Nimue Brown's Blog, page 347

Permission to cry

If there was a time when it felt safe and reasonable to cry when hurt, I do not remember it. The further back I go, the patchier memory becomes, but I’ve no sense of crying ever being ok. I learned early to mute how I was feeling, to hide the tears of pain and frustration at school when I was teased, hit, humiliated. Sometimes I lost it, but I managed more stoicism than not.

Crying has too often just made things worse, and over the years I’ve added new reasons why I am not to do it. I might hurt or embarrass someone else by revealing that I’m in pain. It might feel like emotional blackmail. People might think I was faking it to get attention. Last year I broke down in panic when a group of kids charged at me and I was already in a lot of pain and couldn’t bear to be touched. Their first reaction to my tears was to tell me I was faking it. Better not to be seen than to be put through that, I have felt. Better not to make someone uncomfortable, not to implicitly demand care, attention, or something different by being so inconsiderate as to cry. Other people’s convenience has always seemed more important than whether I am in pain. Add to that the telling off for crying, the accusations of melodrama, and manipulation, and I don’t express if I can help it.

I’ve gone dry eyed through many a funeral. I can spot when the urge to weep is rising and I will lock it down, turning everything on the inside into stone if I can, so that nothing of what I’m feeling gets out. Sometimes the body pain, the fear, and panic attacks, the distress is too much and the tears get out, but the urge to hide it remains, and I’ll be silent, and I will keep my body still so that the motion of sobbing does not give me away. Failing that, I’ll remove myself and hide. If I’ve cried in front of you, then either I really, really trust you, or I was so broken at the time that I failed to maintain control.

It always feels like failure to cry, or to succumb to a panic attack. I feel ashamed of it. It’s a natural bodily reaction to pain and distress, but unless I am entirely alone and it goes unnoticed, I feel ashamed of my own tears.

In the last few days I have come to recognise how dehumanising this is. It’s a denial of my basic animal self, my natural self. To treat my own pain as unacceptable, to not allow myself the freedom of grief when I am hurt, is doing me a lot of harm. I’ve taken the decision to cry when I need to, regardless of the consequences. As a self employed person I have the luxury of not needing a brave face for work. In the short term, to have the space to handle my own distress, (and there’s been a lot to distress me this last month) I will mostly be stepping away from people. I need to feel safe about crying, and I need not to be worrying about how it’s going to impact on other people. That feels very selfish, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m going to see what happens if, for a little while, I let how I feel be more important than anything else for me.

There will be people who find me too difficult, and no doubt there will be people who again call it emotional blackmail and bullying on my part. They are allowed to feel that way. The right answer is for anyone who feels that way about me to spend no time with me. I’ve decided that no matter how much I love someone, if they have no space for me when I am in pain, they have no space for me.

I’m interested to see how the process of allowing my emotions – because I also intend to change how I handle panic and to totally shift my relationship with my own anger – impacts on my depression issues as a whole, and on the issue of body pain. I’ll share the results of the experimentation, because I think there are other people who will find they get similar outcomes, whatever those turn out to be.

How to save a life

I’ve written here repeatedly about my ongoing issues with depression as I grapple with it, trying to survive, to overcome it, maybe even to heal. I don’t talk much about how bad it can get, because I’m afraid of sounding melodramatic, or worse yet, making someone else feel a bit uncomfortable. Wanting to die is a re-occurring issue for me. That’s different from wanting to kill myself – less violent, more like a yearning for a simple off switch. On my saner, calmer days, the issue of how not to get into such a dark place that I want to die, is something I pay attention to.

I know exhaustion is a trigger. The more worn down, burned out, threadbare I get, the more likely that I start to feel that only the end of my existence will put me out of my misery. Prolonged bouts of pain have the same effect, and both of which can be tackled without having to top myself, and mostly I do manage to remember this even though I can feel really, really awful.

Perhaps my biggest trigger – or at least the biggest one I’ve identified – is fakery. The more energy I pour into being a tidy, acceptable sort of person, the more likely I am to feel hollow, threadbare and suicidal. The harder it is for me to be myself, the less will to live I can muster.

The trouble is that I’m a bloody awful person to be around. I know a lot of people like my blogs, books, social media stuff, but I’m like this all the time. Always thinking this intensely, always as deeply emotionally engaged, always this intense. I feel everything keenly, I worry a lot, I think, and think more. In person, the emotional intensity may be more of an issue. Add to this that I’m obsessive (this is where blogs come from) and thin skinned. I care about everything I run into and have an awkward habit of loving passionately the people who are in my life. I try and tone it down, but it’s hard and requires a lot of attention.

That might sound ok as a paragraph in a blog, but in real life, it isn’t. There have only ever been 2 people who have encountered me in a sustained way as I really am, and not run away or asked me to tone down. It can be lonely sometimes, and every friendship is a waiting game. How long can I last? How long can I fake it for before I slip up and am too real? And all the while, the faking it is taking me apart and digging me a deep, dark hole.

For anyone who wants a quiet, gentle, peaceful, easy going sort of life, I am, quite simply, too much. Too intense. Too serious. Too passionate. Too giving. I’ve heard them all and more along the way, repeatedly. So I’ve bent and battered myself trying for more acceptable, harmless shapes. This morning I realised that this is, metaphorically speaking, killing me, and if I keep it up sooner or later it might quite literally kill me.

I’m choosing life.

This means I am not going to be a tidy fake for anyone again. I have a number of strategies for how I’m going to handle this. Absence and silence are at the top of the list. Not being in places where there are people. Moving away if I feel something. Holding distance. I’m an ok person to have as a casual acquaintance, but that may be the limit, and for everyone’s sake, I need to hold those lines better.

My bet is that most people won’t see much difference anyway. It’s possible there are one or two people who would choose to have me in the raw (ever the optimist, me) but I’m going to be looking for much clearer feedback in the future. People are going to have to opt in, really clearly, using the kind of small words I can’t possibly mistake for anything else. You would have to love me a lot to do that, and you would have to be ok with the idea of being loved in return.

Assisting the artist

This week, The Raven’s Child comes out. It’s a graphic novel written by New York Times best selling author Thomas Sneigoski, and illustrated by my other half, the adorable and very talented Tom Brown.

It’s proof that myspace wasn’t a total waste of time – thanks to the more famous Tom spotting the art of the arty Tom back in the days of myspace, this has happened.

I’ve included some art here from the development stage.

It’s about 200 pages of graphic novel, and those 200 pages were planned, drawn and toned last year, which meant that my Tom was working most days, and for long hours. I did what I could to take care of him.

One of the things I contributed, was shading. Large areas of straightforward black can be slow, dull things to put on paper, and ‘make that bit really dark’ is an instruction I can follow. On my more ambitious days, I shaded raven feathers and did the lines on the rattan armour.

What rattan armour is this, I hear you cry? Well, it’s in the book, and if you look for the slightly less good bits, those will be mine. I did A Level art a long time ago, barely scraping a pass. I’ve dabbled since. I have neither the skill nor the discipline to be a serious artist. It can be fun to dabble. What it isn’t fun to do is spending hours and hours shading things in very dark. (Watch out for the eye sockets in the skulls, I did the insides of those.) On the whole, Tom did far more of the less than entirely exciting shading bits than I did.

It’s an odd thing to look at a book and know it’s pretty much a year of someone’s life. The energy that goes into making a graphic novel is huge. The hours, the physical skill, the knowledge. We lived with these characters, with their world. We talked about them in bed. We talked about them when we went out to do the shopping. The number of pages left to go was the measure of our days, shaping every choice we made in the long months Tom was working on this. If a page was easy to draw, it might mean a few hours off, a rare chance to go out, or just curl up and rest.

I also did some modeling, getting into assorted poses so Tom could figure out what went where. I was the test reader (the resident idiot) on a lot of trickier panels. I’m not very visually literate, and some of the pages have to be pretty intense in terms of what happens. Whether I could make sense of what was on the page was often the measure.

It was a journey. It was the year of The Raven’s Child. Nothing will ever be quite like that again. Early reviews have suggested it’s the new Buffy, and this cheers us greatly. There are ideas in this story we’d really like to see out there, getting people thinking.

More here: http://www.sniegoski.com/ravenschild.html

Learning to Meditate

At Rainbow Druid Camp 2015, Philip Carr Gomm talked about how we find the idea of meditation. We each have a body, if we experiment with what it does, especially around pain and pleasure, we learn about the power of focusing and surrendering at the same time.

This relates to one of the core differences between Paganism and a revealed religion. If we burned all the books, all the Pagans, took away every written and oral-tradition reference to modern Pagan practice, sooner or later someone would look around them and notice the land and the sky, the pragmatic way we depend upon everything else for life, and the sense of wonder that beauty inspires. From there, many of the things intrinsic to Paganism could be reconstructed. With revealed religions, were you to destroy all the records, stories and evidence, you would destroy the religion.

Meditation is something we do because we have bodies, and all traditions, however old, come back to the truths of the body, and are available to be found, rediscovered, or reinvented on other terms by anyone with a body who happens to be paying attention.

I started meditating as a child, as a desperate response to insomnia. I created a method to still my mind and focus it so that I wouldn’t panic and make things worse when I couldn’t settle at night. I would count, slowly, sometimes to very high numbers indeed. It wasn’t creative, or inspiring, but it helped, and it meant that when I came to other forms of meditation, I already had a lot of the needed tools.

Aged ten or so, I read a fraction of a book on yoga that talked clearly about transcending the body, overcoming the body, negating it. I knew instinctively that this wasn’t what I wanted, stopped reading and moved on. In my teens, I learned about pathworking and visualisation, from witches. My formal exposure to meditation was in a Pagan context, and I’ve always thought of it as something Pagan, and with its own perfectly valid traditions rooted in this soil, and this ancestry. I get very stressed when people are adamant that meditation *is* eastern, that only the eastern models exist, that everything else is derived from there, that we have to do it that way and so forth.

The meditation I practice comes from my body, and from other Pagans. There’s a dash of Tai Chi/ Taoist influence in how I approach very body orientated meditation, again, because that’s who taught me. As this is a more life and body affirming path, with a very different underlying logic to transcendent faiths, I find it a better match for my Druidry. There’s a little bit of Quaker influence in the mix now as well, coming to me from working with the Contemplative Druid group.

Meditation exists across time and places not because someone found the one true way and everyone else then stole it, but because we have bodies, and there are things those bodies very naturally do. Stop. Breathe. Listen. Feel. The rest is just detail.

Life after the Druids

I return home from Druid Camp exhausted, sore and covered in bits of field. In the last few days I have been inspired, challenged, encouraged and affirmed. There’s a lot to unpack from the experience, so that’s going to dominate the blog for some days to come, I rather suspect. If you’re wondering how I managed to get all of last week’s posts written in the midst of this – I cheated – and set them up in advance.

There were three fantastic speakers at camp, Professor Ronald Hutton spoke about the seasonal festivals, Penny Billington spoke about being a tree, while trees and meditation dominated Philip Carr Gomm’s talk. Getting to meet him was a very big deal for me – OBOD has been a big part of my life for more than a decade now. It’s lovely when you think you know someone from online exchanges, and you meet them in person and they are very much as expected.

Music at camp was fantastic – during the day I experienced singing bowls with the awesome Bliss, and chanting – Enchanting the Void with JJ Middleway. Damh the Bard and Paul Mitchell provided some kickass evening sets. I was also blessed with an informal folk circle including the aforementioned Mr Mitchell, Penny and Arthur Billington, Talis Kimberly and clan, and an array of other people with fine singing voices. My own anarchic sound space on the Wednesday night was pure magic – due to the glorious contributions of a gathering of wild and inspiring people. Musically, the absolute highpoint for me was seeing my son get up on stage to sing as part of the eistedfodd, and being really good.

I also knitted a hare, wriggled past my own body awkwardness to follow Vishwam’s inspiring guided meditation, gently triumphed over my nudity issues and also worked out how to handle physical contact with people. There’s a lot to unpack from all of this.

I’ve struggled a lot with issues of belonging in the last six months or so especially. I come out of this week with a very keen sense of who my people are and where I fit. Alongside that I have a much clearer sense of what I want from Druid community. I know how to put a hand on the shoulder of people I don’t really know but who merit friendly gestures, how to reach out to people I like, how to throw myself unreservedly into the arms of the people I really care about, and how to keep the hell away from people who make me uncomfortable. There aren’t many people who belong in that last category.

I come out of this feeling a good deal clearer about what I need to be doing, and who I want to be doing it with.

Stroud Short Stories

A bit less than a year ago, I ran into Stroud Short Stories competition on Twitter. I decided to have a go, found a 1500 ish word story somewhere at the back of my brain, sent it in and promptly forgot all about it. This is a protective tactic that comes from more years than I care to number sending stories, novels, poetry and articles to contests, magazines, publishers and websites. Like most authors I hear ‘no’, or I hear nothing far more often than it gets me anywhere.

Consequently I was quite surprised to find myself picked as one of the ten readers, reading on a dark night last October. I haven’t done much getting onto stages in recent years – Druid Camp of 2014, when I contributed a single song, was the first time I’d been on a stage singing, in years. I’d done a couple of talks in years previously to that, but had gone from being a confident and regular performer, speaker and ritual leader to being an anxious mess and not at all easy about stages. I’ve got a lot better over the last year, I’ve done a lot more stuff in public and I’ve had some much appreciated support. The Stroud Short Stories evening was a stepping stone on that journey, and it led to all manner of things.

During the competition, organiser John Holland kept saying that there never would be a published version of the selected stories. His version of what followed, and mine are radically different, especially around who talked whom into what and on what terms. The net result was that in January 2015 I started collecting and editing the 70 stories that had been read at previous events, plus the 10 that were read this April. Almost everyone said yes to being included. Over a busy few months I got to know some amazing local authors, a number of whom I’ve gone on to explore other creative possibilities with since. It’s been an epic journey.

There are usually two judges picking the ten stories to be read on the event evenings. When it turned out there could e a vacancy this autumn, John Holland asked me if I might consider doing it. (Give us six months and there will probably be some very different versions of how this happened as well.) I’ve never done anything like this before, so was delighted to say ‘yes’. It’s a wonderful community event, Stroud based, but open to writers in Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire.

I’m looking forward to it.

The contest is now accepting submissions, full details over at http://stroudshortstories.blogspot.co...

Community ritual

It’s Saturday at the Rainbow Druid Camp, and that usually means community ritual – an opportunity for everyone at the camp to be an active participant in crafting and participating in a large ritual. It’s quite an opportunity.

The organisation of it is canny, and effective. A way will be found to assign all participants to one of a selection of groups (last year it was where Mars falls in your birth sign, for example).  This prevents cliques, gives everyone an equal footing, and a place to be. Each group is assigned someone to hold it together. An overall theme, or narrative for the ritual is figured out ahead of the day by a group of people who show up because they want to do this, and on the day, each piece of the ritual is planned by the groups who then come together to make it all happen.

From which you can comfortably infer that as a way of getting a lot of people, most of whom are not acquainted,   to all actively make and enact a ritual, I think this is brilliant.

However, I don’t do it. I’m not personally drawn to big rituals. I’ve done some of the circles at Avebury and Stonehenge where there could be a hundred people and more. I go along for the opening and closing rituals at camp, because that feels like the right thing to do, but otherwise, I find really big rituals with lots of people incredibly disorientating. For myself, twelve to twenty four people is about my comfort zone for ritual groups, and I’m happy to work smaller.

My personal preference is for more focused, more intense ritual with people I know and feel connected to. I like circles small enough that a person can sing in them and not be lost, and where I can do the formal bits without having to shout. I like to be able to see other people’s eyes.

There are many very good reasons to do big, public and inclusive rituals that engage and offer celebration and theatre. There are Druids (and Mark Graham who runs Druid Camp is one of them) who are brilliant at this sort of thing and can carry large circles and engage large numbers of people at one go. And there are those of us who need to do other things in other ways. One of the many things I love about Druidry is that this is fine, and there’s room for everything. The small scale deep sharing rituals, the big acts of public drama, the solitary Druids, the people who do not do ritual at all… there is room.

Falling Down

Falling down is an inevitable experience for anyone who thinks they are on some kind of upward spiritual journey. Perhaps ultimately what any spiritual path is for is some kind of growth, progress or ascension into a better and more enlightened state of being. The trouble is that as soon as you get into the idea of working really hard to become a more elevated, more enlightened sort of person, the slippery slope down into something else is also always really close.

In ‘The Gospel of Falling Down’ Mark Townsend talks about these issues with a degree of personal honesty and humility that really challenged me to look at what I do and what I think about myself. He’s absolutely right. There are things that all too easily take over from doing the work because they look like being important. Once you start thinking that being important is the measure of your path, the spiritual journey ceases to be the driving force in what you do. If you’re lucky, you fall from this, or something pushes you out of it and you have to reconsider and start over. The unlucky ones who continue unchecked may become smug, self important, dogmatic, egotistical and keep pushing away from the heart of what was once their spiritual journey.

Unlike some faiths, Druidry doesn’t hand out titles, but we can get very obsessed with giving ourselves titles and fretting about who is entitled to call themselves what. How big is your Grove? How many students have you got? How many books did you sell last year? Where are you on the billing? Did you get radio play? Are there enough 5 star reviews? How many people follow you on social media, follow your blog and how does that compare to the followers a more famous Druid has? Once these things start to become important, and you pay attention to them and pour energy into them, rather than the Druidry, it all starts to go awry.

I went through some of this earlier in the year, my third year booked for Druid Camp with no suggestion initially that I was worth putting on the fliers. It’s tough, being worth booking but not being worth mentioning, and I took it badly. However, the decision was made to include more of us who are not ‘big name Druids’ on the publicity, and so I managed to sneak in after all. A long way down the list. What smarted was the sense of not being able to break through. I do all the things – I blog and write books, I teach, I offer talks, I go to events if asked, I write articles and review books… but I can see no way at all of getting from where I am as a one of the many small and obscure Druids to being a headline act, a bestseller.

I realised I could pour more energy into feeling bitter and thwarted, in questioning my validity, in pushing myself forward and demanding attention. I was lucky, as much as anything, because I had nothing to support me in doing that outside of my own desires. I was also lucky in that Mark’s book turned up and reminded me of all the reasons that chasing fame is not what a spiritual path is all about. How many fans and followers and book buyers do I need to validate my path? And why would I imagine any of these things could validate my path? That it is meaningful to me should be the key thing, and if what I do helps someone else that’s great, and the rest really should not matter. I want to be a Druid more than I want to be an author or a big name.

Mark’s book is written from a largely Christian-centric position, but as Mark has also studied with OBOD, it’s a Pagan friendly sort of text. His subversive take on Jesus is something I find immensely cheering. If you’re feeling lost and out of sorts, the gentle humanity of Mark’s writing might be just what you need. This is a companion book for people groping about in the dark and wondering what they’re supposed to be doing. If you’re feeling smug and superior and sure that you’re better than all of this, you definitely want to read Mark’s book some time very soon.

Paperback  AMAZON US AMAZON UK
eBook  AMAZON US AMAZON UK

 

Writing the land

I’ve been reading a lot of landscape writing, and a number of authors writing about writing the landscape (Robert McFarlane, Landmarks, Rebecca Beattie, Nature Mystics, Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth). I’m interested in how we talk about landscape, the cultural impacts of how we position ourselves in relation to the ‘natural’ world, and I admit, the scope for doing more of this kind of writing myself.

I’m noticing a trend. The authors who stand out as nature writers tend to record something that is passing. These are often records of loss, whether that’s John Clare’s pre-enclosure world and the loss of freedom that followed, Thomas Hardy’s loss of rural tradition with the coming of industrialisation and urbanisation, lost traditions – drovers and pilgrims, lost ways of life, lost species or lost habitats, there’s a mournful, nostalgic quality to a lot of nature writing.

I think some of this is simply because people like a good wallow in nostalgia with a side order of self pity. It think it’s a curious counterpoint to the progress narrative that even as we collectively embrace the tale of the great forward march of progress, we are at the same time persuaded of a more innocent, better time before it all got ruined and degraded. When the magic better time was varies, but a couple of generations ago is a fair bet. Much as I don’t like UKIP, it’s clear some of their support comes from a fantasy of what England was like back in the unspecified good old days.

To be a successful nature writer in the long term is to correctly identify what’s on the way out and record it for posterity. Your peers will share in the mournful recognition, and the future will look back at the better things you lived to see the last of. That is of course a terrible simplification, but relevant nonetheless.

What that I love in this world is passing? Shall I mourn the fields disappearing under unaffordable homes, the bees, the rainforests, the lost species? Shall I mourn each new road and each place despoiled? It would be a bloody miserable project, to commit to recording every wound. Doing so would also tie me into the narrative of loss and decay. I don’t want to do that – this is not a story I want to feed into.

So, I’m going to go the other way. I’m going to start thinking about the facets of life that look untenable to me. I’m going to think about walking the margins of life in the 21st century, and all the things that could change if we ditch the progress/trashing narrative, and do something better. I’m going to consciously choose the era I want to see end, and I’m going to write, slowly and occasionally, about that. Not for some book I foresee publishing in a year or two, but for something decades down the line. Something that may only be relevant after I’m dead.

I’m increasingly interested in living the change. I will not be another poet of loss and backward glancing. I want to do something different.

Why capitalism doesn’t work

There are lots of reasons why capitalism doesn’t work. Some of them are ethical, some are about resource distribution, waste, and environmental harm. There’s not a lot of point arguing with a pro-capitalist from this basis, so I prefer to pick holes by other means. Capitalism does not deliver the things it claims to deliver. It does not work on its own terms for a good 99% of us. Most people in the system do not get to be as rich as they want to be.

The competitive element of capitalism means there have to be winners and losers. There have to be companies that fail, people who are paid less than their work is worth, people who pay more than the object was really worth. You can’t have profit without this combination of underpayment and overcharging. Capitalism works very well for the winners for as long as they continue to be winners, but the fear of losing is ever present. Losing your job, your home, you market share, your business, the edge, the advantage… that’s a lot of fear for a lot of people a lot of the time.

When the cost of living goes up, people push for higher wages. It’s pretty basic maths. Wages have to keep up with inflation, and inflation is the increasing cost of stuff. So, you put up the cost of stuff to increase profits, and so does everyone else, and then the workers start to squeal because they now can’t afford things. They may down tools, wrecking your profit. They may not buy because they are too poor – bang goes the profit again. The economy may falter. No profit there. You put the wages up and the profit margin shrinks, and so not very far down the line, you’ll put the price up again. Inflation is a consequence of trying to make a bigger profit. It delivers economic uncertainty, and there are always those who lose. In terms of economic gain, I don’t think most of us get much from it.

To be competitive of course, you have to drive prices down, and while you can do that by screwing the workers, producers, sourcing in cheaper developing countries and so forth, there’s a limit. What happens when the people in the developing country want a fair wage? We’ve exported jobs to China and India, where people desire western lifestyles, and they will start demanding fair payment for what they do. Getting a profit on cheap goods has depended on finding cheap labour to resource and countries willing to sell their natural assets at bargain basement rates. That’s not infinitely available.

Capitalism depends on growth, on ever bigger markets consuming ever more stuff. At present we have just the one planet, and finite resources, some of which are going to run out and some of which we over-exploit at our peril. We’ve over exploited the sea, fish stocks are in crisis. We’re over using carbon based fuels, we could render ourselves extinct. What you get when you push for constant growth, are boom and bust cycles. These hurt a lot of people for the benefit of the few.

In evolutionary terms, survival of the fittest seldom means the biggest (think about those really big dinosaurs and what happened to them) the most dangerous (like, ooh for example, the sabre tooth cats) or the most violent or aggressive. Evolution favours the flexible, and thus far we’ve done well as a species because we’ve been adaptable. A system that can only think about more exploitation, more consumption, more growth and more profit is not adaptable. The world is changing, and capitalism is a big angry dinosaur that may inf act be chewing on its own tail. As long term strategies go, this isn’t one.