Nimue Brown's Blog, page 361

The untouchable Druid

I���m really not good with social hugging. I had thought this was all very straightforward. My childhood was definitely a non-contact sport, as an adult I have been physically abused, and I suffer a lot of pain. Why would I want anyone to touch me? Unexpected kisses can give me panic attacks. However, in the last year or so, I���ve had a lot more very tactile people in my life, lots more scope to find out what I want. I think it would also be fair to say that in the context of my marriage, I am not an untouchable ice queen. Whatever my issues are, it���s not as simple as an absolute unwillingness to make contact.

It���s worth pausing to note here that it is very easy indeed to be doing things and not know why. If something has become normal, if you grew up with it, if it���s part of your culture then going along unquestioningly is very easy. Who we are is somewhat malleable and we are easily persuaded by our environments into being someone who fits. But if that���s not who you are, there���s an accompanying unease, a chaffing sense that something is out of kilter. So here I am, doing a thing, and not knowing why. Hating being pounced on and resenting casual, unmeant contact, and assuming it was because I���m not a very tactile person.

In the last year I���ve had three very important sets of exchanges around the issue of reduced physical contact. Three different people who, for different reasons are not able to make physical contact with me on the level I would have gone for. There have been conversations to understand why and to figure out what would work, and how to honour boundaries. These are three people I really like, and in the space where contact does not occur, I���ve been seeing a thing. A great welling up of joy and affection that seeks expression. I find it mildly frustrating that I cannot pour that emotion out in the most obvious ways, but at the same time to inflict unwelcome contact is, as I know from grim experience, a pretty disgusting thing. There is no way I would do that to someone I care about.

And that may be the critical point in all of this. Unmeant social affection, I realise, troubles me because it is unmeant. On occasions when I���ve expressed discomfort with being kissed, it���s tended to be the case that the person doing the kissing kisses everyone and considers it to be no big deal. I am really uneasy about doing that casually precisely because it���s not an empty gesture when I do it. I don���t like hugging people where nothing is felt or meant.

I���ve put in some serious contemplating time around this issue over the last few days. I realise I am not a cold and standoffish person, and that all my issues with contact come from somewhere else entirely. I���m an intense, emotional, passionate sort of person and (when I���m not hurting bodily, which is a different issue altogether) my inclination is to express surges of joy and adoration by throwing my arms around people, and in more serious cases, kissing them on the cheek. When I mean it, I hug tight, close and serious and I stop there for as long as I think it acceptable to the other person. In learning to accommodate people whose wants are different to mine, I���ve become more able to understand who I am and what I want, which is an interesting moral to the story. When everything is the same, when we don���t allow difference, we are less able to find out about our own authentic selves. Who I think I am has just shifted dramatically. It probably won���t change what I do, but it changes things within me.

Knowing thyself is not a form of narcissism

This all started with a recent comment on the blog, which I will repeat here so you know what I���m referring to…

���There is an excessive introspection and self-absorption, called narcissism, which is enfeebling and detrimental to one���s well being. Prolonged and obsessive reflection about issues of identity and health can drag one into this morass and become consuming, eclipsing joy and breadth of vision, and preventing one from seizing with gusto the wealth of wonderful pursuits and experiences available to us regardless of our sex, race, appearance or gender-identity. A lot of dialogue about valid issues of fairness and justice has deteriorated into a narcissism ��� characterized by feverish self-labeling into ever more recondite categories and sub-categories ��� which then shields itself from due criticism by waving the banner of Political Correctness.���

I imagine (but I do not know) that it is relatively easy to grow up as someone who is normal within their cultural context, and live your life as a reasonable match with the people around you. There���s not a lot of soul searching or angst in recognising that you have the same needs and inclinations as the people around you. So, for example to grow up in the UK white, straight, inclined to have children, with no learning disabilities or mental health problems, no major bodily health issues, getting a job, wanting a house and wanting all the things everyone else seems to want is, I imagine, relatively easy. Everything you see reflected back affirms your sense of who you are and tells you that who you are is ok. Not all of us have that. For those who do it may be hard to imagine what it feels like to be missing that basic and dependable affirmation of fitting in.

It wasn���t until some way into my teens that I even knew bisexuality existed as an idea. It���s a lonely thing to feel something you don���t have a word for, and as a consequence never to be able to speak of it or find someone who understands. This is the case for many people who seek labels, as far as I can make out. It���s not narcissism, but the need to have a common language that enables you to find someone who knows how you feel, understands what you mean, can swap notes with you about how to live life as the kind of person you are. How many bisexual Druid women are there? And it���s not just about big difference, and the differences you can���t choose. It is such a joy to know that I���m not the only Pagan Steampunk folk enthusiast out there. I���m not the only Druid reading comics. I���m not the only Pagan involved with politics. I���m not the only person walking the land as a spiritual practice. I am not alone. There are places I belong and people I make sense to.

There is a terrible, terrible loneliness that comes from not knowing another living soul to whom you make sense. At 12, I had crushes on guys and girls pretty evenly. I knew about straight and gay people. I could not tell if I should be in the straight camp or the lesbian camp and that was frightening. Not knowing who or what I was. I never talked about it, because I had no words. Somewhere later, 14 perhaps, the missing word entered my vocabulary and I knew who I was.

There is joy and relief in those most blessed words ���me too���. Whether we���re talking about pain, or the difficulty of touching people, or how we talk to the divine, humans measure their sanity by not being alone. To do something, think or feel something when no one else does is to be alienated and possibly crazy. When you can ask ���how does that work for you?��� ���how do you manage that?��� life is better, easier. Depressed people and anxious people, people of complicated heritage, tribes with wounds in common, tribes of aspirations shared… they all matter.

Without opening up those other stories of difference, without finding other ways of belonging and participating, those of us who do not belong in the mid ground can either accept being other, or can pretend to conform, but there���s precious little comfort to be had from either. It is not narcissism to need to understand exactly who you are, and it is the first step to figuring out who your people are and where on Earth you might possibly be able to find them.

Seasonal shopping, token gestures

There is a wheel of the year for consumers, moving us neatly from one shopping opportunity to another. Valentines, mother���s day, Easter, father���s day, summer beach things and barbeques, then Halloween and Christmas. On the given days you are to run out and buy the right things for the right people. In theory you are celebrating your family, and doing nice things for them. When you���re told to, and by buying stuff.

Little moments in the year when you can assuage your guilt over all the things you don���t do the rest of the time, perhaps. Fuelled by adverts that encourage you to feel a tad guilty and that reinforce the sense of what other people expect from you. An approach demanding token, commercial gestures, as though spending money on a few days of the year is what it takes to have a relationship. Of course if everyone is doing it ��� taking Mum out for Sunday lunch on a specific day, going out for a meal one night of the year… the pressure to be part of that is vast, and the sense of alienation and loss if you don���t, or can���t, or don���t have those people, or have such a poor relationship that it wouldn���t be viable… If we could measure the total of human shame, anxiety and distress caused by the commercial wheel of the year and weigh it against the happiness it causes, I do not think happiness would win.

If course if you���re dealing with someone who mostly doesn���t bother, then the making of effort a few times a year has a heightened value, and the failure to honour key dates seems like a bigger deal. The partner who doesn���t even remember your birthday and can���t manage a Valentines card and takes you for granted on all the other days as well, is really depressing to deal with.

And so we end up with these little, seasonal pockets of overload, when there can be too much. Patters of feast and famine in our exchanges, and the difficult sudden bursts of expense. The burden of Christmas can be terrible for people on low incomes.

I like gifting people with things when I can, and just because. I take more joy in small, ongoing exchanges of things ��� often far less commercial ��� loaning, sharing and passing on also being important parts of this process. Relationship is not something you buy for people on key dates. It is what we do for each other, together, from one day to the next. Every day.

The Easter Eggs have been in the shops for weeks already. Of course we all have to buy them, because it���s fun, paying through the nose for shaped chocolate to give to people who probably don���t need it. Especially children. We���re well under way with an obesity epidemic. What fun we can have stuffing their little faces with eggs! It���s all about the fun, and anyone (me, invariably) who questions the fun is of course a misery and a spoilsport. The problems could not possibly lie with the festivities of consuming, and anyone who dares to suggest it is just a bitter killjoy intent on making everyone else miserable. (I figured I���d get in early and pre-empt the usual comments, because there���s always one).

Druid Camp

At this early stage, much of Druid Camp is a mystery. I know I’m looking after a contemplative space. I know James Nichol will be talking about contemplative Druidry, and that there will be chanting – I’m hoping for an Enchanting the void session from J.J. Middleway, and I’ve got designs on doing some awen soaked anarchic music experimenting. Probably on the Wednesday night. I may well lead some meditation sessions – what and how much depending on who else wants to do what, and how much. Part of the joy of Druid Camp is that there’s a lot of flexibility, a lot of space to go with what happens and follow the inspiration. I’m really looking forward to it.

 

Breaking the Mother Goose Code

I did not really expect to be convinced by Jerri Studebaker���s book about finding signs of ancient Goddess worship in fairy tales. I���m just not the sort of person who is easily persuaded by much, and the sleight of hand history of Dr Anne Ross, and the chicanery of Robert Graves have left me resistant, to say the least. I���m very wary of circular logic, too. Go out looking for evidence of sacrifice and you���ll see it any time there���s a dead person. Go out looking for Goddess survivals and you can all too easily infer them into anything with breasts.

I ended up persuaded to a degree that surprised me.

What makes this book such an interesting and provocative read isn���t, I thought, the main thrust at all. It���s the details. The histories of where nursery stories have come from and how they���ve changed over time. The correlations between fairy stories and other major cultural shifts. I���d not thought before about the way in which many fairy stories are really at odds with Christian stories. I was, I confess, too busy being cross about the princesses. But now I have reasons to rethink those, as well.

The historical correlations Jeri Studebaker brings together in her book are intriguing. There are many unanswered mysteries here, that will leave you wondering. She has evidence for the political use of the fairy story as a way of making commentary, and the literary place for the fairy tale in Europe as well. That���s without getting into the issues of goose footed women, egg laying, and shamanism. Oh, and magic spells. And how we might envisage a non-patriarchal world. I love this book because the author is cautious about her claims, and keen to remind us when she is speculating and the limits of what the evidence can support. Speculation is so much more enjoyable when we hold our uncertainties with such honour, I think.

At this point, whether or not Mother Goose is really, historically and provably a goddess survival seems a lot less important than what we try to do with her stories, and other such stories, moving forward. It is in the nature of stories to change and evolve over time, being re-imagined to fit the new context. Stories that survive are often stories that can be adapted, or that give us powerful archetypes to work with. So the question to ask may really be, how do we want to work with those archetypes in the first place? What stories do we want to tell, and why? Do we understand the implications of the stories we are sharing?

For me, the book raised another question as well. (Bear in mind here that I am a maybeist, not a theist nor an atheist.) If religion is imagined into existence by people, as well it might be, then to connect with the religions of our ancestors we need their stories, or whatever fragments survive. Take away its stories and Christianity ceases to exist. If religion is based on the experience of living, then through shared experiences, we can come to similar conclusions as our ancestors did. If we reverence the things life depends on, then we can find our way to the importance of the mother, the goose, the eggs and all the other ideas about life fairy tales can carry. If the deities are independently real and active, then of course things that look like them will keep turning up in people���s stories and ideas, for all the same reasons that they turned up in the first place ��� because they are offered to us by the divine as inspiration.

I don���t know. I still don���t know. I���m fine with this, and I enjoy books like this one that are able to challenge my carefully chosen uncertainty.

More about the book here –��http://www.moon-books.net/books/break...

Politically Correct Pagan

All too often I see the term ���P.C.��� being denigrated as some kind of mealy mouthed nanny state intervention depriving us of the right to freely express ourselves. I would like to tell this story in a different way.

Once upon a time it was considered totally acceptable to pick on anyone weaker than you. Those who were different ��� racially, sexually, physically, emotionally, intellectually… you name it, anyone who dared to be different or had no choice about failing to conform to norms, was fair game. You could make jokes about them, you could casually undermine them with cruel names, you could insult, hurt and ridicule them with impunity. As the ���weirdoes��� (as non-PC folk like to call us) had no power, there was no fighting back. Pagans were afraid to admit to their faith. Protest, and you were no fun, a spoil sport, making a fuss. Some fifty percent of the population were also expected to smile sweetly and be good sports about routine sexual discrimination.

If you feel a warm glow of nostalgia thinking back to that, then Gods help you.

There were grass roots campaigners from all kinds of minority groups standing up to this, asking for fair, polite and equal treatment. Mostly it didn���t happen. Mostly it took legislation to stop people who felt entitled to abuse others from randomly spouting whatever inconsiderate, toxic rubbish spewed normally from their mouths. Said people have fought, and resented, and demanded to be allowed to freely express their opinions. Sometimes this is dressed up as their rights being violated, and I have encountered white, healthy, middle class, middle aged guys who truly think they get a rough deal and that one legged black lesbians get all the good stuff in life. This is because, in part, they���ve never knowingly met, much less talked to any one-legged people, black people or lesbians.

Now, let���s consider what an un-pc-opinion actually is. It���s a gross generalisation, rude in nature and targeted at either an individual or at groups, based on assumption. Being un-pc means claiming the right to insult women for being female. It���s about ridiculing the old for no longer looking like young people and mocking this disabled for the bodies they were born with. Racist un-pc statements are all about racial superiority. Most of it comes down to asserting your belief that you are better than the person you are kicking. The un-pc person gets a power trip out of kicking people with less power.

There are times when being specifically rude, or specifically offensive has its place. It has to be specific and it has to do something worthwhile. Most politicians urgently need offending into doing their jobs properly, as I see it. What great social problems do we challenge when we mock a disabled person, make jokes about ethnicity or poverty, or ridicule transgender folk? If there���s a real problem, we should be talking about it. This is not about real problems, this about how some people have a problem with other people not being like them. Nothing at all is happening here except one person causing pain to another so as to feel bigger. It���s not about freedom of speech because for it to be a freedom of speech issue, you have to have something to say. If no actual point is being made, if the whole point is to put someone down because you can… what excuse is there?

We have to challenge people who think that being powerful makes it ok to hurt those who aren���t. Using humour to puncture pomposity and challenge the powerful and hold the unreasonable to account is not the same as using humour to denigrate people with no power who have done nothing to offend you but be themselves.

I see a lot of Pagans online getting into ���telling it like it is��� which seems to mean being as rude and careless as they feel like. It���s not good enough. Freedom of speech is not an entitlement to inflict pain for the sheer hell of it. Freedom of speech does not entitle anyone to defend an imaginary right not to know how it is for other people and why what they���re saying might not be ok.

Zero Growth Economy

One of the beliefs holding modern economic and political life together is the idea that growth is good. It is through economic growth that we will create benefits and improve quality of life. It sounds plausible. However, it is worth asking what the process of eternal growth means in practice.

To have economic growth, people this year have to buy more than they did last year and next year they will need to buy even more. Where what is bought is largely experiential, this can be feasible. Mostly, growth is not about experience though. It is about the use and consumption of consumable goods. To have economic growth, we have to use ever more resources. We have finite resources in terms of land, minerals, clean water and food supplies. Time is also a finite resource and when you need to earn ever more money to buy ever more things, your time should be factored in as a consideration.

A few weeks ago I listened to MEP Molly Scott Cato explaining how the desire for profit above all else affects chickens in Europe. Chickens and chicken meat travel all over the EU, to wherever someone can make a bit of a profit from them. Never mind that fuel is a finite substance, and that chickens eaten close to where they are reared are much more sustainable, profit comes first. Never mind the road traffic from the lorries moving the chickens about, either. Molly also pointed out that eternal growth depends on obsolescence. If possessions were made to last, they would make less profit for producers. So by building in a cause of death, creating fractionally different ���new and improved��� versions, or changing the ���fashion���, that which could have lasted for years is thrown away.

Growth economy is all about waste. It���s about getting you to chuck out last year���s tired, old-fashioned things to by the new shiny things. Again. It���s about not being able to get replacement parts when things wear out. It���s about time wasted making things that will shortly wind up in landfill or driving chickens across Europe. How many jobs exist to create things people really don���t need, in order to make a profit so that the growth of the economy continues? How many valuable and needed things don���t happen, because we are only interested in making a profit?

You get to a zero growth economy by a number of means, and it���s about changing our ideas first and letting work and business choices flow from that change. First, imagine that quality of life is not solely about bank balance. How we spend our hours could be considered important. If we start to value life, the idea of using up someone���s precious time needlessly taxing unfortunate chickens over hundreds of miles starts to look like insanity. We change our attitude to work and stop assuming that productivity is a virtue. That moves us towards ditching jobs that only exist to move round things of no use and value. Instead we���d want to spend less time in the first place on effectively making things that last and have value, so that we can get on with using and enjoying them and living, rather than producing and consuming. Imagine if we were all working modest hours doing what was needed for everyone to be happy.

It may well be a fallacy that growth drives progress and delivers innovation. If we were more interested in improving the quality of our lives than in increasing the bank balances of shareholders, why wouldn���t we spend time innovating? We���d have more time and energy to spend on true progress if less time and energy went into creating rubbish.

Let���s face it, if hard work was really a blessing and a moral virtue, those with power would want as much of it as they could get, and there would be no desire to share that lovely thing with those who couldn���t force a claim on it. It���s money that we hold as a good and a thing not to share with others. If you start treating your time, and your life as more precious than money, everything changes.

People: what���s not to like?

Taken individually, I tend to like people. It probably helps that I look for things to like, and have passable empathy around the things that render people grumpy. I���ve been following School of Life, who do a good job of pointing out that even as adults we can be knocked around by all the same things that make babies miserable and uncooperative. Low blood sugar can bring any of us down. I���m endlessly interested by other people���s stories, ideas and beliefs and very easy about people not agreeing with me over a lot of things.

Most of us are works in progress. Many of us have old scars and places of fragility that make perfect sense of why we do as we do, but which make us odd for other people to deal with. Many of us are insecure, anxious, overtired, out of our depth, faking it in the desperate hope of one day making it. Some of us are in pain. Some of us have really big challenges that are not visible. These are all things to cut each other some slack for, to be patient with, and not to judge. It helps to talk, I find. If I know why a person is flailing, I���m less likely to take it personally and therefore more likely to be able to help. Or at least turn up with cake.

Just every now and then, someone turns up who I cannot find it in myself to like and often the things on the list combine, so that three or four are acting at once.

Fondness for creating drama in order to be the centre of attention, needlessly using up other people���s time and energy by making problems. Eventually the inability to be out of crisis becomes obvious.

Unwillingness to learn. By all means keep making new mistakes, but to refuse to change what manifestly doesn���t work and then expect sympathy, time, attention and energy from others and there are serious questions that need asking.

Entitlement. Imagine that you are entitled to my time, skills, energy, body, without any expression of gratitude or anything offered in exchange, or act like you are entitled to take from me without my consent, and after a while I will stop co-operating. Assume you are magic and special and that everything you want should happen the moment you announce it, and we are not going to be friends.

Cruelty. I have no time for people who enjoy hurting other people. (Consenting BDSM stuff aside, that���s different). Anyone who takes pleasure from making other living things miserable, I have no tolerance for whatsoever.

Dogma. Often this comes from a place of insecurity ��� not feeling confident the person needs everyone to agree with them. However, if the dogma pushing becomes aggressive or abusive, or demanding, then I will move away.

I���m also not very good at dealing with smug self-importance, rudeness, arrogance, and people who like to patronise me. People who wilfully mislead me had better have a stunningly good reason and I really don���t like being taken for granted. I also don���t like people trying to control me or hold power over me.

I believe in giving people second chances, because people mess up, it���s part of being human, and so often messing up has everything to do with not knowing what was needed. We do not all start with the same beliefs, assumptions and emotional needs, and we don���t all communicate in the same ways, and these things merit gentleness and trying again. Just now and then, someone crosses the lines so often, or so thoroughly, that I have to step away.

Matlock, a review

 

 

 

I struggle with even finding books I want to read. Often I go into bookshops and come out empty handed. I read blurbs, I read opening pages, the book doesn���t grab me. Often I end up re-reading books, or going back to older literature. So much modern writing affects me like a diet of junk food, leaving me feeling a tad sad and malnourished. Which is why it is so very important to talk about the good stuff, the books that don���t merely pass the time, but enrich it.

Matlock the Hare is illustrated and looks like a children���s book, but requires more advanced readers ��� over ten at a guess. There���s a great deal of plot and a lavishly constructed reality with a lot of new things to get your reading head around. There���s also a language, which you learn as you read. It is one of the most imaginative books I���ve had the pleasure of reading in quite some time. There���s warmth and depth to it, big ideas, a lot of questioning of human norms just beneath the surface, all wrapped up in a fantastical plot that pulls neither hares nor rabbits out of hats… the construction of the story is brilliant.

This is fiction for animists. Anything in this story might turn out to have a voice and intentions of its own. And yes, that does mean that we get some interesting issues around who is eating whom ��� I know as a child this would have freaked me out, but as an adult there are some uneasy moments that I really appreciated.

The art is lovely, and the illustrations in the paperback are delightful and add to the story. With hindsight I rather wish I���d gone after the full colour version instead.

One of the measures of a good novel, for me, is what happens when I���m not reading it. If I can put a book down and forget about it, then it isn���t doing much for me. If I think about the book when I���m not reading it, this is because it is gifting me in important ways. A book I have to think about has really caught my imagination and will lead me to ideas I���d not had before, and this is something I delight in. Two days after finishing Matlock Hare and the Treffelpugga Path I���m still thinking about it. I���m still wondering about the underlying story, back stories, motives, implications. One night I even dreamed in the language of the Dales, which is an unusual amount of a book getting into my head. Along the way, I have worried about characters, got angry over their mistreatment, and been relieved by their successes. Some of them I���m still pretty cross with.

I have book 2, and I���m going to pause and read other things before I get to it, I like to space these things out. I anticipate a book 3. So, is it the book for you? I hope so. If you liked Harry Potter but wanted it to be more, wanted the complex world of adult magic politics a bit more visible, wanted the magic a bit more magical and the writing a bit more lush… then yes, this is a book for you.

You can find out more about the book here – http://matlockthehare.com/

And there���s a guest post https://druidlife.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/matlock-the-hare/

 

 

Economics is more philosophy than maths

There���s a bold assertion to start a Monday morning with. It comes out of the difficulty of discussing alternative economic approaches with people who aren���t green. The argument always, always goes ���but where does the money come from? It doesn���t add up? You can hardly run a country if you can���t do basic maths���.

The current economic models defining how our financial world works can all be traced back to people. John Stuart Mill and John Keynes have always been the poster boys, but there are plenty of other people with ideas in the mix. From the outset there have been countering voices, speaking against our current economic models. This is theory, not science.

The mistake we are encouraged to make, is to believe that our current economic system isn���t theory, but truth. That it is a science based on numbers, and therefore beyond question, is an understanding that serves to keep the current approach in place. The numbers follow the philosophy, not the other way round. If you require alternative economic theories to be measured by the dominant one���s standards, of course they don���t hold up, because what you get is a numbers game, not a conversation about the underlying philosophy driving the numbers.

So, what is the underlying philosophy? It is about value. Money is a system for recognising value, and we understand value as that which can be bought and sold, and we understand profit as good. Starting from this position, growth is good, and more trade is good, more consumption is good. Our system tells us that only that which we can sell has a value. Health only has a value in terms of ability to work, or to sell health care. Beauty only has a value if someone will pay to look at it. Unpaid work has no value, eco systems are assumed to have no value. The future has no value, your unborn descendents have no value and your quality of life has no value. It is possible to value things you cannot buy and sell. We need to reclaim that.

If your system is only interested in how to move money around, it does not even properly think about resources. It���s a very short term growth economy that we have ��� as we run out of resources, there���s no long term thinking about how to be viable in the future.

Our system treats work as a moral virtue for those who are poor, and as unnecessary for those who are rich. Anyone who is poor and unwilling to work is lazy and stupid. Anyone who is rich and unwilling to work is virtuous and clever ��� we are not considering the value of the work to the society in this, we are assuming money to be inherently good and having it to mean something. Thus a person who has never done anything useful because their parents are rich and they don���t need to, is loved, and a person who has never done anything useful because they belong to a culture of low aspiration, is hated. This is about valuing and belief, not about maths, because either way there���s a person who does no useful work, but attitudes to it are radically different.

If you start to question what value means, you need a totally different conversation about how economics might work. If you want to factor in your grandchildren (or someone else���s) your happiness, the condition of the oceans and the wellbeing of bees, you need a whole other philosophy. No one is buying or selling the wellbeing of bees, people are buying and selling the chemicals that kill them. This creates an inevitable bias if all you value is that which can be bought and sold.

For anyone interested in a grass roots approach, I���ve been wondering about how we act in our own lives to challenge this. My personal answer is that some of the best things I do are not and will never be for sale, and I watch myself for any evidence that I am letting the price tag influence my value judgements.