Nimue Brown's Blog, page 367

R.I.P. Off! or The British Way of Death

By Ken West

In the 1960���s I killed barn owls. It was not a conscious decision. The people in control instructed me to spray the new wonder chemicals, invented by the Americans, over the old cemetery. The weeds and long grass disappeared, as did the voles, the food source of the owls. Nobody noticed ��� or cared!

This happened all over the UK. Ten years later, less ignorant and in control of cemeteries and crematoria myself, I introduced conservation management in cemeteries. The results were astonishing. Acres of rare pignut, a plant that once fed the poor, appeared, followed by voles; the owls returned.

Years later, and offering a Funeral Advisory Service, two women, possibly pagans, wanted advice on burial in their garden. I told them it was feasible, but that it would depress the property sale price. I discovered that they sought garden burial because this was the only way that they could be buried under a tree and thereby satisfy their environmental and spiritual philosophy.

Because of these events, I wrote a feasibility study for natural burial, the first time that human burial was integrated with conservation. This was accepted by Carlisle City Council and we opened the world���s first site in 1993. It was a traumatic time; funeral directors hated the idea, not least the prohibition of embalming. They were apoplectic when I first mentioned cardboard coffins. Natural burial was also a threat to cremationists because it highlighted the energy and pollution problems with the process. Increasingly labelled a weirdo, I was grateful for the support from pagans, environmentalists and the artistic community.

There are now more natural burial sites than crematoria in the UK (270+) and the idea is going universal. It has created the market for green coffins and reinvigorated burial. It also gave greater emphasis to the emerging funeral celebrant, expanding options for more spiritual and earth centred services.

After 45 years in the work, I retired with new purpose; to get people to discuss death and dying (see www.naturalburialcreator.co.uk). My first book, a specialist title, was ���A Guide to Natural Burial��� published in 2010.

Based on my experience introducing natural burial, I wrote ���R.I.P. Off! or: The British Way of Death��� to show how the funeral market is stitched up; how it shuts out innovation. I wanted to convey information, without the dry blandness of a self help book, so that the reader could take control of a funeral themselves, even to the point of doing one without a funeral director. But, as nobody wants to read about death, how could I appeal to readers? Bookshops welcome writers on children���s stories and romance, but not death. I opted for black humour, and a series of cameos based on true events; an expose of the funeral world.

Getting to the other side has never been easy; or cheap! The Egyptians needed their ornate tombs; the Romans to cross the River Styx and the Vikings to sacrifice an entire longship. The Americans renamed this palaver the death care industry and set new rules; the funeral director became a salesman in a black suit, the coffins were given fancy names like ���The Balmoral��� and nobody was allowed to mention the word death.

Revelation meditation

One of the downsides of shared meditation ��� especially if you���re also sharing feedback of your experiences, is the pressure to have something important happen. In guided group pathworkings, and other guided visualisations the effect of being in a group can tend us towards wanting meaning and potent symbols. If the person next to you found the Holy Grail on their pathworking, if a wild boar came to them as their animal guide in a shamanic trance, if they saw their dead grandmother who said something important sounding… it���s not easy to sit there and say that nothing much happened to you.

All meditation work comes out of the mind ��� both the conscious and unconscious parts of it. If a group develops a culture of powerful, meaningful symbols, the odds are good that everyone will fall in naturally with that. If your meditation circle gets messages from angels, you will learn to talk to yourself with the faces and voices of angels. If it���s all about the Stone Age village, you���ll see the Stone Age village. If everyone else seems to be getting scenes from the tarot, you���ll get scenes from the tarot. There���s nothing wrong with this ��� the same thing happens (by all accounts) in dream sharing circles and psychotherapy. Humans have urges towards finding common language. What is language, in fact, but the deploying of shared symbols?

The trouble with everything being big, important and meaningful is that it is exhausting. Big meanings call for actions, for change, for re-envisioning your life. It���s a good thing to do ��� I would say it���s a good thing to do at reasonably regular intervals. But every week? That���s tiring. You can also suffer from inflation issues, because if you found the Holy Grail last week, what on earth can you find this week? And if you haven���t integrated that finding of the Holy Grail into your life in some meaningful way, that���s not any kind of comfortable. I know. That one happened to me. Years on, and I���m still profoundly uneasy about it. Like Parzival, I have seen the grail and had no bloody idea what to do about it, and am left to wander and be uncomfortable. Big dramatic symbols can as easily be a curse as a blessing.

These were not issues I was aware of back when writing Druidry and Meditation (I still think it holds up as a book, though). That���s the trouble with books ��� there���s always more to learn and more perspective to gain. These days the meditation circle I sit in does not talk much about personal experience. It���s taken me more than a year of doing that to notice what it changed for me. There can be a temptation to want to compete, when meditation sessions are shared. The desire to have a really profound experience so that you can tell everyone else about it. The longing for the best story. There���s always room for a bit of self importance or reassurance-seeking to sneak into any spiritual practice. In the absence of structured sharing, my inner performing seal no longer feels obliged to stick a ball on its nose and look charming. It makes meditation a more restful process for me. There was a glorious liberation in realising, this week, that if I sat there and nothing happened, that was totally fine.

Working on your Druidry

When I first came to Druidry in my twenties, I was a serious, diligent student. I read widely, thought deeply, practiced deliberately and pushed very hard to try and be a Druid. With hindsight, I think this is an important opening gambit, and that coming in wholehearted and willing to make radical changes in your life is important, if not essential.

Moving from the mainstream into Druidry requires a consciousness shift. We start asking questions about our relationship with the rest of life, and that can create some challenges and demands. The need to live more greenly, with greater awareness and greater care seems to me an inevitable consequence of taking up Druidry. We might not have any set texts, but there���s a lot to learn around the modern history, mediaeval remnants and ancient fragments. There���s also much to learn about the natural world, your own ancestors, the land you live on.

What kind of Druid role do you envisage for yourself? Teacher, healer, lore keeper, herbalist, seer, peace maker, visionary… the aspect of Druidry that calls you to serve will make demands of your time and will likely require study and effort.

And so when a person comes to Druidry, there���s a lot of busyness in those first years. There���s a lot of work to do, and a lot of changes to make and it feels like a big, conscious investment.

Over time, either you decide it���s not for you and step away, or your efforts start to embed in your life. Remembering to do the recycling becomes normal, it���s no longer an act of dedication to the gods. The herb garden you planted is flourishing and in use, you no longer spend hours reading and learning. You can play the harp, you know some stories, you���ve read everything Ronald Hutton has written, you have a daily prayer practice, and a staff and a set of oghan wands and animal oracle cards and an altar in your home and a circle of Druid people to do ritual with… somewhere along the way it stops being a big, deliberate, conscious fight to radically change your life, and starts being just life.

I strongly suspect this is the point at which many people who lay down the title of Druid, do their letting go. Having done all the really hard work, they may be less conscious of the ways in which they are being actively Druid. It inclines me to think of the difficulties communist China had around the need to maintain the revolution. It wasn���t enough to revolt and start again, the revolution had to be an ongoing process everyone was consciously engaged with, to keep it alive and meaningful. In their case it meant there always had to be an enemy, someone to weed out and destroy. For Druids, the process may be the same but the implications tend to be different. Unless of course this recent bout of online angry infighting is all about keeping your Druid revolution alive by finding people to be cross with.

On the whole we are probably better Druids for letting go of the language, than for holding onto our Druidry by keeping ���the revolutionary flame alight��� by starting fights with other people who dare to call themselves Druids, but don���t practice in the same way or uphold the exact same beliefs.

Voting, Politics and the Xartus: Paganism in Practice

Nimue Brown:

a fine and thoughtful post about balance, chaos, revolution and Druidry…

Originally posted on Treasure in Barren Places:

I���ve been having a debate with with a friend about politics and voting. (See Cthuludruid���s blog post here.) I���ve been doing my usual reaction to people who yell ���Revolution!���, nearly as gleefully as American apocalypse-wishers who hoard food and guns and wait for humanity to return to its true wild ways (only this time with better weapons). Cthuldruid points out to me, elsewhere, that he���s not talking about violent revolution ��� although that���s primarily what we see, in revolutions throughout history. But even where that���s not what happens, theorising about change feels so useless sometimes.

This is about��the current, real struggles of people who are dealing with some horrendous shit, to a degree that we haven���t seen since Thatcher���s reign of terror ��� maybe since Victorian times. (As my partner said the other day ��� at least there were workhouses to go to, under the Victorian regime.)��Think of Marx���

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Happiness in perspective

Misery attracts introspection. We are also more likely to challenge miserable people, while the question ���what have you got to be happy about, why don���t you look on the downside more?��� is never thrown at the relentlessly cheerful. Perhaps we assume that happiness is the natural default and misery the aberration. Perhaps when we���re happy, we���re too busy being happy to ask what���s going on. Misery affords more time for reflection. The trouble with this is, not knowing why you are happy means you have less idea how to get there when it doesn���t turn up automatically.

I���ve spent the last couple of weeks being consistently more cheerful and upbeat than I���ve probably ever been at any other point in my life. Why? And how do I get to spend more time here? There are a great many factors involved. I���ve been outside and walking more ��� this reduces stress and helps me sleep better, and when I sleep well I tend to suffer less pain. I���m crafting more, and that is a thing of joy, and I���m crafting for people I love, and that cheers me greatly. The prospect of carrying on doing more of that also cheers me. I���m spending more time out and about with people I enjoy being around, this causes happiness. I���m getting more interesting things into the mix. All of the work I���m doing feels worthwhile, but none of it is pressuring me to breaking point ��� I have achieved near perfect balance. The weather has not been to cold or grey. I have more time off. My bloke is less stressed and my child is overcoming challenges too. Everything is moving the right way.

Of course sooner or later something won���t work out. I���ll get ill, or something will go wrong, or a problem will arise, or I���ll misjudge something and suffer as a consequence. Such is life. I don���t imagine I have seen off depression and anxiety forever ��� that would seem overly optimistic. However, knowing I can get to places of being peaceful and happy, knowing I can pull out of the gloom makes it easier to deal with the rough patches. Of course life will grieve me, it will send me setbacks and break my heart from time to time. The key thing is knowing that I can get up, having some idea of how to do it and the belief that it can be done.

I don���t want much. I have the basics covered, and do not feel drawn to the accumulations of material goods that seem to be the focus of modern, western life. I can live cheaply, I do not need to work myself to death to make ends meet. What I do need is time under the sky, time with people, shared creativity, good stories, surprises, friendship, hugs, pretty things, wild things, and time to gaze out of the window. I need people who are fine with me as I am ��� whatever that is today, more and less upbeat, more and less physically able… acceptance. I need to be doing something worthwhile, and I have an increasing sense of how to make sure that���s the case. I have fabric offcuts to play with people to see… and of these small and simple things is sustainable happiness made.

Sufficient

It is one of the best feelings I know of: The feeling of sufficiency, and a sense that the sufficiency will last. For many of us westerners, there is an excess of the material such that we cannot recognise abundance, much less enjoy it. At the same time our emotional, spiritual and intellectual lives can be desperately impoverished – often because we���re expending so much effort on earning the money to buy the things, that living comes a poor second. In all non-material ways, we tend towards insufficiency.

To know that you have enough brings peace and contentment. Recognition of material sufficiency is liberating. Why suffer anxiety over social status, the perceptions of others, ���keeping up��� and all that other nonsense designed to keep us consuming, when you can have the peace of ���enough���?

Enough good food and clean water. Enough warmth and shelter. Enough useful clothing. Enough rest, peace and safety. Those are the basics of sufficiency. Only when we recognise them can we hope to also recognise how unacceptable it is that so many people in our wealthy world lack for these things. They should be available to all. We should be ashamed to wallow in excess.

Recognising material sufficiency makes it easier to see what is good. A wide screen television is not happiness, nor is a new car. You might do things with them that make you happy sometimes, but the object is not happiness. The experience of beauty is a far more reliable form of happiness, but we are destroying the beauties of the natural world to make the objects that are not embodiments of joy. Companionship is happiness, but the work patterns that pay for the objects make us ever more socially isolated. We stay at home with the screen that is not beauty, is not companionship and is not happiness, but does a poor imitation of all three.

Objects are not happiness, and so in our object filled lives we are not happy, but we���ve been taught to deal with that by getting ever more objects. This is a game that no one gets to win.

Skin Magic

It���s remarkable how much difference the thinnest layer of fabric makes to human interactions and our experience of the environment. I imagine that people willing and able to undertake ritual naked have a much more immediate experience than is felt by those of us who don���t. Without clothing, there is absolute and direct connection with the space you are in and it is impossible not to be conscious of where you are. Clothing stabilises body temperature and makes it a good deal easier to ignore our own physical presence.

A millimetre thickness of fabric transforms an embrace from an act of intense intimacy, to something you might do with a person you barely know. This fascinates me. I am not, perhaps, as persuaded by the fabric as some people, I am very wary about who I���ll touch and who I���ll allow to touch me. I also tend to have more than minimal covering. Even in summer it���s rare for me not to have a couple of layers on (including underwear) and I���ll cover my back and arms. Most of the time, most of my skin is not at all available to most people.

Bodies produce energy, and energy flows through them. We have all kinds of chemical experiences going on. Skin is a lively place, with yeast and bacteria, whatever you smeared on it, and dead skin and all manner of things. Bring your body into contact with another body, and there will be some kind of exchange. That can include passing on diseases. I���ve heard it argued that many STDs exist because previously fairly innocent skin diseases had to evolve to cope with clothing and reduced contact.

If your reality has magic in it, then you should perhaps ask what happens magically between skins that are in contact. What are we sharing? What are we exchanging? If you believe in auras, in chakras, in any other magical energy system in the body, then you need to ask what you are doing when you put your energy systems in close proximity to someone else���s. A strong heart will dominate a weaker one when they are close together, and one can pull the other into its rhythm. I���ve had this happen, it is a very strange experience to find that your heart is beating under the direct influence of someone else���s heart. Again, it���s not something I���d enter into lightly or casually because it just doesn���t get any more personal than this.

We���ve had hundreds of years of covered skin, prudery and serious taboos around making bodily contact with each other. We���ve had less than a century of radical swing the other way, exposing skin and casually making what would once have been considered incredibly intimate contact with humans we barely know. Somewhere between those two excesses lies something more workable, more comfortable and rewarding, where the magical possibilities of skin can be properly explored. Both extremes are likely to make the magic of skin unavailable ��� an excess of contact mutes awareness just as an insufficiency denies opportunity. Considered, boundaried, conscious contact between people requires a middle way, and that���s where the magic lives.

Books and blogs

As those of you who have been with me for a while will know, I also write books. Mostly I don���t write about them, because that would be dull for all of us. The relationship between books and blogging however is (I insist!) going to yield some more interesting thoughts.

Books are a very old form of communication, blogs appear to be very new, but they have a lot in common with the pamphlet writing of the last 400 years or so. Pamphlets were low cost to produce and available to far more people than the elite ���book��� and there were pamphlet wars, full of written arguments between rival factions getting steamed up with each other. It wasn���t so different, it���s just this is faster and involves les standing on damp street corners yelling at passers by. Well, for me, at any rate, other bloggers may do differently. Instead we get to stand on the corners of damp social media sites, yelling at passers by to check out our wares. Not much changes.

Nimue as blogger is not quite the same person/voice as Nimue as book author. Blogging is what I do first thing in the morning as a way of warming up my brain. I write a blog in about quarter of an hour, read it outloud to Tom to make sure it makes sense, isn���t too self-indulgent and isn���t awash with typos. Then I post. I pick topics out of the air each morning based on whatever���s been on my mind lately ��� there���s not much logic and structure and the only continuing narrative is created by what little coherence there is in my life.

I think about books a lot more. I plan them and give them structures. I undertake research and deliberate exploration rather than just spouting whatever���s on my mind. I polish the sentences over numerous re-drafts and make some effort with references and the like. If the blog is me first thing in the morning, the books are me when I���ve had a LOT of coffee.

I don���t duplicate content. You may get the odd blog post promoting the books where I copy a bit to give you a flavour, but that���s about it. Once I know I���m working on a subject in a serious way, I don���t blog about it ��� to keep my thinking book focused, to stop the project being diluted, and to make sure anyone reading the blog isn���t going to find they���ve paid for something already known to them should they pick up a book. I also don���t duplicate posts from other sites, so if you follow me in more than one place, you���ll only see a given blog post once. (If you were wondering, I do a monthly alternative wheel of the year blog here, I blog at Moon Books�� and JHP Fiction��intermittently, and other pieces of mine are scattered widely across the internet.) As a blogger it would be far less work to just re-use articles across different sites. However, as a reader that would annoy me, and I like to imagine I have one or two people who get around to everything and whose dedication should be rewarded by making sure there���s always something new.

A book is always a failed attempt at saying something definitive. A blog is always a successful work in progress that lacks for coherence and conclusion. In many ways the blog is my more natural environment, because there���s more room to grow and change as I go and to explore the nuances of those shifts. It���s harder to step away from an opinion you���ve carved into the immortal rock of a book. Perhaps I take books too seriously!

As a reader I come to books and blogs very differently. I read a lot of blogs ��� usually in the morning, and very much to keep a sense of what is going on out there now. Book reading is an evening activity, and not about the contemporary at all, often. I read old books more than new ones. I read paper more than ebooks. Who we are as readers of blogs and books may be as diverse as who we are as writers of the same.

Work ethics

���The Devil makes work for idle hands.��� There is an assumption, and it is a very old assumption, that working hard is a virtue. It is never explicitly expressed in wisdom statements of the last few hundred years, but hard work is specifically a virtue for the poor, and not something the wealthy need to trouble themselves with. Members of the leisured classes never seem to have worried themselves much about what the Devil may do with their un-busy hands. However, it has always been the case (still is today) that the poor are assumed to be feckless and foolish. If you don���t keep them gainfully employed, they will waste their time and health smoking, gambling and drinking. When the wealthy drink, smoke and gamble, that���s not a problem.

It doesn���t matter if what you do is in and of itself useful, a ���work ethic��� will encourage you to be busy. It results in the creation of ���make-work��� which has no other function than to look like you���re doing something. It creates cultures of overtime and overwork where people feel obliged to stay on and look busy because that���s important. Never mind what the job is, you can���t be the one person seen to leave at the end of the working day.

The underlying assumption is that work is good for you, if you are working class. In some ways this is true. Meaningful work can do a lot to establish dignity, a sense of purpose and social position. Work can confer identity, and it can get the necessities of life done. However, a traditional work ethic isn���t much interested in this, only in the sense that if you aren���t busy busy busy, you could be dangerous. If you aren���t worked to exhaustion, you might have time to stop and think. You might question the usefulness and point of your productivity. You might notice that other people make more money from you productivity than you do. That could lead you to some serious doubts about the whole project of capitalism.

Truly ethical work would be about doing the things that need to be done so that everyone has the necessities and at the same time the balance of the planet and its eco-systems is maintained. Truly ethical work would not suck up a person���s whole life but would give them time and space to be a person. Truly ethical work would be fairly paid, not this curious system where those who do the basic essentials are barely valued at all, whereas those who take long lunches and make decisions (regardless of how those decisions play out) are deemed to be worth a lot more. If work was about ethics, we���d spend less time berating the poor, and more time complaining about the lazy leisured class and its consumptive habits.

There is nothing remotely ethical about the existing notion of a work ethic. It would be a good deal more ethical to do less, consume less, live more modestly, prioritise taking care of needs rather than profits, and getting shot of the idea that simply being rich is a valid contribution to your community.

Challenges for new Druids

Go back twenty years and more, and the challenges for new Pagans and Druids were very different. There weren���t many books about Paganism, and if you didn���t know titles and authors, you���d have trouble tracking them down. Your local library wouldn���t carry them, most likely. Pagans of decades past were more cautious by far ��� there were no laws to protect us and a Pagan could lose their job for their faith. Back before the internet, your local moot, grove or coven would be considerably harder to locate. Finding other Pagans took time and patience, and you had to jump through a lot of hoops before anyone would spot you and take you seriously.

Today���s challenges are perhaps not so obvious. Five minutes with a search engine will give you information that would once have required years of patient hunting, asking and waiting. Most Pagans are ���out��� and you can find their webpages. However, you may decide that social media is enough, and not make it to a physical moot. Useful if you live miles away from others, but potentially also a trap, because you may not get round to in-person Paganism, and that���s a loss.

The internet is a big place full of a lot of information, much of it contradictory. Druidry is wide, and deeper in some places than others. The people who get online and shout the most often know the least. As an example, there was a person who rolled in here and on message boards, with the email address of ���seniordruid@��� and started making a lot of noise ��� much of it rude and self important. It took five minutes to discover that said person had no knowledge base ��� perhaps in world of warcraft they were a senior Druid, but not out here in the real world. I confess I was neither kind nor gentle ��� overconfident pedlars of misinformation are too much of a liability to leave unchecked. But there���s a lot of them out there.

Would-be Druids of the 20th century largely had to contend with shortages of information and slow starts. 21st century would-be Druids have the opposite problem ��� too much information, too many options and possibilities. The challenge for the modern seeker, is to work through the mounds of information and the vast amount of noise to try and figure out what makes sense to them. You start knowing little or nothing, guided by a gut feeling or a yearning. Telling what is worth your while, and what has no value to you, is not easy. The old rites of passage were simpler, in that you knew when you���d found your way in. These days, ���in��� is quick, but often devoid of meaning. Finding the needles of what you need to know in the great internet haystack is a sizeable challenge.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember, and the thought most easily lost in the noise, is this: The internet is not your Druidry. You can learn here and you can connect with people ��� and that���s all to the good, but this is not where Druidry lives. Druidry is about the earth you stand on and the air you breathe, it is tribe and wilderness meeting. You might be able to talk and learn about it here, but you can���t do it here. However valuable the things you learn online, you have to take them out into your life and apply them in some way.