Nimue Brown's Blog, page 352

Ritual Druidry

When I first came to Druidry, doing the rituals associated with the wheel of the year seemed like the most important thing. The tone and style of Druid rituals, and all the things that made them different from other people’s rituals, seemed to define what Druidry is. I was able to learn the seasonal approaches by participating in a Grove, and going on to study with OBOD affirmed, and firmed up this learning (amongst other things).

For some years I ran an open gathering and a closed circle – again with seasonal ritual being the main features. As an organiser, it started to seem to me that the most important things about ritual were the bringing together and bonding of communities, and getting people who were not otherwise much engaged with the seasons or the natural world, to engage meaningfully. For busy urban Pagans, those eight festivals a year were key opportunities to get out to somewhere green and stop for a while.

As an organiser, ritual became something I did for other people, and my own practice shifted towards something more private, less structured.

In recent years I haven’t had a group of people who wanted regular ritual from me, so I haven’t organised any. It’s not something I want to do on my own account any more, aside from being occasionally drawn to the sharing-with-people aspect.

At the moment my involvement with the wheel of the year is much more a day to day process, with no big celebrations. I engage primarily by walking, and by seeking out the changes that go with each season. Finding out which flowers bloom where and when, and seeking them out, has been a major feature over the last few years.

Four years ago or so, I had no idea how to be a solitary Druid because the community work defined my path for me. For a while it felt like showing up to write this blog was the only discernibly Druid thing I had going on. Recognition of, and deepening of my own relationship with the land has changed how I feel about a lot of things. Ritual for personal practice makes a lot less sense to me – generally the more involved a ritual is, the less sense it makes! Minimal practices to hold meditative group work I am fine with, and that’s all I have going on at the moment on that side. Showing up for collective Druidry has become an aside, not the main thrust of what I do.

Learning to trust that the unshowy, private, confers neither power nor importance stuff, is also Druidry, and is Druidry even though there’s no one outside my immediate family to validate what I’m doing, has taken a while. I still think of proper Druidry as the kind of thing clever people do in circles while wearing robes, but I feel increasingly out of place there. Not clever enough, robed enough or drawn to circles enough. I think there is room alongside that for something more personal, less useful to anyone else, less easily spoken of.

Writing the landscape

How the landscape is written about is something I’m exploring at the moment. That which we do not talk about, we tend not to value. If we don’t have words, or a language for something, then often we don’t pay as much attention to it anyway. With our landscapes threatened by all manner of ill conceived development, with rising urbanisation and a generation of children who are more familiar with Daleks than magpies, it seems important to me not only to talk about the land, but to make sure I’m doing that well.

My natural default when I don’t know an answer to something large, is to read books. At the moment I’m reading as much Gloucestershire orientated material as I can, because it helps to know the place being described. I started the conscious leg of this journey with Robert McFarlane’s Landmarks (even though he’s not from round here!) and I have a growing ‘to read’ list.

Adam Horovitz’s “A Thousand Laurie Lees” follows in the footsteps of “Cider with Rosie” to tell of a childhood in beautiful Slad valley, and growing up there. It goes beyond the first book not only for being later (published on the centenary of Lee’s birth) but for being much more conscious of the relationship between the writing and the land. Cider with Rosie changed Slad. It brought tourists, second home owners and an array of arty people – Adam’s parents included – until the celebrity arts thing going on in Slad became an attraction in its own right and even lured the press out.

Alongside this, Laurie Lee used his status and the power of his book to protect his valley from development. Since his death, people have continued to evoke him; a protective spirit whose written vision of glorious childhood paints a glow over the valley that even hard nosed developers are a bit awed by. Slad is not uniquely beautiful, it has the same kind of charm, heritage and loveliness of all the valleys carved into the Cotswolds around here, only this one has a book to protect it, and others do not.

When a person sets out to write a book, there is no way of knowing what impact that book will have. It’s worth thinking about, anyway. What will be the impact of Adam Horovitz’s lyrical revisiting of this iconic place? I will have to go and look for the lost village he mentions. Who else will be moved to do what, there is no knowing, but like Cider with Rosie before it, this is a book with the potential to both record and change how people relate to a place.

It’s important, I think, that both “A Thousand Laurie Lees” and “Cider with Rosie” are as much autobiographies as they are books of place. Land and life are inextricably linked. Our formal history is surprisingly uninterested in where things happened, and treats geography as separate from history. And yet the geography here shapes the history – the steep sided valleys with their streams allow certain things and thwart others, and always have. The marks of historical mining and agriculture are in the land – life lived alters the landscape, and landscape shapes the life.

The relationship between who we are, and where we are, is something I want to consider further.

Find out more about “A Thousand Laurie Lees” here – http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/inde...

Finding the good bits

One of the apparently cruellest things about depression, is that it makes it very hard for a person to see and feel the good bits of their own life. Being wrapped in a blanket of personal gloom, good things struggle to get through and register. It can be hard for those on the outside, whose care and affection doesn’t get through the gloom layer to make any discernible difference – I’ve been there, too. When you want to be able to wrap love and support around a person and make everything better, but the gloom keeps you out.

I try to hang on to the idea that there will be good things. I have far more control over my mind than I have over my emotions, and I can throw logic at almost anything, so long as it occurs to me to do so. I do my best to carry the idea of good things, so that even on the days when I really can’t see them I still know that they must still be there. It’s a thought form that helps prevent the despair from getting an absolute grip.

I make deliberate time for gratitude – usually at the end of the day when I review what’s happened and try to spot the good bits. Some of those good things will be very small – a flower, a bird, a moment. Recognition of the friendship and support I have helps to keep me on a more even keel.

Alongside this I am careful to pay attention to my rage and distress, my ingratitude and to look hard at whatever is bothering me. To focus only on the quest for the good things can be to deny myself any hope for identifying and resolving distress. I spent a lot of years determined to see the best in things, and it kept me suffering when I could have protected myself had I only acknowledged there was a problem.

I find it easy to love the small things. The butterfly that came to my hand and stayed, and had to be gently persuaded to leave. It was easy to love the butterfly, and to smart at parting with it, the very smallness of it made that easier, somehow. I could not have had an exchange of physical closeness, adoration and parting with a human in that time frame, and I find that interesting to consider. Dogs bounce up to me and demand affection, and I give freely of myself for a moment or two before they depart. I touch without anxiety and accept the gifts of their easy affection and again, there is no way in the world I could do something as fleeting and generous with a human person.

I am blessed with a lot of lovely, brilliant, fascinating people – many of whom I do not know well, but who saunter along the edges of my life. People who come to this blog, or talk to me on facebook, people I know a bit in the less-virtual world. I treasure the passing encounters and unexpected exchanges.

Sometimes, it is hard to see the bigger things, the constants. I fear taking for granted anything or anyone who is more familiar, closer, more available to me. If I cannot always see the small good things, can I see the big ones? Probably not, and they are, emotionally speaking, harder to sneak in under the gloom. Small things can sometimes get through when bigger things cannot. A butterfly can land on the hand I would find it impossible to let most people touch, because humans are bigger, and our physical interactions so much more loaded. There is always meaning, implication. The rejection of a dog is easier to bear. The irritation of a butterfly would not break my heart.

In looking for the good in small things, I have come to recognise that my gloom is often protective. It is there to keep people out, and to help me mistrust what presents itself warmly, because I’ve been trapped and wounded by that more than once. I don’t let many people inside the gloom, because it is a level of trust and vulnerability, and I have not learned how to arrive like a dog or a butterfly and give without fear.

Another year older

Today I am 38. I notice as I get older that I also get more relaxed about revealing my age, rather than more uneasy about it. Being a young Druid (back when I was indeed a young Druid) I worried that my lack of years would undermine my credibility. As a younger person my lack of age often seemed to be an issue in terms of getting taken seriously. The more middle aged I become, the more years I stack up, the less I feel like I know anything but at the same time the less it bothers me. I am no longer a bright(ish) young thing with something to prove, and haven’t been that for a while, and it probably makes me a good deal easier to be around.

What has this cycle of the seasons taught me? It’s been a year of incredible change in terms of my work life, my home life (chiefly buying the flat), how I feel about my creativity, how I feel about myself. I’m a long way from the person I was this time a year ago. More together, more in control, more confident. I hold my head up more. I have adopted a revised version of the wiccan rede that goes ‘do no harm but take no shit’. I am trying to work out how to be frolicksome, not least because I like the word. I want room in my life to be frolicksome as well as maudlin, depending on need.

Birthdays are a time that invite looking back, and looking forward. Where am I? What have I done? Where am I going? I’ve done a lot of work recently in making peace with my past – not being ok with it, because there are many things in my history that I am never going to be ok with. But I can accept them as part of the path that has brought me to here. I like where I am and so I cannot regret the journey. Any step missed may have cost me something that has turned out to be precious.

I have no idea where I am going. Right now I probably have less sense of direction than at any time previously. It’s not the same as feeling lost or uncertain, more a shift in style. There are things I am choosing to do because I think they are the right things to do, and that the reasons for doing them are good. I will accept the consequences, regardless of how those serve me. I will speak out and be an activist, and if things do get darker and more repressive, (and they could) I will take the consequences. I will not be frightened into silence, or passive acceptance.

In my creative life, it is my intention to throw all the time and energy I can at doing the best and most original work I am capable of. This may sound like a no-brainer, but it isn’t. The book industry is not driven by the desire to publish the best and most original work people are capable of. It’s about making money, and in turn making money is about giving people what it is supposed that they want, which tends to mean more of the same. My audio short stories, webcomic and novel (Fast Food at the centre of the world) over at http://www.nerdbong.com are getting plenty of hits, this blog has plenty of followers. There are enough of you who like the things I do to make it worth doing, and I have a day job that means the writing I do is not obliged to pay the bills.

So, I re-dedicate myself to art for art’s sake. I rededicate myself to striving towards innovation, originality, deep thinking, wordcraft, and the very best that I can do as an author. I re-dedicate to making stories for people who, like me, want to be taken somewhere they haven’t been before. I re-affirm my belief that the right story can change the world, and that these are the stories I want to be writing. If the only way to do that is give my work away and pay the bills by other means, that is how I will be doing it.

I accept that I am choosing a path that makes it even more unlikely (and it was pretty unlikely to begin with) that I could ever become rich or famous as a consequence of what I do. I am choosing a path that means I probably won’t ever earn a viable living as an author. But the thing is, I am utterly shit at doing the commercially orientated work, I lack the skills, the discipline and the drive to make that succeed, and I would rather be me as I am, than suffer trying to be something I am not. At first, coming to terms with this was a distressing process but the more time I spend with it, the more I realise that I would rather be a bit arty and totally invested in my work, than do something designed primarily to sell, and whenever there is a choice to make I will be doing the former and accepting that I cannot have the latter.

The Butterfly Effect

There’s a tale about a butterfly who flaps his wings on one side of the world, and causes a hurricane. In my head, this is what that butterfly sounds like. The video is from a couple of years ago, and features the utterly amazing Peter Knight on violin.

I can’t remember when I first heard Peter Knight playing – it wasn’t an event, he was an intrinsic part of the soundscape of my childhood. He played for Steeleye Span for many years, and their music was a big part of my early years. As a teenager, I used to dance to his rendition of Mooncoin jig when no one was around to see me.

I saw Steeleye Span in concert some years ago, and I saw his new band, Gigspanner as well. Last night, much to my joy, Gigspanner played at a venue I could walk to. And walk we did. It was a truly amazing evening – a small venue, breathtaking musicianship, my son with enormous eyes and in a state of total awe. Peter Knight is a remarkable player, lyrical, melodious, graceful and with an appearance of effortlessness. He puts me in mind of a blackbird, singing down the sun at midsummer.

I used to be a mediocre sort of violin player – a frozen shoulder has left me unable to play at all for more than a year now, which is frustrating. I know enough to be stunned by this man’s playing. There are things about violins that, for the rest of us, are a liability – the little scratchy, whispery noises, the harmonics… and he plays these as well. As well as the regular bowing the violin (as in this video) he picks strings to use as accompaniment for singing, uses the body percussively, there’s even a track where another band member plays the violin with sticks while Mr Knight is bowing it. I don’t think I breathed during that whole piece.

I was struck last night by the capacity of music to act on the body – percussion and lower notes are easily felt as vibrations, but anything we hear, we also feel. It’s no doubt this line of thought that has led us to sound bathing as a New Age therapy. Given the choice, what I would prefer to immerse in, is this. Over several hours last night, the music washed over me, and through me, and for a while there just wasn’t room for anything else other than what was happening to me in response to this extraordinary sound.

The idea that what we put into our bodies in terms of food might have huge effects on us is something people are increasingly aware of. But what about the sound we put into our bodies? What does daily exposure to traffic noise do to a person? What happens to us in response to our soundscapes, the rhythms we experience, the songs we sing, and the songs we don’t sing?

Last night’s music affected me profoundly. It touched and changed me in ways I have no language to express. I can measure the difference in my mood today. I feel more complete in myself, more well. For me at least, the sounds I experience are as important as the quality of the air I breathe, and what I’m eating. I’m probably not alone in this.

What is it worth?

If you work a normal job, then the worth of your time and skills is decided by someone else and you don’t get much say. If you buy from normal shops, and utilities providers then the cost is equally beyond your control. In both those situations you could well be dealing with someone who needs to make a profit – so you are undervalued to create a profit margin while the things you buy will be overvalued, also to create a profit margin. Profit is the difference between production cost and sales price. On one side of that equation workers’ wages have to be kept down and on the other, prices have to be kept up or there is no profit.

For those of us who are self employed, the game has at least the potential to be very different. I don’t need to make a profit on my time and skills, I need those to be valued at a reasonable worth. I can often set my cost, and when I’m dealing with other independent people, the cost of products is also negotiable. I might make a sale or return arrangement with another trader. I might work for a profit share if I believe in the product but its creator has no money up front. Equally if I value something I might pay over the odds to support the creator if I know they could do with it.

I don’t charge for celebrant services. If I’m asked to do a handfasting or some other rite of passage, I’ll ask either that my transport costs be covered (if there are any) or that transport is arranged for me. Beyond that, I leave the issue of payment in the hands of the person/people booking me. Pay what I am worth to you. Pay what you can afford. I’ve had no cause for complaint over how this has worked out so far. No one has taken unfair advantage of me.

What happens when the economic value of an object or service becomes tied to ability to pay, and the needs of the one who will be paid? Money ceases to be an expression of power and control, where those who direct the flow are able to determine the options the less powerful person has. Low wages and high living costs create a terrible power imbalance. If ability to pay becomes a moral obligation to pay, things change. If factors such as liking the work enter the equation it is very different from a money exchange based on desperation and power to exploit.

The basis of capitalism is scarcity, and control of resources. So if there isn’t much water and you can control access to it, people will pay anything you like. Those who can’t, die. This is an ideal capitalist scenario. Greater earning from water means money for the means to protect your control of the asset. If another well opens, the good capitalist will buy it and close it again to make sure people stay desperate, thirsty and willing to pay. Money in a capitalist system is not about exchange, but power.

What happens when you deploy money in a way that is not about the power relationship between you and someone else, but some other factor? How we feel about money starts to shift – it just becomes a way to get things done, not an item of fetishistic reverence. Our identities become less tied to how much money we can earn and deploy. Our sense of human worth ceases to be about what we can be made to pay them.

It might sound farfetched, but it is happening already, on places like Patreon.com and bandcamp, where supporters can give, and pay and offer more than is asked for, more than is ‘normal’ for the products in question. It happens at events where there is no door charge but a hat is passed. It happens around crowdfunding.

We don’t have to have an economic culture based on scarcity, exploitation and money as a tool of power. We can use money to get things done, to support each other, to make real change. This is not just an option for the arty and self employed either, opportunities exist for all of us to change the money game.

Negative affirmations

I can’t. I won’t. I don’t like it. I don’t want to. It does not interest me. No.

The right to say no, and to have that ‘no’ heard and respected, is a key part of getting to be a functional human being. People who are only allowed to say yes, are not allowed to say anything at all. It doesn’t matter whether the pressure to be relentlessly positive comes from a belief system, or the demands of people, being denied the right not to want, not to like, not to participate, is to be denied a very large part of your self.

I am especially wary of spiritual positions that see anything negative as bad. We are finite beings. We really do have limits. While we occupy these bodies of ours, we have limited perceptions. We don’t know everything, we can’t do everything. Flesh boundaries us. Gravity inclines us to go down, not up. These bodies can be hurt, and broken beyond repair, and no amount of positive thinking can cure us of that. Perhaps outside of our bodies we become eternal wise beings of limitless possibility, but perhaps we become nothing at all. I don’t know. In the meantime, knowing we have edges, limits and boundaries, and being able to say ‘no’ rather than breaking ourselves against them, remains a good idea. Those edges are often best affirmed by acknowledging what we are not and what we cannot do.

Of course ‘no’ is not always the answer we want to hear from other people. No, I’m not well enough to do what you want of me. No, I haven’t got time. No, this thing that you think is important is not important to me. No, I will not help you. No, I do not love you. No can hurt. Other people’s ‘no’ can haunt, demoralise, and distress. Even the small ones. Tiny things that seem of no great value to one person can shatter another person’s world.

It is a tough lesson, that things we value are worthless to someone else. Things we need are not available. Things that burn us with need and break us with grief and longing are minor trivia to others, not worth a second thought. Such is life. We may have free will aplenty and room to choose for ourselves, but we live surrounded by people who are also choosing, and they will not always fall into line with us, and that has to be ok.

The freedom to say no is the freedom to be real.

The means to say no calmly is a great asset. A ‘no’ that is asserted in anger can cause a lot of hurt. To be quietly strong in a negative statement can avoid tearing someone else down for the sake of holding a boundary line.

To hear a ‘no’ without anger, also opens the way to better things.

It doesn’t have to be black and white. We can negotiate, we should be able to. Can I say ‘this really matters to me?’ Perhaps your ‘no’ didn’t recognise that you are brushing off trivia and I am breaking my heart. Perhaps my ‘no’ can become a ‘not today’. Perhaps we need to talk about what’s really important between us. When I have time. When I’m in less pain. Another day. Perhaps my no can be partial, recognising what I can’t bear but also finding places to compromise. There must be absolutes. There have to be lines we will not cross. There also has to be room for flexibility, kindness, compromise, negotiation and rethinking.

Redefining luxury

Western culture tends to define luxury around items that cost a lot of money, or at a pinch, experiences that cost a lot of money (luxury holidays, mostly). ‘The Good Stuff’ is all about objects, and to afford the objects, or cheaper replicas of the objects, we have to work very hard. The culture of things is not sustainable, our planet cannot keep everyone in the style of an average western household, much less in the style of a household that can afford a lot of luxury goods.

What do you consider to be a luxury? Is it the price tag? Is luxury defined by scarcity? Is it an emotional response to something indulgent? If so, what feels indulgent? If we can redefine luxury, perhaps more of us can get off the treadmill and enjoy living, rather than chasing after objects that will soon become obsolete. Here are ten things I experience as luxuries that have little or no cost. Feel free to add more in the comments.

Sleeping for as long as I need to and waking without an alarm clock. Most of us do not get enough sleep most of the time. The pleasure of feeling properly rested is considerable. Having an extra ten minutes to just stay in bed and enjoy it is a lovely feeling.
Sitting in the sun. Granted, the British climate doesn’t create that many opportunities, but just to have the sun in my face, regardless of season, and to have the opportunity to be out in it, feels really good.
Spending time with friends and having the energy to invest in that.
Having time for creativity. Whatever creativity appeals to you, as an audience, as a creator, as a participant. Singing or dancing with people, listening to music, going to a comedy show, sharing jokes and stories with people. It doesn’t have to cost anything but it’s worth a lot.
Having nothing to do. If that’s the case every day, life can get dull, but now and then to have a day with nothing in it, nowhere you have to be, nothing that must be done, and the freedom to do very little with that day should you so desire.
Inspiration, and the time, energy and opportunity to access the things that inspire and uplift you, whatever those are.
Curled up evenings that are snug, snuggely, comforting. Sharing that with other warm, soft mammals. Apparently Scandinavian languages have a word for this, celebrating the cosy.
Leisurely, indulgent, heartfelt, glorious and delightful lovemaking in all its many forms and possibilities.
Good food. Not expensive food, but happy food. Nourishing food. Things you foraged or grew or cooked yourself, things you enjoy, food you can share with people you like.
Any new thing can be delightful, it doesn’t have to be expensive. A new view, a band you’ve never heard before, a food you haven’t tried. Novelty enriches lives, and it can be available on a very slim budget, if you are willing to find it on a small scale and appreciate anything unfamiliar that comes your way.

Part of me thinks these things should be there for everyone all the time. Too many of us do not have the things that would make us well and happy while we chase after the money to buy things that wouldn’t give us that either. Much of what’s on my list rather depends on not being perpetually exhausted and overwhelmed by work issues, and having a small amount of money and an abundance of time to deploy. If we reframed luxury to understand it in terms of small happy things we can have, rather than big expensive things that will leave us in debt, the scope for being happy and being sustainable increases. These are things we can have, if we stop letting big business tell us what we have to buy in order to feel good about ourselves.

A friend in need

Notes from a dark journey… for those of you who have started following the blog recently, I’ve suffered depression for years, and in the last few months have given up on trying to cope and manage, and started trying to face down the underlying issues. There are a lot of them, and they relate to each other.

The thing that most reliably breaks me, is dealing with other people. I’ve had some bloody awful relationships – some romantic, some allegedly friendships, some familial, that have damaged me at all levels. For a long time I took this as my due. I wondered why it seemed to happen to me so much and fretted about what I had done to attract it, deserve it. Why was I causing people to treat me in such unkind ways and what could I do to reduce the problem? Try harder. Give more. Ask for less. Be more accepting.

It’s taken me until recent weeks to recognise that most people get selfish arseholes in their lives now and then. People who have self esteem and boundaries deal with this by telling the git to sod off. They don’t give second chances, much less third, fourth, fifth. If you don’t accept the lousy excuses and justifications, if you don’t internalise the situation and instead hold the other person responsible for their actions, you spend less time in the company of people who hurt you and you don’t take it to heart. At least, this is what I assume based on observation, and I shall be experimenting to see how it works in practice.

I’ve been vulnerable to this because I was taught to think no one would want me or put up with me, and that anyone who did was some kind of saint. I have since learned better.

I look to other people for approval and affirmation, for a sense of belonging on which I can base some tenuous kind of self worth. I look to other people for affection and emotional support. Aside from my marriage, I generally haven’t handled these deeper and more involved connections with people very well at all. It is in my nature to love deeply, fiercely and in enduring ways. I get told off (as recently as last year) for being too intense, giving too much, because something in this strikes other people as uncomfortable. I have yet to figure out how that works, and I have tried. I have also tried to figure out how to tone down, be more acceptable, less alarming…

I have one person in my life who gets me entirely as I am, and loves that, and does not want me to tidy that up in any way. So I know that the things I have sought with people are available, possible and that I am not wholly unacceptable. That is enough.

I think the only answer to everything else, is to start letting go. Not holding the belief that the people who hurt me are in any way justified or entitled to do so. Not toning down for people, and letting them go easily if/when they find me too much. If I let go of the desire to be acceptable, I create the space to be myself. That space, I think, is more important now than anyone else’s approval or affection could possibly be. I will lose people for doing this. I will watch (more) people I love back away from me, but from here on, I will accept that as an outcome and recognise that it is as much about the kind of people they are, as the kind of person I am. I have also learned that the kind of person I am maybe isn’t so hung up on what other people think. I learned to think that getting the approval of others mattered, but I think that’s conditioning, not core identity. I’ve managed to pick all the layers of it apart. Someone else entirely has been locked up inside me waiting to emerge, shrug at it all, laugh and move on.

Wandering Other Worlds

When Pagans talk about otherworlds, it’s usually in a shamanic sense. You make a deliberate journey to an otherworld for a purpose – a spiritual, learning or healing purpose usually – and then you journey back. The otherworlds associated with various spiritual traditions have defined characters and there are specific reasons for visiting them. This is not something I really do.

Every now and then I find a book, or a series (and just occasionally, a film) that takes over my thoughts. A piece of creativity where the world is so complex, rich and involving that the act of reading the book is a journey into it and emerging takes a while. I finished the second Matlock the Hare book about a week ago, and am only just leaving the dales now. I’m not sure what happened to me while I was there – the journey created by a book and the aftermath of a book is not one I have full conscious control over. Certainly it has facilitated changes for me. I have seen other perspectives, thought new (to me) thoughts. I have wondered, and felt and dreamed and been carried to places of other people’s imagining.

Really good, imaginative fiction (of which Matlock the Hare is a fine example) takes the reader somewhere else. Out of your own life, out of your everyday concerns and into another place, one that may or may not shed light on things for you, and where the experience itself is a blessing. Really good, imaginative fiction can create worlds for you that are like nothing you have ever encountered before. Landscapes and challenges, characters and possibilities can blow you away. These worlds can be utterly surprising and yet wholly pertinent to life lived.

Which leaves me wondering why our descriptions of otherworlds in the mainstream of non-fiction books often seem so samey. The idea that we would all experience roughly the same things in comparable ways seems to underlie most of the shamanic books I’ve read. All too often, the otherworld of non-fiction is not presented as likely to startle, overwhelm, radically change or otherwise upheave a person. It’s a fairly safe place. You go in, you find your spirit guide, or animal guide or whatever your tradition dictates, they take you sightseeing. So long as you have them, you are safe. There are some basic rules to follow – precise etiquette varies with tradition. You go in, you get what you need, you come out. There’s no room for the place to radically change you – in fact I wonder if the methods and setups are very much about avoiding that happening.

Step into the world of a fictional novel, and if it’s any good, the lives and fates of imaginary people start to matter to you, and the world itself is able to seep into your mind. Not a world you control, or choose, or get to direct. Not a world that exists necessarily to heal you and answer your questions. It may be going to challenge you, break your heart, throw your own world into chaos, demand you rethink your personal philosophy. It may leave you grieving or shocked. The worlds inside books are not safe places – not in terms of the power they have to act on your emotions.

I thought about trying to review Matlock the Hare: The Puzzle of the Tillian Wand in a normal way, but it’s the second book of the series and assumes you’ve read the first one. It is too plotty and complex to start here. Get a copy of the Trefflepugga Path first.  Find out more about them on www.matlockthehare.com

And question why it is that so many authors present the otherworlds of magical tradition as safer, more predictable and less awe inspiring than the magical worlds available to us in books. Step onto the Trefflepugga path and anything can happen to you. Your life is no longer in your control. It’s very difficult to have wild change beyond your imagining if you also insist on staying safely in control of the experience.