Nimue Brown's Blog, page 37

Working with criticism

(Nimue)

To learn and grow, we have to be able to recognise flaws and mistakes. Not all criticism is useful though, and some can be intentionally harmful. How do you decide what to take onboard and what to ignore? This has applications for any creative work we do, for studying Druidry, working in groups and for the not so druidic aspects of our lives as well.

One of the things I’ve learned from having work edited is that a good editor will leave you feeling better about your writing. A good editor gives you confidence and the knowledge that the best possible version of your work will be going out into the world. This is something to welcome.

Good feedback is helpful – and while there can be some initial embarrassment or discomfort around identifying mistakes, that is something that can be dealt with. It’s ok to feel uncomfortable. It’s good to be challenged.

When the feedback is good, it leads to better things. The red flag to watch for is feedback that won’t give you scope to improve. If someone puts you down as a person or rubbishes what you do, then you can’t learn from that and might as well ignore them. If there is no right answer, if everything you do is wrong then you dealing with a troll and owe them nothing.

It’s not your job to please everyone. It is your job to figure out whose feedback is relevant and useful. Whose input helps you improve, and who is just being critical for their own amusement?

Unsolicited critical feedback is often a form of bullying. If someone writes a bad review of your stuff, that’s fair enough. If someone seeks you out to criticise you, that’s not cool and you certainly don’t owe them a response.

There has to be room for negative feedback. It will help you figure out who your work is for, and it is not for and this will improve how you present yourself. It’s important to connect with the right people – that’s as true for what you make as it is for social spaces. If you cannot take negative feedback then you need to look at why.

Perfectionism can make it hard to hear criticism. It is fine not to be perfect, and being gentler with yourself will help with this. We are all learning, we are all flawed. Insecurity and rejection sensitivity can make it hard to hear criticism too. However, criticism is not rejection, not if it comes from someone who is trying to help you do better. Feedback can be an important form of care, when it’s done kindly.

Absolute refusal to engage with criticism of any sort is the path to narcissism. This is an awful condition that people back themselves into by refusing to accept anything suggesting they are less than perfect. It leads to massive cognitive dissonance and a damaged relationship with reality is a whole. Allowing yourself to make mistakes, allowing people to flag them and being ok with that is critically important self care.

Landscape stories

(Nimue)

If human stories merely have settings, that encourages us to see the landscape as nothing more than a backdrop for human activity. When stories engage with the landscape, they can create feelings of involvement and investment. When it comes to getting people to take better care of the planet, this can make a difference. For anyone on the bard path, this is an important consideration.

It can be as simple as making spaces specific – talking about actual landscapes or landscape features as part of the story. Have the landscape impact on the characters in some way. Include weather and seasonal details. If you create characters who have a relationship with places then that colours the story. This is something Pagan authors are already doing – MA Philips has a lot of landscape in her work. Laura Perry’s Minoan fiction is deeply in formed by Crete. Maria DeBlassie’s Weep Woman Weep is a landscape story. Nils Visser’s Wyrdwood books and David Bridger’s fiction all have this going on. (Get in the comments if you’re writing this kind of thing, add links please.)

The landscape I live in is very much part of my sense of self. I have written about my part of the world, in the Wherefore series and in Spells for the Second Sister. My novel Hunting the Egret is set on the banks of the River Severn, while Ghosts of the Lost Forest is very much about the forest of Arden – which used to cover much of the Midlands.

If you feel a sense of belonging you are more likely to care about a place. If you can experience your own landscape as magical, then this will enrich your life. If beauty and wonder aren’t exotic, distant things, you are better off. In practice a lot of people have no sense of belonging or relationship with the land. This alienation is harmful for people and planet alike. Anything we can do to try and change that for ourselves, and for each other, is well worth doing.

The magic of not knowing

(Nimue)

Many religions exist to try and explain the mysteries of life and death. That’s never appealed to me. I think the not-knowing is part of what it means to be human. The longing for meaning and explanations is also part of what it means to be human. We want there to be a point, a purpose, and something to offer comfort in face of all the many challenges and the inevitability of death.

There is wonder in mystery, though. There’s more magic in the uncertainty than in any tale we might want to tell ourselves about it. However much we know, there will always be more to know. The universe is vast beyond anything we could hope to grasp. At the same time, a field is vast beyond anything we could hope to grasp. You could devote your entire life to trying to understand a single field, and there would always be more to learn. That, to me, seems incredibly magical.

I have a hunger for knowledge and a longing to understand whatever I encounter. Yet clearly I cannot understand more than a fraction of what I experience. There are also no absolute truths. All we have is our best understanding right now. If you look back at how people saw things in the past it seems fair to assume our understanding is also partial now, and we do not have everything figured out.

Truths are so often partial, slippery things, depending on context and perspective. My truth is not your truth. My truth today may well be overthrown by my experiences tomorrow. To be human is to be unsure.

The desire for certainty can lead us badly astray. It makes us more open to the snakeoil sellers who offer is their total conviction. It’s part of why conspiracy theories are often persuasive – because there is no element of doubt, while anyone with expertise will be more cautious. The person who says ‘this is the truth, this is how it works’ pushes a lot of emotional buttons. It’s a big part of what makes religion attractive in the first place – that promise of truth and meaning in face of the chaos and uncertainty.

Part of why I feel at home with Druidry is that we don’t deal in absolute truths. We’re each on our own journey, making sense of the world as best we can. Druidry gives us tools we can use to help navigate, but what sense we make of anything is individual. What meaning we settle on is the one we have found for ourselves – helped by guides, teachers or deities perhaps, but still with the individual Druid being responsible for the choices they make.

The Rattlin’ Bog

(Nimue, review)

It isn’t easy finding good books for children growing up in Pagan households. Most Pagan parents are wary of raising their children as Pagans and want to make sure they have a broad perspective on religion. At the same time, there are key values that many of us want to pass on. Respect for the natural world is certainly one of those.

The Rattlin’ Bog isn’t written to be a Pagan children’s book but I think it has a lot to offer on those terms. The first part of the book is based on a folk song, it’s repetitive so easy for a small child to get to grips with. There’s a lot of nature in the song. Then there’s a section that gives you lots of child friendly information about what’s going on in the song, so you can build understanding. Author Jessica Law has a background in biology and knows what she’s talking about.

Bogs and wetlands are really important ecosystems but get a very bad press. Protecting these complex and liminal landscapes is really important – they take up a lot of carbon and they can absorb a lot of water. Re-establishing bogs will help us mitigate against climate chaos as well as protecting landscapes that are valuable in their own right. Encouraging children to see wetlands as good things will help with this. 

Obviously this isn’t a neutral review – that’s Keith’s photo of Jessica, the same Jessica who heads up Jessica Law and the Outlaws. I had the pleasure of seeing her new children’s book ahead of release (out at the start of April). I think it’s relevant though, hence the post.

Here’s the publisher’s website https://www.barefootbooks.com/uk/rattlin-bog

Spiritual love

(Nimue)

The love stories I am most used to, as a white European, are romantic love stories. We tell tales of people getting together, or the first rush of passion and attraction. Love in such tales tends to be sexual. It’s a very narrow take on what love is, and a misleading one as well. Romantic love doesn’t really work as some kind of event that happens to you.

As a Druid I experience love in response to landscapes, the elements and the living world. This is an everyday thing for me; a bubbling up of joy, adoration and delight that fills my heart and makes me feel open and expansive. This kind of love is very much at the centre of my Druidry.

As a follower of the bard path I am deeply emotionally affected by inspiration, and by the beauty other people create. As I hold inspiration sacred that feels intensely spiritual to me.

For many, love in a spiritual context can mean love of deity, of gurus, guides, prophets, teachers, ancestors, preachers, celebrants and the like. It can mean love of sacred texts and teachings, and of the religiously specific creations the path in question has inspired. Love of sacred places, of the relics of the sacred dead, and even the love of organisations and ways of living your beliefs can be part of this.

I’m interested in all of these broader and more spiritual approaches to the idea of love. I’m also interested in what happens when we approach our human relationships with the same openhearted appreciation that we might bring to landscapes or trees. Human love stories tend to include a lot of drama, conflict and tension – because that makes for a good story. It doesn’t make for the best experiences, though. Love that is softer, gentler, more exploratory, and more of an everyday thing has a lot more to offer.

Getting away from the Hollywood romance model opens up room for love that is wilder, more tender and more constant. Love like a sunset, an everyday beauty. Love like a stream moving through a valley, always changing and yet always itself. Love like the wheel of the year bringing gifts at every turn. Love that shows us our own sacredness as we see the sacredness inherent in the beloved. Love that can take any form, and that can take us in many different directions, joyfully and with wonder.

Lost forest wonders

(Nimue)

This tree is some 4.500 years old. It was preserved by a peat bog, then covered over with sand. Back in 2014, storms stripped the sand away, revealing it again. As a consequence, the beach at Borth has the remnants of an ancient forest, and peat bog, where seaweed grows on the tree stumps. It’s something I’ve wanted to see for years, and I was finally able to encounter at the weekend.

This isn’t a petrified forest in the usual sense of the term- those are far older. I don’t know what the proper technical term is for something peatified in this way. To walk amongst these trees is to be in two different landscapes and times. The present moment of the beach and the frozen historical time of the trees overlap in a way that it is very strange to encounter. It was a remarkable experience.

Every landscape is full of history. Often it isn’t self announcing in this way. Seeing it brought to mind just how much history is under our feet, all the time. The unseen presence of the past informs the present, and that influence acts on us even when we aren’t conscious of it. This is one of the things I think about when the idea of ‘spirits seen and unseen’ goes past in a Druidic context. History exists in the soil. What is long gone is also still with is. The echoes of things that happened hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago are still here. Time is intrinsic to landscapes.

What makes this even more fascinating is the local folklore about a lost city – a kind of Welsh Atlantis beneath the waves. When the forest was revealed, it had a walkway in it – I think we saw part of it. People lived in this lost forest. Whether the story is a folk memory of that, or the result of the trees being exposed before, or of something else entirely, isn’t clear.

(Photograph by Keith Errington)

Revisiting intuition and anxiety

(Nimue)

This is a topic I’ve not touched on for a few years. How do you tell between intuition and anxiety? It’s not an easy question. Last time I was looking at how I feel these things and where they land in my body. What I hadn’t considered then was that the anxiety itself might be as valid and useful information as anything intuitive.

If something rubs up against the edges of trauma triggers and makes me uncomfortable, there’s a reason for that. It’s a good idea to look at the reason. Is it just an awkward coincidence? Usually not. If someone pushes my buttons it’s usually because they’re doing something that isn’t ok – it might only be slightly not ok, not trauma-inducingly not-ok. Even so, acknowledging that it isn’t alright and needs dealing with puts me in a much healthier space.

For anyone exploring a magical path, intuition is vitally important. It’s the basis on which everything else depends. If you can’t trust your subtle senses, how can you possibly interact with the world on magical terms? Anxiety, and mistrust of your own feelings is a real obstacle to overcome if you want to act in a magical way, or even in a spiritual way. You need to be able to trust your own instincts and inclinations if you want to be able to focus.

Reclaiming your sense of self and your trust in your own responses is key to reclaiming intuition. Being able to trust that if something doesn’t feel right, then it’s not right is an essential underpinning for human interactions as well as spiritual endeavours. 

If you’ve dealt with something that was ongoing and traumatic, then the odds are it included denying what was happening to you. Domestic abuse, workplace bullying, abusive cults, state-organised gaslighting – these things all come with a side order of victim blaming. If you’ve been told that you over-react, were making something of nothing, making a fuss, being attention seeking or anything else of that ilk you’ve likely had your trust in your own responses compromised. This is normal behaviour from abusers who will try to persuade victims that what’s happening is fair and appropriate.

Reclaiming the validity of your own responses is an important step towards healing and moving forward if you can’t trust your intuition. Taking yourself seriously and looking at what discomforts you gives you more space to decide how to handle it. Trauma can have you responding disproportionately to experiences, but at the same time if something discomforts you in a way that pushes those buttons, it is well worth considering that it isn’t ok. 

The idea that if it doesn’t feel ok then it isn’t ok comes up a lot as guidance for magical practice. It is often better to back away carefully when you didn’t need to than it is to push through something that feels wrong. That’s as true for a magical working as it is for dealing with a group leader who keeps putting hands on you without consent. If it feels wrong for you and other people tell you that you have to be ok with it, or that it is necessary, that wrong-feeling remains valid. Anyone with your best interests at heart won’t just tell you they know what’s best for you, they will care about what you find difficult and why.

Intuition is about trusting yourself. It’s about claiming the right to do things on your own terms and in ways that work for you. Being at the edge of the comfort zone is good. Being outside of your comfort zone when you aren’t the one choosing that, is probably a sign to back away into something safer.

Killing time, saving time

(Nimue)

The language we use around time can have a strikingly capitalis quality to it. When we talk about saving time or spending time there’s an economic echo in that language. ‘Time is money’ as the saying goes. Wasting time, killing time, free time, time management… how we think about time is inevitably informed by other aspects of our cultures.

Clock time is a relatively recent invention, and ties us to industrial and working. This leads us to the idea that we have some ‘free’ time we can ‘spend’ in the way we choose, rather than to a feeling that our days and nights, breaths and moments belong entirely to us. They are part of us. Time is our heartbeat, and we are creatures who live in the flow of it.

Capitalist thinking inclines us to feel that we have to use our time productively. We must be busy, and doing something and ideally that something contributes to either earning or spending money. We work longer to have the money to buy time and labour saving devices. Our time is not saved by this. As many of us are paid by the hour, a lot of worth and cost can be understood in terms of the time it represents. It can be a useful perspective, but it can also suck the vitality our of lives.

It’s interesting to think about different kinds of language that we can bring to thoughts about time. ‘Gentle time’ has become an important one for me. I like quiet time and social time, and time that feels expansive. I like slow days and languid days, because these lend themselves to daydreaming.

There is no time I want to kill. I don’t have to be busy, and I don’t have to be occupied – gentle time allows for window gazing, for being present to a journey, or waiting for what comes next in a relaxed way. 

There is time that I give and time that I devote, and those are happy choices. Inevitably there are deadlines and challenges and busy days when I have to juggle and be clever, life requires this sometimes. But I don’t have to make it the default or treat it as something natural and inevitable. I don’t have to live there. No one should have to live there. Time is too precious for that.

(With thanks to Irisanya Moon for alerting me to this language in the first place.)

Can you really learn Druidry?

(Nimue)

Spend any time in online discussion spaces and you will run into people keen to tell you that you can’t learn Druidry.

The most usual reason is because the Druids are all long dead and didn’t write anything down. Therefore anyone claiming to be a modern Druid is fake, a scammer, or deluded. 

There are also the people who feel that the only way to learn Druidry is directly from nature. They never elaborate – do they watch the rain falling? Are they learning Druidry from trees, from yeast, from the tiny worms who live in their skin? They don’t say, because then they’d be teaching Druidry which obviously you can’t do because you can only learn it from nature…

I suspect quite a few of them are simply bad faith actors who like to come along and rubbish things. They can be annoying, frustrating and demoralising to encounter, which is why I wanted to write about it.

Modern Druidry exists. It is inspired by what we know about the past. Many  modern Druids do not claim to be doing anything ancient, while the genuine reconstructionists put in a lot of work trying to be as informed and authentic as they can be. A tradition doesn’t have to be ancient to be valid. If something works for you, then it doesn’t really matter if it was thought up last week, or a thousand years ago. Equally, age doesn’t make things good, there are plenty of old things (human sacrifice for example) that are not made good simply by being old ideas. 

It’s fine to be a modern Druid working with modern ideas and inspiration. There are many ways of doing your Druidry, and many ways of learning. I’ve learned a lot from people, but also from direct experiences of the land, the seasons and other living beings. You can learn in whatever way suits you,

It seems entirely pointless to me to devote time to telling people that what they do isn’t real, or valid. To me it seems to miss the way that the essence of spirituality is one of reaching after the impossible. Faith is intrinsically about what we don’t know, and any quest for meaning in this life is about resisting the apparent lack of meaning. 

To follow the Druid path is to make your own peace with what we do and don’t know about ancient Druids. It’s to choose something here and now, for whatever reasons that speak to you. For most of us that’s a journey we undertake with all the integrity we can muster. We learn from each other, from our own explorations and from whatever inspires us. 

In all aspects of life, there are people who will come along simply to tear you down. They do it because they have nothing better to bring, and because it gives them some small feeling of power. No matter what capacity you encounter them in, you owe them nothing. They are not entitled to demoralise you, or to take anything you value from you. They will claim their destructiveness is helpful realism, but they are wrong about this and I think some of them know that. Useful criticism helps a person grow and do better. If someone knocks you down, it doesn’t prove anything except that they are not kind. It doesn’t make them right, or useful. 

If you find yourself in spaces where people tell you that you cannot be a Druid, leave, and find better spaces.

Celebrating my muse

(Nimue)

Today is my partner’s birthday so it seemed like a good time to talk a little about our shared history and how we came to be where we are. 

It all started on a stage at a steampunk event. Keith was running the stage, I was contributing to it and we instantly hit it off and appreciated each other’s creative work. I was struck by his charm, wit and warmth, and how easy he was to work with. I’m seldom much impacted by how people look, but he is a dashingly handsome chap and I wasn’t oblivious to that.

As a result of that weekend, I wrote a sea shanty for the Hopeless, Maine project, and Keith asked if he could write stories in the setting. I’ve always been keen to have more people contributing, so that was an enthusiastic yes. Stories ensued – usually funny, and digging in with the twisted whimsy. Keith figured out ways to get Hopeless onto the stage, and we had a few rounds of that. He ran a kickstarter for some of the prose fiction he and I had written, and also ran online events pretty much because I asked him to and he has the tech to make that feasible.

We spent time together at events over some years. We supported and encouraged each other creatively, test-read each other’s work, batted suggestions back and forth. He’s one of the few people I’d ask for advice if I am struggling with a project, and he’s been of considerable help in the past. It was always a substantial and very creative friendship.

Back in the autumn of 2022 I discovered that Keith could sing, and wanted to sing. Getting people performing has always been a passion of mine. Helping people find their voices and their confidence is a thing I am here for, and I could see Keith had huge potential. This led to me playing viola again, which in turn led us to becoming Jessica Law’s Outlaws.

Along the way there was a process for me of realising just how much I love him.

It’s not been a smooth journey. We were both with other people when we started to realise that we wanted to be together. These things are inevitably messy. I try to be careful with other people’s privacy when it comes to the blog, so this is a gappy story with a lot to leave out. There’s nothing I’ve done that I won’t happily admit to, but only in private conversations. There are however a lot of things I can’t write about at all without that flagging up things about my history. I’ve tried to keep that focused on what I’m learning and what’s changing for me, but it’s a tricky balance and I end up not saying far more than I say.

Keith has been amazing for me. His love and support have been life changing. He inspires me, and encourages me and as a result I’ve been far more confident and far more creative since we’ve been together. It’s no exaggeration to call him my muse, and he takes that seriously as a job (and is also delightfully silly about it). His desire to give me the chance to be everything I could be is the most incredible blessing.

That I have become a lot more physically and mentally well is very much due to him. I’m not stressed all the time. I sleep well, I relax. I feel secure, and I know that any difficulties can be talked about and worked through. That substantial friendship we started from gives us a firm basis. We’re both people who want to communicate and to understand, and who care and want to take care of each other. That gets a lot done.

This life is an adventure, a dance, an enchantment.