Nimue Brown's Blog, page 335

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.

Traditional Witchcraft for the Woods & Forests: review

I like Elen’s blog. Do go beyond this post and have a general poke about.

Compassionate Listening

Last week I read The Heart of Life, by Jez Hughes. It’s a rare thing – a book I think everyone ought to read. Jez is a shamanic practitioner, and in this blog I’m going to pick up on one of the healing techniques that he talks about: Compassionate Listening.

I know from conversations here and on wider social media, that I’m not alone in finding interventions from other people tiring around matters of health, and that I’m just as likely as anyone else to want to respond to suffering with useful intervention. So what can we usefully do for each other? So many books about healing offer a sense of shame and guilt – the idea that my negative thoughts or past lives are responsible for my feeling as I do, and if only I could be more positive, it would all be fine! Oddly, this idea has never caused me to feel more positive, and when I’m depressed, it usually helps to push me further under. I’m glad to say there’s none of this in The Heart of Life – it’s a very human sort of book.

Compassionate listening is just that – hearing what the other person needs to say about their experiences. Paying close attention, making it clear that you recognise and comprehend. If something is fixable, you have to be able to start by properly identifying it. If it’s not fixable, sometimes saying ‘that really is shit’ is the best we can do for each other.

Listening helps to overcome isolation. All illness is demoralising, and reduces people. If we can be heard, then we know that it doesn’t matter that we’re less useful right now, or need caring for, we still have a place. It’s easier to ask for help when you don’t feel that people are primarily relating to your utility. It is often helpful to know it’s not just you, especially around emotional distress in face of the world. There are many problems we’re better faced to overcome as communities. Listening is the first move towards being able to come together to act.

There’s more to it on an emotional level though. Listening means allowing the other person to speak. It means no one is telling them there isn’t time for this right now, or that it doesn’t matter, or something else is more important. I’ve been told to push though pain and distress countless times, and told that my suffering was less important than other things that were going on. When this happens, it locks something inside me. Practical solutions become less available, but it also causes a grief, a wounding, a sense of devaluing, if I need to cry, but no one around me thinks it matters. This is not a good place for a person to be. Endure enough of it, and you will lose your sense of person-hood.

Being listened to allows us to be people. It allows us to own and express whatever hurts, which provides rapid emotional relief all by itself. Then we just have to deal with what’s wrong, not with the struggle of hiding it and pretending to be ok. We get to matter. Someone cares enough to hear. The act of putting pain into words is releasing, and can often give back a sense of having some control over the situation. To cry, and be acceptable, is a very powerful thing.

To listen, you don’t have to be able to solve everything. You don’t have to patch things up for the other person or magically make it ok. You don’t need answers, or wisdom, or the means to change anything. Just by putting your body in a situation, and stopping, to witness, to recognise, to allow a space for hurt to be acknowledged, helps.

I think it often doesn’t help that amongst Pagans there is a suspicion that we ought to be able to use magic to fix people. People who self-identify as healers can find the long term sick really problematic. So we end up blaming people for their negativity and refusal to heal, rather than face the hard truth that maybe we don’t have anything that can help them. Listening  is good. Listening is a balm we can all bring to each other. Making time to hear does change things.

More about The Heart of Life here – http://www.moon-books.net/books/heart...

Talking about books

I spend a lot of time talking about books. Partly because, some of the time, it’s my job to do so. How cool is that? I also spend a fair bit of time talking about books because reading is something I do for fun, to learn, to be part of a wider community. What I struggle with is talking about the books that I’ve written. So much so that in a recent social media conversation about dream interpretation, it was pretty obvious that most of my online friends hadn’t the faintest idea I’d written a book on the subject of dreaming.

So, why am I doing such a poor job of promoting my own work? Well, for one, by the time I’ve written it, I tend to have said everything I ever wanted to say on the subject. At least for the next few years. I’m just at the moment getting interested in talking about meditation again, nearly 5 years after my meditation book came out. I also assume that you (dear reader) do not come to my blog to read me banging on about my books and trying to sell them to you.

I’m not personally attracted to authors who spend most of their time banging on about their books. The closer it is to a hard sell, the less interested I am. But at the same time, selling books makes my publisher happy (and I really like my publisher, he’s an excellent chap). Producing an income stream would make it easier to keep writing. So, if you want any of my Pagan books, they’re over here. And if you don’t, that’s fine! I’ll still blog.

It’s possible, I realise, that there may be things of interest about my books, so I’m just going to throw this open. If there’s things you’d like me to include here, pop it in the comments and I’ll see what I can do to oblige. Possibilities might include book excerpts, bits from other people reviewing my books, information about what I’m working on at the moment and why (a novel, as it happens, I’m not sure what/if to do next on the Pagan book front, again, open to suggestions!)

If you’d rather not have too much content pertaining to my books, do please say, because that’s helpful to know. The whole point of this blog is to be useful and interesting to other people, but at the moment I’m only guessing as to what delivers that.

How books can save the world

Reading is a low carbon activity, especially if you read the same book more than once or share it.
While theatre, film and other creative forms can offer some of the same benefits, it’s the effect of being involved with the world of a book over days, maybe weeks of reading that has the power to really impact on us. The act of getting involved with a story over time means a book can become part of our lives in an ongoing way, and in the easy business of having a long term relationship with a book, we become more able to engage with that which is not us.
Fiction teaches us to see the world through other people’s eyes. We imagine ourselves as other people, and so learn to empathise, which in turn should help us be more co-operative in real life. It is co-operation, not competition that we need right now.
Sitting quietly with a book is soothing to body and mind. It slows us down, takes us out of the fast lane of consumption. The more people leave the fast lane, the more sustainable everything becomes.
Stories get us interested in ideas, encouraging us to think and question. They teach us not to take everyone’s words and motives at face value. These are skills we all need to deal with information from politicians and the media, who seem intent on pushing us towards ecocide, but good at telling us they aren’t doing that.
Fiction shows us people overcoming challenges, hardships, and if you read fantasy, significant forces of evil. We can find courage to face our own challenges from the inspiration of fiction, we can believe that one person may change everything, and so we are more able to become that person.
In most stories, selfish, greedy, power hungry people are the bad guys. This gives us a valuable perspective on the real world and the people in power.
Books have the capacity to be far more than entertainment, however the chance to escape into other lives and worlds offers us emotional respite which in turn makes it easier to deal with this world and not be ground down by it. Avoiding people being ground down by misery and despair is an essential aspect of fixing things.
Books offer us other ways of being and living, from the idealistic to the horrific. This helps us recognise that the world as it is, is not inevitable, just one option amongst many. We could choose differently.
Books expose us to beauty, love, heroic friendship, happy endings (at least sometimes) adventure, and they stimulate the imagination. The more of this we have inside of us, the more able we are to recognise it, seek it and make it happen. People who are full of banal thoughts, mean ideas and the like aren’t likely to imagine a better way of living.

Friday Reads (again)

Things I’ve read recently that I think other people ought to read, too.

 

Hall of Misery, by Bill Jones. A small, illustrated text you have to buy directly from Mr Jones, which you can do on his website – or in the streets of Stroud. If you’ve been missing Edward Gorey, this, quite simply, is the book you’ve been waiting for. Dark and funny, making comedy of existential angst and putting it all into perspective. Usually the perspective involves tiny human figures in vast, oppressive landscapes. If you’re still not sure whether this is for you, poke around www.hawkerspot.com until you succumb. I laughed out loud, repeatedly. (And yes, that stalking poem a few weeks back, this is *that* Bill Jones.)

 

House of many ways – Diana Wynne Jones. I read this cover to cover on Tuesday night because I needed some escapism, and this delivered. It’s book three of a series that starts with Howl’s Moving Castle – ideally you need to read all three in order.

Plotty, clever, imaginative, its charming.  Diana Wynne Jones favours stories in which young people discover that they had good things going on in themselves all along. Values, qualities, strengths and skills they hadn’t recognised, worth not previously identified, alongside their flaws and foibles. I like this about her work.

Available all the places one can find books.

 

 

Your Faery Magic by Halo Quin, published this month, this is a book I was asked to read well ahead of the release date. It’s a gentle introduction to things faerie that acknowledges the darker and more dangerous bits. You could read it entirely as a pathworking book – the journeys Halo suggests would work very well from a purely meditative perspective. It’s also I think a very good book for enthusiastic teens – enough good content to be worth their time, but unlikely to get them into serious trouble! If you are a gentle soul, or starting out and wanting not to get out of your depth, I think this is a good place to start.

My adult self rather suspects that my early teens self would have utterly loved this book.

You can order this or find it online anywhere that sells books. More about the book here.

A sense of self

Who am I? This physical presence in the world, more awkward than I would like. A soft animal body that blesses me with perception and the scope for action. A story of physical ugliness and unacceptability I’ve been told too many times. Uneasily feminine, mother of a child who stands on the brink of adulthood. A body that works, and weeps, and does what it can and wants to do more. A body that used to dance, and hasn’t in a long time. A voice that seldom finds reason to sing anymore. Even so, I’m probably less alienated from my body at the moment than I have ever been.

Who am I? An obsessive mind full of uncertainties. Questioning all things, trying to make sense of an increasingly incomprehensible world. An anxious, uneasy mind, desperate to be doing more, but limited by the realities of a body that cannot give indefinitely without rest. A mind fighting to stay sane in face of the madness of ecocide, the needless greed and cruelty shaping this age.

A feeling being, intense in those feelings but not defined by any of those feelings. Always either too much (too intense, too needy) or not enough (not compassionate, patient, generous enough). Feeling, but never seeming to feel the right things at the right times to fit neatly in with everyone else. Feeling, but hiding those feelings, inherently dishonest in matters of the heart in the hopes of not causing offence or inconvenience.

There was a time when I would have defined myself in terms of my aspirations. That was some decades ago. I no longer have much sense of direction, more a suspicion that I’m not really going anywhere, that there isn’t much else I am going to achieve.

There was a long time when I would have defined myself in terms of what I was doing – writer, folky, activist, parent. These days I do what I can and I do what seems necessary but feel little sense of identification with any of it. There were times when I defined myself by the communities I belonged to, and the people I felt most closely associated with. I’ve come to think of myself as someone who isn’t very good at community or at friendship.

I’m aware that for many spiritual people, the loss of the ‘little me’ and the ego is a spiritual goal. Get rid of the clutter of identification and ideas about self to be a more authentic spiritual being. Clearly what I’m experiencing isn’t some kind of enlightenment or improvement. It feels like disorientation, loss of purpose, and increasing despair in all aspects of my life.

But then, is the loss of ego for spiritual purposes really a loss of identity? Or does the person simply import spiritual values, spiritual community, a sense of being respected as a spiritual person and a sense of being good, worthy and enlightened, in replacement for all the things they were previously hanging their sense of identity from? I expect it feels great to have an identity that is so firmly rooted in a spiritual path.

It’s not easy to function when you don’t know who you are. How do you make choices when you don’t really know what you want? How do you find the motivation to do anything? It’s not, let me be clear, the peace of slipping into simplicity either, because the not knowing, is not simple. It’s confusion, and unsettling, and never knowing what call to make.

About the only bit of me I can be sure of, is this awkward flesh self, but I can only be sure about it in a feeling way. The stories I have are also uncertain. This body I understood to be funny looking, unattractive, unfeminine, badly proportioned, unloveable, and which a few people insist on seeing very differently.

Who am I?

Honestly, I’ve no idea.

Dreams, meaning and the things we don’t want to mention

There’s something about the human mind that inclines us to look for patterns. We infer faces where none exist. We’re really good at seeing patterns of causality, when faced with coincidences. This is, in essence, where all superstitions come from, and why we end up with lucky socks and obsessive compulsive disorders, sometimes. The ability to find meaning is of course also the basis for all science. Let’s pause a moment and enjoy the beautiful irony that superstition and science may both depend on the same human qualities!

Post a dream on a social media site and in minutes, someone will try and interpret it. We can’t resist. Surely, amidst all the weirdness, there must be sense and significance? Surely those bizarre happenings must have symbols in them, and once we get to the symbols the madness will turn back into coherence. You can easily see the benefits this could confer as a life skill, but dreams are not regular life. I remain suspicious about the degree to which intelligible meaning can be squeezed out of the strangeness that is dreams. I think we risk reducing the dream to something less than its splendid whole when we try and make it mean something.

The sharing of dreams is also a partial process, and that’s very human, too. I’ve shared two dreams publicly, of late, where I have changed the whole impression the dream is likely to give by deliberately missing out some details. It’s tempting to skip over the embarrassing, awkward bits to get to the funny anecdote. It’s advisable not to name the people involved, frequently. Or why it was that we didn’t have any trousers on in the first place. And what we were doing, exactly, that meant this obsessive fixation with doors that won’t lock properly really came into focus.

Usually (at risk of too much information) the unlockable doors in my dreams are on toilets. A recent occasion where they weren’t raises interesting thoughts for me around ideas of boundaries, privacy, personal space and secrets. And there it goes again, that all too human urge to make sense of a dream, coupled with the equally human urge to withhold from you all of the most private and secret parts. Without the unwritten content, no one else has a shot at making sense of it – and of course that’s deliberate too, because while I might be interested in what you think about the possible symbolism of unlockable doors, I don’t want you dwelling on the symbolism of what I was trying to lock in, or out, or why.

There are all kinds of things we can do in response to our dreams. Looking for meaning is just one option. There’s a lot we can learn just by looking at which aspects we want to draw other people’s attention to, and which bits we will never admit to. Secret urges of which we will not speak. Things that do not sit well with our waking personas. Images of shame, guilt, lust, and all the other vices that we wanted to tidy away and find, awkwardly, that really we haven’t.

Pagan Dreaming… in case you want more of this sort of thing.

Living with pain

Not so long ago I had a conversation with a friend who has been suffering from something called post concussion syndrome. I’d not heard of it before, but it has involved months of horrendous headaches, and, the friend thought, had affected their personality.

“Well, obviously,” said I. “Pain does that.”

To those for whom physical pain is an occasional thing, the experience of it comes as a shock. If the pain doesn’t go away, it has an impact, and one you probably aren’t prepared for unless you’ve paid attention to other people dealing with ongoing pain.

Pain is limiting – whatever hurts, you just don’t want to use any more than you have to, and you rapidly learn to avoid adding to the pain in any way you can. Sometimes these tricks put extra strain on some other bit of your body and you end up damaging that too. Pain is exhausting, it undermines concentration. In large doses it can become hard to think in an organised or sustained way. It’s emotionally wearing. It erodes you, sandpapering at your sense of self. The loss of things you used to do easily doesn’t help with that.

Most people are good at being helpful around short term setback. But when the answer to ‘how are you?’ is ‘pretty shit and suffering a lot, just like I was the last dozen times you asked me’ it becomes tempting to lie. You get bored with talking about it, bored with explaining, too tired to explain, bored with pity, bored with a sympathy that is devoid of empathy and bored with other people not understanding what you can and can’t do and why concentrating is so hard. You lie and say ‘I’m ok, I’m coping’. It may seem better and happier to talk about anything that isn’t the pain.

And then, because you haven’t felt up to explaining everything about what the problem is and where it came from, the well-meant helpful advice will flow in, and most of it will be useless because it’ll be based on not knowing what the problem really is, and reading/hearing it will be exhausting and probably also annoying, but you can’t say that because they’re only trying to help…

Pain affects mood. Sometimes very simply – it hurts so badly that you end up crying. Sometimes, the idea of ever having an ok day again, ever feeling passable, ever being able to function properly seems so impossible that it’s hard to know how to keep going. Rage against the people who are lucky enough not to be suffering and do not know how lucky they are. Frustration over what can’t be done, and the lack of understanding from others. Despair. Pain certainly does affect personality, because you can’t experience any part of that and not change how you think and act. Then you realise that your sense of self isn’t as robust as it was, because this thing, this pain in your body is able to turn you into someone else – a depressed person, a grumpy person, a person who won’t go out any more, or whatever it is.

I’m just surfacing after a couple of weeks of overwhelming pain. I’ve watched it punch holes in my mental wellbeing. I’ve watched it undermine my creativity and productivity. I’ve mostly not talked about it because I couldn’t see any point – and while I was in there, I doubt there was much point. There wasn’t anything much anyone else could do to help me. I’m still very sore, but it’s down to a level that allows me to function. Pain has taught me patience and stoicism, although it’s also caused me intermittent despair. It has changed who I am over the years I’ve been living with it. There is no avoiding that.

Taleweaving: teaching tales

A guest post by Elen Sentier

Folk and fairy tales have come down to us through the ages. They continue to be birth themselves today with modern authors like Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife, and Patricia Wrede’s Talking to Dragons.

What is a folk tale? They can be hard to describe but one thing they all seem to have in common is that they’re teaching stories. They all have a point and teach how to be and work with otherworld through the actions of the characters. They show us how the world, the universe and everything works and have done since our ancient hunter-gatherer told tales and to help their younger folk to learn the ways of the world. They show us ordinary folk (show not tell!) how to be and behave when we meet otherworld.

And this is what I write, magic/mystery/romance. The novels are set in the present and involve ordinary people and revolve around a female protagonist. They also have an important male second-lead who also has to learn how to be with otherworld. Both the woman and the man have a relationship that needs lots of work from both of them if they’re going to make it. They have lives, problems, wants, needs, frustrations, all the usual stuff of life that we all have, but they also have connections to otherworld even if they’re not quite convinced about this! Sometimes they reject this otherness … and then have to backtrack in order to go forward. They find themselves asked to do something they don’t understand but which grabs them by the heart and the gut so they have to follow, do it.

My first two novels, Owl Woman & Moon Song, do just this. Both have female protagonists who both have to stretch themselves beyond their limits in order to achieve their quests. Both women have difficult relationships that they have to “grow into” … and so do the men! They have ordinary, everyday difficulties as well as otherworldly ones. Their challenges happen in both thisworld and otherworld at the same time, for this is how it is in real life! Magic intermingles with our everyday life but mostly we’re afraid to look, afraid to see it. Both Vicki in Owl Woman and Isolde in Moon Song manage to do this. They’re human, funny, annoying, daft, brave, and full of grit, guts and determination, they are strong women. They show you how to work with otherworld.

I’m working on the third novel – Whispering Bones – with another female protagonist and her difficult relationships with her father and lovers. She and they have to learn how to be, how to work with otherworld. It’s what our stories do and how we learn best for we are Taleweavers and we love to listen to them, hear them, and learn from them.

You can find out more about Elen and her books over at http://elensentier.co.uk/