Nimue Brown's Blog, page 362

Not so magically psychic

I���m not psychic. I get flashes of insight, and I apply a lot of reasoned thinking to trying to work out where everything is going and what might be needed ahead of time. I miss things, I fail to work things out and I make mistakes, because I am not magically all knowing. That should be fine, and straightforward, but it isn���t.

I���ve spent a lot of time in situations where I was required to magically know ahead of time exactly what would be wanted. Told off for things I didn���t do for other people that I had no reasonable way of knowing were required. This is because I have been through some profoundly psychologically abusive stuff. If you ask a person to magically know things you don���t tell them and then punish them for not being psychic enough, you will harm them. Demanding a magical reality is not always good for people.

For me, the damage manifests as obsessive over thinking as I try to work out what is wanted, based on far too little information. I panic about getting things right in contexts where I couldn���t possibly hope to know what the right thing would be. No matter how well I think of a person, I still go through rounds of fear that my failing to magically know will lead to anger and rejection.

I beat myself up over poor relationship choices, and for getting into situations with people who hurt me and messed me about. In my head, that was clearly all my fault because, magically, I should have known what they were like. I should have used my non-existent psychic powers to see through the lies and deliberate deceptions. That they were able to hurt me is my fault for not protecting myself. This week it has occurred to me that here we have another consequence of being treated like I should magically know everything. How could I know that a sweet smile and an offer of friendship masked a cold heart that just wanted to use me? Or the weird and frustrating weeks when the things I was being asked to do were not the things that were needed, nor even the things that were wanted. There have been many such.

I am willing to see the best in people, and I���ve managed to keep doing that to some degree despite my history. That���s not a trait I plan to let go of. However, I can give up the story that I am supposed to magically know everything. I can stop trying to be that ��� most especially for anyone who asks it of me. I can become a bit more wary of people who expect me to magically know things. I can recognise that the idea that I should have magically known who was kind and who was manipulative without really testing anything, is just a way of making me responsible for what other people do. I may have mistaken innocence for complicity, and blamed myself for enabling people to hurt me. Perhaps I wasn���t so very complicit, just open hearted and well meaning.

I am not psychic. I do not magically know what you want or need, but if you���re in my life, I���ll be doing my best to figure that out because it���s important to me. I want to know what I can usefully give. It works a lot better, I realise, when people tell me what they want, what they would like, what would be good. On the whole I am much better at magically getting things done than ever I am at knowing what to magically do.

Authentic Pagan, sometimes howling

So there is this brave, brilliant and much wounded lady who I have known for some time. Life has not treated her kindly recently. I���ve sat with her and watched her fight to suppress feelings. Sometimes there are flashes of pain and rage, and the glorious manic pixie she used to be before she stopped doing those things. This is hard for me, because I know a bit about how this works. Five or six years ago, I probably looked like that too. I was forcing control on an unruly body in the hopes of remaining tolerable and acceptable.

I am a creature of intensity and my natural condition ���swings from high to deep, extremes of sweet and sour��� as James so eloquently put it. (They could have written ���sit down��� for me). Yesterday was all about the slightly dangerous giggling. I was high on nearly finishing the draft of a novel, and with a lot of exciting things going on. I���ve had a lot of lows in the last week, and the week before there was full on howling. Such is my nature. The things that matter to me are keenly felt. I live a vast and technicoloured emotional spectrum where the blacks are very black indeed and the bright stuff burns people. Not always just me.

I have tried being normal. To tone myself down, I have to crush all the things that also give me energy, drive, and inspiration. I���ve tried living there, it���s a sort of death. I frequently wander about with a mute button on, so as to be more bearable. People who find me too much are depressing. People who find me ridiculous, really aren���t a bonus (those who find themselves ridiculous sit down next to me). I find it exhausting being around people when I have to mute, so I keep to a minimum time spent in spaces where it isn���t appropriate to be who I am. It isn���t easy to judge, especially if I���m in pain, so I tend to err on the side of caution, steeping away and muting in order to survive.

I choose this path. I choose it very deliberately. I do not want the calm that comes from not feeling anything much. I���ve tried being numb, and dead and convenient, and it does not agree with me. The best that I am and the worst that I am, the most difficult and the most alive are all the same things. Fire in my head, howling at the moon, giggling with the little whirlwinds, falling in love with landscapes and people and stories and surprised deer. I choose a path that invites ecstasy and agony. I choose to be heartbroken. I choose to feel so much that it threatens to break me apart.

If I do not feel my way through this life, if I do not let it move me, inspire me, hurt me to the core of my being, knock me down, bowl me over, set me on fire… I am not me, and I am not living. I do not want to transcend this life. I do not want to be safe or saved from an excess of feeling.

Although no doubt sometimes it will also be messy and difficult, I will hold that space for being real and alive for anyone who wants to bring me their own howling, living self. I won���t always get it right, because when feelings are running high and wild, there is more to get wrong. Equally, if you can look at all this and say yes to it, then I will gift you as best I am able with all the magic and lunatic creativity I can manage when I feel able to be myself.

Meeting Elen Sentier

The interwebs are a strange country, where there are a great many people. I know what people choose to share with me, and there are many internet people I am very fond of. However, there is a whole different kind of knowing that comes from being with someone in person. Sometimes, tone of voice, and body language can make all the difference. Some people in person turn out to be exactly as you anticipated from their online self. Some of us are more honest than others.

I think, casting my mind back, that I first ran into Elen Sentier on facebook. The first exchange we had that left a lasting impression was around the release of her Celtic Chakras book. Now, I don���t do chakras, and was very clear about this, but I read the book, and found her very readable. I still don���t do chakras. Our paths are so different in some regards that her non-fiction work makes very little emotional sense to me. Her fiction I really like.

Yesterday we sat in a cafe and drank tea, talked about Steampunk, falconry, why we don���t like scripts in ritual and how dislocated many modern urban folk are from the natural world. We talked about non-dogmatic teaching methods and the importance of finding your own path. It was all very easy, as though we had been in the habit of drinking tea and talking about the work we do for decades, not minutes.

I don���t need anyone else to see the world exactly as I do, or follow the path that I follow. It can be delightful to walk beside someone for a while, but it certainly isn���t necessary. So long as the person I���m talking to is equally relaxed about me not seeing things their way, all of the differences of opinion cease to be reasons for conflict and become points of interest. There���s a lot to be learned from talking to someone who sees things differently but doesn���t need to convert you.

We talked about books, too ��� of course! There are a lot of people I have connected with through their books. Moon Books, which publishes both my work and Elen���s, has a vast array of Pagan authors. I read as much as I can, most of it isn���t close to my path, but there is always some scope for finding inspiration. I like knowing what other people are exploring and are interested in. It stops me getting any silly ���one true way��� ideas for a start. We agreed that, however alien we find the content of other people���s books sometimes, the Moon Books writers, for the greater part, clearly have their hearts in the right places. (I don���t know all of them, so, no absolute claims here).

Tea with Elen Sentier confirmed a lot of that impression for me. People who meet open heartedly and as equals, with no desire to convert or compel each other can have incredibly valuable exchanges, without needing much common ground at all.

Spoons, carpets, creativity and critics

There are only so many hours in a day, and as person who struggles with energy issues, there are only so many of those hours I can spend working. We all have our limits. How we deploy our time is not just a daily consideration, it is the means by which we craft our lives. What is life but the sum of each small part that makes up a day?

What time do we give to really engaging with other people? How much time do we have for our spiritual lives, for the natural world, for proper rest and sufficient exercise? What time are we lovingly pouring into food prep, study, ritual, prayer, writing, dreaming, creating? What duties do we have to family and workplace?

As I do not have an infinite supply of spoons (which have become a term for talking about energy levels amongst people who struggle with energy) I cannot do all the things. Some days I can���t do much at all, because I hurt too much. I make my life choices based on how I can get most benefit out of my time and energy, for myself, the causes I support and the people who have a use for what I do. Art is time consuming. If Tom���s work requires ten or twelve hours a day at the board ��� and sometimes it does ��� then those few remaining hours have to cover down time, inspiration, exercise and social life if he is to stay at all sane.

This leads me to the carpets. It may shock you to hear that in my flat, the floors and carpets are not always perfectly clean. Quite often there���s a muddle in the living room created by whatever I���m working on ��� a rag rug takes up a lot of room when in progress. Currently I���m turning strips from Wool Against Weapons into blankets. They occupy a lot of the floor because there is no other space for them to be in. I think there is more gain to the world from this than from daily cleaning. I also don���t write as much or as well without the mental spaces craft creates for me.

Some visitors handle this better than others. If we are expecting people, we will make sure the place is functional, I may even clean something important, or Tom will (the bathroom, usually). I���ll be more likely to make a cake than render the floor perfect, because I think the cake has a greater value. My other half is more likely to run out for biscuits, and cake, than to hoover. This is how we roll.

People who understand how we live and why, turn up into the cheerful chaos and enjoy being in the flow of creativity. That���s always lovely. One of us may be working. There may be wool all over the place, but the recognition that there is love, and good things being made, changes this into a comfortable sharing. People who ���get it��� seem able to enjoy the space we have, chaotic though it is. Not in spite of how we are, but because of it.

I find it tough dealing with people who are critical. People for whom a recently cleaned floor with no bits of plant that followed us in from the last walk, is more important than how much book got written today. Putting the carpet before the creativity raises barriers. People who judge the dust on the shelves, not the songs we���ve been singing, from my point of view, miss out on the best we have to offer for the sake of the things we aren���t so good at. A life lived is messy, and frequently sheds things on the carpet.

Who does the Druid serve?

The call to service is a significant part of the Druid path. Who or what a Druid may serve is a much more personal question. Broadly speaking, land, tribe, gods, nature, ancestors, tradition, spirit and awen would be likely candidates, either in combination or focusing on just the one. How that manifests can be incredibly diverse ��� serving the land could mean running an organic community allotment. It could mean getting into politics, becoming an activist, planting trees or giving up your car, to suggest a few obvious routes.

Service has to be needed. It���s all too easy to use the idea of service to further our own goals or fuel self-importance. That in itself isn���t entirely a problem ��� Druidry is not a path of self effacing modesty after all, but if your Druidry gives you a boost in some way, it must also genuinely serve someone else to count as service. The bard as archetype offers a great example here. To be on stage, basking in the adoration of an audience is to get personal benefit from what you do. However, if the audience is inspired and uplifted, if their souls are touched and their hearts healed by what the bard offers, then the bard is serving their community, tradition and the awen and likely a few other things as well.

Service cannot be a flow in one direction only. If you come to give, then something has to nurture you, or you end up drained and defeated, or going mad in other ways. Paths of martyrdom offer their own interesting temptations, and people who are most ostentatiously self-sacrificing can be on the most outrageous of ego trips. Where service is held in a more balanced way, it works better and everyone stays sane.

It is important to look not only at how we serve, but how we are served, and to make sure gratitude flows back where it is needed. The bard on the stage owes greatly to the event organiser, the sound person, the person who taught them to play, the people, stories and landscapes that inspire them. Inspiration, service and gratitude, offering back from what was made, keeps all participants nourished and feeling valued. It keeps people grounded, and also able to give. It means that people whose work is all background get to feel part of the exciting bits. It���s when we start imagining that we are separate and alone, that our service flows purely from us, and people ought to be grateful that a Druid courts problems.

I would, quite simply, be lost without the people who inspire me from day to day. I would be lost without the people who value my work and come back to tell me this so that I understand what I���m doing and why. (Iva broke my heart and fed the fire in my head with this beautiful review of my book, recently) I need the people who give me opportunities to get on stages, sing, run workshops, write books. I need the people who read what I write and ask for more songs. I need the people who get up and do things such that I can go and be in the audience. I need the people who write books and tell stories. And without the people who taught me, this would all be a moot point anyway.

Every act of creativity exists in a context, there are always other hands that you can���t see, making things possible. Where those flows of inspiration are honoured, where love and appreciation flow along the same lines, life is better, and there is more good stuff.

Stories about songs

I���m not much of a songwriter. Inspiration seldom comes to me in that shape, and I tend to be too wordy ��� it���s a very specific skill writing lyrics, and I haven���t got it. Nor am I a natural tune writer. However, I���ve sung and played music since childhood, and this means I spend most of my time with other people���s work. Picking material is a major process for anyone in my situation. So, what to pick, and how? These questions don���t have to be tackled in order.

I tend to look at traditional folk music, rock and pop for my source material. A song therefore has to work stripped down. It needs enough melody to work with me signing it, and must not depend on complex multi-instrument arrangement. Many pop songs, deprived of their backing, sound like nothing at all, so for me the first measure of a song is whether I can sing it unaccompanied.

Question two is, does it make sense if I sing it? Is it personal to the singer ��� again often an issue with pop ��� or is there something universal here that makes sense. Is there a story, or a message, a mood or a concept that I can express? Do I like, value, engage with those things such that it makes sense for me to sing them?

I then have to ask if I have the vocal range, technical skill and playing ability to do the song justice. I might well not know until I try. I did, once, sing the entirety of Meatloaf���s ���Bat out of hell��� unaccompanied in a folk club. Mostly for giggles. It���s surprising what can be got away with. I know the entire song because it is such an excellent vocal workout, I use it for exercise.

There will be other factors ��� how the song makes personal sense to me. Who wrote it. Who I first heard singing it, and where that was. Every song acquires a story about who I���ve sung it with and why. There���s also an arranging process of figuring out how to make it mine. There is a difference between ���doing covers��� and singing someone else���s song. Here are three I���ve recently put on my youtube channel.

Hazard, by Richard Marx was around in my teens. The original sounded like a pop song, but it strips back to something that���s pure folk ��� a strong narrative with much of the plot implied but not present, a strong melody, powerful emotions. That ticks all the boxes for me. It was written for a guy to sing. I like the way that my singing it with a couple of minor word changes turns it into a different story. I���m not usually at all visible in my bisexuality, music is one of the places that gets expressed.

Elation, a Levellers album track. This was a struggle to learn because the original isn���t in a key I can sing in. It���s goddessy, and there are so many people it needs singing to, who are heart-sore and need hope. Every time I sing it now, there is also a pang of missing the chaps I used to sing it with, and hearing where they are not. This arrangement always sounds a bit thin to me, because I know what it���s missing. Some losses we just have to carry.

Sit Down was at number 2 in the charts when I was 14 and Chesney Hawkes was at number 1. And although I adored young Mr Hawkes, this was always the better song. I���ve only been able to sing it since acquiring the bouzouki ��� it just doesn���t work for me unaccompanied. everything this song says has always been true of me, it is how I feel, it is the song I would have written if I could. I have yet to sing it in person with all the people I most want to sing it to, but I know who they are and they will almost all be at Druid Camp.

If you sing something frequently, it becomes part of your life, and part of who you are. It���s worth choosing carefully.

How to empathise with imaginary people

Tom and I are co-creators on a graphic novel series. Volume three has just launched in webcomic form over at www.hopelessmaine.com . For various reasons I���d not looked at it much in the year since Tom finished the art. It came as a bit of a surprise to realise how many real people and settings had crept into this one. The first chapter features the church from Purton, Gloucestershire, fellow comics creator Maxwell Vex, and Canadian Steampunk icon Lee Ann Farruga, more real people will be along later.

It is generally held wisdom with comics that the more realistic the people are, the harder it is to empathise with them. Smiley emoticon faces have the power to be anyone, and this can be a great aid to getting people into the story. Cartoons function in a totally different way to realistic representations, in terms of how they affect the mind of the viewer. From a creative perspective, this raises some really interesting questions about whether we want people getting inside or standing outside the characters.

Alongside that is the issue that the less detailed and individual the faces are, the harder it is to have something visually gorgeous going on. Elegance can be had, but not sumptuousness. You can���t have nuances of emotion in smiley emoticon faces either. The words have to do more of the work.

Hopeless is not a story full of ���everyman��� characters where the idea is that the reader can slot their own life into the gaps. Although that said, a surprising number of people have cheerfully imagined themselves into islander roles, which is part of why more of the people we know are getting into the books. We know this from www.hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com and from reader responses. Despite the specific and individual nature of characters, people can get into this. I have theories of course. I always have theories…

Everyman faces work for simple storytelling. They work for uncomplex emotions. If you want a mix of emotions, you need more face with which to express it. You need eyes that can reshape and lips that can move, and a body shape that can express feelings. It isn���t possibly to convey all of the things human bodies and faces can convey without an image able to hold more of those details in the first place.

I think it���s also a consideration that empathy is not transference. You can feel with a person without feeling that you *are* them. I know that many people come to all manner of things just looking for affirming reflections of themselves, but not everyone does. Some people are happy to look outwards, to consider unfamiliar emotions and ideas, to put themselves in shoes that are not their own. If your capacity for empathy depends on being able to see yourself in whoever you���re looking at, then simpler cartooning is your friend. If what inspires you to empathy is seeing someone else���s humanity, then perhaps more involved art isn���t going to alienate you from the story.

Accepting Nature���s Limits

The idea that we should be able to triumph over nature, transcend its limits and move beyond it informs how people think about technology and spirituality alike. For me, it���s also become a very personal issue. So I���m going to talk about the personal, and let the implications for everything else just hang in the ether.

I was born with my feet pressed back against my shins and walking did not come easily as a consequence. For as long as I can remember, I have had to fight my body to get it to do things others find easy. In my teens I started encountering bouts of really debilitating fatigue. Unable to persuade my doctor to take me seriously, I defaulted to the thing I knew how to do, and I started fighting. I learned how to push through, how to keep moving when it felt like my bones had been lined with lead, how to use will power to overcome exhaustion. I honed my will, it was the one weapon I had against this endless fight with my body.

In my twenties, the pain and stiffness started. At first I ignored it, and as it grew steadily worse, I fought it.�� I got used to cycles of burnout, illness and depression. Last year, in a final, heroic effort, I pushed myself so hard that I ended up crying all the time and unable to do anything much. I have found the limits of will, and by midwinter, I knew I had to make some radical changes.

I stopped pushing. I started to look for signs of impending exhaustion and escalating pain before I hit points of dysfunction. I started rationing out my time and energy, looking hard at my priorities and saying no to things that aren���t viable. I mostly say no to late nights, aside from this week when I chose to say yes, twice, and am suffering the consequences. But that���s ok because I���ve budgeted this weekend to be gentler, with more rest and downtime so that I can get over it. If I make good choices, I have more room to say ���yes��� than I did before. If I mostly work within my limits, there is more room, and more scope for pushing out now and then when something matters. If I���m always up to the edge, there���s nowhere to go if something really good or important comes along.

If I co-operate with my body and don���t spend all my time pushing through pain and exhaustion, I am less vulnerable to depression and anxiety. Not immune, but more resilient, and the habit of saying ���no��� allows me to make more room around the things I find hard, so that they take less of a toll. There���s a lot I want to do this year, but I���m only going to manage it if I pace myself. I have to balance the things my body needs. I have to start looking at what my body needs in terms of rest and exercise, sleep, and the right food. I have also come to recognise a profound need for affection and inspiration. Hugs and novels are good.

Things are discernibly easier now that I���ve stopped fighting and am trying to work with what I���ve got. It obliges me to ask why I fought so long and so hard in the first place. I have had to question all the beliefs I carry about what I should be able to do, and the beliefs I have around entitlement, or the absence thereof. For most of my life, one of my mantras has been ���it���s only pain, it doesn���t matter��� which allows me to do to myself things I would never consider it ok to do to anyone else, for the sake of keeping going, being useful, getting things done.

I think I was waiting for someone to come along and say ���it���s ok, you���ve done enough, you���re allowed to ease up now.��� It took me until the winter of my thirty seventh year to work out that the only person who could or would do that effectively, was going to be me.

Difficult People

It���s early days, we���re testing the waters and don���t know each other well but there are all kinds of possibilities around working together. ���I���m difficult������ he admits across a cafe table. In the seconds that follow I do not fall about laughing, whoop with delight, or burst into tears, although it could have gone in any of those directions had I not clamped down rapidly. It���s funny, and wonderful, and a bit heartbreaking, to hear something like that and to respond, as much from habit as anything else, by hiding all the difficult bits. Because, you see, I am difficult, and I like the company of difficult people.

I don���t like mean people, or sadists, or divas especially, and all of those things could be classed as ���difficult��� ��� although ���pains��� would be closer for my money. The attention seeking, self important folk I can do without, alongside the destructive and the toxic. Genuinely difficult people are difficult for reasons, and those reasons often have everything to do with caring. The person who doesn���t care about much can be shrugged off, no matter how annoying they try to be. They have no stamina, because nothing much is motivating them. Their challenges are surface irritations that have no power to change your life or break your heart. People who care are a whole other order of difficult.

A person with passions, standards, obsessions, visions… they don���t turn into something tidy and biddable. With that kind of difficult person, you either take them as they are, or you walk away. Try to make them dull and straightforward and (in my experience) either they run away, suffer a lot, or break. These are not good outcomes.

I like the kind of difficult people who care about things. The ones who will sit up all night because they can���t stop now and it has to be done and the muse is with them. The ones who go a bit mad when things aren���t working, who wrestle despair and agonise over meaning and how best to do things. The difficult people who ask the questions that lead to more questions, and that offer no easy solutions. The ones who won���t sit down and won���t shut up because dammit, this stuff is important and people need to know.

That kind of difficult, I am always delighted to encounter.

Courage, delusion and the Prince of Fools

Courage was considered a virtue by the heroic cultures many modern Pagans look back to for inspiration. However, once you start prodding it in earnest, courage turns out to be a rather complicated thing.

I���ve spent the last few days reading Mark Lawrence���s novel ���Prince of Fools���. Book one of a dark fantasy trilogy, running in parallel time-wise with his Thorns trilogy. I really like Mark as an author. He can do plot and action, he balances light and dark superbly so you���re always in your toes, but sometimes giggling, his craftsmanship with words is superb, and there are layers. Start digging around in what holds the plot together, and there are weighty concepts about what it means to be human. These are qualities I very much appreciate in a book. He���s also a lovely person.

After some deliberation, I feel that the key themes in Prince of Fools, for me were cowardice/courage and self-delusion. The interplay between the two in the narrative is also fascinating. The first person narrator ���hero��� self-identifies as a coward. Jalan prefers running away to fighting and getting out of things tends to appeal to him more than sorting them out or facing responsibility. Much of this is held together by a total refusal to think too much about anything ��� a form of protective self-deluding there, which keeps him from the consequences of what he does, and does not do. His companion, Snorri, seems brave, he���s certainly driven, but there is no small amount of refusing to think making that apparent bravery possible, too.

The theory that Mark puts forward, through Jalan, is that everyone is afraid. Everyone is in the business of running away, it���s just a case of what you fear most. The person who fears dishonour more than death will run towards a fight, not away from it, quite simply. They may be no less afraid, it���s just a different fear. I note for myself that I can be careless of my own pain and physical damage, but fear causing discomfort ��� even minor emotional discomfort ��� to others. Which has interesting influences on my choices.

Without fear in the mix, it���s very hard to call anything brave. It may just be stupid, unimaginative, misguided. To be brave, you have to know what there is to be afraid of. It���s an interesting question as to whether, having identified the biggest fear, you can then bravely run away from it towards something that also offers challenges. I am inclined to think that the naming and owning of the fear might well be the bravest part of the whole process. To know what frightens you most is to know yourself, and to be honest about your fear is to be more authentic.

However, Mark doesn���t leave it there, because the theme of not being honest with yourself about fear runs through the book. It takes a certain amount of dishonesty to keep going when the things to be afraid of are big enough to easily break you. It takes a certain kind of deliberate forgetting and denying to stay sane in the face of horror and trauma. ��A person with PTSD needs to forget ��� because it is the remembering that takes you apart. What do we lay down of past and self in order to face the future? What lies do we have to tell ourselves in order to be able to act? When failure seems inevitable, the heroic path may depend entirely on your ability to believe otherwise. To die for a cause is to be able to believe it���s worth it right up until the last breath, despite all evidence to the contrary.

We tend to hold honesty as a virtue, but it is also worth considering what the little lies and bigger ones we tell ourselves allow us to do, for well or woe.

(More about the book here –��https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...)