Nimue Brown's Blog, page 337

Fighting for love

One of my longstanding assertions is that I would never fight someone to try and get them to stay with me. Not friends, and not lovers. Anyone who wants to go, I would let go. If I’m put in a situation where I need to compete to get someone’s attention, I don’t compete, I step back. If someone pushes me away, I go. If someone has something better to do with their time than spend it with me, why would I want to get in their way?

Sometimes it’s probably a good idea. This summer a person I’d thought was a friend blocked me on Facebook, after a few months of odd behaviour. I could have fought over it, emailed, phoned, said ‘why are you doing this to me?’ or ‘what did I do to cause this and how can I fix it?’ I didn’t do anything. I let go, and a few months on I don’t regret letting go.

Like any simplistic response, it’s too simplistic. It held up well enough in the situations from my teens. It held up with the kinds of lovers who play manipulative games and wanted me to ‘earn’ their attention. It works in the face of asshattery of all shapes and sizes. It doesn’t work when dealing with depressed people.

When depressed people go away, it’s not an act of rejection. I know this, because I do it. I retreat when I feel like I’m no good to be around and have nothing to offer. I quietly hide when I’m too difficult to deal with. People I trust to be there for me when I’m a mess, I can count on the fingers of one hand. When other people are depressed and hide, I infer that they wish to be left alone. I’ve done a passable job of mentioning that I can probably cope, but even so I don’t get this stuff right in any reliable kind of way.

I need to change some of how I think about this. I’m easily persuaded to go away, and that people have better things to do than spend time on me. I’m easily persuaded that I’m a nuisance and/or imposing, and the reasons for this run deep. I tend to focus on whether I’m being useful, and that can distort how I see things.

I’ve had close calls with giving up on several people this year. Feeling that I didn’t have much to offer, and that I wasn’t needed anyway have been a big part of that. I’ve been letting assumptions about myself colour my entire understanding of quite a few things. I’m trying to put down my beliefs about how other people may see me, which is not easy. I’m thinking there are times when I need to stand and fight, rather than quietly slipping away.

At the Magical Crossroads in Scotland, 1979

A guest post by Suzanne d’Corsey

When Nimue Brown kindly invited me to offer a guest blog to her site, spurred by the publication of my novel The Bonnie Road, the topic of witchcraft in the book was the obvious choice to explore.

The Bonnie Road takes place at a pivotal time in the history of our Western neo-Paganism, in Scotland, 1979. This was when the secretive followers of the Auld Ways existed in a relatively static state; when a quiet movement was underway to uncover and make meaningful a pre-Christian legacy; when many strands twined together in the New Age movement, of passionate explorers of lay lines, earth mysteries, of UFO sightings, of Findhorn finding its feet, all these trends rising against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s new government. Add to the mixture the encroachment from England of a relatively new style of witchcraft that came to be known as Wicca, and it was a swirling, heady, occult, confusing and exciting time for seekers. The face of neo-Paganism- and Scotland- was about to change forever.

When I began writing the novel, many years ago, the magical maelstrom was not my primary focus, at all. It was a by-product of simply setting this novel in a time and place I knew well, populated with eccentric characters which included the witches. (Not that ‘witch’ was used as a positive reference back then.)

The people I knew in Fife and further afield, who actually practiced the old customs and kept a sort of country wisdom, may or may not have been influenced by various other movements through the previous couple of centuries, including the Celtic Revival, Spiritualism and all. While the wonderful Silver Bough by F Marian McNeill was available, it was a description of what the people were doing at the time, not a research tool to discover Scotland’s pagan remnants, unless one were drawn to the study of folklore. Rather, the last major player to dramatically affect the expression and beliefs of the magical ways in Scotland was the Reformation and Calvinism. How curious then, that the next huge change would come from “The Wica,” as it gradually made its way north, till it caught fire and blazed across the world. But back then, this was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind, including those few Wiccan pioneers in Scotland, for whom secrecy was the norm.

I include a good few scenes in the novel of the uneasy alliance between Morag the Scottish town ‘witch’ and the secret coven in a neighboring village. To whet your appetite, here is a scene from the novel, part of Morag’s musings as she is in process of seducing one of the young coven initiates. I chose it because it draws in all the magical threads, of Scottish witchcraft, of Alastair Crowley, of the new Wiccans:

There was a new style of witchcraft migrating north from the Sassenachs. Morag had been tipped off a few years past when rumors circulated about “the Strathkinness coven.” The wee village already boasted a resident witch from a century past, who could gang aboot invisibly, and did all the usual folkish mischief. Her specialty was transferring her neighbor’s butter to her own churn. Caught in the act of cantrips on the last night of the year, she was overheard to make a charm by spinning a cow’s hide tether about her head and singing “Hare’s milk and Mare’s milk, an’ a’ the beas’ that bears milk, come tae me!” She must have been a lazy besum that she couldn’t churn her own butter, though Morag would never begrudge the use of spellwork to effect changes. The witch would also gang into a hare, a popular game among the auld Scots witches, emerging with the inevitable gunshot wound from a confused farmer, thus proving the witch’s credentials. Considering that Morag often enough flew on the raven’s wing, she knew this talent to be entirely feasible.

The magical group was very different, insofar as Morag could ascertain. Secretive coven- formed, a hierarchical High Priest and Priestess requiring initiation, magic which seemed to be codified in a process in the context of ritual. She knew how Alastair Crowley did things well enough. Her grandmother Morag had visited him in his house on Loch Ness, called Boleskine, and enjoyed some “parties’ there. There was a similar structure to their ritual, what with protective circles and invoking this and banishing that with much brandishing of swords and sticks and all, and being joyfully out of their minds with drugs and trance. Young and beautiful grandmother Morag had been made welcome, right enough, by the Master of Boleskine, who was curious to uncover the auld Scots magic, indeed to test whether it legitimately worked for his own purposes. Which were not at all the same purposes as that of a Scottish witch; the one a clever magus, the other kin to the wild. And so they came together like a hunter and a wild deer, enjoyed the exchange, kissed in kindness, and departed back to their own kind.

But this English group was quite different from Crowley’s Boleskine frolics. Staid. Proper. Genteel. At last she might be able to uncover the truth of their existence. Far as spying went, what could possibly be more enjoyable, and effective, than seducing the lovely young initiates of the so-called secret coven? That made everybody happy. A little magic of her own, and the lover, lost in a blissful trance, would barely recall any of his pillow talk. (Pgs. 103-4, The Bonnie Road)

Needless to say, things escalate, as they will when personal agendas are played out, in this instance through practical jokes, seduction, alliances and unexpected twists and turns leading to a horrific episode at Samhuinn in the Highlands. Depending on your viewpoint, of course.

I have taken great pleasure in layering descriptions of how things really were in the late 70s in Scotland among the followers of the Auld Ways, throughout the novel. It is only now, in hindsight, I come to find I’ve described a time that is slipping away from memory, or worse, being revised and often misinterpreted. If The Bonnie Road helps to shine a light on this dark time of Scottish witchcraft, and does so in an entertaining and enlightening way, no one will be more pleased than I.

“Let us open our eyes to the great mysteries that surround us…. for in them is our only solace in this fleeting world.” – Quote by Morag Gilbride, The Bonnie Road

www.suzannedcorsey.com

www.thunderpoint.co.uk

How to write and whether to read

I’m not a great fan of how-to instructions for writers. I’ve read a few, of varying length, and often what happens is that the process is reduced to its mechanical components. Many could be better described as ‘how to write what’s fashionable right now and therefore easier to pitch to a publisher’ and of course fashions change, it is in their nature to do so. This year’s hot, sure fire thing is next year’s damp squib. Authors who seek a career being quite like that big popular thing, may well make a living, in fact may well be a lot more successful than I am, but it’s still not a path I’d choose.

If my primary interest was money, I would not be trying to write books. There are easier, more reliable ways to make a living. So much of the book world is about how to sell. I work in marketing some of the time, and I understand how the selling side is essential to make publishing work, but books designed for marketing are just entertainment products, and for me that’s missing something.

Reading Paul Matthews ‘Sing Me The Creation’ brought home to me what it is that I don’t like in books about writing, and in the industry as a whole. This is a book of re-enchantment, seeking magic and wonder in language. It’s a book of soul and art. Writing for the love of it, and for the love of the world, sharing stories and poems because it is good to do so. There’s not a marketing tip in there, and no consideration of whether you can cough up a best seller. On the cover is an image of a heart shaped book – and this is a book all about bringing heart and words together.

It’s full of ideas and creative exercises. If you do all the exercises, you will not have written a book. You won’t have a model for a book. You won’t have a marketing plan. What you will have, very likely, is a fire in your head and a joyful sense of the possibilities of language. You’ll have an urge to play with words and concepts, and perhaps a returning sense of why you wanted to write in the first place.

This is a book for people who need to fall in love (again) with the idea of writing. This is for people who are feeling a bit lost, a bit jaded in their craft. This is the book for writers who are no longer sure why they write, or what it achieves or whether there is any point. There is a point.

I’ve struggled with all of this for years, with the demands and nature of the industry pulling one way and my inspiration pulling the other. I’ve struggled with the idea that to be a successful professional, I have to write what’s wanted, not what I feel needs putting into the world. This is a book that has helped me reclaim my inspiration, my sense of wonder and possibility.

I’ll keep the marketing hat and I’ll use it to help other people get their work noticed. I’ll keep the marketing hat for after books are written, but I won’t wear it when I’m writing. It tends to constrict the flow of blood to the brain, the flow of words to the pen.

This book, Sing me the Creation, I will keep, and any time the world of publishing gets me down, I will pick a random page and open it, and remind myself of what I’m doing and why. If it sounds like a book you would enjoy, then I very much recommended it to you, if re-enchantment calls to you, this book is well worth your time.

More book information here – Hawthorn Press.

What is a Druid?

What is a Druid?

Someone who chooses to walk the Druid path.

What is the Druid path?

It may be a broad, smooth trail through a wood. It may be a narrow, winding path across mountaintops. It may be a sea road, or a passage through the air only known through the wings we can imagine. It is a path that can be known only by travelling it, and no two take the same route. It is a path through life, a way of being.

Can it not be taught, then?

No, but it can be shared. We can learn without copying, be inspired without being lead.

How can we trust that inspiration?

What else is there but the fire in the head, the vision, the feeling response to being alive. It’s not the inspiration that is ever wrong, but what we choose to do with it could be.

By what rules can a Druid discern the good from the bad, then?

We know it’s often all subjective. We create our honour, we define our virtues and live by them. We seek authenticity, truth, beauty and wisdom as best we understand those things.

What are we to do when we find those things?

Share them, for the good of the land, the tribe and whatever we hold sacred.

What should we hold sacred?

Whatever fills us with a sense of wonder and awe.

Where do we go in this world to find awe and wonder?

We walk the Druid path.

Being human in a crisis

I got online this morning to find that, in the last 24 hours, a lot of really awful things have happened in a lot of different places. We live in an age where the woes of the world are rapidly available to us. While part of me feels shock and sorrow over what yesterday brought to a lot of people, another part of me knows this is nothing new. These things have always happened, we just didn’t always know about it. Big disasters, be they natural or man-made, can catch us in a number of ways.

Some of us respond by trying to find meaning. Did we anger the gods? Did we damage the balance? What caused it? How can we prevent it, or better mitigate against the next one? Answers and action give back a sense of control. We like having something to blame. If we’re realistic, this can be helpful, if we come up with some lunacy like ‘god is punishing us for gay people’ then we’re going to make things a whole lot worse.

Some of us respond with despair. Life is short, nasty and brutish. Nature red in tooth and claw. Man’s inhumanity to man. It’s all horrible, we’re all horrible, eventually we will all die. Grief is an essential part of our humanity, but if we let it run too far, and too deeply, we become powerless to act, unable to see the good in anything, and that doesn’t help in the slightest.

Some of us respond by trying to help. We donate to good causes. If we’re really keen, we head out for the area of disaster to help deal with the immediate crisis and the rebuild afterwards. We don’t ask why it happened, we just get on with sorting it out, and in the short term this is often a good response, but if we don’t stop to ask the awkward, uncomfortable questions at some point, things that could have been changed go unchallenged.

Some of us enjoy it. Perhaps because of the challenge, or the drama, or we find it exciting. Perhaps it validates a personal belief or we enjoy the suffering of others.

Some of us go numb, we tune it out, we refuse to feel, to know or to care. It’s not our problem, not our responsibility, we don’t want to know. We think we’re protecting ourselves by not caring, but there is a cost to hardening your heart and looking the other way.

The meanings we ascribe to events, and the choices we make may not have the power to radically change what’s happening out there. What they do is inform our own lives, and shape who we are, and what we do. World events are nothing more than the combined effect of many lives. Each small part may seem irrelevant when viewed alone, but what we do collectively has huge impact.

We can respond with blame, rage, violence. We can respond with apathy and inaction. We can try to help. In the long term we can think about why things happen as they do, and we can think about how to change things. We have those options.

Sitting in silence

One of the reliable features of a Contemplative Druidry session is Stroud is that we sit in silence together. There are no instructions about what anyone does during that silence, no aims to achieve, and normally it raises nothing to discuss.   I find this a very powerful experience.

Normal human contact tends to revolve around activity or speech. In most contexts, silence is a sign that something has gone wrong socially, and people will try to fix it or become very uncomfortable. Equally, stillness and inactivity are not part of regular human encounters. There is a sense of acceptance in still and quiet sitting. There is a peace in shared space where nothing has to be done, or achieved. There is no hierarchy, no authority and no dogma. Whatever happens to a person, and whatever they choose to do with themselves in that time tends to remain private.

When I started on this two years ago, I came with the pressure/expectation that something important should happen while sitting. Something to share. It took me a while to learn how to be absolutely fine with there being no great insights and no revelations. This has had implications across my whole experience and practice of Druidry. I’m much more accepting of the quiet and ordinary, and not looking for the validation of something dramatic. This in turn has opened me to the small beauties of small things.

Outside of meditation spaces, I increasingly value the scope to be quiet. I like it when I don’t have to be entertaining or interactive. People I can be around who do not always require words. I like walking quietly, talking when something arises, and just being with people when there is nothing to say. While speech is a powerful form of communication, it can also be used to hide things. We use noise to cover fear, uncertainty, awkwardness. Silence can be revealing in its own ways, and it’s good to have some space for it.

Life Without Drama

*Somehow I messed up posting this – my computer was down and I was writing on an unfamiliar machine, sorry about that! Normal service resumes now…*

I’ve had more than a month with no real drama, although there have been plenty of intense and challenging things going on. None of the big stuff of late has happened with extra arm waving from me or anyone else. It’s been a very measured time, with things being tackled, not expanded. I’ve not missed the drama at all, but have experienced this as a relief. I’ve had arguments that were all about the content and the issues, not about how I should be behaving differently.

Life throws everyone curve balls, and when we’re connected to other people, the odds are at any point we’ve something to fret over. Friends with cancer. The colleague who fell down the stairs recently. The colleague suffering from stress, the various people I know who are dealing with counterproductive management from the hierarchies they have to engage with. The people who have been hurt, and undervalued… I have a long list at the moment of people dealing with difficult things. And yet none of it feels like drama. It feels like life, and people trying to deal with life and qualitatively that’s really different.

Drama is not about problem solving, it’s about drawing people into the crisis, and directing attention towards the person who wants to be in the middle of it. Looking back I suspect patterns of desire for power and significance. Drama created so that someone can suck up time, energy and resources and in so doing, feel important. Drama created to silence me when I needed to talk about something I was having a problem with.

My problem has not been that I like or manufacture drama – I feel fairly confident of that, now. My problem has been that I take other people’s drama seriously and try to be helpful. As I’m a finite being with limited time and energy to deploy, I need to look carefully at where I step up and where I step back. I’m seeing people tackle enormous, life altering things with no drama at all, I do not have to burn myself out for people who create situations so they can demand my help, or for people who have to be at the centre of things and will do anything to stay there.

Prayers for abundance

“May we be sufficient in all things, may we have abundance enough to share with others.”

As far as personal prayers of petition go, this is something that I regularly repeat, but there doesn’t tend to be much else because this covers all the practical stuff for me. I tend (at the moment at least) to simply address prayers to the universe. Does anything out there listen, care and respond? I can’t tell, but for me that’s not really the point. Most of my prayer practice is about being open and listening, on the off-chance anything does flow towards me. This small prayer is my way of wrapping up all the practical things so that I can let them go.

It has other consequences, too. Divinely inspired or not, I can’t say, but the process of using this prayer regularly certainly changes things for me. Firstly it focuses me on the idea of sufficiency. “Enough” is a magic word. Recognising the ways in which I am sufficient helps me. We live in a culture that promotes the idea of scarcity, and that we have to be afraid and grasping because everything is scarce. By focusing on the ways in which I have enough, I am able to see through some of the narratives of scarcity and get better balance in my life. In seeing through the scarcity myths I become better able to recognise where I have abundance and how I might share it to good effect.

Thinking about when and where I have enough helps me recognise where I don’t, and where that needs to change. Enough rest, enough inspiration, enough gentle happy time – these have been the areas of lack. These are not scarcities driven by poverty, but by responding to fears of scarcity. I have, slowly, learned that I do not have to be working all the time to feel safe. I don’t have to earn more all the time in case there’s a disaster ahead. I just need enough. Do I have enough for the things I need? Then I have enough. I don’t need much, and much of what I need is not for sale anyway. The more I understand this, the more able I am to have a life that I find good.

Where is the abundance? In a household with two adults working full time yet collectively earning less than the average wage for one person, how can I talk about abundance? Answer: because we have things set up such that we can live well on what we have. I’ve lived in arrangements where a good deal more money came in each month, but where very little was good or happy. As I don’t want a lot of things, and I don’t need my things to be new, or fashionable, I’m not expensive to keep. I like upcycling, re-purposing, I like using the things other people would throw away. There is abundance available in this. I can say yes to things n one else wants and experience them as richness.

At the moment my flat is full of fabric and wool that no one else wants, and I’m in the process of turning it into things that I can gift to people. Here is abundance! I can create something cheering and useful from something no one else wanted in its old form. I can use my free time making things – which I delight in, and which rests my over-busy brain and gives me time to think gently about stories. I can keep things out of landfill. I feel blessed with riches when I’m doing this.

“Enough” is fairly simple, abundance is not as hard to find as it might seem. So why does our culture encourage us to seek excess and guard it jealously? Why are we encouraged to use up our precious time – time we really want for resting, sleeping, playing, being with friends and family, getting exercise and eating well – why are we encouraged to sacrifice all of those things so that we can afford new cars, gym memberships and pre-packaged food? And why are we encouraged to feel good about all the excess we might own, when around us others go hungry, can’t heat their homes, or end up on the streets. Recognise enough, and see what you can share, because we all deserve better than these toxic normalities.

For more of my thinking on prayer, check out When a Pagan Prays.

Forks in the road of history

With the benefit of hindsight, the road we took to get to this point can look straight and obvious, even if it didn’t seem that way at the time. The way in which choices, opportunities, apparently random connections and the like become the story of your life is something you can only see by looking backwards. It should be obvious that history – personal or on the grand scale – only makes sense in retrospect, but there are less obvious implications that are important.

When we look backwards, we see the path walked; the line from then until now. In hindsight, it looks like a line. All the things that didn’t contribute to it seem less important. The choices not made, the options discarded, and all the little things we did and said and had a go at that led to nothing of apparent import. When we look back to make history stories, all the asides tend to seem less relevant. What we’re looking for is that story of how we went from there to here.

There may be all kinds of consequences in terms of what we lose, but there’s a reliable one in terms of how we tell the story and how we understand it. With the path from then to now apparent to us, ‘now’ looks inevitable. It becomes harder to imagine we could have gone the other way. That we are here seems to validate all of the choices that brought us to here, or to prove that everything before was inevitable. Here we are, history has happened and because we are where we are, it is foolish to think any of it could have gone differently.

There are a lot of people in the past who still influence us, whose beliefs included the will of God and predestination. If you think everything must happen in line with God’s plan, then you look at the past and see the clear line of intent. I think that influence dominates how many of us tell stories – that we see the line of clarity. I also think that life lived, and the trajectory we follow is not inevitable. I think it’s important to look at options, for chances to rethink the whole direction and for different ways of understanding all the stories we carry.

In terms of history, I believe we have a major fork in the road before us. Are we going to become wholly corporate in a world ruled by big business? Huge international trade agreements that give companies the power to sue governments if their profits are harmed, seem to be taking us that way. The growth of giant companies, and the rising wealth and power of the 1% suggests an inevitable trajectory. But it’s not inevitable, and we can choose differently. Many of us are uniting through an array of campaigning groups around the world to fight for human rights, to resist ecocide, to challenge over climate change and to resist the direction our collective path seems to be taking us in. We could win this.

If we let go of the idea that history went the only way it could have done, we can think a lot more flexibly about the present. If we let go of progress narratives, and watch out for ideas of predestination, then we don’t have to go with the apparent flow, we don’t have to be washed away by someone else’s story. By changing how we see the stories of the past, we can imagine the future differently.

I’ve read a fair bit of radical history. I’ve read about resistance, and apparently futile fights, and things we didn’t win, and I see in there not the failures of the losing side, and not the people stood on the wrong side of history, but an ongoing thread of not accepting that we have to go where we are told to. There are options. A neo-feudal world of warring corporate entities is not necessarily our future.

Wonderful, unvirtuous creatures

We tend to think in terms of utility – we do it to landscapes, creatures and other humans. We ascribe virtue to anything that serves us, and label as useless anything that does not. Bees are industrious and virtuous because we like them as pollinators and take their honey. No one cares how busy wasps might be because we don’t think they help us, and therefore they are not virtuous and industrious, they are a bloody nuisance.

Similar things happen with cats and dogs. Humans have a long history of working with dogs. Even when we aren’t getting them to specifically work for us, they do what we tell them. They may defend our persons and property from attack. We can train them to tolerate considerable abuse and still treat us with love in return for it. Therefore dogs are good and virtuous. Cats, on the other hand, are lazy. We’ve worked with them because their eating mice can be useful, but they don’t do it on command and if you abuse a cat, it will leave. They are not team players, they do not take orders and they aren’t that interested in keeping us happy.

Why do so many of us choose to live with cats, if cats are selfish, ungrateful bastards? But here’s the thing – cats aren’t inherently mean or unpleasant, but they have boundaries. They don’t tend to bestow affection on total strangers, they expect to be treated well, and if they are happy, they express that by being pleased to see you, purring, making body contact and so forth.

Cats do not work. There is no way to train them up as beasts of burden or doers of jobs. Being small, lithe and pointy makes non-cooperation easy for them. A cat has no interest in doing anything unnecessary, anything that is not pleasing to it. Find a warm place, stretch out or curl up. Enjoy. Eat. Play with things, stare out of windows. Sing. Cats tend to have simple, uncluttered lives, and to be happy.

If we stopped measuring virtue in terms of workishness and use to humans, and started looking at happiness in other creatures, our whole view would change. We’d notice how the busy bees rapidly work themselves to death. We’d notice that cats tend to be enormously happy, and if they aren’t, they leave if they possibly can. It’s not an accident that we use the term ‘fat cat’ to describe a big company boss with a lot of wealth. However, actual cats, fat and otherwise, own nothing. Yes, they quietly take advantage of our homes, but I’ve met plenty of feral cats along the way, and they know how to find the warm spots and they make the time to sunbathe. Being a cat is a way of life that does not depend on human benevolence.

Most mammals, left to their own devices, try to rest, sleep, sunbathe and play as much as they can, and only do what’s necessary. The ‘hives of industry’ involve insects – ants and bees especially. We’re mammals. Why have we decided it is virtuous to emulate insects, and lazy to live like a mammal?