Nimue Brown's Blog, page 368

Review: Bard Song by Robin Herne

Nimue Brown:

A lovely review of a very lovely book… if these splendid people are not part of your world… do take this opportunity to find out more…

Originally posted on From Peneverdant:

This review is long overdue. Coincidentally I was re-reading Bard Song with the intention of reviewing it at the time Robin published his recording of Gwynn���s Guest, dedicating it to me, which has spurred me along.

I���m not sure if I can give this book an objective review as I���ve owned it so long and like it so much. The pages are scored with under-linings. Against many of the poems are pencilled a���s, b���s and c���s from my attempts to decipher complex metres. The spine bends open on my favourite poems, which I return to frequently, have shared with my local Poetry Society and used as examples in Bardic workshops. But I���ll give it a go.

Robin Herne is a polytheist Druid based in Ipswich. Bard Song provides an introduction to reading and writing honorific and seasonal poetry (in English) in mainly Welsh and Irish metres. This fulfils an important���

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Druidry and diplomacy

The Romans gave us the tale of Druids going out onto battlefields and ending the fight. Far too many modern Druids, especially those arguing with each other in social media spaces, manifestly lack for diplomatic skills. Further, there doesn���t seem to be much inclination to foster them, either. Online debate is all too often about point scoring, hammering your opponent and showing off how clever you are. I���ve dabbled in at as well, although most of the time I try not to. I just can���t resist piling in when someone gets sanctimonious, smug and self important because usually such people spout a lot of nonsense. Still, it’s not something I’m proud of, but its important to flag that I’m a work in progress on this issue.

For Druidry to grow we need to be able to flag up what is bloody stupid, inside our own community and beyond it. We need to be able to challenge each other, and everyone else. We need room to disagree and even to argue. However, too aggressive and abrasive a culture will wound and discourage. It favours the loud and smug, and is more likely to harm the gentler, more reflective person ��� to my mind that���s the exact opposite of what we need. Draw battle lines and people will dig in, and cling harder to their opinion and be less open to your reasoned explanation of why, exactly, it sucks. It takes diplomacy, and more surreptitious approaches to engage people with ideas that they do not initially accept. We could use more diplomacy.

Diplomacy is not tacit support of wrong things. It���s not appeasement, or taking the easy option. Diplomacy is not refusal to challenge or peace at all costs, but it is a quest for the smoothest, gentlest and at the same time most effective way through issues of conflict.

There are two critical balancing acts around diplomacy, where too much and too little are equally counter-productive.

The first is around truth. Too much truth can turn into a form of psychological violence. The internet has too many folk who use ���brutal honesty��� as a thin veneer to mask cruelty and sadism. We need to be honest about the right things ��� identifying facts from opinions, recognising dogma, recognising that others are entitled to different opinions and beliefs when the foundations are as good as anyone else���s. The thing to avoid, and to refuse to co-operate with is the ���brutal honesty��� that abuses the person as a person. ���I���m just being honest by pointing out that you are stupid and worthless��� is not the kind of honesty we need, and probably lacks for truth anyway. Insufficient truth obviously doesn���t work either. Somewhere in the middle is useful truth.

The second critical balancing act is around kindness. On the whole the world needs more kindness in it, not less. Learner Druids will learn more from kindness than from being humiliated and put down. People who make honest mistakes or have been misinformed will be more likely to recognise that if the transition is handled with kindness. On the other hand, too much kindness doesn���t challenge people at all and lets them stay where they are, no matter how toxic where they are is for them. It is not ultimately kind to let a person carry on harming themselves, but it is easy.

Balancing truth and kindness in our interactions is a moment to moment, word to word sort of enterprise. It is not easy. It requires a lot of attention to detail and nuance, and to the language and responses of the intended recipient. Diplomacy does not give the practitioner as many opportunities to be publically smug and self important ��� and while that���s a good thing, it���s also a tough thing for the fragile human ego that craves attention. Diplomacy isn���t any easy path, but we could use a good deal more of it within Druidry, and a great deal more of it in the wider world.

Craft Life

Much of my crafting starts with things that are of no use to anyone else. (This may be because I am a Womble).

This project started about a month ago, when Potia sent me a box of wool scraps. I have a number of dull hessian bags, and a man who can draw. This is basically just woolly cross stitch on hessian, but the uneven nature of the underlying fabric gives it a degree of irregularity throughout. If you start with a smooth canvas and use one size of wool, you get a smoother, tidier sort of finished piece. As I am a creature of chaos and loose ends, this more bumpy outcome appeals to me more.

It���s a fine example of why I am not going to be a crafter professionally. That bag must have taken me fifty hours. I���d be hard pushed to make a pound an hour selling such things, and I have learned the hard way that it is better to make for fun and to give away, than become a person whose time is worth a pound an hour, give or take. I had a lot of fun with this, I mean to keep doing things in ways that make me happy.

Changing your story

We are storytelling creatures. We tell stories about who we are and where we come from and what we are doing and where we hope to go. Around us, the people of our tribe, family and workplaces tell stories too. Stories are not the same as truth ��� they are more flexible. They grow rapidly, and not always for the best of reasons. The person who does not like you can create a story that you are lazy or mean spirited and if they are a better storyteller than you, then your workplace may come to interpret everything you do in that light. Once there is a story, everything is understood through it, and it is hard to break. If the story is that you are mad, saying ���I am sane��� sounds like delusion.

When you can���t win, when things are never taken as you meant them, when it doesn���t seem to matter what you do, or what you try, or how you change, then there could well be a story at play. If people won���t let go of their story about you, what you change makes no odds. First, the story has to be changed, and this is no easy thing. It is not always easy to figure out what the story might be, it takes time, observation and creative thinking to try and work out what ideas about you would make sense of how people relate to you. You may have internalised other people���s beliefs without noticing it, you may equally be in for some challenges. Perhaps you were the designated black sheep of the family and hadn���t noticed. You may be the workplace scapegoat, or you may be just as burdened if everyone else always expects you to take charge and sort things out. You may be the strong one no one needs to be gentle with, the reliable one, the one who will always help out. Apparently-positive stories can be just as much of a nuisance as damning ones if you can���t live up to them ��� and no one can, not all the time.

Once you have a fair idea what your role is, what story you have been given, you can look at how to deal with it. Tired of never being able to win? Try not competing in the first place. Tired of being expected to have superhuman reserves of energy and ideas? Try being more honest about your limits and boundaries. Sometimes the story can be changed over time.

There are stories that are created not specifically for you, but because you have been chosen to fulfil a role. Failure and scapegoat stories are often impersonal in this way. Someone has to be wrong, useless and inadequate so that some other person or persons can feel superior. Not co-operating with such stories does not change them, because they are entirely about the person telling the story. If you aren���t allowed to win, or to change, to be right now and then, or to be good enough, you���ve been snared in a story that exists very much to rob you of power, self respect and status in the community it pertains to.

You may be offered ways out. You may think if you can only get to a certain place, achieve a certain thing, earn enough, do enough… that the story will change. Mostly it won���t. The only answer to such a story, is to refuse to continue as a character in it. Communities and relationships that have this kind of story intrinsic to them, are simply not good places to be, and tend not to change, because the story of it all being someone else���s fault, is such a useful, convenient tale for the teller.

Perhaps the hardest thing of all is to look at the stories and identify that you���ve been finding a thousand and one reasons why it was all someone, and something else to blame. We may well only get this one life, and its remarkable how much of it can be frittered away in working out why the shortcomings of our days are all down to someone else. That story doesn���t allow the teller to change either. It doesn���t allow growth, improvement or hope, just a very empty kind of superiority.

Convention and tradition

Midwinter offers a vast array of conventions masquerading as traditions. The giveaway that they are conventions is there if you poke around in their history, of which there is little, and in the way that they come across as somehow universal, while traditions are far less prone to this. The modern obsession with gratuitous consumption has more to do with the images hammered into us by advertisers, and the dominant cultural narrative that there must always be more. It must be bigger than last year, cost more, have more lights on it and make more noise. We must get fatter, and in the New Year feel even more guilty and sign up for an even more austere diet.

What is tradition then, if not conventions? Traditions don���t require people to know or understand what they���re doing ��� The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance and the Hunting of the Earl of Rhone are fine cases in point. No one has a clue what that was originally about, but we keep doing it anyway. Morris dancing as well, has its origins and purpose obscured. However, many traditions, when you prod them, have a function of social rebalancing. Be it the letting off steam around festivals and Lords of Misrule, or the legitimised begging of mummers and wasailers, traditions keep things working nicely. Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun is the book for anyone who wishes to delve further.

Traditions honour and celebrate the cycle of the seasons. You can see in Christmas and New Year conventions some lingering echo of that, but the idea of lights and feasting as a reaction to darkness and privation isn���t much discussed. It is a time of year when charities go out of their way to appeal to us, but there is precious little rebalancing in our greed based culture. The UK had (according to homeless charity Shelter) 93,000 homeless children this Christmas. Police in London took blankets and other possessions from rough sleepers. Traditional Christian values around charity and compassion have been entirely separated, for the majority of people, from the festival of getting drunk, eating too much and falling asleep in front of the telly.

Conventions encourage us all to do the same thing. Christmas and New Year traditions have varied a fair bit over time. Sure there���s always been some carousing, except when the Puritans were in power and abolished mince pies. (Mince pies used to have meat in them by the way, what you buy in the supermarket is not what was traditional). Traditions tend to be broader, wider, and more flexible. The same song can have three different tunes, the same story can be told in a dozen different traditional songs. The same festivals can be celebrated all over the place, but not necessarily by everyone, or on exactly the same date or in quite the same way. Traditions grow, evolve and are peppered with local innovations. Burns Night might seem like an ancient Scottish tradition with its Haggis and impenetrable poetry, but in the grand scheme of things, it���s not very old at all.

Will the modern conventions of turkey on Christmas day (A recent import from America) with roast potatoes (only been here a few hundred years, the potato) carry on forever into the future? Probably not. Any more than the iconic boar���s head stayed as the high point of the feast. We don���t cook birds in their feathers to make dramatic table presentations any more, either. We���ve folded the winter festivals inwards, focusing on hearth and screen and visible spending power. Can we keep on that way, ever bigger and better and with even more lights on it? The thing about traditions is that they respond to the needs of the day or they do not continue. The needs of the future will be for greater responsibility, and a far fairer sharing of resources. Give it a hundred years or so, and the outsized turkey and mountains of wrapping paper may seem as ludicrous to our descendents as beef in a mince pie seems to us.

About the only thing you can say for tradition, is that it doesn���t stay still. Anything that seems solid, certain and reliable, is probably just a fleeting convention.

New Year���s resolutions

Sometimes I do these in earnest, sometimes I don���t… but a few years ago I decided that I was going to stop taking this as an annual opportunity to beat myself up about all the things I am not. I am also not going to make an epic ���to do��� list with which to torture myself for the coming year.

Here are my resolutions.

To eat more cake. Because I like cake, I am not gaining weight (quietly and persistently the opposite, which has to stop eventually) and if you use brown flour, unrefined sugar and a lot of fruit, it���s almost healthy food anyway. And it makes me happy.
To walk more. Because being outside wandering about with people I like is one of the things that makes me happiest, so I���m going to do more of it. Possibly with cake.
To have more time doing nothing. This is to include lie ins, early nights, time spent gazing absentmindedly out of the window and the such. Time when I am not economically active and of no discernible use to anyone.
To bring an end to greed driven, exploitative capitalism. No one said this list had to be wholly realistic.

 

Whatever you choose to do with your New Year, I hope it goes well for you. Follow your heart, go with what inspires and uplifts you and may the blessings of inspiration flow your way.

Lessons in life and Druidry from 2014

As the arbitrary human dates role on, it���s as good a time as any to pause and look back. Birthdays are good for this, so are anniversaries, festivals and the like. Looking back is always helpful. Seeing the path behind can give you some insight about where you might be heading and whether that was where you wanted to go. Stuff living entirely in the moment! I want to travel from past to future by ways, means and trajectories that are at least somewhat of my choosing.

I learned some important lessons about the limits of my health, strength and endurance. I learned that if I want to do more, I also have to rest more, and for that to work I need to be more selective and say ���no��� to things sometimes. I have to get better at choosing my fights and causes and selecting where to deploy energy and how to value various options.

I thought for a while that I should be pouring more energy into politics. I even went so far as to put my name in the hat as a possible candidate for next year���s general election, but I didn���t make it through the Party selection stage. Having spent a lot of time working out whether that was a course I could really throw heart and soul into, I was a bit adrift when that didn���t work out. It may well be that I am better on the outside of the system, as commentator, protestor, and general nuisance. There���s more room for more voices on the outside, and the process made me realise how few people have any real voice at all in conventional politics.

I learned, and relearned the value of stopping, working closely with friends in Contemplative Druidry to learn again about slowing down. That���s going to be a big part of what I do (or perhaps more accurately what I don���t do) moving forwards.

I learned to make rag rugs. I also learned that the quality of my thinking and writing are much improved by spending time on crafts projects. If I want to write, then I need to craft. This works well for me, and is a general happiness improver.

Like many people, I am increasingly horrified and prone to despair when faced with the bigger picture. The sheer scale of what humanity is getting wrong right now is unbearable, and my feelings of futility in face of it have knocked my down more times than I can count in the last twelve months. I can���t single handedly save the world. I know this. I am not one of the world���s wealthiest, able to sort vast problems out just by throwing money at them. I am not a politician, able to change laws and inform cultures. I���m not a world famous author able to get millions of people to sit up and take note. So, there is nothing I can do easily or quickly, and there is not much point wasting energy on trying to be rich, famous or powerful enough to make a difference because frankly I don���t have much natural capacity for any of those things. I don���t have the right kinds of drives and ambitions, talents, skills or experiences to draw on.

I have to work with what I���ve got. All I can do is live my values to the very best of my abilities, and talk about that in the hopes that I can support others who are doing the same and help a few people move in this direction. Small ripples in a very big pond. And of course I can pray for humanity. Even as someone who isn���t very good at faith, I am uneasily aware that we are running out of time such that it will require divine intervention, or similar, to save us from ourselves. In the meantime, there is nothing to do but live as well as I can.

Ongoing rites of passage

Rites of passage tend to suggest events; big focal moments in life that need marking. Birth, coming of age, marriage, elderhood and death are the most obvious, along with spiritual initiations and dedications. Pagans can mark any event that seems pertinent, and again the most obvious way to go is to focus on the more dramatic events and changes.

However, many of the most important things in our lives can be more like works in progress than events. Anyone dedicated to lifelong learning, especially anyone not pursuing an academic route, will not have so many events. The same is true in an enduring marriage, or long term dedication to a spiritual path. The road of parenting, caring for creatures, the activist path and the work of a celebrant or teacher has this same tendency. It could easily be the focal point of your life but it won���t deliver big, obvious changes to celebrate.

Making personal rites of passage around ongoing commitments can be a very good way of reminding ourselves why we are doing these things, and celebrating what we���ve achieved. It can be an act of affirmation, and of re-dedication. Making a more obvious rite of passage can help draw attention to ongoing work ��� whether that���s five years of activism, or your seventeenth rescued cat, the point at which you need to flag up what you���ve done, is yours. Expressing it allows other people the chance to recognise and honour what you are doing. I think this is a really good thing ��� we have rather an events orientated culture and can overlook the value of stability, ongoing efforts and long haul commitments. Pausing to celebrate these things helps remind us that our lives are far more about what we do from day to day, than the occasional moments of drama and big anniversaries.

Yesterday was my fourth wedding anniversary. Four years married and we have a pretty good idea of how we get along as a couple and a deepened and more insightful commitment than we could have had when we started. We went out together and had matching bands tattooed onto our arms. It was Tom���s first tattoo, and the first time I have let anyone who wasn���t him anywhere near my skin since the police medical examination. So there���s a second aspect of this for me, reclaiming ownership of a body that has not been treated kindly. The right to say ���no��� is a good deal more powerful when you aren���t too afraid to say ���yes��� sometimes. There was blood and pain, and looking after each other, and we���ll have a week of taking care of each other���s ink as we heal, and I like that a lot.

Small rites of passage in ongoing situations are whatever you want them to be, on whatever terms make sense.

Relationship over time

At the beginning of any new human interaction, there tends to be plenty of optimism and enthusiasm in the mix. It���s as true of new friendships and business connections as it is of new romance. We see the possibilities. There may well be a release of bodily chemicals to support a bonding process, and that in turn can give us a rose tinted view of pretty much everything. Eventually, this honeymoon period ends, and perceptions may start to change.

Were we putting on an act to look good? Perhaps we can���t keep that up any more, or think we can get away with making less effort. Did we see everything we wished to see and not what was really there? Are we now practicing transference and putting our own failings onto the other person? Do we even like them? Do they like us? In romantic relationships, the initial tides of lust can make us oblivious to everything other than the physical. Then one day it may suddenly become evident that the hot body we���d been so enamoured of goes along with an all too cold mind.

When you start a relationship of any shape, you have no idea what you���ll get. Not only do both parties bring their personalities and pretences to the table, they also bring beliefs, ideas, preferences and intentions ��� most of which the other person cannot see. All of this can change over time. Some people grow closer over time, others pull off in different directions. There should be no shame in letting go and moving on when any of that turns out to be in issue. Trying to bind people together for always can be a bloody nightmare.

So here I am, on my fourth wedding anniversary. That Tom is still here is a surprise to me ��� I don���t tend to assume people will choose to stay. But here he is, sat across the table from me sorting out his own morning jobs. This afternoon, we have a celebratory adventure planned, and an expression of commitment. I have not, in the last four years, turned into someone it was difficult to live with. All the horrible, demanding, unreasonable attributes others have identified in me do not seem to exist in this relationship, which is interesting because as far as I can tell, I am mostly who I have always been.

I used to be a solitary, antisocial sort of person, only able to cope with people if I also had plenty of time to myself. Since Tom landed, a bit over four years ago, we���ve spent remarkably few hours apart. He���s incredibly easy to be around. This has also surprised me. I don���t think it represents any kind of change in me at all, just that we fit together very neatly. That we can work and play together and be on good terms, co-operative and happy in each other in an ongoing way is not, to be honest, something I had ever expected any relationship to deliver. It probably helped that we were friends and creative collaborators for years before that developed into this. We knew each other before the curious chemistry of desire got in to tinker with our perceptions.

Our culture is full of stories about what relationships between people are supposed to look like. The same gender best friend, the romantic partner, the battle of wills marriage and all the rest of it. All too often we try to fit what���s around us into the story shapes we carry. That can be misleading, and downright unhelpful. Only when you let go of how you think it���s going to be, can you start to find out how it actually is. Sometimes, that can be delightfully surprising.

Learning the landscape

This year, I spent Christmas morning walking the hills. It was a truly amazing day ��� dry air and no cloud made the sunlight sharp and intense. We watched the first light flood the Severn plain with colour and paint the beech trees in startling reds. There were ravens. What had, recently, been a washed out wintery landscape of faded greens, muddy browns and greys suddenly acquired brilliant, jewel-like colour. The Severn River herself was the kind of blue children imagine the sea as being.

On Boxing Day (that���s the 26th for you international folk who do not participate in strange English customs) we did nothing involving either boxes or hitting people. (Theories vary as to why this day has this name and what it is therefore supposed to be about). ��We walked back the long way, which took most of the day, but enabled me to fill in some holes in my inner map. We saw more ravens, and a red deer.

The Christmas Day walk was along the route we used last year so I knew exactly what we were doing and it all went very smoothly. Coming home on the following day, I was winging it. I did not have a map ��� although I had consulted one at some length. Round here, there are always lots of footpaths that do not make it onto even the most detailed maps. So, while the Ordinance Survey is good for lanes and major walking routes, it will not help you once you get into the woods that cover the sides of the Cotswolds. According to the map, there were only a couple of footpaths where we were heading, but I had a suspicion there would be more, and when the ground has paths and the map none, the map can be a lot less than helpful.

I navigated by land shape. I know many of the valleys and hills round here ��� but not all of them. I was walking places I had never walked before, but I could frequently see bits of hills I knew, and from that was able to keep my bearings. I knew roughly the shape of the land I had to cross, and by considering the land shape as well, made a very smooth journey back ��� if a long one. There was only one notable mistake, where I did not chance a footpath that (I learned later) would have been perfect, but took a slightly longer and more certain lane route instead. I will know for next time.

Map reading is a dying skill, as people turn to sat nav increasingly. Holding an inner map seems to be even rarer. I think it���s a critical skill to maintain ��� as important as knowing how to light a fire and cook raw ingredients. Having an inner map is a survival skill. It connects us to each other, to resources in our landscape. An inner map grants independence and confidence.

I���ve been teaching my son how to make inner maps. It���s important to know how your mind works. A more visual person will favour a more literal map, supported by memories of how different bits of landscape look from different angles. My map is more narrative, a series of stories about how the landscape fits together, with occasional visual references where I can manage them. However you build it, you get there by paying attention, thinking about what you know and how it connects to what you can see. It takes time. The more complex, hilly and secretive a landscape is, the longer it will take to map it.

For me, knowing the land is an essential part of my Druidry. It gives me relationship, a sense of place, and an understanding. It connects me to history as manifest in the landscape, to ancestors of place and to all the wildlife that also lives in this landscape. It���s something I can recommend exploring.