Nimue Brown's Blog, page 345

Pagan Dreaming – out today

Pagan Dreaming is officially unleashed upon the world today. Advanced reviews have been really encouraging. Rachel Patterson called it “the only book you will ever need to read to understand dreaming as a whole” (entire review here). James Nichol described it as “an informed and thought provoking introduction to dreams and dream work” (whole review here). Mike Stygal, president of The Pagan Federation said “Stunningly good!”

Mixing the pragmatic and the spiritual, Pagan Dreaming goes far beyond the standard dream dictionary to offer instead a range of ways for making dreaming a meaningful part of your spiritual life. Exploring symbolism, the physical implications of dreaming, dreaming as learning and problem solving it then places the spiritual dimension of dreams in a context that will help readers go beyond x=y interpretations towards something that will enrich and re-wild their lives. The book includes an array of techniques for working consciously with dreams and developing a Pagan spiritual practice around dreaming.

You can get it any of the places you normally get books, it’s out as a paperback and as an ebook, here’s the AMAZON US AMAZON UK links as I know a lot of people default to those. If you pick up a copy, i would really appreciate getting to hear what you think of it.

Poverty and ethical living

Green living can create some tensions between the choices that are available to you.

Live lightly, own little, do everything the slow way and by hand, walk, handwash, grow your own veg, upcycle things, don’t own a car. Unless you’re very lucky, it’s hard to put this kind of light living together with a well paid job. Most of the people who do it manage by being self employed, and are low paid. It’s hard to sustain conventional employment without a car, in fact if you look at many job applications, you’ll be asked if you have one.

Buy organic, fair traded, buy local (often nigh on impossible for rural people without a car, most villages do not have farmer’s markets I have to say). Buy high quality food products that don’t have palm oil in them. Buy eco friendly washing powders, cosmetics, home cleaners and so forth. They cost far more than the regular versions. Veg from the farmer’s market is much more expensive than veg from the cheaper and nastier supermarkets. Milk is the same.

Of the available diets, vegetarianism is without a doubt the most affordable for someone on a low income. Good quality, responsibly sourced meat is really expensive. Good quality vegan proteins are also more costly, as are the products that don’t have dairy products as fillers. It’s surprising how many cheap things turn out to have whey powder and the like in them, once you start looking.

So, here’s a conundrum. I don’t have a fridge, because I think that’s a greener choice. I don’t buy cows’ milk unless I have guests (I am vegetarian). I would like to keep my use of dairy minimal anyway. So, I can have low cost UHT cow milk at less than a pound a litre, it will keep until I open it and be good for a day or so in the cool box once opened. I can do the same with low cost soya milk, but in both cases, I’ve got no chance in warm weather of keeping the milk for more than a day once open, and I don’t reliably use that much so there’s a high risk of unacceptable food waste.

For a couple of pounds, I could buy a tin of dried milk powder (cow) and make it up with water at need. For about five times the price I could buy a smaller amount of dried soy or coconut milk.

So we have a situation where the person with the high powered job, driving a car, and actively participating in the capitalism mainstream probably can afford seitan, dried coconut milk, ethical cosmetics, green cleaners, and all the other things that go into having an apparently responsible, vegan shopping basket. The person who lives lightly and close to the earth and who is trying hard not to participate too much in consumerist culture, probably doesn’t earn enough to shop this way.

Is one choice better than the other? Are ethical consumer choices sometimes just window dressing for otherwise largely unsustainable lifestyle choices? Is the farmer’s market really that good an idea if you have to drive twenty miles to get to it? I don’t have any answers, just the sense that if we want something sustainable, it has to be possible to both live lightly and source ethically, and if we’ve got to choose between the two, we’re collectively getting it wrong.

Dragons and omens

Last night I had the huge urge to go up on the hill, despite being very tired. So, up the hill we went. It had been a wet day, but there were breaks in the cloud and we were able to sit out and look at the Severn river.

When we first arrived, there were intense shafts of sunlight over the water, and as we watched a patch of intense darkness, largely blotting out the hills beyond, moved up the water for some distance. The sky out towards Wales glowed a strange, peachy colour, but we could see it was raining heavily over the Forest of Dean. At one point, rain on the river was so intense that we could see the disturbance of the surface, despite being miles away. It did not rain on us, but that’s often the way of it with these hills, weather can be very localised indeed.

Up the Severn Vale came a parade of dark clouds, low, heavy and moving a lot faster than the pale clouds above them. Behind the pale clouds lay bright blue sky, and sometimes we could see all three layers, and sometimes some of the clouds were golden from the setting sun. The dark clouds that came were each incredibly distinctive. Animalish shapes – we saw lots of elephants, but far more dragons. Huge, serpentine Chinese style dragons with distinctive heads and faces, winding up the Severn. If it had just been me there, I might have put it down to whimsy on my part, but my husband and son saw much the same things. At one point, a kestrel came and hovered right over us.

I’m not one for symbols. I tend not to infer meaning from natural events except in the most literal ways – it’s a big cloud so it could well rain – is about my level for this sort of thing. Last night was something else entirely. There was such a sense of presence, and significance, of something big in motion. Towards the end, the sky looked like one of those old paintings of divine retribution. As we were leaving, a mix of rain and setting sun had flooded the plain towards Slimbridge with a dense orangeness unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a landscape before.

It all felt important, and I have no idea what to make of it.

Emotional Honesty

Word based honesty has always been very important to me. If I can be properly honest, I will be, although I recognise that there are times when honesty isn’t honourable. Truth can kill people, in some contexts. If I need to protect someone, then my preference is omission and misdirection rather than outright untruth because these cause less trouble and are easier to unpick later on.

Of course, most lying happens for a reason, and not all of it is conscious. The reasons always seem good to the person doing the lying – self protection, harm and pain avoidance, avoiding punishment and reputation damage are likely to seem good ideas. We lie in small, and less small ways to ourselves and others about how good we are, how many people love us or depend on us, and this is all about needing to feel secure. Much of the time this kind of dishonesty isn’t a major problem, but the bigger the lie, the bigger the consequences if it catches up with you. The person who has greatly invested in a lie of self worth, telling themselves and those around them how fantastic and important they are, can be setting themselves up for the most almighty fall.

I know that I have trouble being honest around a number of issues. I’ve spent years refusing to look properly at issues of pain, depression, anxiety and exhaustion, telling myself that what matters is the soldiering on regardless. I got to the point in the last year of no longer having the means to do that – the lie caught up to me, my body cannot take it anymore. I have to start facing up to my own limitations, admitting they exist, and being honest with myself, and everyone else, about what I can and can’t do.

Alongside this I’ve come to recognise that while I’m very emotionally honest if using words, I do my level best to lie with my body language – again mostly about pain, exhaustion and fear. I’ll try and put a brave face on it. I lie a lot by omission around these issues, too. Again, this summer this has caught up with me, and I’ve reached places of can’t do this anymore. It’s requiring me to think a lot about how I present myself to others, the effort involved in masking, and the possible consequences of not doing that.

I lie to make life easier for other people. I lie in fear that if I am honest, people will think I am attention seeking or making a fuss. Sometimes I lie about things because it seems more professional to do so, and I have to wonder about how much of that goes on out there. When did being professional become more important than being real, or being human? I lie because it’s easier than having to explain.

How much of this should I change? How much do I want to change? How much of this is about changing what I do, and my choice of situations? I’m going to try and be more conscious about where I’m quietly lying about how I’m doing, and see whether those are really situations I need to be in, or whether, for the greater part, I can step away from the spaces where I don’t feel it’s safe or appropriate to be honest. I’m tired of pretending to be better than I am.

The Terribly Clever Druids

There’s an incredible diversity out there in terms of what Druids do – and rightly so. What we know of the historical Druids is that they performed a broad array of tasks for their people, as teachers, historians, record keepers, around law and justice, and healing as well as all the more spiritual work. Druid author Graeme K Talboys has suggested that the Druids of old were the thinking class of the Celts, which seems likely to me.

As we have no formal infrastructure for Druids, how any given Druid deals with this is very much up to them. There are a fair few Druids out there with doctorates, which is one answer. Some go into the professions historically associated with Druids – I know there’s at least one Druid lawyer out there, even! You find Druids in the medical profession, in the mainstream and on the alternative side. Those who don’t go the academic route may seek out other courses, or study independently, some are busy enough with the school of life not to want, or need to take on anything else.

As a community, we are much enriched by these many approaches. Particularly when we’re also able to connect and share experiences and ideas in an even handed way. For the greater part, I think this is something we do really well – not assuming that one kind of learning is better than another, just that each way is different, and offers different things.

It can be all too easy to look for ways of measuring each other. This person is better qualified than me. This person is cleverer than me. This person knows more than I do. There’s a balancing act here between being able to recognise that you could learn from someone, and not losing sight of the validity of your own experiences. The person who knows more is not more important as a person. We are all equally people, equally important as people. It’s when we start getting invested in ideas of importance, authority and status that we lose the scope to share what we know, and to benefit from each other’s wisdom. Clever, and wise being not the same things at all anyway.

What happens if you have every reason to think of yourself as a terribly clever Druid? Do you use that knowledge and insight to help and enable those around you, or to make sure they feel smaller than you? Do you want to share, or do you want everyone to learn that they aren’t in your league? The desire to impress is fair enough, but when that becomes a desire to overwhelm, to intimidate, to silence, it becomes a problem. We’re fortunate in that most of our terribly clever Druids are also terribly nice and generous Druids intent on using their power for good.

Speaking as a moderately clever Druid, I find this really helpful. The people who are willing to find a language I can make sense of, rather than wanting to bombard me with alienating technical terms that I don’t understand, are the people I want as elders. The people who are generous with their knowledge are the ones I really respect. On those odd occasions when I run into a terribly clever Druid whose main aim seems to be to keep me in my place, I get grumpy. I’m glad to say that doesn’t happen very often, and I wonder about the people for whom Druidry is more about seeming important, than what it is possible to share.

Encountering truth

Truth can seem like a very abstract subject – the kind of thing you can only explore with language and thinking. Take away language, and what you have is experience, and what you learn from the experience. Whether that’s right or not can be tested by whether you survive future experiences.

We go all too easily from the idea of truth, to the idea of some sort of fixed and ultimate truth. Then we argue with each other about what this might be, and it all gets messy. How we make sense of things depends on who we are and where we were standing when it all happened. The truth for a fox is very different from the rabbit’s truth when they find themselves in the same situation. My truth is not your truth.

Of course if truth is in the moment, in the perspective and the individual, then we aren’t going to be able to agree on it. If there is such a thing as ultimate truth, then persuading people of it becomes a thing. Ultimate truth has implications of power and control. The person who has the ultimate truth has the right to dictate and control, and so there’s a lot of people out there claiming that they have the one true way, the only truth, the rightyist bit of rightness.

The idea of ultimate truth – be that philosophical, spiritual, lifestyle, political, economic – offers the tantalising possibility of right answers. The scope to take the one true way and apply it – maybe only once – and then have everything be absolutely excellent and reliable and all the things.

What if the truth is that life does not work this way? What if everything is specific, and what works this week may not work the same way next week? What if most of existence cannot be tidied into predictable numbers in the style of the sort of physics they teach you in your teens? What if there is no magic solution to tell us exactly how to get everything right?

What if the people peddling ultimate truths, definite salvation and foolproof solutions are, for the greater part, wrong? What if the truth is that we have to make it up as we go along, based on the best information we’ve got right now? What if the truth is that there are no ultimate answers whatsoever?

The care and maintenance of authors

If you like books, then you have something of a vested interest in making sure the books you like are available, so here’s a thing.

This month I have a new book out – Pagan Dreaming. I have a request – if you were thinking about buying a copy, please consider pre-ordering it. Let me explain why…

A lot of books get published every week. Most of them remain relatively obscure, or entirely obscure. This is inevitable, given the numbers. Only the biggest houses have any kind of money to spend on promotion, and mostly even they depend on author fame, TV and movie tie ins and the like, to sell books.

However, books that sell well become more visible – this is especially true on amazon, but also the case anywhere there’s any kind of best seller list. Bricks and mortar establishments tend not to touch books from small and obscure authors unless you give them the copies and invoice them, and wait for them to pay you. I’ve heard enough horror stories about books that just disappeared, to the author’s expense. It’s much better for the author if they strike the bookstore as being worth bothering with. Hit a best seller list – even in a small niche on amazon, and people who are interested in that niche become way more likely to see you.

It’s shockingly difficult to sell books to people who have no idea your book even exists.

If you aren’t considering picking up a copy of Pagan Dreaming, bear in mind that all the same things apply to any book you might consider buying. If you like an author, you can do them an enormous favour by pre-ordering their book. Pre orders mean releasing a book into the lists, not into the unknown. You up their chances of being noticed, ad selling books, and this in turn ups the odds of them being able to afford to live, and thus able to afford to keep writing books. I know I bang on about this a lot but it stands repeating: Most authors are not rich, most are relatively poor, most are only authors part time because that’s the only way they can pay the bills. What you do has the scope to make a real difference.

In case you get the urge, here are assorted places you can find Pagan Dreaming.

Hive.co.uk actively supports bookshops so if you want to support indie book stores, and are in the UK, this is well worth a look. They don’t have it yet, but they have a lot of other books and a good ethos. they have everything else I’ve written.

Book Depository can ship anywhere, so if you live somewhere that doesn’t lend itself to easy book buying, they’re especially worth a look. they have it on offer, and seem ready to send it already.  Plus they’re actually based down the road from me in Gloucester, so I count this as supporting my local economy!

Barnes and Noble

AMAZON US AMAZON UK

And if you do want to order it from a physical store, the paperback isbn is 978-1-78535-090-0

Thank you!

Progress and Decay, Ravens and Druids

The Throng, by Tom Brown, for The Raven’s Child.

We tell all kinds of stories about the shape of human history, but without a doubt its the progress and decay narratives that dominate. Back when I was working on Druidry and the Ancestors, I included a chapter about these kinds of stories, but at that point I was still seeing the progress and decay narratives as two distinct things. (The chapter still stands, this is a development, not a rethink)

My current working theory is that they are inter-related; aspects of the same underlying experiences. The more complex our civilization (progress) the more remote we feel from nature (decay) the more liberal we are (progress) the more decadent we are (decay) etc. Which story you see depends entirely on whether you see things as getting better or worse as a consequence. For many, technology is all about progress, for others, it’s the decay of the environment.

It’s an incredibly binary way of thinking, that doesn’t reveal itself as such if you’ve signed up for one side or the other.

Tom Sneignoski’s story of The Raven’s Child is an interesting depiction of the decay/progress dynamic. The monstrous Throng are a culture of great power, able to conquer new worlds and dazzle victims with biological and technological advances. Even within that culture there are voices of resentment, who see The Throng as having fallen into decadence and lost their direction. Those who believe in the decay narrative will work from within to change or even destroy what they have a problem with. Sometimes that can be right – I think it is around the Green movement. Sometimes it has you beheading academics who know that your God wasn’t the first one on the scene.

The Raven’s Child isn’t just about monstery progress and decay issues. The humans in the story are living in the ruins of their former civilization. They are degraded. They are what we fear happens when we fall from grace, fall from progress. To overcome their situation, they need a new kind of progress, on new terms. Because we see both sides of the progress and decay narrative in this story, we also get to see its limitations, and its binary nature. Both are going on at once, in a vast web of things that improve and things that get worse, with what goes where depending on how you view it.

When we obsess about making things better, we can start to get ideas that some things are expendable in the name of progress. Some lives, some landscapes, some species can be sacrificed for the great push forward, and this willingness to pay unreasonable prices for the idea of progress is, I think, what creates the decay scenarios as a side effect. It’s not progress that’s the problem, it’s progress at any cost. It’s progress that pays no heed to who it crushes or what it destroys. This set up in turn creates the impression that only the brutal destruction of the progress-civilization (as with the humans in Raven’s Child) can set things right again. Of course it doesn’t, it just kickstarts new cycles.

Better considerations of the real costs of our often imaginary progress, might be the better outcome.

Language and landscape

I’ve recently read Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth – it’s a book of literary criticism looking at landscape writing from a more ecological perspective, and it’s decidedly interesting stuff. In places I found it a bit more technical and academic than I could manage, but there were long, more accessible passages that more than made up for this.

One of the key theories underpinning the whole text, is that language is an act of separation from nature. Language is one of the things that makes humans, not natural, and so to speak of nature in language is to heighten separation. Further, that language is not experience, not the real thing, only ever a way of expressing something else. It makes an interesting juxtapose with Robert McFarlane’s ‘Landmarks’ where the message is that specific language helps us recognise and connect, and brings us into better relationship with the natural world, and that human communities living closer to nature have more words for what they encounter. On the whole I am more aligned to Robert McFarlane’s perspective.

I do not see language as unnatural. Nature communicates, with fellow members of its species and with other species when needs be. It does it with sound and movement, smell, chemical emission. If you know a dog you can tell the difference between its wanting to play bark, and its alarm and posturing  bark, while full on aggression sounds different again. A blackbird’s warning call is not the same as its sundown song. We can make sense of the bee’s waggle dance, although they don’t do them for us. Tress give off signals to attract the allies they need if they’re hit by a plague of insects, and on it goes. Communication is intrinsic to life, not some weird human addition. It may be arrogance to assume that other species have fewer ‘words’ as well.

Talking is not the experience itself. Writing and reading are very human activities, but they engage our mammal emotions and our minds. What we learn from any form of exchange goes with us, back out into the world, to help us notice. It is easier to discuss something you have words for, and to extend knowledge by means other than direct interaction.

Verbal communication has been given primacy in human interactions, but we do still use body language if we deal with each other in the same space. We are affected by how other humans smell – not just the binary of gross/acceptable, but subtle messages that come in through the nose. Tone of voice affects us. There’s also the exchanges that happen heartbeat to heartbeat, skin to skin, when we are close enough to be communicating in largely physical ways. The dialogues of holding and being held.  You can tell someone a great deal simply by how you touch them.

Language itself allows us to hold and explore ideas that it would be hard to imagine without the words to frame them. Truth, belief, the difference between experience and the expression of experience… but these are issues for another day.

Afterlife for ephemeral things

Lie you down

For you are tiny

And the hill is vast.

 

Limestone water runs

Over your every surface

Clothes you in fine deposits.

 

Dry and still

Last year’s hawthorn berry

Forgotten things turning to stone.

 

Against the earth

Calcium coated anonymous form

Surrendering to the hillside’s colour.

 

This is not

How rocks are made

Only ghosts, imprints and memories.

 

Your soft body

Leaves no trace behind

But the water imagined shell.

 

Dripstone crystal echo

Of what is gone

Absorbed and made most still.

 

 

(I live on limestone hills. When the calcium of the rocks is absorbed into water, that water can evaporate to form dripstone, which is a kind of quartz, and can attach itself to anything that stays still for long enough.)