Nimue Brown's Blog, page 348

Fragile things

Butterfly wings and spiderwebs. Cherry blossom. Snowflakes. Ecosystems. Nature is full of fragility, full of beautiful delicate improbabilities depending on improbable balances, strange niches, and more than a little luck. In anything else, fragility of being is often considered a source of beauty and of wonder.

When we think about humans, fragile goes with weak. Special snowflake. The sensitivity that is admired in a predator, or a photosensitive plant is a world away from the sensitivity so often derided in humans. For whatever reason, we have decided that strong is the quality to have in humans. Strong, powerful, ambitious, potent, rugged, tough, resilient. These are the qualities we praise. To say a child is delicate is to imply there’s something wrong with them. If an adult is fragile, they are sick. To be sensitive is not to live in the real world, allegedly. I’ve yet to locate this real world but I suspect there are no orchids in it.

The toughness mainstream humanity values can be brittle. So easily offended, so jealous, so possessive of power and objects. What strength we have exists in deep denial of our mortality, and how easily these delicate, fragile bodies of ours can be broken. If not by injury or illness, then always, in the end, by time itself.

Perhaps if we as a species were more honest about our innate fragility, and the myriad delicate balances on which we depend, we might be happier. If we could posture less, if we did not have to clip our wings for fear of them being broken. If we did not have to tear off our flowers for fear of seeming too dainty. If we did not stigmatise emotional sensitivity and delicacy as a form of weakness… we might find other truths. For all its flimsiness, spiderweb is one of the strongest substances out there.

Weather, emotion and pathetic fallacies

‘Pathetic Fallacy’ is one of those terms you run into sooner or later if you study literature. Proper definition here http://literarydevices.net/pathetic-fallacy/ but the gist of it is the mapping of human emotions onto non-human things to get the point across. The classic example would be a story with rain at a funeral. The trouble with funerals in stories is that a bit of them has to happen outside, and therefore there has to be weather, and it impacts on the experience. I remember the weather at every funeral I’ve attended, and as they were all in England, grey and damp has been the norm. The one in torrential rain was interesting because the woman we were burying loved the rain. It felt more like a blessing than an expression of grief, as a consequence. I have a lot of problems with how we put weather into stories, so bear with me while I grumble because how we relate weather and emotion is, I think, rather important.

I type this on a cold, wet day in late July. I’m of somewhat depressed mood. I do not mention the weather because it conveniently expresses something about my feelings, but because it’s influencing them. If today was sunny and dry and I could sit out for a few hours reading and watching the birds, I would be happier. Not as a poetic device, but as a direct consequence of being cheered up by sitting in the sun. It’s not a human foible, this. Most mammals are cheery when they can lounge about and be warm, and sad when they are cold and wet.

There’s a big cause and effect issue here, and a lot depends on which you think causes what. Do we only notice the weather when it speaks to us of ourselves? For me, the weather is a big contributor to mood. Too many wet grey days in a row and I’ve no chance. My being depressed can be wholly separate from the weather, but isn’t immune to it – the sun lifts me, no matter what else is going on.

Inevitably there’s an overlap, because most of us aren’t trained in the use of precise meteorological language, and so are unlikely to talk about low fronts, wind speeds, and the number of centimetres of rain falling in a month. If the weather impacts on us, it does so as an immediate experience. I think because it’s emotionally affecting, we are more likely to frame it in emotional language. Thus a fast wind can seem angry, vengeful, violent simply because of what it does (tearing things and throwing them about) and how it affects us. I do not need to be experiencing inner rage or violence to find the wind threatening simply because of what it can do. If it drops a tree on me, I’m in trouble.

Warm, sunny days seem benevolent, and again I don’t think that’s about imposing a human sentiment onto the world. Sun powers the growth of plants and is the driving force of most ecosystems and life on earth. It seems reasonable to experience it as something benevolent. Rain after drought can also seem benevolent – and is equally life restoring, while torrential rain and flooding are literal threats and easily represented by more aggressive language.

I spend a lot of time watching whirlwinds. For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, I live in a place that gets them regularly. Tiny whirlwinds a foot or two across that play with the leaf litter. I can see a dozen in a week and it not be unusual. They fascinate me, and regardless of my mood, I see them as playful. If I am full of misery and the world seems a cruel and hostile place, the sun is still benevolent, and the whirlwinds are still playful. My sense of their emotional impact has nothing to do with my inner state, which is a big part of why I question the logic of the pathetic fallacy. I think the deliberate use of, and the inferring of the pathetic fallacy can be about a dislocation from lived experiences of weather and a failure to recognise that all fictional characters need to inhabit places with climates in order to be fully functioning people. They are an opportunity to explore the impact of weather on the psyche, but doing so should not automatically cast weather as reflections of an inner life. It can be deliberately used that way, but I don’t like it as either a strategy or an inference.

(This is a slightly unusual blog post in that it is a contribution to an ongoing conversation, that started over an as-yet unpublished novel of mine, in which there is a lot of rain. The relationship between rain and the inner lives of the characters is important to me, but for me this is not about weather as reflection of inner landscape. John, as ever, thank you for the prompts to go further and think more about things.)

Feelings for nature

“That we have feelings (sentiments) about nature demonstrates that we are separated from it (her?).” Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth.

I haven’t read the entire book yet, but this statement leapt out at me and I wanted to take it out of context and poke it a bit. Largely I agree with it, as it stands, with some caveats. As soon as we define ‘nature’ as being a thing, that is not us, all we can do is believe we  stand on the outside and either ignore it, or have feelings about it. If nature is other, we cannot see ourselves as participants.

A lot of the language around nature is incredibly binary. Culture and the intellect are set up in opposition to what is allowed to be ‘natural’. As soon as dirty human hands have violated the pristine, virgin landscape (and I use those words very deliberately) then it isn’t pure nature anymore and further despoiling is fine. Progress is at odds with nature. Technology is at odds with nature. Humanity is at odds with nature. Art is at odds with nature because art is artifice and nature is real. The only state we allow ourselves to imagine as natural, is naked, devoid of language and eating berries.

With ‘nature’ set up this way, how can any modern human consider what is natural to be available to them? Nature is all the things you have to get away from in order to make life bearable. This causes us all manner of problems.

Ants farm fungi, build huge nests and modify their environments. Bees and wasps undertake amazing construction work. Birds make nests, some of them incredibly ornate. There are many animals who craft homes and shelters underground. Hermit crabs use empty shells, octopi make portable houses out of coconut shells. Trees emit chemicals into the air and soil to help modify their surroundings to their advantage. From the tiniest organisms to the largest, life does what it can to manage its immediate environment for its own benefit. Nature innovates, and anything that can do better than silent berry eating, does better. We aren’t the only communicative species.

Half of the problem with talking about ‘nature’ is that to discuss all of existence as though its just one thing is incredibly reductive. What troubles me about Mr Bate’s statement is the idea that as soon as you have a feeling relationship, you are on the outside, and I think that’s wrong. When you can only have feelings about nature as an abstract idea, you are on the outside. When you care about this hill, that tree, these flowers, the birds in this valley, this stream, it’s an entirely different process. If you are depending on something, for food, or shelter, of course you care about its existence. Perhaps not in a conscious or benevolent way, but it’s still a form of care. To assume that we alone are capable of caring about nature and this only because we are outside of it, is a lot of assuming as an opening gambit.

If you’ve ever watched a cat rolling in the sun, or a horse rolling in the grass, or a dog frisking about in water, or a crow riding the wind, or a buzzard on the thermals, it is difficult to hold onto the idea that the rest of nature is all about the mechanics of survival. Watch any creature long enough and you’ll see it doing things just because it can, because it enjoys doing it, not because it serves some evolutionary function. Watch a cow come out onto grass for the first time in the spring, and you’ll be hard put to suggest that cows don’t care about grass, or have any feelings.

To hold feelings about any other living thing is not an act of separation, or proof of not being natural. Probably the only truly unnatural thing we do as humans is to imagine, foolishly and arrogantly, that we are somehow on the outside in anything other than our own imaginations.

Life on the margins

8pm on a Friday night. My hands are too sore for crafting or music. I’m too tired to concentrate on reading. The rest of my body is too stiff to even consider going out anywhere, and even assuming I could push through that, the flatlining of my brain makes me dreadful company. Who can I ask to spend time with me when I’m like this? And so I sit in weary silence and look at the rain, and fail to flag up even to the people I’m living with that I’m sad and sore and lonely. This is not unusual for the end of the week.

What worries me is the knowledge that I’m a pretty minor case. Most of my issues are intermittent, meaning I get good days. I get patches when I can pull my attention together enough to be sociable, and when I have enough energy to go out and do the sorts of fun things that other people do. Many people are in this sort of state full time, always in too much pain, always short of energy, always depressed and otherwise struggling to engage. All the things I can’t do much of the time because they start too late, or are too tough for other reasons… there are people who never have an option on those things. And I know how much of a fight it can be getting people to accommodate me, over things like not being able to do late meetings. ‘Normal’ wins most of the time, and the preferences of the many tend to make it seem ok not to bother with fitting me in. Rare are the places where I’m so essential that setting something up to accommodate me seems worthwhile. Again, it’s not just going to be me who experiences this.

I know when it comes to issues around depression and exhaustion that there are a lot of people who go quiet. They don’t mention there was a problem until it’s dealt with, often. There can be lots of reasons – pride and the desire to hang on to what little dignity remains, not having the energy to even start the conversation. Knowing that things probably won’t be fettled to accommodate you. I wish I knew how to step up to that, to better express that if a hand goes up I might spot the difference between waving and drowning, and I’m certainly going to try.

Physical barriers (stairs and no lifts) are not the only reasons people can find themselves excluded. It’s terribly easy to exclude anyone who does not conform to a standard of mobility (bodily mobility and car access) affluence (can you even afford to get there? Can you turn up to that place wearing the kind of clothes you own?) energy levels (because 8pm is just not a good time to start things for some people). Having young children, and not having on-demand child care can push some people out. Events that become male dominated because women don’t feel ok to turn up because they don’t feel safe in that part of town at that time of night. Places you can’t get to on public transport.

Of course it’s impossible to run everything to accommodate every possible need. But it’s nice when just now and then there’s a bit of flexibility to accommodate the known needs of people who have said they would like to turn up, but have issues. There’s a kind of tyranny in normality that means if you can’t fit with what’s on offer, and you don’t expect to be heard, you just shut up and go away and don’t get involved. Which is a lonely sort of outcome, and means that places of activity can have a very narrow selection of people involved in them.

I find it really funny when groups of people who claim to be tolerant and inclusive (and I can think of several) can’t find any flexibility at all to deal with the fact that I just can’t handle late evening meetings. I’m sure if they thought I was ‘properly’ disabled, they’d go to more effort to fit me in, but I’m just a sore, tired woman who can’t handle late nights, and somehow that makes it ok to just go ahead and have the meetings without me. Those who suffer invisibly – the mentally unwell, those in pain – are easily dismissed, because the problem isn’t visible, so the exclusion isn’t so visible, and depressed people tend not to be very good at standing up for themselves. The less obviously someone suffers, the easier it is not to bother with it, because no one can see you letting them down, and apparently that makes it ok, in some circles.

Evening Meditation

I’ve never had a fixed daily practice. Things that I do shift, fluctuate and evolve over time. I try things, and if they don’t suit me, I let them go and move on. Not being much of a morning person, about the only spiritually relevant thing I can do of a morning is start slowly, marking the move from dreaming to wakefulness and letting my mind settle before the day starts. I find that leaping out of bed and rushing around suits neither my state of mind first thing, nor the direction I want my days to go in.

Meditation has been a part of my life for a good twenty years. How I do it, when and where and why has varied greatly over that time frame. Early on, pathworkings and visualisations dominated my approach. I have a vivid imagination and it’s easy for me to use that in escapist ways, which I gradually became uneasy about.

Like most people who meditate I’ve been exposed to the idea of being wholly present in the moment as the point of meditation. I’m no good at it, and it does not sit well with me emotionally. I cannot divorce myself from past and future. I’m too interested in knowing and understanding, and in gathering material to share as stories and poems. To be wholly present is to be cut off from all of these things. I recently ran into the idea of ‘abundant time’ which I like a lot more. It suggests being very present, whilst also keeping the context of your life and what you know as part of that mix. It feels more natural to me, and makes more sense to me. There are a great many approaches to meditation available, so finding things that make emotional sense, seems the obvious way to go. All else is dogma and submitting to someone else’s authority.

I’ve always loved bats (excuse the huge jump in this line of though). One of the things about pipistrelle bats is that left in peace, they roost in the same place, and hunt in the same place every night. They come out at about the same time in relation to the sunset, not the clock. Seeing the bats requires being alert to when the day is ending, which I like.

I know where my nearest bats are, and I’ve taken to going out in the evenings to stand and watch them. I’ve started to notice things that impact on the life of bats, and have become more alert to the early evening moths. Bats don’t emerge in the dark, but after the sunset, so there’s still a lot of light to see what they’re doing. I turn up to the bats very deliberately. Not to worship them, nor to worship some bat-related sense of deity through them. Not to seek signs or messages in what they do. Simply because they are there, and I like seeing them. I like the addition of their presence to the day. Standing still and largely quiet to watch their amazing flights as they hunt, is inherently soothing and takes me out of myself. The light fades, and I go home calmer.

While primarily it’s a simple kind of meditation for relaxation, I know I am also learning things about twilight, and the sunset sky, the settling of day-flying birds, and the less predictable habits of the owls. That I can stand still and quiet for half an hour or so with no difficulty comes from the meditation I’ve already done. That I have any interest in doing this at all comes very much from my Druidry.

Of Salamandra and Sloth

Nimue Brown:

One of the many projects I have on the go, is a long standing graphic novel series, Hopeless Maine, for which my husband, Tom does the art. It’s had a complicated life, but good things are happening. More on his blog…

Originally posted on The Moth Festival:

What more, dear reader, should I say? Probably very little, but that has never stopped me before. Our search for a new home for Salamandra and the other denizens of Hopeless, Maine has come to a happy conclusion, and I am both pleased and proud to announce that henceforth  their adventures (misadventures, perils, etc. ) will be under the banner of the Sloth! “What (I hear you ask) are you going on about,and what Sloth is this? Also, why does it have a banner? Additionally, what does it eat, and can I comb it?”  Well, to start with, no. You can not comb it, I am very sorry to say. Sloth is a fine comics publisher. Also an innovative and exceedingly cool one. Here, take a look. See? Told you! I very much like the diversity of themes and styles they carry. (Remember! Comics is a medium, *not* a genre.) Their…

View original 210 more words

Stealing into Winter

I take great delight in seeing people I like, admire and generally appreciate getting out there and winning. Graeme K. Talboys getting picked up by Harper Collins is one of those things cheering me greatly right now. I first ran into Graeme as a writer of Druid books – his Way of the Druid, and Druid Way made Easy are starter texts I can recommend to anyone new to the path. As an author he has a strong, clear but not authoritarian sort of voice, and that carries over brilliantly into fiction.

Stealing into Winter is a really interesting piece of future fantasy. Superficially it’s a fairly straightforward story of adventure on the road. However, much bigger plots and stories are just about visible in the background, and as this is the start of a series, it’s clear the main character, a thief called Jeniche, is further out of her depth than she can see.

The world building is fabulous. This seems to be a future Earth, with a history that is slowly being revealed to the reader. This opening to the series offers glimpses and possibilities, but nothing clear. There’s a lot to wonder about, and as a reader who likes to be engaged imaginatively, I really liked this. I don’t like everything laid bare and explained, I like to wonder, to have to infer, guess, fill in the gaps and become an active participant in the world of the book.

I’ve read the second book as well (Exile and Pilgrim), and loved that too, and am waiting impatiently to read the rest.

You can find out more here, and pre-order the ebook.

The madness of authors

There are, in all fairness, a great many ways in which people who attempt to earn a living by writing are a touch insane. This is just one facet. While I’m drawing heavily on personal experience, I’ve also watched a lot of other creative people do similar things.

You write a book, and into that book you pour your love and ideals, your beliefs, values and hopes. You try to make it the very best thing you have ever done. It could take a year of using up much of your spare time. It could take more. If you’ve made it and are a professional, it could be your day job for months, or longer.

While you’re writing it you are thinking about the people who want to read it and don’t know yet. Who they are, what they need from you, and how you can answer them. Most authors do think about readers and want to create something someone else is going to value.

Then a thing happens: Publication day is set. Instead of wanting to get out there and tell the world, panic sets in. What if everyone hates it? What if people hate you for drawing attention to the thing you made? What if it’s really, really awful? Part of the problem is that a year of working on a project means that by the end, you are better, more skilled and more aware than you were when you started. If you re-do the project to accommodate this, the same will be true when you stop. So inevitably every ‘finished’ piece has simply been abandoned when it became unviable to keep reworking it. When it’s published, you may have had another six months or a year to improve in, and see everything wrong with this piece. It’s not a strong position from which to launch the book.

Many authors are, by nature, quiet and shy people. They were the sort of people who preferred books to competitive sport at school. The withdrawn, reclusive, hours spent typing in silence aspect of being an author is probably something they like. I certainly do. And then all of a sudden you have to thrust yourself in front of people demanding they pay attention to, and pay money for, your thing. This doesn’t always go well.

For Pagan authors, there are other challenges too. Service is a big part of what we do, and service means as soon as you ask anyone to pay you’re on a sticky wicket. “Why should we pay to support you?” is something Pagan authors hear a lot. For me this is simple – everyone has to eat, and if someone is so involved in their service that they can’t make a living, and you aren’t willing or able to pay for the things they do that you want, then you should be prepared to feed them. That’s community. The author cut on most individual books will not feed a family for a day, incidentally. Not unless they really like beans on toast.

So I write books, and feel enormously awkward about asking people to buy them. I hope, irrationally, that people will somehow find and buy them anyway, but that’s not a good strategy and authors who adopt it tend to eat a lot of beans on toast. What’s in the books is wholly separate from what’s on the blog, so you won’t find you’ve paid for something I’ve already shared with you. And as a general thing, if you don’t want, can’t afford aren’t into books – that’s fine, but be gentle with the people who write them, all of whom are putting bits of self and soul out for public scrutiny.

I have a new book out this summer, and other books, and the Pagan ones are at Moon Books.

Eco-Pagan Mythmaking

Cultures are underpinned and shaped by the stories they tell. Not just the big obvious myths, but the day to day stories about how everything works. Our current cultural stories include capitalism, austerity, growth, consumerism, and dominion over the natural world. For Pagans, this life destroying, using story-set that leads to unsustainable living just isn’t tolerable. We need new stories.

Writing about perfect worlds is really awkward. It’s so easy to sound preachy, or ridiculous, and that which is set up as Utopian, in fiction and in real life alike, tends to go horribly wrong. Stories for a future world have to balance the better ideas with the emotional realism that lets us accept that this is believable. It’s not an easy balance to strike.

I recently read Anna McKerrow’s ‘Crow Moon’ – it’s a really interesting piece of eco-pagan literature, aimed at the YA market. It postulates a future society that’s living much closer to the land, and dealing with the restrictions, the inevitable hard work and limited options this creates. What makes it work as a story is that it isn’t a perfect vision. There is strife, and struggle, and hardship, but you have to balance that against the good things – one of which is the hope of a sustainable future. In the novel, the greenworld culture Pagans are likely to empathise with, contrasts with the redworld, where people are still killing each other over the last remaining fuel supplies. However imperfect a sustainable future is going to be, it’s bound to beat the hell out of the alternatives.

Of course one story doesn’t have to do it all, in fact it’s probably better that we don’t have one perfect story to try and live up to. Our Pagan ancestors had a lot of stories, and diversity makes us stronger. We need lots of ideas right now, lots of different visions of a future that help us remember that the current stories in our culture are not the only stories. The right wing domination of contemporary story making is a real issue and it discourages people from imagining alternative ways of living and being. We’re being hammered with austerity and growth as the only stories of how an economy can work right now, and we’ve got to change that and open it out into something more liveable, more human, more sane.

In the meantime, I can recommend Crow Moon, and anyone interested in writing for the future should also check out Storytelling for a Greener World.

Fragile miracles

Yesterday we found an injured blackcap. A tiny warbler, that apparently migrates vast distances. She was on the side of a cycle path and clearly unable to get airborne. Most of her tail feathers were missing, so we inferred a cat attack. She did not resist being caught, and we carried her home.

The wisdom is that what you do with an injured bird is put it in a small box where it can’t hurt itself and can recover from shock, and if they’re ok, you let them go again. I’ve done cat rescues before and dealt with birds who have flown into windows. Little Miss had no desire to be in a box, and was lively enough to get the lid off and explore the bedroom. I went to collect her, and she climbed onto my hand. When I carefully stood up, she made no effort to be somewhere else, and so I ended up sitting with her perched on my hand for quite some time. She even had a little nap.

It gave me opportunity to look at her, to see the details of tiny feathers and feel the grip of pointy little feet. She didn’t mind voices, she seemed wholly at ease with me. The sense of awe brought on by having a wild thing choose, of its own free will, to stay with you, is a remarkable thing. She did get off my hand later, proving she could have done so any time, had she wished.

As she clearly couldn’t fly, we couldn’t help her. One car journey later, thanks to a friend mad enough to be a bird ambulance, and we found that no one could help her. She had a broken wing – and for a tiny migrant there is nothing that can be done with that kind of injury. And then she was gone. A tiny, brief miracle, strong enough to survive vast flights, but not equal to the pounce of a cat, and we were absolutely gutted.

As stories go, that would be one, but it isn’t quite the end. Arriving home in the twilight, tired and fragile ourselves, sleep seemed unlikely. A little owl called from somewhere outside the flat and we decided to go out for a bit. There’s a place not far from where we live, where bats are likely, so we went to see the bats – and there were a couple of pipistrelles, fluttering cheerfully against the backdrop of darkening blue sky. From nearby a barn owl called, and then a second. Really close. Then, to our amazement, they flew back and forth a couple of times between the trees. Distinctive owl shapes against the sky. I’ve never seen a wild barn owl before, only rescued and captive birds.

Life can be so precarious, so uncertain. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you try, or how much you want to fix things, some things can’t be done. But I still think it’s important to show up and try to do the things, even if the odds look slim, even if there’s not much hope. And sometimes, not infrequently in fact, in amongst the hard things and the things that hurt, there are wonders. The brief miracle of a wild bird roosting on my hand. The flight of owls.