Nimue Brown's Blog, page 334

The essential muse

For every creative person out there, the exact method that creates ‘ping’ moments of magical insights, varies. Druids like to call the fire in the head ‘awen’ but this is by no means the only term in town. For the ancient Greeks, the flow of creativity came from 9 muses – all women – whose business it was to inspire men to creativity. As a female creator this is not an image I can easily work with, but in modern parlance, ‘muse’ is often used just to describe that which inspires.

Much of my inspiration revolves around people. Other people’s creativity is essential to me. I don’t write well if there isn’t an audience, and if that audience interacts with me so much the better (thank you, lovely blog-following people, for giving me reasons to keep doing this.) People I can write for specifically, make worlds of difference, too. That I write for Tom Brown is a key part of how Hopeless Maine works for me. I write it for him, and because of him, and his responses are essential. In much the same way, I wrote my sections of Letters Between Gentlemen for Professor Elemental/Paul Alborough. Of late I’ve been writing comedy Druid poetry for Aontacht, and having editor Lisa’s enthusiasm and responses has made that possible, where otherwise it would never even have occurred to me. I’m going to name check John Holland of Stroud Short Stories, and Paul Mitchell of Mad Magdalene as being other important influences at the moment.

Regardless of the form you prefer to use, being creative is always a process of putting a bit of your soul into the world and asking other people to interact with it. Not everyone will love what you make – for all kinds of perfectly good reasons. Finding the people for whom your creativity is a blessing, is such a powerful thing to do. Being able to take what you do to someone who loves and values that makes it possible to keep creating. Even if no one is buying, even if the rest of life sucks, those threads of valuing make all the difference.

For me it tends to work best when there’s a flow of some sort. Unlike the ancient Greeks, I don’t hanker after a muse who sits round being pretty so that I can do things because of them, and that be it. I do a lot better when inspiration moves back and forth between people, when one creative thing sparks another. I don’t believe in the idea of the lone creative person in their garret / ivory tower/ bat cave. I think we all do a better job of creating when we do so in community, when we make things for and because of each other and share that goodness around.

Thank you, all of you, for reading and being part of my creative life.

Art and Paganism

A recent blog of mine on the question, What is Paganism? provoked some interesting responses here and on social media. So I think it’s worth carrying on with this one. One of the concerns people raised is wanting to make value judgements about other people’s behaviour when really problematic, and the idea that without really firm edges, Paganism doesn’t mean anything.

So, let’s talk about art! Literally anything can be art these days. It’s not defined by what you create, but by the act of putting a frame round it, or putting it in a gallery, or announcing it as art, or being officially An Artist. Arty people have pushed this one in every way imaginable, which means that ‘can this be art?’ is, from an art perspective, no longer an interesting question. Curiously there’s now a resurgence in art that looks like representation of things. Once the question of ‘is it art?’ is no longer relevant, the question of ‘is it any good?’ becomes more relevant. ‘Good’ is notoriously hard to define, and we will all disagree about which works of art are ‘good’ clever, innovative, and which are rips offs and rubbish.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between Paganism and Art. For decades we’ve been pushing the edges of what can be considered Paganism. Is a Zen Druid a Pagan? Is a person whose practice is almost entirely Yoga a Pagan? Can Christians also be Pagans? Is a World of Warcraft Druid a Druid? And despite the lengthy internet arguments, the truth is that if someone wants to self-identify as a Pagan, then it’s impossible to prevent them using the term. By saying ‘I am a Pagan’ we’ve hung ourselves up in the Pagan gallery, we’ve framed ourselves in a certain way.

Like the question ‘is it good art?’ the question ‘is it good Paganism’ is often subjective. Good Paganism for a polytheist Heathen living in a yurt is not necessarily going to look much like the Good Paganism of an urban vegan Witch or the Good Paganism of a Yoga Druid. Having framed and carefully labelled ourselves, we might look round at all the other frames and labels hanging in the Pagan gallery and find they make no sense at all. But then, this also happens with art. In a physical gallery many of the things on display won’t make much sense to us either. Goat with flowers, still life of dead birds, blotchy thing, unmade bed and of course urinals and piles of bricks. Art doesn’t have to make sense to everyone looking at it. Maybe Paganism doesn’t either.

The problem with wanting to define Paganism along ethical lines, is that we rapidly have to exclude all ancient Pagans. Animal and human sacrifice would not be acceptable today. In modern Paganism, we do need ethical considerations. We do need to be able to say ‘what you are doing is not what I think a modern Pagan should be doing’. However, I think ethics are more effective when they aren’t tied to a belief system, but come from a more pragmatic view of the world. An ethics you can argue a logical basis for is a lot easier to explain and defend than an ethics that depends on belief. You don’t need an Art Ethics to decide whether burning £20,000 or giving away everything you own as a piece of art might have an ethical dimension.

I think it gets really interesting when we hold these three things separately.

Is it Paganism? To answer that we have to decide what we mean by Paganism. We will all come up with slightly different answers.

Is it good Paganism? A wholly subjective question, but well worth asking, as we also have to figure out what ‘good’ means.

Is it ethical? Which requires us to decide what is ethical in the first place.

There will never be tidy agreement between all Pagans on this, there will always be people who self identify as Pagans who are innately troubling to other Pagans. The question is not how to eliminate the ‘problem’ Pagans. You only have to look at other faiths to see how unworkable that is, or how vile it is when it works. So let’s ask some other questions about what we do with this, because those are bound to be more interesting.

No more fighting

We fight oppression and we fight for rights, we fight the system and we fight ecocide, and we fight unethical corporations and we fight the journalists who won’t report what’s happening and then we get cross with each other on social media and fight each other over matters of privilege. We’re so in the habit of fighting that we hardly know when to stop. Places that should be collaborative become combative. But we keep fighting the good fight against all comers.

I start to wonder if the fighting, at least some of the time, isn’t part of the problem rather than a route to improving things. And yes, I know there’s more than a dash of white western privilege in that statement because fighting is a choice for me, not something I cannot avoid. This is also part of my point thought – fighting is an option, so why have I been choosing it?

Well, the obvious answer is because there are so many wrong things that need sorting out so I have to fight all that injustice and intolerance and all the rest of it. The theory makes sense, but in practice I do not see the results I’m looking for. If I fight someone, the odds are really good they will dig in and fight me back. The very act of fighting them becomes part of their story about why people like me should be silenced, shot, not allowed to vote etc etc. By fighting I am feeding the fight.

I’m really tired. This has led me to conclude that I just can’t afford to pour any more energy into fighting. I’ve been thinking about this one for a while. I’ve been thinking about it since I heard Seize the Day at Rainbow Druid Camp last year singing something along the lines of “I will not rest until all oppression is ended.” Not being allowed to rest is in and of itself a form of oppression, and it will break your body and your mind far sooner than it will destroy oppression.

I’m changing my approach. I’m focusing on things I can usefully do – in my life, for the people around me. Comedy and kindness are becoming my revolutionary strategies of preference. Giving things away, buying from small producers, where I can. Helping. Living the way I want the world to be, in order to contribute to that being more feasible. I don’t want to live in a world where we spend much of our time shouting at each other and fighting each other, so I’m going to stop putting energy into that.

What is Paganism?

Paganism is an umbrella term covering an array of beliefs and practices, some of which are heavily informed by older civilisations, others of which are largely modern innovations. The trouble with the label is as soon as you say ‘this is Pagan’ there’s an implication of not-Pagan, which can be used to hurt and exclude. All too often what I see is people saying ‘I do this and I am Pagan and you do something different so you aren’t a proper Pagan’. And then we get bogged down in arguments, sucking up time and energy.

The logic of saying ‘you aren’t a true believer’ goes with recruiting religions based around authoritarian structures. These are, for the greater part not set up to be about spiritual experience, but designed to give power to a few. Most religions have aspects that are all about serving an elite, and every religion has spiritual people who aren’t primarily motivated by power. If you aren’t interested in controlling and manipulating people, why would it matter if what they do is not what you do? Historical Paganism was as much guilty of power wielding to herd the masses as any other set up, but we don’t need to recreate that aspect.

There are reasons we might want other people to agree with us. We may feel threatened by difference, and more comfortable when our beliefs and habits are reflected back by those around us. We may want to be in charge and so must get everyone onboard for our way of doing things. We may have bought into the idea of one true way – perhaps a legacy from the faith we were raised in. We may be so excited about our personal truth that we think it’s bound to work for everyone. While sharing ideas and experiences is good, dogma is suffocating, and if we feel the need to say ‘you’re not a proper Pagan’ it’s worth asking what our problem is, not theirs.

What is Paganism? It isn’t in books, it isn’t a single coherent tradition, it does not have rules. There’s no racial or cultural barrier to membership, there’s nothing to swear, nothing to sign. Dedications are a personal thing. There are no specific gods you have to worship. You don’t even have to believe in gods to be Pagan. What does that leave? How can we make sense of the term when there’s nothing familiar to pin it to?

Let me suggest a thing. Paganism is a human response to the experience of being alive that finds sacredness in being alive. It’s a response to the seasons, life changes, the moon and tides, the agricultural year, the land, the weather. It’s a response to living and dying and to the constant cycles of life and death in this world. Anything that comes from a human response to life, is inherently Pagan. So the urge to make light and festivity at the darkest time of the year – that’s a Pagan urge. The urge to dance and party in the summer evenings, that’s a Pagan urge too. Celebrating the harvest, singing about the dear departed, honouring relationships, respecting the land we live on – no one needs telling how to do this. Every last one of us could come up with a way of being Pagan in response to life with no reference to anyone else.  Solstices, equinoxes, shifts in the season – these things are self evident.

How can we get this wrong? Because if we’re inspired by other people to celebrate our human experience of being alive, that’s fine. We can find inspiration in each other for sacred expression. If we get it from a book, that’s fine too. If we make it up, it’s still humanity responding in a spiritual way to life.

Look at it this way, and the only thing a person could do that could be readily labelled as non-Pagan is telling another Pagan that they’re doing it wrong. Perhaps we could all be a bit gentler with each other.

Falling in love with musicians. More. Again.

I spent last Saturday at Exeter Yule Ball – a fantastic event Tom and I hadn’t been to before. It may take me some days to recover. With live music during the day and in the evening, it was a great opportunity to hear some new bands. I was deeply impressed by the sheer diversity of music.

I’ve been talking a lot about book industry issues in recent weeks, but things are no less tough in other creative industries. Music is given away online, the only way a performer can make a living is by touring (which is bloody hard work) and selling at gigs. It’s pretty much impossible to make a career by staying home and writing songs. Like most authors, most musicians will have a day job. If you love music, you need to support your musicians. Buy their albums, don’t just pick up youtube freebies.

New-to-me music I think you would like… links on the names for things you can check out. Gurdybird – folk electronica, hurdy-gurdy and pirate hat, great tunes, and also really good videos. Ideal for dancing to. The Wattingers – bass and harmonica. No, really. It shouldn’t work, and yet it does, but the bass (which you don’t get at all listening at home) is like a physical assault and I swear my bones will never be the same, having heard them. Totally startling, in a really good way. The Mysterious Freakshow – Fey Pink sings like every female goth vocalist I have ever loved with a bit of Kate Bush thrown in for good measure. Videos do no justice at all to her captivating stage presence, but go watch some anyway.

I’ve been following Miss Von Trapp online for some time now. She sings songs of murder and violence, or turns previously innocent songs into mayhem and blood baths. Accompanied by a cello. Really funny stuff. It turns out that in person she’s just as delightful, and has a truly amazing voice. You can check her out in this video in which she and Professor Elemental abuse a song and a reindeer… (I was there!)

The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing. Another group I’ve followed for years but had not seen live. Very much the punk side of Steampunk, lots of retro-politics that are all too relevant right now. An intense performance, brilliant songs, a mosh pit (from which I was absent) and my first proper encounter with a musical saw. This song is stuck in my head, and is one of my favourite things at the moment. Atheist issues with the supernatural. This house is not haunted – no god, no ghosts, no afterlife.

 

The end of the evening bought a set from Professor Elemental. I found him by accident, years ago when looking for an OBOD video on youtube, and have adored him ever since. Fantastic performance, not just funny, but an experience designed to lift people up, leaving us feeling better about ourselves and each other. A one man austerity antidote in a pith helmet. Part of the normal audience job is to look up in awe and be inspired to love the performer. I go to gigs expecting to love the performers. There are whole other levels to this for me with the good professor. Having worked with him to co-create a book, been a test reader for him, thrown works-in-progress of mine his way, introduced each other for nerdbong podcasts… he’s been important to me for a long time, both as his stage self and when not pithed-up. Seeing him over the weekend reminded me of just how much I love working with him, so I’m determined now to find some opportunity for a new collaboration.

And that previous joint project looks like this. Paperback and hardcover, with the lovely people at Snowbooks.

http://snowbooks.com/products/19647?variant=1278323201

Work in progress

I’ve always been wary of talking about what I’m working on. It’s not the fear that someone else will pinch my ideas – they won’t, and even if they did they’d end up creating something totally different. Some of it is the fear of being told what I should be writing. However, there’s no one in my life now with the kind of power over me to feel entitled to tell me what my books and stories should be about. I can afford to let that go. There’s the fear of losing something of the concentration of a project, diluting it by speaking of it – a magical taboo against sharing. I’ve come to the conclusion I can afford to let that go as well.

So, what am I working on?

I started a novel back in the summer, and it’s crawling along very slowly, in no small part because I’ve not made much time for it. The thing I’m most interested in at this stage is the way people change over time. I’m influenced particularly by Anthony Nanson’s ‘Deep Time’ in wanting to talk about people who are personifications of place. I’m trying to make it a bit funny, and I’m trying for some less conventional structures, because I really enjoyed that with Letters Between Gentlemen. Pared down story telling created by focusing on what people might choose to record, or tell each other.

I’m a bit stuck around Pagan books. In three months, Pagan Dreaming has sold 147 copies, which left me feeling like I should give up on non-fiction titles. Some of my other titles have done better than this, and books are often slow to sell, and my publisher has kept making encouraging noises and refused to write me off as not worth it. This is the second time I’ve nearly lost my nerve and he’s encouraged me not to quit. So, I’m contemplating two projects. One is a Pagan Portal (under 30,000 words) on working with the elements – that should be easy to write and I think there’s enough people who might be interested in it. The other thought, is that I want to write a book about walking, pilgrimage and Paganism. I want to write something soulful and poetic, which automatically means I’m looking at a not-commercial sort of book. I’m going to do it through the blog, probably not writing in a coherent order, just putting things down when I think of them and keeping those blogs in one file. It means you get the first draft, and because I am more reliable about writing the blog than about anything else, there’s a fighting chance I will eventually write the book if I do this.

Next year, my other half is starting a graphic novel version of Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, adapted by John Matthews. Four books over four years, and Hopeless Maine being finished off in the same time frame. This will be pretty intensive. I’m going to be helping out with the colouring. My first job was to go through the script and look at the named characters – there are a good 50 speaking parts in the first book alone, many of whom need to be recognisable as people. That would be a lot of faces for an artist to imagine into existence, so we’ve settled on a cheat. We’re casting people we know into various of the roles. It’s quite an entertaining process.

Aside from that, I’ve got a monthly column at Sage Woman, I contribute content to the Moon Books blog, I’ve been asked to write comedy Druid poetry for Aontacht, and Pendle Craft Magazine are going to serialise my novel Fast Food at the Centre of the World (originally a podcast at www.nerdbong.com and still available from there).

Too many writers?

As you’re reading this, please start off with a moment of well earned smugness, because you are reading, and reading is a much needed thing just now.

Here on the internet, everyone is writing (there is no escaping a certain amount of awkward irony in this post.) On twitter there are a lot of authors all shouting at once about their blogs and books. Who is reading them? My guess is that for the vast majority, the answer is, almost no-one. We all want to be heard, but no one who is busy shouting wants to listen.

I talked to an aspiring author the other day who said he didn’t want to read other authors for fear of being influenced. As though a book should be something you write in total isolation with no reference to anyone else. As though being influenced is a bad thing. How are we to learn, if not from each other? How are we to understand writing, if not by reading?

Some of it is about speed, about putting out words at ever greater tempo in the hopes that acceleration will somehow magically lead to something. Churning frantically in the hopes of hitting on a magic formula. The author as word machine, pumping them out at breakneck speed. All too often what follows is writing devoid of ideas, lacking depth, or interest. All those ‘ten ways to be an even better blogger’ posts that I don’t click through and read because they’re so tedious.

I’m going to be giving more of this blog to talking about reading. The book market is tough, and there are many fabulous and deserving books that get overlooked because no one even knows they are there. I’m going to put more energy into promoting other people’s books. If you aren’t a regular reviewer and find a book you really want to rave about, and don’t have a platform to use for that, this is an open invitation. I take guest blogs. Drop me a line.

I’m going to rebalance my life a bit, so that I spend more of my time being a reader, and less of it being a writer. Partly this is for my own enjoyment – I’m happy when I’m reading. Partly it’s to slow down. I want to stop and properly engage with things. Partly because there’s this frantic competition for attention going on out there, and I want a different relationship with it.

Friday Reads (because books are worth talking about)

Recently I read Jez Hughes The Heart Of Life. It’s a mix of spiritual memoir and shamanic philosophy. As such it will not teach you how to fix your life, but it does has a lot to offer in terms of how to think about fixing your life. I’ve read quite a few shamanic books, and I realise that I’ve not previously read anything much about the underlying philosophy of this array of healing practices. All too often in MBS titles, there can be a blame element to healing. It’s your karma, or you put it in your life plan before you were born, or because like attracts like it’s a consequence of your not being positive enough. It’s rare to read a genuinely uplifting and helpful book about spiritual healing. I know many of you following the blog have ongoing issues with physical and mental health. I can’t say this book is going to sort everything out for you, but it could give you some useful things to chew on. Certainly worth a thought. I really liked it. More about the book here – http://www.moon-books.net/books/heart...

 

I first encountered Nausicaa, Valley of the wind, as an anime film from Studio Ghibli. Director Hayao Miyazaki has also written and drawn a 7 book graphic novel series. It’s a much bigger and more complex story than the film offers, everything is in more details, you get to find out more about where the creatures and technology came from, the politics are far more complex. It’s a really good read. There are two things I especially liked about it – the handling of purity and corruption as concepts, and the idea that no one is entirely beyond redemption.

I read all 7 in a couple of days because I really needed some escapism. They absolutely delivered. If you like speculative work and graphic novels as a medium, these are well worth your time.

More about the manga series here – http://www.nausicaa.net/wiki/Nausica%...

When Is a Reconstructionist Tradition not a Reconstructionist Tradition?

A guest blog by Laura Perry

When Nimue suggested the idea of a guest blog post, I asked her what aspects of modern Minoan Paganism might interest her fellow Druids. Her response was enlightening:

“Probably the main point of commonality with Druidry is that this is a tradition with scant but tantalising evidence, parts of which was recorded by its oppressors.”

I hadn’t really thought about Druidry in that light before, but of course it’s true. Caesar wasn’t exactly a warm supporter of the Druids, was he? And the Hellenic Greeks weren’t terribly fond of the Minoans either, except when they could scrape up a few bits of Minoan mythology to give their own culture the patina of age.

Let’s start with the basics. The ancient Minoans were a civilization that spread across the island of Crete, just south of Greece in the Mediterranean, beginning in the Neolithic era, about 6000-5000 BCE. The main run of Minoan society flourished during the Bronze Age from about 3500 to 1400 BCE, with the heyday (the big temple complexes, colorful art, and so on) from about 1900 to 1400 BCE. This puts the Minoans contemporaneous with the New Kingdom of Egypt and the Mesopotamian cultures of Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon. The first stage of Stonehenge was built during the early phases of Minoan society and it was completed during the height of civilization on Crete. The Minoans were a wealthy mercantile society of accomplished seafarers, trading all across the Mediterranean and as far up the Atlantic coast as Cornwall, from where they brought back tin to make bronze blades.

One issue that confuses many people is the ethnicity of the ancient Minoans. In modern times, the island of Crete is part of the nation of Greece. However, the Minoans weren’t Greek. Their ancestors came from Anatolia in prehistoric times, a part of the westward wave of pre-Indo-European peoples that eventually spread across most of Europe. And while the people and culture are called Minoan after the mythical King Minos who purportedly ruled the island at one time, there is no such place as Minoa. The homeland of the Minoans is called Crete.

You’re probably familiar with the Minoans thanks to their art: the colorful frescoes of bull-leapers and priestesses, the figurines of the goddess with writhing snakes in her hands, the seal rings depicting complex ritual scenes. Much of Minoan art focuses on religious acts: sacred games, offerings, animal sacrifice, sacred dance. As with much of the ancient world, the Minoans felt no divide between everyday life and religion, the ordinary and the numinous.

So what was Minoan religion like and why would anyone be interested in reviving it, even in a modified form, in our times? The initial appeal for many people is the prominent place of the goddesses in the Minoan pantheon. Rhea, Ariadne, Diktynna, Eileithyia, and others may be familiar to most people from the Hellenic Greek pantheon, but they all were born, so to speak, among the Minoans. We can deduce a lot about Minoan religious practice from their artwork – the offerings, dances, sacrifices, and so on that I mentioned above. But we can only get just so far by looking at pictures.

The Minoans were a literate culture. In fact, they had two writing systems, a hieroglyphic system and a syllabary known as Linear A. The problem is, we can’t read either one. Now, the Mycenaean Greeks came into contact with Crete during the last few centuries of Minoan civilization. Either they or, more likely, some Minoan scribes altered Linear A to write Mycenaean Greek. The ensuing syllabary, known as Linear B, was translated in the 1950s and we can read it pretty well. That’s how we know so many of the Minoan deity and place names, what kinds of offerings the temples accepted, and the fact that women owned property. But we still can’t read the native Minoan language. And that’s a problem, because our main source of written information comes from the Mycenaeans, who weren’t exactly the Minoans’ best friends.

Though we can’t be sure of the Mycenaeans’ specific aims, it’s apparent that they did their best to take over Minoan society, first by infiltration and then by force. They may have wanted the island as a hub for naval activity or they may have coveted the Minoans’ wealth, gained from extensive trading activity. In the process, the Mycenaeans borrowed a great deal of Minoan religious practice, including large chunks of the Minoan pantheon. The Hellenic Greeks later incorporated the Minoan deities into their pantheon but altered the myths and even the characteristics of many of the deities to suit their own cultural values.

The main activity in Ariadne’s Tribe is figuring out how much of what we know about the Minoans (mostly through Greek mythology) was recorded accurately and how much was purposely changed. The Mycenaeans, like the later Hellenic Greeks, were a profoundly patriarchal society, in contrast to the egalitarian Minoans. So the Greeks ‘demoted’ many of the Minoan goddesses (Ariadne became a mere human, for instance) while they forced others, such as Rhea, to submit to husbands who ruled over them when these goddesses had been stand-alone, unmarried deities in Minoan religion. Then the Greeks invented Theseus, a culture hero, to show that they were superior to the backwards, human-sacrificing, Minotaur-worshiping Minoans.

So those of us who practice modern Minoan Paganism spend a lot of time teasing out the original myths from what amounts to a political smear campaign. There are some aspects of ancient Minoan religion we’re not likely to revive: huge mystery plays attended by hundreds or thousands; drug-induced shamanic journeys; animal sacrifice. But we use the same symbol set the ancient Minoans displayed in their temples, shrines, and homes: the labrys, the horns, seashells, the sacred serpent. We’ve taken a page from the modern Norse Pagans and are working with multiply-corroborated gnosis to fill in the blanks where necessary, along with a lot of ritual experimentation. And of course, we listen to the gods. They understand that life changes with the passage of time, and whatever we can do to help them remain relevant while respecting their underlying nature is a good thing.

 

References:

Though I’m often wary of Wikipedia, the page about Minoan civilization contains generally undisputed information and is pretty comprehensive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization

 

Max Dashu’s Suppressed Histories Archives has 5 pages of good examples of Minoan art, focusing on the religion of ancient Crete:

http://suppressedhistories.net/Gallery/crete/crete.html

 

The writing systems mentioned above:

Cretan Hieroglyphs http://ancientscripts.com/cretan_hieroglyphs.html

Linear A  http://ancientscripts.com/lineara.html

Linear B  http://ancientscripts.com/linearb.html

 

Ariadne’s Tribe – Facebook discussion group for modern Minoan Paganism:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1502335483312496/

 

The Minoan Path blog, an exploration of modern Minoan paganism:

http://witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/the-minoan-path.html

Winter Dawn Chorus

The dawn chorus is something we tend to associate with the summer, but it’s still going on, a few weeks from the winter solstice. It’s quieter at this time of year – I assume because the long, cold nights leave birds with less energy for singing. Or perhaps they just have less they feel moved to sing about.

The dawn chorus itself is one of nature’s mysteries. We don’t really know why they do it. Unsubstantiated scientific-sounding explanations include using up any excess energy they didn’t need over night so as to be ready to fly – birds have to watch their weight. If that were so, you’d think a mild night in winter would provoke more of a chorus, but it doesn’t. There may be territorial aspects. There may be checking in to find out who survived the night and who didn’t.

I like to think they’re singing up the sun, but by the winter, fewer of them believe in the return of the sun and get miserable and don’t sing. I don’t sing when I’m depressed, perhaps birds are the same. Perhaps they are more inclined to sing in summer when life is better.

Curiously, owls do at night what other birds do in the morning. The first thing an owl does when it wakes up, is to have a bit of a sing. The sun has usually set by the time they get going – although in summer with the late sunsets and young to feed, they can run a bit earlier. What owls do in terms of signing isn’t sun orientated, that much is clear. I like to think they’re singing to the mice.

Why anything does anything can be quite mysterious. A lot of life isn’t directly focused on survival and reproduction. Rationalism has taught us to look at the natural world in terms of function and utility, as though life is no more than reproductive units maximising the chances of its genes. Even in the winter, the birds sing up the sun, and the blackbirds sing it down again, and the owls sing to the evening, serenading the mice. Nature is full of things that do not sit neatly alongside the current, allegedly rational understanding of what nature is supposed to be all about.