Nimue Brown's Blog, page 363

A gathering of tribes

It���s interesting to think about where we fit and belong, the communities we call home and the relationships we have with them. I started pondering this a couple of days ago, and making notes, and the scale of it surprised me.

I have my blood family and the people I share history with ��� people who have lived in the same places, been through the same schools.

There���s the folk community ��� full of family ties and personal history. People I have played music with, people whose songs I sing, people I listen to. Also there���s the tribe that gathers for Genevieve Tudor���s folk program, and that���s an important weekly moment of belonging. I hope to put dancing back on that list.

I identify with the Pagan community, and with Druidry, and within that I belong a whole host of places ��� OBOD, The Druid Network, Druid Camp, Contemplative Druidry, Auroch grove, and through the bard side, it overlaps with the folk, and through my writing with the next lot…

Authors, book people, bloggers, readers, Moon Books, JHP fiction, other publishers. People I read and admire, storytellers, the local writing community and through those connections I branch out into…

Wider creative connections with artists, musicians, local creative folk, organisers of things, and I branch out into Steampunk, Comics, and geekery in general.

My Paganism also directs me to green activism, so that���s The Green Party, which is part of my local tribe, as is my engaging a bit with the Transition Network and other local, green, sustainable alternative outfits. People I know because they are local.

Eventually, I also managed to recognise that there are people who are in my life simply because they like what I do. I have a number of important connections based entirely on that.

Inevitably it���s the people who fit in more than one of those circles that I interact with most, because time is also a factor in all of this, and the more I share, the more time I tend to spend with someone. There are people I see once a year, or less, and there are people I pine for if I have to go more than a week, and I can manage an afternoon without Tom, but that���s my limit.

Of those people who I interact with in numerous ways, there are a few with whom I share creativity ��� either working together, or working alongside, swapping ideas and inspiration. This is a small tribe, and these relationships I pay a lot of attention to. They are the most defining ones in my life. It���s not any kind of coincidence that I married my artist… I am most emotionally invested in people with whom I can share creativity.

Beyond that, and overlapping with wider circles in all kinds of ways, is the tiny tribe I walk with. My most essential tribe.

Moon Books Family

Authoring can be a very lonely business. For me, it���s the part of the experience I have most trouble with. I prefer to work with people around ��� if I can get the right people who are companionable without being too demanding. Being married to an artist works well for me in this regard. I���m also very dependent on wider creative networks and contact with other creative people. It helps me keep my frustrations and victories in perspective, and means there are people around who know perfectly well how it goes. How hard it is to make any kind of living from your work being the major issue there. People who don���t do it tend to assume that writing, art etc are easy ways to make a lot of cash. Often they are hard ways to barely break even.

To be any kind of viable, a person has to get out there and actively sell their work. This is a nightmare for me. For one, by the time a book comes out, I���m working on something else, I���ve half forgotten or come to dislike the older one. I feel uncomfortable drawing attention to what I���ve done ��� I was raised to understand that being attention seeking was a major social failing, so leaping about going ���I made this book and it���s great and you should all buy it��� does not come easily, if at all.

In a creative family, this is much less of an issue. I can happily tell you about artists I love, books I enjoyed, films I was blown away by, and so forth. That���s not just easy, that���s a joy. Over at Moon Books, it���s brought some really interesting things into my life. Moon Books publishes a lot of Pagan titles (mine included). Having got to know many of the authors, I can say many of them are just not the people to go blowing their own trumpets. A couple are more cheerfully out there, but as is often the case with authors, there are a lot of shy introverts for whom it is a world of pain to have to try and draw attention to their own work. So let me take a moment and point you that way. There���s lots of good stuff.

Over recent years, we���ve formed a collective habit of reading each other���s work. This is great in so many ways. It means less isolation. Engaging with other people���s ideas and world views stops a person from disappearing up their own bottom in a puff of self importance (always a risk for authors). The sharing of knowledge is good. Seeing what others are working on, and how they handle issues, is good. Spiritual experience is a tough thing to write about ��� so personal and ephemeral in nature ��� swapping notes about how to express it helps us build a viable common language.

Thanks to Moon Books, I���ve read a great deal that isn���t Druidry in the last few years. I���ve read perspectives that make no emotional sense to me. I���ve read about paths I wouldn���t follow and I���ve seen teaching approaches I wouldn���t use. I���ve also seen a lot that has influenced me and given me things to explore and play with. I am a fuller, richer, more open minded person as a consequence. I have learned that I do not need to agree with a person���s worldview to respect it and to be enriched by encountering it. I���ve become very relaxed about reading things that are not my path at all, and have found that a book can do a lot for me without being at all about what I do or who I am. It���s so easy to go into other people���s books seeking mirrors of ourselves, and I���ve certainly done that in the past. This way is more interesting.

Reading is a much more rewarding experience when you don���t need to like or agree in order to find value. There are, I have learned, no books that were written just to help me on my path. No books that are perfectly and wholly what I need. No book will tell me how to make my journey. That helps me appreciate that no book I write will be fully those things for anyone else, either.

Seeking Goddess

I went into the forest, searching

For elegant sylphs, beautiful goddesses

Of familiar, pristine grace.

 

I found dense briars, tangling,

Thorny thickets, mud slick trails

To badger sets and nowhere,

Trampling predecessors vanished.

Walking beneath ancient boughs

Amongst bulging bowls, mighty trunks.

Deer trods and flood paths,

Forgotten streams, deep banks

No gilded Goddess called to me

No angel led the way,

No answers came.

 

I waded the wood mud

���Till it crusted my skin,

Tore that skin bloody in brambles,

Tangled leaves into hair knots,

Grew a thick pelt against winter.

Walked my feet into leather

Leather into hoof and horn.

Ribbonned clothes into feathers

Found claws for fingertips.

I made love with the trees

And grew sharp tusks to root

Alongside the boar. I slept with lynx

Rolled in deer musk, licked blood

From fresh snow, sucked berries

And learned the raven���s song.

 

I grew ivy from my temples

Birds in my hair, roosting

Pouches of flesh to hold apples.

Found my own milk flow

And those who would feed.

Gave birth to wild bee swarms,

Wrote letters to the moon, in smoke.

 

Became bristle, blood, belligerence.

Became mud hunger desire.

Became wood and wasteland,

Bleak moor and mountain

Left trails to lead you astray

Waiting for you to follow.

 

Come you for a taste of leafmould

And tusk sharp wild woman kisses.

Death by autobiography

Most of us are in a constant process of turning life into stories. In trying to make sense of experiences, we attach meanings, and sometimes impose narrative shapes on our lives. This can be really helpful, bringing coherence, a sense of direction and an understanding of who we are and what we���re all about. Sometimes those stories can be hard to carry.

I have a story about my body. It���s an old story, and I know how I got it, although that hasn���t made it go away. I���ve tested it on the man I���m married to, who finds it silly and clearly doesn���t fit with it, and still it doesn���t go away. Once allowed to take root, autobiographical stories can be pernicious things and bloody difficult to weed out.

The story goes like this: My body is hideous and repellent. It is therefore reasonable to assume that people will respond with anything from dismay to full on horror in any situation where they have to deal with my body. I am painfully self conscious about swimming, and I wear guys trunks and a top these days because of the horror of my midriff to upper thigh region. I struggle with photographs. Some days, just being looked at makes me uneasy. I expect to be judged, and found wanting. I���m passably symmetrical with no extra appendages, and there is no simple physical aspect I can point at to explain why I expect my body to be an affront. There are stories feeding on stories here.

One of the consequences of this is that I find it very difficult to seek affection. Imposing my body on someone else feels like an invasion. I tend to be very passive. It doesn���t help that in recent years I���ve developed alongside this a lot of anxiety issues around feeling safe being touched.

Making physical contact with another person is a profoundly affirming action. It���s a very tangible expression of acceptance, and of finding the other person good enough. I lug my weighty autobiographical story into every situation of exchange, wearing it on my back like a shell. If someone compliments me, I wonder if they are actually teasing me and I���m being slow to get the joke. I was teased a lot about my appearance as a child. I grew up with members of my own family calling me ���funny looking��� so that story comes along for the ride, too. The boyfriend who was embarrassed by my tattoos, the ex who told me I had no idea how to move like a woman… stories upon stories.

Not only do we carry stories about with us, but we help other people create theirs. Small, throwaway comments, made carelessly or from casual spite can turn into another person���s reality. When I look into a mirror (which I don’t do any more often than I have to) all I see are the stories, and none of those have ever been pretty.

Sacred submission

Deity orientated religions often talk about submission to the divine, or the will of the divine as being the goal of spiritual practice. Religious activities are designed to attune the believer, and enable them to submit to the will of their deity. Paganism isn���t always so submission orientated, many prefer to stand before their gods, but we have these threads too.

Sacred submission isn���t an event. It���s not something you do once and then are all sorted. Submission to deity, to a belief system, to a way of living, is a day to day, moment to moment sort of process involving every choice and action in a person���s life. It is the ongoing nature of it that makes it so powerful; the constant, conscious submission of personal desires to a higher goal. I don���t follow that path, but I can entirely respect it.

Submission is a gift. It is a gift we may offer to deity, or to a partner, or to a cause. The problems start when the flow is in the other direction. Submission should be an act of gifting from one who submits, not forced on them by someone with more power. If you are making someone act in accordance with your religious rules, or making them perform acts that you want, in no way are they submitting. They may be coerced into going along, but this is a whole other thing, and it tends to be very toxic, and very abusive not only of its victims, but of the ideas that have been subverted.

For a spiritual path to be meaningful, it has to be chosen. Anything we do in fear, under duress and threat of violence, is not being given freely. If there is no gifting, there is no spiritual power. There is no spiritual depth and value in what is done, you just go through the motions to stay alive. From the outside, it isn���t always easy to tell who is giving freely, and who is forced to conform ��� the veiling of women provides a wealth of examples of both. Veiling by choice is a powerful act of dedication. Veiling out of necessity is an affront.

You can���t force gifts out of someone. They cease to be gifts and become the fruits of conquest. An act of submission, is an act of gifting, and needs valuing as such. It should flow from love and be an expression of love. To demand submission is to be a tyrant, and there is no love if the submission is not gifted.

Me and my worms

I live in a flat in an area that doesn���t currently collect kitchen waste on the doorstep. We don���t generate a lot of food waste, but there���s the inevitable banana skins, squash peel, carrot tops and things of that ilk. I hate sending things like that to landfill. Last autumn we had a family conference, and decided we needed worms.

We purchased a junior wormery ��� small enough to be a comfortable addition to the small kitchen. It���s basically a big bucket. Inside the bucket is an elevated platform so that liquid can collect at the bottom. There���s a tap to let the liquid out. The tiger worms came by post, with some starter bedding and instructions. In the first few days we had a lot of escapes and had to be very careful in the kitchen of a morning, then we got clever about tying the lid down, because the securing brackets just weren���t enough on their own to thwart the adventurous inclinations of our wormy friends.

In the last month, they���ve had babies ��� which encourages me to think they find their standard of living acceptable. This morning we were able to drain off liquid for the first time ��� watered down it provides a feed for our small array of windowsill plants. It also stinks. Apparently worm wee is one of the smelliest things imaginable. Still, hopefully the plants will like it. We should now get a regular supply of liquid. We should also get a few pots��� worth of compost, come the summer.

This just leaves the problem of the non-recyclable plastics. I continue to harass supermarkets and product produces when opportunities arise, still pondering the scope for clever reuse. In the meantime, the worms save our council a few pounds here and there on landfill costs, and provide us not only with fertiliser, but also considerable amusement. They���ve been a surprisingly entertaining addition to our little household, and are well worth considering if other compost options are not available to you.

A Lament for Gothic Romance

I was invited at rather short notice to contribute to a Friday the 13th, Unlucky in love night of miserable poetry. I wrote the piece especially, not having anything suitable. as laments go… it seemed to elicit a lot of giggling. Words below for anyone who can’t get along with video.

 

Gothic romance

I wanted a black dress, damn you to hell

With a hearse to arrive in and mourners as well

A bunch of dead roses to hold at my thigh

With brown crisped up leaves all crumbling dry.

I wanted a honeymoon, somewhere remote

With a host and a ghost and a sacrifice goat

And rings on my fingers and bells on my toes

And a bloody great raven as mournful as Poe���s.

Then back to the castle for cobwebs and gin

Things claw at the window and try to get in.

Where others than we would go bump in the night

Surrounded by those most unfond of the light

I wanted to sleep in a velvet lined coffin

While down in our basement some misshapen boffin

Makes mechanised prayers to evoke elder gods

And hatches unspeakable things out of pods.

I wanted the spiders, the webs and the dust

The squeal of a hinge overtaken by rust

A pendulous promise of doom in the air

And decay and delusion and also despair.

 

You took me for afternoon tea, in Cirencester.

Sure. I like scones as much as the next person

But I knew, from that moment, we were doomed.

And not in a good way.

 

You hand picked me roses all sprinkled with dew

And proceeded to write me a sonnet or two.

Then hired a man with a lute and a hat

To sing under my window. He looked like a prat.

Oh you took me to dances, you took me to France,

You spoke of eternity and of romance.

You bought me a cottage, a pony, a ring,

But darling, you see it just isn���t my thing.

And yes, your whole family seems very nice

But I picture them bloody and frozen in ice.

 

I wanted a poet whose heart had been broken

Whose tears were all real and whose bleeding not token.

I wanted the raw and the driven insane

But you sent me kittens, not pathos and rain.

I wanted the tortuous depths of your soul

Not this shiny courtship, I fear it���s your goal

To marry me, make me a comfy old wife

Condemned to be cheerful the rest of my life.

And so sweetest darling there���s nothing to do,

But create my own tragic ending for you

A wedding day accident, that would have charms

So cruelly snatched from your new wife���s pale arms

Then I can weep and float round in a veil

Faint for no reason, from time to time wail.

 

Who dares to say gothic romance is dead?

You���ll find all you need, in my coffin shaped bed.

 

(If you want any more silliness, there’s also Intelligent Designing for Amateurs)

Dirty Druids and magical cleansing

Cleansing is a concept that comes up a lot around magic practice. I think there���s much mileage in thinking about what we might want to cleanse, and why, and how that relates to your world view. In witchcraft it tends to be about the removal of negative influences or unwanted energy that might conflict with your intentions. In spiritual practices, cleansing is often about the idea of purifying body and spirit to be more acceptable to the gods, and to help you transcend dirty, earthly things for the life of spirit.

Before you can cleanse anything then, you have to figure out in what way you consider it to be dirty, and what ���clean��� would mean. Now, I have to say that in nature based religion, cleansing, cleanness and purity are all tricky words. Nature is dirt, and shit, and decay just as much as it is pretty flowers and nice birds. Some of it I���m more inclined to get close to than other bits, but if I start from the premise that nature is sacred, I want to be careful around ideas of cleansing in case it turns into a rejection of some part of life and the natural world.

What about cleansing myself? I make some effort to be sure the outside of my body is passably groomed and not unpleasant smelling. I also consider what I���m putting into my body in food and drink so I���m not dirtying myself with pollutants any more than I can avoid. I have a lot of mess and pain in my history, and dubious mental health as a consequence. Do I want to try and cleanse that away? Well, it���s part of my journey, it has been a great teacher, there���s a balance to strike between what to take with me and what to let go of. It���s not simple.

Might I want to purify my thoughts to be more spiritual? Yes, but I don���t believe I can do that in single acts of ritual cleansing. What I have to do is look at and work with my thinking over time to make sure I am not carrying about ideas I don���t believe or perpetrating ideas I don���t like, or inflicting on myself attitudes I would find unbearable if inflicted on anyone else.

When it comes to cleansing other things, there���s also the issue of free will. I have an animist perspective, give or take. I see the potential for not just spirit, but also intention and autonomy in things around me. I can���t assume that anything else has no opinions and won���t mind me waltzing in, and imposing my idea of spiritual cleanliness on it. This means if I want to do a ritual and my chosen space has picked up a bad atmosphere, I need to take time finding out what���s going on there, what the problem is, what would help. Sweeping out the negative influences may well not solve the problem, and might cause bigger issues in the longer term.

Traditional magic seems to me to be very much about imposing your will. If you���re looking at a largely unaware reality then this may feel comfortable. If you think everything else might have will and preferences too, forcing your will onto anything becomes ethically problematic.�� When that will expresses my understanding of purity, cleanliness spiritual acceptability, usefulness, there are a lot of value judgements involved, and a value judgement is not the same as being right.

On the whole, I would rather be open to experiences that might change me, than seek any means of ���purifying��� myself.

Romance myths and other grey areas

There is a myth that what women want is a guy who is forceful and dominant. He shows up in films and romance fiction as the ���alpha male��� ��� suffering from entitlement issues, a lack of sensitivity and an ego the size of a house. From such archetypes, a subset of young men, and perhaps older ones (I don���t see them so much on twitter) assume that being aggressive, pushy and demanding is what women want, and that the closer you get to raping women, the more they will want you. Mr Grey takes this unfortunate archetype to whole new depths, by all accounts.�� I haven���t seen or read 50 Shades and mean to keep it that way because rape described as romance makes me very angry.

What���s attractive about the alpha male romance? Often it���s the takedown. It���s the woman who has the sexual power, self confidence, virtue and strength to reduce the snotty, self important git to a pile of humiliated mush, willing to sacrifice all pride and dignity if only she will love him. It���s not the bad boy archetype that women are most usually attracted to, it���s the bad boy put on a leash and brought to heel. In many ways it���s the same as the attraction of the emotionally unavailable male (the Mr Spoks) and the allure of thinking that restraint and control might be breakable, for the right woman.

The trouble with these stories is that they encourage women to think that if you stick it out long enough and are good enough, the less than ideal bloke will be magically transformed into something you wanted. People only change if they want to, and taking someone on in the hopes of turning them into something else is seldom the best plan. Such stories as these also have some guys thinking that what women want is to be bullied and mistreated ��� mostly they don���t, mostly they want to rescue that kind of man from himself. On the whole it���s a story set that isn���t doing us any favours.

A man who knows what he wants is undeniably attractive, if he can ask for it, and if he can take no for an answer, and do so with some grace and style. The man who forces his wants onto others isn���t attractive. While we don���t have as many stories with the roles reversed, it should be equally true that a woman with the confidence to responsibly express what she wants is attractive, and a woman who tries to take, isn���t. The biology biases the probabilities a tad here, but there is more to failed romance than ugly, forced sex.

The stories we tell each other shape our expectations. It occurs to me that my mother and grandmother and many other women of their generations loved ���Gone with the wind��� ��� a tale in which a snotty young lady who cares nothing for other people���s feelings or happiness, sets out to force her desires onto the world. She���s no kind of role model either, and romantic expectations based on that book and film combo would be about as unhelpful as the current shades of grey. Perhaps the rest of us could agree to leave Mr Grey and Miss O���Hara in the same cupboard, as possibly deserving each other, and come up with some better stories about human relationships.

Steampunk Hands Around The World- Steamed puddings

Nimue Brown:

February means Steampunk hands around the world, and for this, we bring you… pudding!

Originally posted on The Moth Festival:

Steam Pudding Punk

The steamed pudding is a Victorian icon. Whether blazing in burning brandy, steeped in custard or covered in jam, a period pudding is a thing to reckon with. The truly authentic pudding would feature the shredded fat taken from around the kidneys of cows (that���s suet!). There would be flour in it. After that, all bets are off, depending on what you can afford. Eggs? Sugar? Booze? Fruit? Spices? If you boil it in a shirt sleeve, you might call it dead man���s arm. If it���s very plain, it might be ���old lady���s leg���. Put fruit in it, and for reasons best not explored, you could end up with a spotted dick.

Of course a modern enthusiast for Victoriana need not limit themselves to traditional recipes. You want cranberry and rum, you can have cranberry and rum! (I���m not offering to buy them for you, just to���

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