horrible that no one would want to get anywhere near me. Even though I feel sad about feeling unacceptable, feeling acceptable might be worse. The thing that hurts me also functions to protect me. There’s a defence mechanism here that helps me keep people at a safe distance, and it helps explain the people I’ve had problems with (it’s my fault, not theirs and I find this easier to deal with). That in turn may be protecting me from facing other things I have not wanted to think about. I find it easier to internalise blame than to deal with the idea of other people being inadequate or unfair. To change, I need to identify all those things and think them through properly. Testing my reality opens up new questions, and new things I need to deal with.

The key thing here is creating the opportunity to gather evidence that what we thought, may be wrong, and to use that to construct better ideas, and from those better ideas, better ways of being in the world. It offers no quick fixes, it can be bloody uncomfortable, but it gives you something solid to work with. I’m not good at belief, or just changing my reality with a daily positive aphorism, but this experimental approach gives me information I can work with to rethink issues.

It’s important not to beat yourself up while doing this. Exposing unhelpful theories and beliefs can make a person feel a bit stupid. These are coping mechanisms that have passed their sell by date, usually – things that once made sense, or once held up. We change, everything around us changes, what worked before is hurting us now. The more lightly you can hold the idea of a rethink, the less the process will hurt you and the more good it can do.

Ways to live – a trio of reviews

It occurs to me that all three things I’m reviewing this week have explicit things to offer about how we live, and how we might need to rethink how we live. All three things could be discussed from an array of other angles, but I’m going to run with this common thread…

Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear, by Brendan Myers. An epic and at the same time accessible philosophical book about how to live well and fully. It really is a handbook for life, and challenges us to explore 22 different forms of relationship and re-imagine ourselves in light of how we can live out those relationships in more meaningful ways. Each one of those 22 chapters was totally fascinating, and rewarding to read. Every chapter gave me things to wonder about and new ideas to play with. It’s a practical, inspiring book full of details – history, philosophy, popular culture, all manner of studies into all kinds of things plus the author’s many insights. A great read, and offering much to chew on, I can heartily recommend it.

More about the book here – http://www.moon-books.net/books/circles-of-meaning-labyrinths-of-fear

 

Fullmetal Alchemist, Brotherhood – the anime adaptation of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, by Hiromu Arakawa. 64 episodes, with a complete and well plotted story. I could write you pages about the plot intricacies, and about the alchemy, but what really interested me was the importance of relationships in terms of getting things done. Threads of causality that come from how characters treat each other. The long term consequences of small gestures. It’s an expression of how big moments in history are made out of the actions of many, many people. A powerful tide for change can be created by lots of people all making a small move in the same direction. Themes around not giving up, not succumbing to despair, not accepting defeat in the face of overwhelming odds run through the story, but what’s key in keeping those themes alive is the two young central characters, who refuse to give up, and who refuse to let others give up either, and the wide reaching consequences this has.

I reviewed Crown Moon, by Anna McKerrow, last year (review here – https://druidlife.wordpress.com/2015/07/20/eco-pagan-mythmaking/) and was delighted to be offered book 2 for review. I loved Crow Moon, but Red Witch is an even better book. Strong plot, strong characters, compelling magic, and a dark view of the future. This is a world in which we (the Redworlders) have burned most of the fuel and fought a long and brutal war over what little remains. We’re fracking, and letting the poor starve. The Red Witch of the title – Melz – comes from a little alternative enclave in the south west of England – Greenworld. It’s not however, a book of easy or comfortable morals. There’s good and bad in everyone. At the same time, a lot has gone wrong. Human relationships with power, energy and the land are at the heart of what has gone wrong, and the book is in many ways an invitation to get our shit together before it’s too late. How we treat those around us, how we give and withhold resources and information are contributors to the world we co-create.

More about the book here – http://www.annamckerrow.com/books.html

Everything we do is about relationship, and how we hold those relationships affects everything.

Pagan Community, Pagan Service

In a traditional community, it is normal for people to invest effort and resources in things that benefit others, safe in the knowledge that everyone else is doing it too and the aim is group survival. When we talk about Pagan communities, we don’t usually mean groups of people who are dependent on each other in an ongoing way. What we get instead are a mix of economically driven interactions, and volunteer interactions.

In a traditional community, entitlement is part of the mix. You are entitled to partake of other people’s successes, creativity and resources. They are entitled to partake of yours. This is fine – it creates flow where good things move from those who have plenty to those who are lacking. Everyone contributes what they can when they can, and you trust that it balances out, and you take pride in looking after those who cannot, for whatever reason, look after themselves.

There’s no shortage of that same sense of entitlement in modern Pagan communities. We often feel entitled to benefit from the work of others, and can be resistant to paying them anything for that work. We make huge demands of our volunteers. All too often what we don’t have is a sense of responsibility to go alongside that entitlement, and this is something of a problem.

Sometimes it works out well – I think Mark Graham’s Druid Camp is a case in point here. There are people who buy tickets, and people who work for tickets, people who contribute to ticket sales such that they get paid. Rainbow, who provide the infrastructure, are also paid. There’s a real effort to make sure that no one feels exploited, that everyone gets a good exchange experience from the balance of what they are asked to put in and what is available to them.

However, I’ve been in plenty of other spaces where it didn’t go like this. Where working a ticket caused problems and wasn’t respected, so that volunteers ended up having to pay to participate. I’ve seen volunteers taken for granted, and I’ve seen outlandish beliefs about money being paid to people who, in reality, barely had their expenses covered. I’ve seen people charging outrageously for what they do, as well. I’ve seen people pay celebrants generously in relation to their own resources, and I’ve seen people think they were entitled to have that celebrant work for free – because we’re a community and that’s how it should be. I’ve seen people think the community owes them support and adoration, and I’ve seen people who deserved support not getting it.

Partly this is because we are not really living in tribes. Sometimes we like to use the language of tribe, but as we are not mutually dependent on each other, we don’t have a tribal relationship. We aren’t entitled to each other’s service because we are not obliged to provide service in return.

As individuals, we can pay attention to what we contribute – in any form, and what we seek in return. We can look at the flows of energy we participate in, and we can look at how that impacts on other people. To get this right as a ‘community’ all we need is for enough individuals to be thinking honourably and carefully about how energy and resources and opportunities and demands flow between people. (Borrowing Cat Treadwell’s famous battle cry) What are you doing?

Ideas of sacred land

What makes a place sacred? Perhaps there’s a religious event associated with it, or a human construction there to hold that sacredness and alert us to it. Maybe the construct’s purpose is obvious – as with temples, maybe more elusive – as with stone circles. Often we’ll travel vast distances to visit the sites that humans have framed as sacred by building something. Be that Stonehenge, Greek Temples, Nazca lines or ancient cave paintings, or anything else of that ilk.

Repeated use of a place by people approaching it in a state of veneration has an effect.  However, these designated sacred places also attract tourists, who come to look, but not to experience the sacred. A sacred site full of loud, photo taking, irreverent site seers doesn’t always feel very sacred at all. Of course being Pagan does not prevent us from showing up as tourists, and our showing up does not guarantee anything will happen.

I’ve been to Avebury more times than I can count. It’s a place I love visiting. I’ve participated in rituals there and spent time contemplatively amongst the stones and on the earthworks. For the greater part, I’ve had no really spiritual experiences there. No flashes of awen, nothing numinous. A sense of awe at the vision and determination of its builders – every time. The most profound experience I had there was a few years ago when, for the first time, I had chance to walk the site. I went out to Silbury Hill and West Kennet long barrow and back to the stone circle. There are many sites in the Avebury complex aside from the main stone ring, and seeing some from afar and moving through that landscape was by far the most profound thing I’ve ever done there.

I’ve been to the Nodens temple site at Lydney, once, as a visitor. There were a lot of visitors. It was an interesting experience, but not a profound one. As a ‘pilgrim’ coming in for one visit, what are we expecting from the place we land at? Does that expectation psyche us up to a heightened state so that things feel more profound than otherwise they might? Thinking back to my first visit to Stonehenge, sleep deprived and deeply invested in the experience, I think the answer is ‘yes’. Making an event of pilgrimage, of arrival at the sacred site, we can enchant ourselves into feeling more than otherwise we might.

It may be a bit like the difference between the chemical rush of falling in love, and the depth of a long term relationship. The wildest reactions to another human can be fleeting and soon lost. It takes active, dedicated involvement to make a relationship, with another human or with a place.

All of this suggests to me a case for making pilgrimages over and over again to the same places. Ideally not just driving up and looking around, but moving thoughtfully through the whole landscape, putting the place in its context. Where does the sacredness stop? Of course it doesn’t, there is no line in the land. There’s the limit of how far the tourists normally walk from the car park, and it’s important to find ways of going beyond that limit. If you can’t walk out of and around a site, time spent at the edges, looking out will take you further than you might otherwise have gone. Time spent in the site paying attention to it takes you beyond gawping and into experiencing. The more touristy a site, the more important it is to figure out how to be something other than a tourist in that place if what you really want is a spiritual experience.

Finding the third artist

Arthur by Brown.

In January of this year I started working as a colourist alongside my husband Tom, on the John Matthews graphic novel interpretation of Le Morte D’Arthur. This is an intensely collaborative project – a dead author and a living one, Tom doing all the lines and then me doing the colour, and then Tom doing the final things in photoshop – not least sometimes dropping his lines back in on top of my work. Someone else will be lettering the pages.

I’ve worked collaboratively before, but usually as an author – either writing with other authors (Professor Elemental, Letters Between Gentlemen) or as Tom’s author. There are all kinds of issues around art/words collaborations, but the artist does the art and the author does the words and for your bit you remain yourself, albeit in service to something that is more than you.

At the moment we’re working on the same sheets of paper. For the first couple of weeks I found it hard just bringing colour to the pages. What I do obscures Tom’s lines, inevitably. I’m a big fan of his pencil work, so watching it disappear from view is an uneasy process. A page I’ve coloured looks very different from one he’s drawn. The lines alone have an airy, delicate quality while the colour is solid and substantial. For the first week I had the unpleasant feeling that I was taking pieces and wrecking them. Then the photoshop magic started, and the original lines went back on top of the colour. A whole new thing emerged, something that wasn’t really him and isn’t really me. The third artist who is more than the sum of its parts. We’ll probably call it ‘Brown’.

A great deal of talking goes on around each page – an advantage we have, as most comics artists do not sit at the same table as the colourist. We’re finding out what our individual strengths are, where to back off and let the other one handle it, where to be ok about the end result not looking like our bit. I’ve started trying to do on paper some of the things we thought would happen in photoshop – candle glows, mist… and I spend time watching Tom do the final work on the piece. In seeing what changes he makes I can better see how to get the page right in the first place so that he does less.

In an ideal world, we’d pass the paper back and forth between us, doing very little in photoshop. We’re already talking about what happens with Hopeless Maine this way. I had a go at the latest cover, using watercolour pencils, which gives Tom room to come in over the top and reassert pencil lines. Oils are trickier that way – slidy, and a physical presence on the page. I know it can be done, because my grandmother used to pencil over oils to get the rigging details on tall ships. But these are things to explore another day.

Cover art above. The Sky, the ray of light and the lighting effects are Tom’s.

Mystic or Magician?

“The Mystic wants to be with God. The Magician wants to do with God.” This quote leapt out at me yesterday when I was listening to Penny Billington on The Druid Podcast.

Even though prayer, meditation, and contemplation are important to me and regular features of my life, I’ve never been attracted to the idea of mysticism. Until yesterday I could not have put the reason into words, but it has everything to do with doing.

I reflect and ponder, retreat and wonder with the intention of coming back, at some point, and doing something with that. I pause to make periods of action more feasible. I’ve never done the contemplative things purely for their own sake.

My life revolves around doing – plenty of people have suggested to me along the way that I probably need to spend more time being.  I like doing, and the more I explore this, the more I find for me, it’s about how I’m doing, and any pressures I’m under. I write and practice various handicrafts, I make music, and food, I walk, and work and colour for Camelot… but I don’t really do spells, and this has generally inclined me to feel that I’m not a magician either.

What is magic? Change. Transformation. Making something where before there was nothing. Changing hearts and minds. Healing. In Druidry, inspiration is called Awen, and understood to be a sacred force, so it would seem reasonable to think that the Druid Magician who wants to Do with God is working with divine inspiration to get stuff done. I found myself wondering, if the inspiration is divine, does the action have to be esoteric for the person to be a magician?

I’m not sure about God – there might well be gods, but I have never had any sense of them speaking to me. I have however often experienced the power of inspiration as a blessing, a lightning bolt of magic hitting the brain at just the right moment. I feel inspiration as a magical process, and I am certainly interested in aligning what I do with what is spiritual, soulful, in tune with the flows of the universe.

I also know what it feels like to ride, for a while, on one of the universe’s waves. To be so in tune with what else is moving that everything comes easily. Everything that’s needed falls into my path, as though other forces were cheerfully helping me on my way. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I’ve experienced it too often to doubt it. When you’re in tune with other things, magic happens.

How we frame our thoughts affects what we do and the outcomes we get. That’s an established tenet of magical thinking. What happens if I re-frame myself as a Druid Magician seeking to Do with God? (Whatever we suppose god to mean). I’ll wrap that unexpected gift of a conceptual cloak around my shoulders, and see what happens.

Ancestors in the land

The presence and nature of ancestors in the land are going to vary a lot depending on where you live. For people of European descent living in formerly colonial countries, ancestors of land raise issues of appropriation, and of awful histories. Having never worked with this, I can only flag up the issue, I can’t really answer it.  I think relating to those who went before us as part of the land may help to make honourable relationships that take nothing, but maybe give something back in terms of respect. It wouldn’t be about visiting their places, but about recognising their continued presence, and knowing the stories of their presence in the land, and knowing what happened to them. As someone who lives in the UK, I’m not well placed to discuss these matters. Working with ancestors of place is certainly easier if there’s been no conflict between them, and your ancestors of blood.

Rather than trying to imagine all possible ancestors for all people in all places, I’m going to talk about my own experiences and hope people can use that as an effective jumping off point.

 

Ancestors in the geology

I live on Jurassic limestone. The internet is your friend when it comes to finding out about the rock where you live. Different rocks come from different eras and have different qualities, so there’s a lot to engage with here. Some of the soil here is thick clay, some is a more sandy loam, and there are areas of good topsoil for growing produce. Where it’s thin, sandy soil over rock, there’s often a history of quarrying, and a current presence of grazing livestock.

The Jurassic limestone is full of fossils – generally small sea shells, and other relics of a long departed shore. I’ve picked up fossilised crab shells, sea urchins, and all kinds of things that were probably plants. That these ancient ancestors of place can appear, so perfect and undamaged by time, is a startling thing. I cannot make any sense of the vast swathes of time between their lives and mine, and yet I can hold them in my hands. A dinosaur skull was found locally, some time ago, and I remain in hope of finding one myself. But then, having grown up on this limestone, I’ve spent much of my life finding fossils and longing for dinosaurs.

 

Ancestors in the archaeology

Prehistoric human life is only available to us as archaeology. I’m lucky – there are four barrows within viable walking distance, and more I have yet to visit. There are three Iron Age forts I can walk to from my home. I’m a short distance from a churchyard that was discovered to have a Roman villa on it, and an incredible mosaic, which is dug up at intervals – I have yet to see it. There’s a site reputed to be a Roman camp site, and stories and histories go forwards from there, becoming more certain as we go. Not so many miles away is the city of Gloucester, known to have been inhabited since people returned to these shores after the last ice age. Ancient ancestors are all around me, and visible. Much of the UK is like this.

There’s a great deal I cannot know about them, but I can walk the paths they used – some of the paths around here are 4,000 years old. I can visit their graves, and I can look at this land and try to imagine their lives in it. Currently, the Severn River is cut off from the Cotswold hills by a motorway, crossable on foot at only a few points. For much of history, there was no barrier to walking between the river and the wooded hills. It’s easy to imagine a mobile population doing just that – shifting out in times of flood, going where the hunting would be good, and coming to the hilltops above the river to bury their most significant dead.

Of course my imaginative engagement with them does not give me certainties about who they were and how they lived. However, I’ve walked from the river to the hills, I have a physical knowing of this place that must, to at least some degree, be held in common.