Nimue Brown's Blog, page 370

Shapeshifting with Tam Lin

Tam Lin is an ancient Scottish story full of love, magic, faerie complications and a lot of shapeshifting. Many versions exist, but the short explanation is: Tam is a young man, falls off his horse while hunting, taken by the faeries to live with them, goes round seducing young ladies in the woods. Seduces Janet, gets her pregnant. She comes back looking for a herb to terminate the pregnancy, he tells her the faeries are going to sacrifice him to Satan at Halloween, and how to save him, she shows up, pulls him from his horse, hangs onto him as he shifts and eventually gets a naked man she can take home. It���s a good story, and there are a lot of places to go with it.

This version doesn���t have any angry faerie queens in it. Just a strange young man, who wanders the forest. A young man who has become more of a shade than a man, and who she has to hold through his transformations so that he can turn back into the kind of person you can realistically take home.

I find this incredibly resonant. Take out the faeries, and what you have is a story that reflects something about bringing back someone who is lost and wandering. I���ve had nights like this, when the difference between life and death is the person who can hold you as you flail, howl, and sometimes bite. A lot of the versions have Tam Lin become a burning brand of iron. Anyone who has tried to hold someone in crisis can expect it to be tough. Mostly it���s not a case of one hard night fending off faerie transformations. Seeing the snarling wolf and the snake within the other person, seeing their teeth and their broken animal self, seeing where they are dangerous and where they are wounded… generally it takes more than a night of holding to make that journey. It takes a lot of holding the burning iron.

But sometimes, at the far end of it, when you have weathered everything there is, when you have heard it all, sometimes what you are left with is another person, whole in their skin and naked in their vulnerability. Someone who might, after all, be able to go back to the village and take up life as a person again.

Try harder want less

You only get out what you put in, and life is what you make of it, right? So when things go wrong, when I���m unhappy, the answer has always been do more, try harder, give more, be more flexible and accepting, be more grateful, ask for less, want less. It takes a lot to bring me to giving up on something, or someone and generally if I do, I���ll just swing round and start applying the try harder and want less approach some other place. Give more and be more grateful for all that there is to be grateful for, all the small beauties and modest good things. And if that fails, be glad it���s not worse.

I notice it���s a way of approaching things that makes no room for a number of options. At no point does ���try harder, give more, want less��� make it possible, much less ok to say ���I am drowning���. Someone please help me, someone please do some of the doing so that I can draw breath. At no point does try more want less allow me to comfortably say I really am too tired and in too much pain today to do the things. It does not have room in it to ask people to go easier on me for a while, and there is not much scope for asking for help, either. Flagging up when something is hurting me, or more than I can bear, is something I find really hard to do.

Give more want less does not make me open to things flowing towards me. It leaves little space for asking what would make me happy. As a person who cycles round depression on a pretty regular basis, I have trouble holding the thought that my being happy is in any way a relevant issue. If it���s a side effect of something else, all well and good, and the appearance of happiness helps people around me to be more comfortable, so that at least is important.

Give more, want less. As though there are no limits on this, no practical, physical bodily needs that can���t be ignored if they turn out to be inconvenient. No demand on my energy that is unreasonable. This autumn I hit a place of not having any more to give. It was not an amusing experience. I kept pushing and trying, and couldn���t stop crying as a consequence. I hit a limit. I���m still limping along, trying to find other places where I can give, organise my time and energy better. Give more efficiently, give more wisely seemed like the way to go.

Want less, because my body wanting things has always made me uncomfortable. Food especially, but affection too, and I���ve been shamed for both along the way. I carry the belief that ideally I wouldn���t want anything, able to exist on air and not requiring any care or maintenance from anyone else. I am aware that being alive and human is not compatible with this, and that to want to want nothing is the most outrageous and unreasonable want of all.

At the moment I can���t do anything useful with this. I know why it exists, I know what it is there to protect me from, I haven���t got to a place of being able to own that, as yet. But I can name this part of it, on the offchance it isn���t just me. One of the things I have learned is that things we think are fine when we inflict them on ourselves do not look so reasonable when we see someone else doing them, and that way lies a chance at escape and freedom. One thing I can say is that it is not a way of living I would recommend to anyone else, it does not fix things or make things better, in any reliable way. There comes a point where all those positive living and thinking ideas about gratitude, getting out what you put in, and the like just turn into a big stick to beat yourself with, and that���s not very positive at all, it���s just self-loathing with a nice mask on it.

The unavailable author

���The opinion of the author is neither available, nor desirable���. It���s a thought form that was drilled into me in my first term at university, all those long eons ago. I think something akin to it may have been said by a chap whose named could be Roland Barthes, but I might be wrong and I lack the will to google for insight. It���s the sort of statement that deserves to have its author���s name divorced from it, not least because it so often turns out true. What the author means and what the reader does are two wholly different things.

It���s not just a literature issue, either. It is an issue for anyone who sets out to write, blog, speak or teach. Your words, and their intended meaning, go on a journey. They pass through the filters of belief and assumption, the different associations other people have with words, and they land in some distant brain, not always in the form you intended. I���m pretty sure what Marx intended looked nothing like communist Russia or China. Mark Twain intended to protest against slavery, but modern readers find him racist. Pretty much every religious founder there has ever been was really clear about not wanting people to go out and kill other people in their name.

Even when the author is supposedly God, humans are entirely willing to infer what they want to find, to twist things where necessary and to generally fit the words to their plan. Even as clear a statement as ���thou shalt not kill��� ascribed to God the Author somehow doesn���t result in people quitting on the whole killing other people thing, even when they claim to follow the book.

If being God doesn���t mean you get your authoring properly understood and respected, frankly the rest of us have got our work cut out.

I don���t really have an answer to this, but I think the issue could stand serious consideration. Humans throw words out into the world all the time with little consideration for the impact those words might have on others, and seldom much willingness to take responsibility when someone takes those words in a way we did not mean. We might not be able to steer exact interpretation, but more thought to the emotional impact could help. Are we feeding hatred and anger? Are we just wallowing in the bad stuff and facilitating emotional pornography? Or are we offering hope, ways forward, inspiration and opportunities to do better? I try and make sure I include some scope for usefully doing something, even when I���m angry or miserable. There are no doubt days when I fail in this.

Some of the responsibility lies with the reader. If we are to be better humans, learning to be more careful, precise and deliberate readers and writers, speakers and listeners would not be a terrible place to start.

Misery is a choice

���Misery is a choice��� is one of those splendid positive thinking memes doing the rounds at the moment, and while it���s mostly true, it���s offered in a way that suggests all the wrong things. Misery is a choice so you should choose not to be miserable, and anyone who is miserable has no one to blame but themselves, is the impression it creates. So, let���s be very clear. If your brain chemistry is awry you may have no choice over being miserable. Further, there are a lot of times in life when misery is the best, healthiest and most honourable choice you can make.

You can only be hurt in so far as you care. The easiest way to avoid misery, is therefore to go through this life not caring about anything. The things you love, value, and invest in have the power to hurt you and let you down, but the person who doesn���t care is spared from this. It seems to me a very drab, joyless way to live. I would rather love fiercely and accept the inevitability of heartbreak.

Grief is a process. We can all expect to be bereaved as we go through life. We will lose jobs, friends, homes, we will move from one life stage to another, and not everything will go as we wanted. The process of grieving is the way in which our bodies and minds deal with profound and life altering loss. This process is important, but you can choose to repress it. Sooner or later, that repression will fail to hold up, and you get to move from choosing not to be miserable, to serious mental breakdown where you probably won���t have much control over your mental state at all. Feeling misery is a part of having a healthy mind, shut that down and you store up trouble.

Pain is part of the learning process. We all mess up. We all do things that it is reasonable to regret or wish we had done differently. Feeling misery over this helps us learn to do differently. If we have to be happy about all our choices, actions and all the outcomes we get, we do not allow ourselves to learn or change. Hone this skill long enough and it becomes a condition called covert narcissism, which will then poison every relationship you have. But you never have to feel miserable.

Cognitive dissonance is the mind bending process of having to think things that do not add up. If you have an abusive partner but are practicing the art of not being miserable, you may stay, choosing to see the best in everything, and not dealing with the damage you are taking. If you can���t acknowledge misery, you won���t leave the stifling job, or necessarily take on any other discomfort in your life. The more time you spend choosing to be happy and tuning out the things that really should be recognised as problems, the more trouble you get into and you can entirely break your mind this way.

The worst thing you have endured is the basis for your ability to empathise with other people who are struggling and suffering. The person intent on avoiding pain, is less likely to be able to develop compassion or understanding for others. In some very privileged lives, avoiding misery is just about recognising that what you have is pretty good. If your misery is your inability to feel gratitude, that���s something to work on, but it does not follow that everyone else who is miserable is also incapable of feeling gratitude. Their partner may be dying, their child may be sick, their job and home may be on the line. There are plenty of real things out there to be afraid of, and in working to understand our own misery, rather than ignoring it, we can build empathy for others and do more to support each other.

Mourning the planet will make you miserable. Thinking about climate change, extinction, hunger, and deprivation in the world should make you bloody miserable. Yes, you can choose to ignore all of this and carry on in your own sweet way, but frankly if you do you will be part of the problem, not part of the solution. Our misery in the face of human destructiveness is the thing that could yet save us.

If you use the recognition that misery is a choice to help you get out of miserable situations and to make real change in the world ��� that���s a good choice to be making. If you chose to switch off that capacity within yourself, you may feel more comfortable in the short term, but you are likely to become toxic to those round you, and deeply dysfunctional within yourself such that your future choices may be sorely compromised. It is better, surely, to choose to be real, than to make sweeping judgements that reject parts of your life experience.

The mechanics of faltering

Yesterday I wrote about having a calling but no answer to it, today I want to talk about how that works in practise. I have a regular and dependable burnout cycle, I���ve repeated it over more than a decade, with each cycle taking six to eight weeks, typically. That���s got to be getting on for 50 bouts of getting wiped out physically and falling into pits of despair. If not more.

I have a calling, to write and to serve, and it gets me out of bed in the morning. I run all day, as hard as I can, doing as much as I can, saying ���yes��� as far as is possible. I throw everything I have at trying to do something worth doing. I don���t take whole days off, and I push my limits until I collapse. I do this because I feel so driven, and because for assorted reasons, I do not feel safe or comfortable about stopping. Then I fall over, and on none of the occasions of my falling over have I achieved enough for that to feel ok. Often the timing is inconvenient. I look at all that I have done, and see how insufficient it is, and depression kicks in. Once again, I have failed. Eventually, I pick myself up from this and try again, promising myself that next time it will work. Next time I will do better. The next project, the next voluntary job, the next book will be the one that makes it all worthwhile.

Repeat.

It is the burnout that causes the despair and the feelings of failure. It is the despair and feelings of failure that prompt me to run like a mad thing towards the next burnout. Clearly this isn���t working, and for the first time I���m coming out of the dark patch of the process and questioning whether the answer is to gird loins and other body parts, brace myself and start doing it all again. I���ve got this audio project on the go, and this one, surely, this one (if I really give it my all) will be the one that gets somewhere…

I���ve started asking what underpins this process. Answers: I move the goalposts because anything I achieve, by dint of my having achieved it, ceases to look as big as I thought it would be. Some of that is learning and perspective ��� there was a time when I believed all I���d need to do was get a publisher and the rest would flow from there, and that���s not how it works. Some of it is sane, and some of it isn���t. I carry a suspicion that anything I have managed, probably wasn���t good enough anyway. Alongside this, I don���t feel entitled to stop, to rest, to let up, to go easy on myself and I don���t feel entitled to be happy. What this means is that any attempt to break the cycle feels like being lazy. I���m not trying hard enough, unless it actually hurts, and if I���m not trying hard enough, how can I possibly succeed? This is not a game it is possible to win, because there are diminishing returns around morale, confidence and energy reserves. I���ve spent ten years or more beating myself to a pulp on a regular basis for not being good enough and not deserving anything better.

I just can���t put my worn out body and fragile mind through much more of this. Every time I go down, it gets that bit harder to stand up and try again. One of these days, I will not be able to get up, odds are. If I slow down, much less quit, I have to contend with feeling like a failure, and a fraud. I have to face all the little voices (other people���s mostly) that say about how lazy and useless I am and that someone like me could never hope to do anything much. I have to face them being right. The years of running hard have never made them go away, never silenced them either in my head or in my life. I have to accept that there are people for whom I will never be good enough or worthy of respect, and that I do not get to prove them wrong. They���ve helped keep the goalposts moving and there is no winning this game.

It is a hard thing to look your own inadequacy in the face, but there is nothing remaining other than to turn and face it, and accept it. Running and pushing has stripped me of my faith in my own work, robbed me of energy and inspiration. Either I keep running and lose everything, or I stop now and settle for writing books for the tiny handful of people who like them. I salvage what I can and learn to accept that it will do.

A call with no answer

The experience of being called gives a sense of purpose and direction to things we might do. The call to serve as a Druid, the call to activism, to writing and other forms of creativity. A sense of having been called to act implies meaning, a whiff of destiny perhaps, an impression of being wanted. And if it works, things flow towards you, opportunities to act and speak. Callings such as these result in people like Philip Carr-Gomm, J K Rowling, Caroline Lucas… callings give you Einstein, and Ghandi. On the darker side, calling can also give you serial killers, tyrants, lunatics.

But mostly not.

Callings are not always answered. They don���t always mean that doors will open, or that what you do will bear fruit any time you can see it. Van Gough spent his life poor, obscure and struggling. Only after death was he taken seriously, and the fame that has since validated his work, was never available to him. While it���s possible to go through life clinging to a belief that at some point, what you do will prove worth it, the longer you go on banging your head against a wall and making little difference, the harder it is to justify.

Just exactly how much does a person have to do to answer a calling? How much success? How much usefulness? How much service? There are no tidy answers to this. When is it fairer to say that the call to serve is really a call of ego, a call to be important? Surely, if we believe in our calling our vision, we should be willing to do the work no matter how unvalued, how ridiculed, how financially compromised it leaves us… surely that���s what a real calling means.

But how do you tell, if the thing driving you is truly a calling, truly purposeful, or if it���s just the desire to be loved and famous? How do you tell if the dream is any good, if most of the feedback you get suggests it has little or no value to anyone? The history of cutting edge creative people is a history full of depression, despair, and too many suicides. The roll call of brilliant people, modern and historical, who did not survive their thirties, is almost unbearable to reflect on. Mozart died young and in poverty, so did Robbie Burns. Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain… too many names. Too many callings that could not be survived, too many people who were truly valued only after they were gone.

How do you tell if a dream is worth giving your life to? When do you say ���enough���? When does it stop being brave and visionary and start being irresponsible, self indulgent, deluded… And if it is not possible to be great or significant, is it worth showing up, day after day, to be small, modest, a little bit useful sometimes, liked by a few people?

I simply do not know, but this is the rock I break against every few months, pouring hours into work that does not pay, conscious that my most useful economic contribution to my family is as housewife, kidding myself each time that the next project will be the one that really takes off. The next project will be the one where I finally manage to do to something I think holds up. When do dreams become insanity?

I recall a recent interview with Leonard Cohen in which he said it was this or wash dishes, he couldn���t do anything else. But that���s ok because he���s Leonard Cohen and he���s never going to need to find something else to do. But for every Leonard Cohen out there, how many of us are there? The hundreds, thousands of never made the grade, never turned that calling into an answer, those of us who put the best we have into the world, and find that we would indeed be more useful washing dishes. With hindsight, fame and success validates the years of struggle, for some, but for many there is never anything to justify to the world the time we spent on the things we made. The scorn and ridicule this attracts is both reliable and unfunny. I talked about the struggles of the creative life before, and got a comment to the effect that I have a hobby, not a job, and how dare I imagine I was better than someone who earned a living doing mundane things. I���ll probably carry that one with me as long as I live. The assumption of arrogance in my desire to live by doing the thing I do best. A call with no answer.

My perfect demon

There is a woman who lives inside my head. She has perfect, flawless skin and isn’t hairy. Her teeth are straight, her hands elegant. She can dance on the tips of her toes, run all day and then cook a three course meal without turning a hair. She remembers dates, references, details and conversations perfectly, has perfect pitch. Her hands do not shake, she never drops things, she is graceful, not clumsy. She knows intuitively what everyone around her wants and is able to deliver this smoothly and unobtrusively. She is calm, reasonable and sensible, free from melodrama, but she’s also warm and emotionally available. I could go on, but you probably get the idea.

The woman in my head is everything I have been asked to be down the years and failed to live up to. She is everything parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, students and lovers have failed to find in me at varying times. She has grown alongside me, my perfect demon, sitting there day by day making it clear what I am not. All the things my body cannot do. All the places my mind fails, all the skills I do not have. She has been well fed by every reproachful moment of me having let someone else down.

I cannot be her, and that’s the point. She’s not available to me, not obtainable. No matter how thin I get, I am never thin enough to be her. No matter how well I do, she is always going to be better. You don’t get to win this kind of game. I did not create her alone, I had a lot of help from my culture especially. Everything I do, at some level I am comparing to the perfect demon in my head. Everything. But what makes this interesting is that I know I can’t be that. I know this cluster of beautiful, unobtainable goals cannot be mine, so why is she still here? Why is she still in my head, flawless and charming as she is?

Because her photo-shopped sisters are on the cover of every magazine, perhaps. Because I’ve seen the adverts full of perfect, clean, tidy homes where perfectly made up women smile for the camera with their perfectly clean children. Because I’ve seen pornography, and I’ve read positive thinking memes, and encountered yummy mummies, and not a day goes by but somewhere, something manages to tell me that the shiny woman, the impossible, unavailable woman in my head is who I am supposed to be.

I don’t know any perfect people. I know a lot of people with real, hairy, potentially flatulent bodies that do not do everything they might want to do. I know mournful people and grumpy people, and very few people with perfectly tidy homes. I have never met any shiny people, but I have met a lot of people who are trying hard to be the shiny and do all the things, and most of them do not seem to be enjoying it.

We have been occupied, some of us, (how many? I don’t know. It may not just be me)by a race of perfect creatures who leave us feeling inadequate and miserable. I’m thinking some deliberate resistance to this may be in order.

Why I can���t forgive you

In order to bestow forgiveness, a person has to have some very particular underlying beliefs and ideas in the first place. As I don���t, and therefore can���t, I thought it might be interesting to pick through the mechanics a bit.

It has come to my attention in the last few months that to be able to forgive, you have to feel that something else should have happened. You have to believe that the other person shares your sense of what should have happened, and that they would have preferred to get it right and do the thing that would have fitted with that. From that place, (as far as I can make out) you forgive the shortcoming, the mistake, and everyone moves on.

I automatically differentiate between things I need and want, and the actual shape of my interactions with people. Entitlement doesn���t feature much, for a whole array of historical reasons. Consequently, if something goes wrong I tend not to see this as an accidental departure from the real relationship, but as a reflection of it. I make sense of my interactions with people based not on what I think should happen, but on what happens. It means that forgetting, letting me down, being less than fair or kind to me is likely to just be quietly recognised as how things are between us. It is absolutely not a coincidence that I tend to be wary, distant and closed with most people.

My suspicion is that if you carry an ideal about, then however wonky the reality is, you���ll probably do a better job of holding positive and open sorts of connections with other people. Failure to live up to expectation might seem more temporary, more transient from that perspective, and be easier both to point out and to then let go of. What point is there in making a fuss about how someone treats you, if you start with the belief that how they treat you is an expression of how they feel about you? Ask them to do differently and you���re asking them (from that way of looking at things)to be dishonest with you.

I don���t think I fall into the trap of expecting people to know what I want and need. It���s very easy to go round getting cross with people when you think they should know your foibles, weaknesses and whatnot. It���s more about things that could be applied to anyone. Are they kind to me? Do they keep promises? Do they ask more of me than I can give and respond badly when I can���t keep up? Do they only seem to value me in so far as I am useful to them? Are they patient when I struggle? When I am in pain, are they gentle with me, or is that just another inconvenience to get cross about?

It says something about my history that for me, kindness is not a reasonable expectation, nor do I feel entitled to expect people will be careful round me around distress, pain, exhaustion and other limits. I���m used to being asked for more than I am equal to by people for whom I mostly seem to be a resource. Observation suggests that people who feel entitlement do not tend to accept that sort of thing and are much better at holding their boundaries, but for long periods of time my sense of place seemed wholly dependent on utility, and it���s hard to break with that.

To forgive you, I would have to start from a place of thinking that I deserved something better. I find it hard to imagine I deserve other than I get. It seems to me a fair measure of how people around me and groups I interact with relate to me. It seems like a measure of who I am. People who offer to forgive may be in a better place than people who don���t, on the whole.

Why I can’t forgive you

In order to bestow forgiveness, a person has to have some very particular underlying beliefs and ideas in the first place. As I don’t, and therefore can’t, I thought it might be interesting to pick through the mechanics a bit.

It has come to my attention in the last few months that to be able to forgive, you have to feel that something else should have happened. You have to believe that the other person shares your sense of what should have happened, and that they would have preferred to get it right and do the thing that would have fitted with that. From that place, (as far as I can make out) you forgive the shortcoming, the mistake, and everyone moves on.

I automatically differentiate between things I need and want, and the actual shape of my interactions with people. Entitlement doesn’t feature much, for a whole array of historical reasons. Consequently, if something goes wrong I tend not to see this as an accidental departure from the real relationship, but as a reflection of it. I make sense of my interactions with people based not on what I think should happen, but on what happens. It means that forgetting, letting me down, being less than fair or kind to me is likely to just be quietly recognised as how things are between us. It is absolutely not a coincidence that I tend to be wary, distant and closed with most people.

My suspicion is that if you carry an ideal about, then however wonky the reality is, you’ll probably do a better job of holding positive and open sorts of connections with other people. Failure to live up to expectation might seem more temporary, more transient from that perspective, and be easier both to point out and to then let go of. What point is there in making a fuss about how someone treats you, if you start with the belief that how they treat you is an expression of how they feel about you? Ask them to do differently and you’re asking them (from that way of looking at things)to be dishonest with you.

I don’t think I fall into the trap of expecting people to know what I want and need. It’s very easy to go round getting cross with people when you think they should know your foibles, weaknesses and whatnot. It’s more about things that could be applied to anyone. Are they kind to me? Do they keep promises? Do they ask more of me than I can give and respond badly when I can’t keep up? Do they only seem to value me in so far as I am useful to them? Are they patient when I struggle? When I am in pain, are they gentle with me, or is that just another inconvenience to get cross about?

It says something about my history that for me, kindness is not a reasonable expectation, nor do I feel entitled to expect people will be careful round me around distress, pain, exhaustion and other limits. I’m used to being asked for more than I am equal to by people for whom I mostly seem to be a resource. Observation suggests that people who feel entitlement do not tend to accept that sort of thing and are much better at holding their boundaries, but for long periods of time my sense of place seemed wholly dependent on utility, and it’s hard to break with that.

To forgive you, I would have to start from a place of thinking that I deserved something better. I find it hard to imagine I deserve other than I get. It seems to me a fair measure of how people around me and groups I interact with relate to me. It seems like a measure of who I am. People who offer to forgive may be in a better place than people who don’t, on the whole.

Preparing for ritual

If ritual is to be a spiritually meaningful and rewarding experience, it’s not enough to just turn up at the designated time and place and expect it all to happen. Some preparation is required, but what? It’s easy to invest a lot of pre-ritual time in getting the kit right, sorting out your attire and having all the objects you want just so. For some people, this is a really powerful act of transition – if it works for you, go for it. I’ve also seen the ‘stuff’ take over, such that the stress of getting all the things to the right place can take a person away from ritual, not towards it. The more involved we are with the stuff, the less involved we are with the place of ritual, often.

We need to let go of normal life. It’s not much use coming to ritual space with a head full of last night’s TV programs, today’s anxieties, and gossip from social media. We need to be clear in ourselves and not tangled up in all that daily stuff. Meditation, and prayer can be a great help. If you come to ritual space by car or public transport you will also need time to ground and connect, shifting speed to be more in tune with the land.

Taking people into ritual space and kicking off into ritual can be good in terms of dramatic effect, but it isn’t my preference. I think there’s a lot to be said for giving participants time to get the feel of a place, to look around and notice what is happening in it. Time to look at the sky and the earth, to listen to whatever is in the wind and to attune yourself a bit to the spirit of the place you are working in.

The more time there is before and after a ritual when you can be in the space, the more room there is for community. We need community, we are communal creatures and the coming together of likeminded people is part of what ritual is for. It is the creating of shared spiritual language and experience, making a common ground. It’s good to be able to take some time at the end, too, passing round the cake, talking, before plunging back into the rest of your life. The less abrupt transition to and from ritual is, the more you are likely to get out of it.