Nimue Brown's Blog, page 356

How to change the world

Here in the UK, we have a democracy that means every 5 years you get to make 1 suggestion about who should represent you, in a first past the post system that means the person elected doesn���t have (usually) the support of more than 50% of the people electing them. My MP just got in with 45% of the vote, 76% of people having voted. Less than half of three quarters. That���s three eighths of those who could have voted supporting him.

Once elected, politicians do not, for the greater part, represent the will of the people. They have their own agenda, and increasingly around the world what we���re seeing is politics run for the benefit of big business and the affluent, at the expense of the majority, pretty much regardless of public will.

So, show up when you can and vote, because it���s the best formal system we have, and gods help us if we lose it, because that���s the thin line of defence regular people have against exploitation. But don���t count on it to save you. Democracy works better when people get more involved ��� with parties (which may increase your say in policy, candidate choice and general direction) with local politics where there are real choices to make that affect your life. But don���t expect that to work miracles either because you are still inside the system, and the system is not geared to your benefit.

If you want radical change, if you want social justice, sustainable living, the tackling of pollution, climate change and all the other big issues our politicians are in denial about, there is no point waiting for politics to lead the way. It won���t. Politics panders to money, and every now and then makes token gestures based on what it thinks voters want to hear. If you want some token gestures in the direction of radical change, you have to make a LOT of noise just to get a bit of greenwash and window dressing.

Do not wait for politics. Live your values, be the change. Reach out to other people who are doing things you believe in. Take as much control of your life as you can, and be prepared to rethink everything. Climate change is coming. Peak oil is coming (some people think we���ve hit it already) our society is not sustainable. We know what happens when cultures damage or destroy the resources they depend on or are hit by radical change. We���ve got ruins around the world from ancient cultures that did just that. I���m sure the people who made the Nazca lines and the Aztec cities thought they were too clever, too big, too important to fail as well. We know what hubris gets us.

What you can do will depend on where you are, what resources there are, what the likely challenges are going to be (or if you���re in Australia, or California, the challenge of severe drought is already evident). Learn, and keep learning. Learn skills. Learn about local resources. Find out who else is thinking the same way and connect with them because local communities are more survivable, more sustainable than lone individuals. Put something good into the world ��� whatever you can, whatever makes sense where you are. We are more than our governments.

Unsolicited advice

Once upon a time, when western people lived in communities and had a vague idea of what was going on in each other���s lives, perhaps unsolicited advice worked. At least the knowledge of local resources would have been relevant, and knowledge of the context helpful. Express any kind of difficulty in any area of your life on social media and a bunch of self proclaimed well meaning people will pile in and tell you what to do about it.

I have learned, the hard way, that if I just want people to cut me some slack and send me pictures of kittens, it is best to be vague about the problem and specific about the kittens. Well meaning advice from people who do not know my history, circumstances or hopes is at best, usually useless. Often it���s also demoralising, and counterproductive. The more aggressively/enthusiastically it���s pushed, the more uncomfortable it becomes.

Back in the imaginary village, my pretend people do not say ���oh, you need to get more and less exercise, become a vegan, eat more red meat, drink more water, drink less water, sleep more, get out more, be more positive, be more realistic, get a proper job…��� Instead they say ���want to come over for tea?��� or ���I could look after your kids for an evening.��� In fairness, out here in the real world those things still happen. Online, if you are suffering, people will tell you (sometimes order you) to fix yourself and it���s a lot rarer to get actual offers of real help.

I do find it helpful when people share their stories. Not least there is no dogma, necessarily in ���this is what happened to me���. There can be the relief of empathy and understanding, and some clues about what to do, or not do. I���ve yet to find a situation in which there is one solution that totally works for everyone. Problems are complex, answers, and even the degree of answer available, can vary a lot. What looks like a good outcome for one person can be totally intolerable to another.

The thing about dishing out advice (and I know this only too well because I���m doing it) is that it feels like you���ve done something useful. Dying of cancer? Never mind that I know nothing… have some advice. Heartbroken? Have some advice. Ill with a mystery thing that is wrecking your life? Advice. Abuse victim? Advice. Those things are scary. We don���t want them happening to us. We want to believe that we know how to avoid and overcome those things, especially if we don���t. We want to feel useful, powerful, on top of it. We give unsolicited, uninformed advice all too often not because it has any chance of helping the person hearing it, but so as to feel like we did something, and to tell ourselves that we do not have to fear this happening to us.

So here���s my bit of unsolicited advice for today: It is ok to be uncomfortable in the face of suffering. It is ok not to know what to do. Often ���here if you need me��� is of far more real value than anything you���ve read online that offers an impossible cure to an intractable problem. And pictures of kittens.

Abundant Time

I have huge problems with the living in the moment understanding of mindfulness as a philosophy, so when James Nichol posted this blog about John Heron and abundant time, I was really interested. I���ll try to make my post make sense if you haven���t read the other, but, read the other anyway.

To me, living in the moment does not seem like engagement with life, but removal from it. Being in the moment sounds like pure immersion, but what does it do? It takes away the context for the experience. Humans have fairly linear lives, out of which we fashion narratives and understanding. Beyond a certain point, the more present you are, the more you have to let go of certain other things.

The focal point of living in the moment is (as I understand it) to free us from all those uncomfy emotions. Fear (of the future) and regret (about the past) are the big reasons why we don���t want to bother ourselves with any of that past and future malarkey. I simply don���t like the implications. Our discomfort with past actions is part of how we learn and our anxiety about the future is part of how we avoid disaster. We need, for example, to be really worried about climate change.

Nostalgia and a sense of loss teach us about what we love and value. Hope for the future uplifts us, creating purpose and direction. Do we really want to be free from the judgemental thoughts that are part of not being in the moment? Or do we need to make value judgements in order to function? What space is there, in only being in the moment, for love, or duty, forward planning to take care of self and others, or backward glancing to learn and understand? I can see some utility in it as a short burst activity to clear an over busy mind, but if you are living in the world as a responsible, creative entity, you cannot divorce yourself from past or future for very long at all. What you lose, for being entirely in the moment, are the emotional connections that flow naturally from your humanity.

Coming at this as a Druid, is seems to me that balance is the critical issue. We live now, and we have to be present enough to do that living, to act well in the moment and to appreciate life from one breath to the next. To do that, we have to set the present moment in its proper context, evolving as it does out of the past, and reaching as it must towards the future. We need to be consciously engaged in that process if we want any control over our lives, choices and experiences. If dwelling on the past or worrying about the future takes over such that we don���t really experience ���now��� that needs rebalancing.

The human mind is gloriously complex, and capable of doing more than one thing at any time. Living in the moment is associated with a tradition that says we should only do one thing at a time and do it with total awareness. I admit that would drive me mad. My mind is not like a single track, it���s like a rainforest, and at any given time a whole array of thoughts ��� some more consciously held than others ��� tend to be in process. Letting that roll, letting things surface, I can still be very present to my environment and to the people around me. Shutting that down is awful, unnatural for me and distressing. Not all minds are the same, and you have to start with the one you���ve got.

Abundant time as an idea has us showing up to the present and experiencing it while being able to hold the narrative context of our lives. It gives us room to make important emotional connections with past and future to enrich the present. We are now, but we do not cut ourselves off from awareness of before and after. Without the threads of past and future we cannot be fully functioning human beings. Working with abundant time has the additional advantage that you can live here. You can aim to do this full time, and be richer and better for it, more functional, more engaged with the world, more alive, more present. It���s nothing but win, really. Again, coming at this as a Druid what I���m looking for above all else are ways of living that I can live.

Bird watching for enlightenment

There���s an issue I���ve been wrestling with for a while, and reading Mark Townsend���s work has really brought it into focus for me. There���s an aspect to following a spiritual path that says ���you are not good enough right now, but if you do all the things you will get a better outcome���. Whether that���s enlightenment, heaven, or some other notion varies, but the idea of improving yourself is part (surely?) of what religion is for.

The idea of improvement creates problems though. I strive, and study and try and do all the right things. (Thank you Mark, for letting me know it isn���t just me, or I would not have been able to admit this). Sometimes, I start to feel like I���m getting somewhere. External achievements help with this. Ooh look, X has occurred and therefore I���m a better sort of Druid! Which on its own would be fine, but it raises the temptation to look around and see who isn���t this far down the path, isn���t this clever, or this good. It may be one of Druidry���s saving graces that we don���t have an agreed model for what the perfect Druid looks like, whereas Christianity suffers a good deal more from the effects of this because there are clearer patterns to follow.

I catch myself doing it sometimes, and it leaves me uncomfortable. In the recognition of this as ���failure��� is also the sense that there should be some other, better way of doing this that doesn���t risk replacing wisdom with smugness or experience with superiority. It also makes me anxious because I worry about being judged by others, not being a good enough Druid myself, not keeping up, not knowing enough or being clever enough and all the rest of it.

I may have come up with something.

When you take up bird watching, there���s a sudden learning curve as all the anonymous and familiar birds around you become individuals you can name. It���s exciting. You move on to less common birds over time, you get more confident about telling one from another from a burst of song or a flash of tail. Then, quite possibly, a thing happens. It stops being the birds that are exciting, and starts to be about the bragging. It���s not the seeing the crane, it���s the knowing how jealous other people will be when you tweet about it (sorry, couldn���t resist). You travel hundreds of miles to see a bird that isn���t rare where it lives, but is blown off course. You dash in, get a picture, dash out ��� you���re a hardcore birdwatcher now, and you don���t bother yourself with boring, everyday birds.

I think this is how it can go with religion, all too often. The practice, the trappings, the process start to take over from the thing that is the core of what you are doing. In the case of bird watching, what���s called for is just being able to enjoy what is there, still being excited about the everyday birds. What is the equivalent for Druidry? As Druidry is harder to define in the first place, I think the short answer is ���showing up���. Be present, do the things (whatever they are for you) show up and experience, and don���t let the idea of big shiny things take you away from the little everyday things. Get excited about seeing something rare and precious ��� that���s a blessing ��� but maybe it doesn���t mean much. Maybe it doesn���t mean we���re getting somewhere, maybe it���s just luck, or grace and we do not need to feel important.

I���m a cheerful, naive bird watcher who still gets excited about robins and blackbirds. I���m going to try and take more of that mindset into the Druidry, and see if I can fret less about being a good Druid.

Status anxiety and a spiritual life

There are a lot of things I am not, which sometimes bothers me. I���m not, economically speaking a very successful author ��� not a best seller for my publisher, not a big name in my field. I���m one of those people who goes in to make up the bulk of a movement, the crest of a wave someone else will ride on to far more glorious effect. History is full of us. We provide momentum for movements, we underpin change but individually, we are entirely forgettable.

Like a lot of people, I fret about how other people see me. I fret about issues of success, and status. For me this often includes a fair amount of angst over not being intellectual enough. It���s not been an easy process for me, coming to terms with the facts here. It���s been evident for a lot of years that at no point would I go back to formal study. I can���t afford it and I do not think I could take the pressure. The more I watch those who can, and the more I read, the more evident it is to me that I just don���t have the right kind of mind for this sort of thing. I don���t have the discipline, or much inclination to cultivate it.

The desire to be able to do this, or be seen as a certain sort of person has everything to do, in my case, with a desire to be taken seriously, and that���s really all there is to it. I associate academic status with credibility, and being taken seriously, which in turn would seem to validate the process of writing, and the time spent on it. Fame and money have similar, validating potential. There���s an illusion in here about achieving the kind of status that would stop the people who habitually put me down from doing that, but I���ve started to notice that anything I achieve seems to cause a devaluing of the thing in certain quarters, not an improved valuing of me. There are games I do not get to win.

It���s a very easy game to play with yourself, too. Set up a distant goal, a really tricky hoop to jump through, a magic point of achievement that will validate you. When I get there, then I will be ok. Then they will accept me and take me seriously and be nicer to me. Then I won���t have to feel all the put downs and humiliations I���ve been lugging around for all this time. Get the right job, achieve the right income level, raise the perfect child, become massively famous, save the world… And somehow all you ever get to do is run, not arrive.

Most of us will not be wildly successful, heroic, wealthy, famous or important in any of the ways we might want to be. It does not help that we have a culture where celebrity is some kind of holy grail, and ���ordinary��� is tantamount to an insult. We prioritise the feats of the few whose names we can remember, and the vast majority of people, slogging away as best they can, are slightly invisible.

Spiritual paths will often tell us that we shouldn���t care about these things ��� fame, wealth, status etc are trappings of the world, traps, dead ends. Pulled by this in one direction and by massive cultural pressure to strive and feel like a failure in the other, the results can be untidy to say the least. If I���ve learned anything in recent years, it���s that ���you shouldn���t feel this way��� is the least helpful advice. I also wonder, because I���m cynical, what exactly to make of people who are making a lot of money and achieving fame as spiritual leaders and gurus who cheerfully dole out the message that the rest of us should focus on our spiritual lives and not worry about all the things they have accumulated. That can just create a new set of status goals, as you strive to be the best Druid, do the most meditation, have the best wand, or whatever becomes the substitute.

I should not worry about wealth, fame, power or worldly status because the famous guru I just paid a lot of money to said so?

We all seek validation, one way or another. We all measure ourselves. I wonder if the answer might be to support each other in finding some better and more available yardsticks, praising each other for what we can do, for what goes well, for modest success, and taking down the impossible goal posts for each other, so as to come up with a more sane culture.

Small books, big ideas

The trouble with introductory books in Pagansim, is that most of them keep introducing the same things ��� basic guides to well trodden paths tend to dominate. There���s a logic in this because it is in theory the biggest market and the author who becomes the definitive writer on how to be a what-have-you could do quite well. Except mostly this doesn���t happen and we get a proliferation of ���how to do the things you already know how to do��� books, and from a reading perspective that���s not a great thing. What do you do once you���ve read a couple of introductions and want to go further? That transition out of beginner Pagan status can be immensely frustrating.

One of the things Moon Books is doing that I think has considerable merit, is offering an array of very small introductory books. Little and cheap, they don���t require a big investment of your time or money, which makes it easier to poke about and see what appeals. They are introductions to niches, small areas of thinking and practice introduced in more depth, which makes them handy for transitioning out of beginner status, and also useful for the more experienced Pagan reader who just likes to have some idea of what everyone else is up to. Kitchen Witchcraft, hedge riding, working with power animals, fairy witchcraft, pathworking through poetry, to name but a few. It���s a diverse set of books, and growing all the time as authors come up with new niches they want to explore. I���ve read many of them, the diversity is wonderful, and I���ve learned a fair bit.

There���s now a page where you can look at all of them, which is handy for browsing. Do check it out.

There is one of mine in here. Spirituality without Structure is in part a response to Alain du Botton���s Religion for Atheists. It���s a look at the nuts and bolts of religion, considering what religious experience does for us socially, psychologically, and in discernible real world terms to help a seeker figure out what it is they need. Even Pagans following a defined path tend to be on their own in terms of putting together a practice, and for that matter a belief system, and I think there���s much to be gained from asking how and why we do that, what we get out of it, and what it might cost us. There���s a trade-off between dogma and reassurance, conformity and authenticity, we have to weigh shared participation against personal experience often, too. I know from reader feedback that this is not a happy, uplifting sort of book full of joy and sunshine, but on the other hand if you need to poke around in the underpinnings of what you���re doing, it may prove helpful to you ��� I have had some good feedback on that score.

If you���re reading this, and have looked at the page and are thinking ���but why isn���t there a book on…��� do please consider that you might have a job to do.

Of Tea and Dragons (also, bones and glue)

Nimue Brown:

This is from a project I started a few years ago. There were a number of reasons ��� how little there is for a bright and articulate child to read, if they can���t cope with the emotions and ideas of adult books but they need something a bit more engaging than what���s normally aimed at kids under 6 years of age. Partly in self defence because as a parent reading books brought home from school I have been depressed and demoralised so many times by the banal, trite and joyless stuff they are so often given. Child readers deserve better. So do the poor adults trying to support them. Reading for all ages should be fun, it should be interesting, engaging, exciting, it should inspire and encourage and surprise and generally result in life being a bit better. I don���t know I can claim this project does all these things, but it does at least try!

Originally posted on The Moth Festival:

Hello again, dear reader! This time, I thought I might share some art process and a bit of poetry with you. The following images are (in order) the drawing for the Tea Dragons Alphabet poem (more about Tea Dragons in a bit) and the finished ���painted��� version.The drawing was done with graphite and black coloured pencil on Bristol, and the ���painting��� took place in Photoshop.

The painted version *is* a bit colourful, for me, but I��hope you are not too badly shocked.

Here, now is part of the verse that it illustrates. ( I��did promise you poetry, after all)

A is for Assam, a champion brew

B is for bones, crushed and mixed up with glue

C is for cups which we make from the bone,

D is for drinking, our tea skills we hone.

E is for Earl Grey, full of bergamot,

F for the forest where tea dragons���

View original 170 more words

Medicine for a troubled heart

One of the things about really sitting with my depression over the last few weeks has been an increased awareness of what truly alleviates it. Not in the sense of being able to tidy it up and put it away, but in moving towards a more viable and sustainable state.

In all of this, perhaps the most surprising (re)discovery has been of my natural gloom and melancholia. I���ve spent most of my life in places where a mournful nature was not welcome, and hiding that may be one of the reasons I���m here in the first place. The part of me that resonates with tragedies, graveyards and Leonard Cohen songs. Mournful, melancholic states are very different from depression because for me at least they do not confer numbness, powerlessness or an inability to act or function. Mournful I can live with, it���s a headspace I can create from and it allows me to respond honourably to all the things in this world that break my heart. Allowing my natural misery may in fact ease my depression.

Walking is helping, because I respond well to landscapes, and I find it grounding. Walking allows me to knock the destructive anger out of my body without harming myself. Not having to talk much is also good, not having to entertain, or sort anything or be useful is incredibly healing. Walking in quietly accepting company is making a lot of odds.

Hugs are an interesting double edged sort of thing. Where I���m not comfortable, those can leave me in worse places. However, in those exchanges where being hugged feels like affirmation, acceptance and care, I���m finding that really helps me to feel calmer within myself.

Iggy Pop��has been an unexpected source of medicine, too. He has a Friday night BBC radio 6 program that I catch on listen again in the week. Warm, eccentric, generous, surprising and with a startling play list each time, he has a knack for making me feel that bit better about life, and humanity. Little bits of life philosophy interspersed between songs, diversity, acceptance, recognition that we are all flawed and messy and doing what we can with that. He���s my current favourite for world leader. He has also made me realise how ground down I am by the cruel, shitty, destructive, toxic behaviour of too many humans.

I can���t reasonably turn away from the things that are driving me a bit mad sometimes. I can���t ignore extinctions, climate change, austerity, human rights abuses, eco-system destruction and all that greed achieves out there. But I can cry over it, and walk, and listen to Iggy Pop, and in that mix it might be possible to be present, and not be broken by it.

Bloody, bold and resolute?

My understanding of what Druidry might be, and how I might manifest it, is an ongoing project. I doubt I���ll ever settle into a state of thinking I have it figured out. It���s complicated, because we don���t have the details of ancient practice, and if we did it probably wouldn���t translate well into another setting. There are many things influencing the varied approaches to modern Druidry, too. Rationalism, Christianity, eastern religions, and shamanic traditions from around the world can all be looked to for ideas and inspiration. What is my Druidry? How am I doing it?

Meditation has always been an important part of the mix for me, but western approaches tend to stand on the shoulders of eastern ones. I don���t do well with the meditation of the empty mind. Over the years I���ve spent a lot of time exploring the possibilities of calm, unattached, in the moment and the like. Occasionally I find it helpful in small doses, but as a direction to move in, I find it unsatisfying, and it makes me uneasy. My emotions are part of how my body works, my body is a manifestation of nature, and anything that moves me towards tidying up my emotional responses reduces my experience of inspiration and by extension my creativity.

Some weeks ago I saw something that affected me profoundly. I saw Robin Herne at Leaping Hare, telling a tale from Irish mythology. It was a very human story, full of pride and ambition, and jostling for position in a complex society. It was also a story about wisdom, courage and mostly avoiding either violent or cowardly outcomes. Robin laced the tale with ribald humour, and he told it with passion, bringing to life the intensity of characters for whom pride, honour, status and action all matter more than death. The story, and the manner of its telling left me thinking about who I am, and who I want to be. It’s taken me a while to process that, but coming out of a depressed patch, it’s something I want to think about.

So often, the very idea of spirituality seems to be about resolving ourselves into peaceful, unconflicted, uncomplicated, at one with everything, able to take anything calmly in our stride sort of people. Either by letting go, or by faith in deity, or the calming influences of the right practices, we can free ourselves from trouble and discomfort. I’m not that. Too much of my identity is tied up in being a bit unseelie, mournful, gothic. I’m passionate by nature and passion is not reliably peaceful. I think too much and feel too much for such a path, and I have no desire to relinquish that for a spiritual idea that not feeling what my body feels would somehow be a good thing.

I have a confession: I like trouble and discomfort far too much to want to get rid of them entirely. Not because I enjoy being ill or hurting, but because on a good day, I can respond to a challenge. Trouble tests my wits, skills, honour and abilities. Trouble is when I get the chance to do something heroic, to be more than I had thought possible. Discomfort pushes me to learn and adapt, to take onboard difficult things, to open myself to the world or to protect myself from it, depending on the lessons. Peace, comfort and stability may seem nice, but if I seek those states and try to hang on to them, how am I also to be open to the pain of others and to their challenges? I can���t get freedom from pain for terminally ill friends, I can���t magic peace for the heartbroken and depressed. I can at least be there for��them and try to understand, but I have no sense this is possible unless I am willing to share their distress, and be uncomfortable too.

Do I want to offer everyone else a simple, peaceful, untroubling and uneventful sort of tranquil life? I admit that I do not. I would prefer to be the grit that makes pearls, the spur to action. I love the primal figures who step out of myths with challenges and trials for mortals. Such beings I hold as sacred. Bloody, bold and resolute seems like a good way to go.

Spiritual superiority and how it will hurt you

You���re a spiritual person. You���ve adopted a way of life, a practice, a set of beliefs, and you���ve done this because they strike you as being good and right and likely to make your life better. Maybe for a while life is better, and you feel uplifted, reassured, affirmed and good about what you are doing.

Something goes wrong.

You can count on this. Someone gets ill, or dies, or is hurt, someone else���s anger impacts on you, or your boss is shitty or you lose your job or some practical thing stops working or explodes, or one of those things happen to someone you care about or somewhere in the world some awful thing happens and the images on the TV make you cry.

Then what?

The sane and sensible answer is to admit that your religion is not a cure-all and that you are not so enlightened and magical and special as to be able to avoid all of this. Other options are available though. What the other options do is allow you to uphold the superiority of the system you are in, or perpetrate an illusion of your spiritual superiority. None of this does a person, or the people around them much good in the long term.

Denial: Just refuse to let yourself think about it or admit there is a problem.
Blame: It���s the other person���s fault for thinking negative thoughts, having bad karma, not trying hard enough.
Justify: This is really good for you, that���s why it���s happened.
Insulation: practicing not caring so as not to feel either your own troubles or anyone else���s.

None of these choices help us improve situations. Pushed far enough and any of them can turn into cognitive dissonance ��� where the story you tell yourself about what���s happening is so far removed from reality as to be dangerous to you. This is what happens when victims convince themselves that their abusers are only doing it as an expression of love, for example.

Often, when you infer the existence of a higher plan, a spiritual failing or a deservedness to explain something awful, what you do is remove any need to take action. It ceases to be your problem, and while that has an insulating quality, it also dehumanises all of us. It dehumanises the person whose situation is being explained so as to be ignored, and it dehumanises the one who is refusing to recognise that sometimes, life is a bit shit.

Sometimes, life is a bit shit, and if we can be honest with ourselves and each other, we can do something to alleviate the shit bits, sometimes. No one is so saintly, enlightened, magical, or clever enough to avoid the nastier sides of life. Anyone who claims otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.