Nimue Brown's Blog, page 371

Serenity Rose

Tom (my bloke, for anyone new here…) has been a big fan of Serenity Rose for a long time. It’s a comic about a troubled, diminutive, youthful witch, and mixes the cute and the gothic, so there’s a lot to like. Over the last few days I’ve been reading the mighty hardcover of the collected ten years of Serenity, by Aaron Alexovich. It’s been a good journey and I am entirely in love with the setting and decidedly taken with the main character. I wish I’d met her as a teen, because while I tried to fake social capability, that totally confused, don’t know the rules, last child to be picked for anything oh god please let me go to the back and disappear entirely sort of feeling… that I recognise. I still have that body posture most of the time; almost ducking.

This is a story about how to live, how to deal with your personal power (whatever it is you’ve got) and the anxiety of not knowing when to act. It’s also a story about the state of the world, our collective values and our ways of living. It’s about being a genuine witch in a small town marketing itself on dodgy fake magic replicas. How on earth do you even start to be real, when everything around you is a dubious fake? It’s there in the goth side, too – the effort and over the top, bought it in a pricey store goth, verses the gothic sensibility, the soul that goes wandering the empty streets in the dark. So while the magic is fantastical, I think there are a lot of things here Pagan readers will find resonant.

This is a book that pushed a lot of buttons for me, in a more personal way. There was so much I recognised. The person who spends most of their time moving to avoid attention, standing small, folding away, whose every gesture contains a bit of an apology for taking up space. Serenity would be cute, if her awkward self-consciousness didn’t create a big sphere of prickles around her. It’s hard to come over as attractive when you’re that ill at ease in your own skin. Seeing it drawn out like that made me realise that to a very large degree, attractiveness is about attitude. It’s an expression of confidence. The person who feels good in themselves comes across better than the person who doesn’t.

When you are by nature a painfully shy and awkward sort of introvert, feeling like you are made almost entirely of elbows, there’s not much comfort to be had from thinking that if only you were someone else entirely, you’d be passably pretty. But it does help to make sense of some things.

In social situations, I’m often more comfortable as ritual leader, organiser, performer than I am trying to just chat to people. For a start, the rules of engagement are clearer when you’re at the front. I know who I’m supposed to be, and it’s also fine to be what would, in other contexts, seem excessive and overblown. The intensity that makes me hard work in person, is diluted a bit by a stage. It occurs to me that when I’m performing, I’m not faking anything. That’s me. What’s hard is getting that down to a sensible size for normal human interactions. So I look at Serenity Rose with her magic and her people issues, and something chimes for me. Clearly it’s not just me, then. This is a lot of what it’s like if you’re trying to live with a mute button on most of the time. As though we are all living in one of those TV sitcoms where the setup isn’t allowed to change and nothing important is allowed to happen.

I can very much recommend this story to all you in-hiding goth introvert witchy types. You know who you are. There’s a digital comic, if you want to explore, and also, there’s the lovely book.

Seasons don���t fear the postman

Conditioning is a process by which one thing becomes so associated with another that it informs our reactions. Pavlov���s famous dogs, drooling when they heard the lunch bell ring are of course the classic example, but we all do it. Conditioning is one of the means by which we learn, and you can get all kinds of problems by teaching a small child that they���ll be paid attention if they act out.�� We don���t just consciously look for patterns, we learn them with our bodies.

So, postmen then, and where they all fit. There were years when anything dreadful started with a letter and anything terrifyingly important would be in the post, too. Things from solicitors. Bills (not always but frequently also from solicitors). Paperwork for Tom getting to stay in the UK. It all came thick and fast for a long time such that the sound of post became associated with a rush of adrenaline. It wasn���t long before I���d get the rush without even knowing what had come through the door. By extension, seeing our postman or his van started to make me nervous, too. Then we moved to the boat and had to collect our post from the post office. Cycling past the post office soon became unsettling. And then gradually all post offices, post vans, post persons, post boxes and reference to post started to be infected by a sense of creeping dread.

It probably sounds mad. It is, and it isn���t. There���s a perfectly reasonable connection with things that were genuinely terrifying and I had every reason to dread and fear, but the way in which trained fear responses can spread makes it rather a lot like a disease. It is mechanisms like this that result in people feeling like they can���t leave the house.

The post hasn���t been scary for about five months now ��� it was scary again during the house buying period. I still feel anxious when I hear mail falling through the door, and have to consciously remind myself that most of it will be junk, the rest will probably be ok and some of it could be good. ���The postman can bring nice things��� has become an important personal mantra for dealing with fear.

The best way to deal with conditioning is to put a new layer of something different on top. I���m being helped by people sending me lovely things. The postman can bring good stuff. I make a point of talking to postpeople and being friendly, I make myself go into post offices, and slowly, slowly I replace the conditioning with better associations. It is an attrition job.

If you do something, or respond to something in a way that seems irrational, it is always worth tracing it back and finding out where it came from. The odds are there was a time in your life, or there is a place where that reaction makes perfect sense. Knowing what it is, you can start trying to build a different set of associations and beliefs to replace the ones that aren���t serving you. Our minds and emotions are surprisingly malleable. We can learn startling emotional responses without knowing how it happened, but we are not then, any of us, stuck with them. It is always possible to change.

The postman is nice.

Other postpeople do not have things for me and will not run at me in the street with unpayable bills.

The postman is nice.

There may be mushroom spores in the post today.

Seasons don���t fear the postman…

Seasons don’t fear the postman

Conditioning is a process by which one thing becomes so associated with another that it informs our reactions. Pavlov’s famous dogs, drooling when they heard the lunch bell ring are of course the classic example, but we all do it. Conditioning is one of the means by which we learn, and you can get all kinds of problems by teaching a small child that they’ll be paid attention if they act out.  We don’t just consciously look for patterns, we learn them with our bodies.

So, postmen then, and where they all fit. There were years when anything dreadful started with a letter and anything terrifyingly important would be in the post, too. Things from solicitors. Bills (not always but frequently also from solicitors). Paperwork for Tom getting to stay in the UK. It all came thick and fast for a long time such that the sound of post became associated with a rush of adrenaline. It wasn’t long before I’d get the rush without even knowing what had come through the door. By extension, seeing our postman or his van started to make me nervous, too. Then we moved to the boat and had to collect our post from the post office. Cycling past the post office soon became unsettling. And then gradually all post offices, post vans, post persons, post boxes and reference to post started to be infected by a sense of creeping dread.

It probably sounds mad. It is, and it isn’t. There’s a perfectly reasonable connection with things that were genuinely terrifying and I had every reason to dread and fear, but the way in which trained fear responses can spread makes it rather a lot like a disease. It is mechanisms like this that result in people feeling like they can’t leave the house.

The post hasn’t been scary for about five months now – it was scary again during the house buying period. I still feel anxious when I hear mail falling through the door, and have to consciously remind myself that most of it will be junk, the rest will probably be ok and some of it could be good. “The postman can bring nice things” has become an important personal mantra for dealing with fear.

The best way to deal with conditioning is to put a new layer of something different on top. I’m being helped by people sending me lovely things. The postman can bring good stuff. I make a point of talking to postpeople and being friendly, I make myself go into post offices, and slowly, slowly I replace the conditioning with better associations. It is an attrition job.

If you do something, or respond to something in a way that seems irrational, it is always worth tracing it back and finding out where it came from. The odds are there was a time in your life, or there is a place where that reaction makes perfect sense. Knowing what it is, you can start trying to build a different set of associations and beliefs to replace the ones that aren’t serving you. Our minds and emotions are surprisingly malleable. We can learn startling emotional responses without knowing how it happened, but we are not then, any of us, stuck with them. It is always possible to change.

The postman is nice.

Other postpeople do not have things for me and will not run at me in the street with unpayable bills.

The postman is nice.

There may be mushroom spores in the post today.

Seasons don’t fear the postman…

It is good to be uncomfortable

The edges are always places of fertility and possibility, and it is often when at the edge of the comfort zone that we do the most important things. Discomfort itself is a very good indicator of something important happening, and whatever else you do, is worth paying some heed to rather than trying to just ignore it or make it go away unquestioned. Yesterday, noticing a highly critical 1 star review for Spirituality without Structure  gave me a very good opportunity to be uncomfortable.

I read the review, and my first response was to wonder if it was a fair criticism. I went back and spent much of the evening re-reading my own book – I wrote it a couple of years ago and my memory isn’t perfect. I attempted to re-read it with an eye to how it could cause so much hurt and offence. Do I berate people? Do I call readers blind, ignorant, arrogant and belittle at every turn? Well, I am terse, I realise, and when dealing with difficult subjects that may make my words more pointy than is intended. There are some style issues to consider for the future, so that’s useful to know.

I came away from my book with some ideas about who it would offend, because there are indeed people I go for with no punches pulled. I am pretty damning about those individuals who use religion as a way of controlling other people and getting power over them. I am really intolerant about the way genuine spiritual endeavour is so often subverted for political ends, for war, abuse of others, violence, empire building and the egos of the few. Religion is human, and some humans just want power over everyone and everything else. I don’t know if my reviewer feels that way, or had some other issue and I’m not going to give them a hard time based on imagining what was happening in their head. As they labelled me an atheist and I spend as much time picking holes in atheism as I do in anything else, I wonder if the reviewer simply misunderstood me.

As I worked through this process, I became ever more interested in the idea of how my reviewer was handling feeling uncomfortable – it’s the second time this week that I’ve had very hostile feedback from someone who took as an attack, words that were not meant to be attacking. But, I’ve been told before that I make people uncomfortable and that I shouldn’t be surprised if they lash back sometimes. Previously, I’d not been able to make sense of that as an idea, but a bit of a light came on yesterday.

Of course I could have read that review and got angry with the reviewer for being ‘mean’ to me, and saying things that weren’t (in my subjective opinion) fair or accurate. That anger would have been protective; its function to protect me from feeling uncomfortable. If we feel uncomfortable and can project that as meaning the other person is attacking us, we don’t have to look at anything on the inside. We don’t have to question whether we were right, or look at how we might seem from another angle. We don’t have to ask if we misread, or misrepresented, or anything else that demonstrates we were less than perfect.

The desire to be always comfortable is natural enough – comfort is nice. However, if you try and stay there all the time, you can only have stagnation, and you can’t allow yourself to know about anything you might be getting wrong. I take on big issues and my writing is terse, and I need to look at the relationship between those two things because I have no desire to bruise people who might, if given something just a bit warmer to work with, be more able to do something useful with it. I learn a thing. I also learn that I feel threatened by people not liking me, and it doesn’t matter how distant and unknown to me they are, my hackles still go up. There are reasons, human and historical, and I should look at that another time. I learn how easy it is, how comfort restoring to simply blame something on the outside for causing uncomfortableness, when really we’ve felt it on the inside and something must be going on there, too. On the whole, I would choose to know rather than push the opportunity away.

Why Twitter���s #cameronmustgo is so important

Of course there���s been a lot of criticism ��� the right wing tells us that hashtags don���t win elections and that elections are how you get rid of prime ministers. I don���t think that was how they relieved themselves of Margaret Thatcher but there we go. It���s internet bullying, they say because nothing is meaner than a bunch of ordinary people standing up to wealth, power and media influence to offer an alternative. They say we don���t understand the economy, and yet they are the ones who have pushed ours further into debt. It���s been an interesting ten days so far.

Of course ���Cameron Must Go��� isn���t the half of it. I don���t think anyone using the hashtag really wants to see him replaced by another smug, overpaid suit who thinks anyone earning less than ��150k is irrelevant (yes, one of them, Mark Garnier, apparently said that…). It���s not just Cameron that must go, but the whole logic of punishing the poor and the majority for the sake of a very rich few. No more selling off national assets to the lowest bidder. No more lying to us, no more expenses for MP dinners, duck houses and jollies. #Cameronmustgo is a demand for cleaner, fairer and more reasonable political thinking.

I���m not speculating when I say this ��� one of the things that has inspired me about this grass roots campaign is the way regular people are bringing facts to the table. All of the hideous truths in the public domain that neither media nor politicians are, for the greater part, willing to talk about. How our illegal levels of air pollution are killing thousands of people every year. How planned cuts for future spending will put us in breach of child rights, of deaths brought about by austerity, and the squandering of public money. It���s been a calm and reasoned argument thus far, with frankly a good deal less verbal abuse than the ******** deserve.

A hashtag may not win an election, but it���s meant there are a great deal activists from different parties and no parties at all reaching out to each other as never before to talk about what needs to change. Anyone who thinks that won���t make a difference, doesn���t know much about people. It is hard to fight, when you think it���s just you. It is so hard, feeling like one lone voice against the cacophony of madness, to keep speaking out ��� it is lonely, exhausting and demoralising. But now we know. We know there are a lot of other people out there who want to be part of a fairer, kinder society. We all know there are a lot of us who think that greed is not a virtue, and that looking after everyone should be the business of politics. There���s a sense of momentum in that.

Hopefully, other political parties are looking at this Twitter movement and realising that the UKIP/Tory agenda of immigrant bashing, isolationism and picking on the poor is not necessarily the only way to get voters interested. A lot of us do not want that world. Many of us think quality of life for all should be the focus, not the impossible, unsustainable, illogical nonsense of eternal fiscal growth. Never mind that most of the ���growth��� seems to be in the financial sectors where the ���wealth��� is imaginary and can disappear in a flash.

All greed gets us is destruction and misery for the majority. Greed trashes our planet and damages the things most essential to life ��� air, water, food supply. It encourages me to see how many people are waking up to this and demanding change, and demanding it politely and with reasoned arguments. This, people, is what a quiet revolution looks like and it is most assuredly going somewhere. When enough people decide not to support a system, that system fails. I think the time is coming.

Why Twitter’s #cameronmustgo is so important

Of course there’s been a lot of criticism – the right wing tells us that hashtags don’t win elections and that elections are how you get rid of prime ministers. I don’t think that was how they relieved themselves of Margaret Thatcher but there we go. It’s internet bullying, they say because nothing is meaner than a bunch of ordinary people standing up to wealth, power and media influence to offer an alternative. They say we don’t understand the economy, and yet they are the ones who have pushed ours further into debt. It’s been an interesting ten days so far.

Of course ‘Cameron Must Go’ isn’t the half of it. I don’t think anyone using the hashtag really wants to see him replaced by another smug, overpaid suit who thinks anyone earning less than £150k is irrelevant (yes, one of them, Mark Garnier, apparently said that…). It’s not just Cameron that must go, but the whole logic of punishing the poor and the majority for the sake of a very rich few. No more selling off national assets to the lowest bidder. No more lying to us, no more expenses for MP dinners, duck houses and jollies. #Cameronmustgo is a demand for cleaner, fairer and more reasonable political thinking.

I’m not speculating when I say this – one of the things that has inspired me about this grass roots campaign is the way regular people are bringing facts to the table. All of the hideous truths in the public domain that neither media nor politicians are, for the greater part, willing to talk about. How our illegal levels of air pollution are killing thousands of people every year. How planned cuts for future spending will put us in breach of child rights, of deaths brought about by austerity, and the squandering of public money. It’s been a calm and reasoned argument thus far, with frankly a good deal less verbal abuse than the ******** deserve.

A hashtag may not win an election, but it’s meant there are a great deal activists from different parties and no parties at all reaching out to each other as never before to talk about what needs to change. Anyone who thinks that won’t make a difference, doesn’t know much about people. It is hard to fight, when you think it’s just you. It is so hard, feeling like one lone voice against the cacophony of madness, to keep speaking out – it is lonely, exhausting and demoralising. But now we know. We know there are a lot of other people out there who want to be part of a fairer, kinder society. We all know there are a lot of us who think that greed is not a virtue, and that looking after everyone should be the business of politics. There’s a sense of momentum in that.

Hopefully, other political parties are looking at this Twitter movement and realising that the UKIP/Tory agenda of immigrant bashing, isolationism and picking on the poor is not necessarily the only way to get voters interested. A lot of us do not want that world. Many of us think quality of life for all should be the focus, not the impossible, unsustainable, illogical nonsense of eternal fiscal growth. Never mind that most of the ‘growth’ seems to be in the financial sectors where the ‘wealth’ is imaginary and can disappear in a flash.

All greed gets us is destruction and misery for the majority. Greed trashes our planet and damages the things most essential to life – air, water, food supply. It encourages me to see how many people are waking up to this and demanding change, and demanding it politely and with reasoned arguments. This, people, is what a quiet revolution looks like and it is most assuredly going somewhere. When enough people decide not to support a system, that system fails. I think the time is coming.

Where Druidry begins

I’d like to point you at a small film on youtube it’s the first ‘Calm’ film in this list, which for reasons I cannot fathom, I can’t get a url for.

It’s a beautiful video. If you can’t watch, the audio is still well worth your time, and apologies to anyone whose internet does not allow. The urge towards peace and stillness is a big part of what brings many of us to Druidry. Awareness of the enormity of nature can help us not be overwhelmed by the frantic elements of our own lives.

What this film misses, is the way in which our collective anxiety and panic is not essential. It need not be like this. We’re forced to run ever faster, haunted by economic pressures in a system that demands we do more for less, and pay more for less, as though this could continue forever. But why? Because fear makes us willing to seek comfort in consumption. Panicked running means we have no time to stop and think. That in turn means we don’t question, and we don’t resist. Like the eternal child, I keep asking, but why? Why is this happening?

Because greed is a sickness. Greed to own more than can possibly be used. It’s sane and reasonable to want sufficiency. It’s fine to want a bit more, a bit of a safety net, a rainy day fund, but a small percentage of humans accumulate as an obsession. It gives them the power to influence the rest of us, and they do so in ways designed to keep us building their piles of gold. It is madness. It is unsustainable, illogical, destructive madness and we are all paying for the money-sick in our culture.

It is very hard to step away from this, to unpick the many sticky threads trapping you in this system. Odds are, you won’t. But the call to calm, to quiet, to wide open places and perspective helps. Druidry is the call to reason, sanity, hope and healing. With calm, we can see through the lies of growth and progress every time we get caught up in them again.

I firmly believe that we still have time to change things, that we are not inevitably doomed as a species by the madness we have created. The more of us are able to find some calm space, wake from the nightmare and get modern life into a healthy perspective, the better a chance we have.

Becoming a Druid author

Anyone who has passable literacy skills, can write. These days, blogging and self publishing mean that anyone can put ideas into the public domain and offer themselves as a writer in their chosen field. The more ambitious can chase magazines, and publishing houses. Not all will succeed with this. Not everyone will find a large readership. However, having a big fan base is not the only reason to write, and getting ideas to the people who needed them is, for some of us, a lot more important. So, becoming a Druid author is easy. Success is a matter of how you measure it.

The notion of the wealthy, glamorous, fame filled, adoration laden life of the author really only exists inside the heads of people who have never tried to be authors. The few, most visible authors at the very top of their profession, get this kind of life. The passably successful author will get odd days when they get to feel loved, valued and important. For most authors, most of the time, the reality is lots of work for little reward or encouragement. If dreams of fame and riches motivate you, there are many more reliable ways than this one.

So, why write? Why set out to right if there’s no money in it, and no groupies?

Because you have found something that you think is important and useful, and want to share it.

To inspire others and broaden what they might be able to do.

To change the world.

My writing so far has come from places where I’ve struggled and wanted guidance and been unable to find what I‘ve needed. I’ve learned the slow, hard way things that would have been a good deal easier if I’d had a few pointers to begin with. I come back and offer those, and perhaps someone else is spared from re-inventing the wheel. I write to push for political, cultural and social changes. Increasingly, I write because it is a silly thing to do from an economic perspective, because it will probably never pay me fairly by the hour, and because I am increasingly a living act of protest against our collective insistence that everything should have a price-tag, and that everything should be devalued when that happens.

In a world where (I gather from Ursula Le Guinn) marketing departments at big publishing houses set the agenda for content, I’m proud to be part of a publishing house that has room for something as overtly un-commercial as a beautiful collection of Pagan Poetry, and that creates anthologies allowing less established authors a voice, an opportunity and an audience. I’ve loved being part of the Contemplative Druidry book too – many voices there, and another not so commercial venture. I am gladdened by the distribution of authoring authority in the Pagan community. Our non-paying magazines at least give voice to many people’s opinions and ideas. Our blogs are many and varied. I think there’s much to be proud of in the Pagan writing community, and plenty of reason to get involved.

Power and community

When any event or group kicks off, the priority is to get enough bums on seats to make it viable. New ventures haven’t formed identities yet and have little incentive; social or economic, to be fussy about who is ‘in’. Further, to be viable, they need to work for plenty of people, so new gatherings are often more tolerant and inclusive, or at least appear to be. When a group is established, this can change.

There are good reasons for changing – if something gets to big it can be the victim of its own success and lose its identity. That’s my impression of giant music festivals. An identity can form that needs holding carefully. Everything needs edges of some sort or you just end up with gloop.

Less useful things can happen. If something is desirable, you can put up the ticket price and perhaps force out the people who made it work in the first place. (Festivals, again). You can start demanding more conformity and if the group matters, people will conform to keep their place. A large group of people are an asset – be they customers, voters, your social kudos, advertising revenue sources or just a thwacking great ego trip. Having lots of people involved with, or wanting to be involved with your thing, has a value. A huge value. Large groups of people are easily exploited for money, status, and influence. Of course once you start doing that, you will also become afraid of losing your power, status and influence. Control freakery ensues – perhaps this is why Facebook is such a mess at the moment.

In creating a boundary, you decide who is in, and who is out. That’s inevitable, and it can be fine. Druid Camp is not going to be a good space for non-Pagans who hate camping, clue is in the name… and many such spaces tend to encourage unsuitable people to select themselves out, and as a consequence, everyone is happy. Exclusion can be a more painful process than this, from the one person in the village not cool enough to get a party invitation, to deliberately compromising people’s rights to participate in things like voting. We have responsibilities about how we handle the edges.

Perhaps most dangerous is the habit of defining group membership in opposition to some imagined other. Fascists do this. So do angry fundamentalists of all backgrounds. We imagine the hated other possessing all the qualities we abhor and do not want to see, and we feed that hatred, so as to feel better about ourselves. It’s not healthy. All those angry comments about what imaginary people do – imaginary people who are on welfare, imaginary Pagans… While it’s all about make believe and ego-trips it’s merely not doing us any good, but all too often what happens is that people who look superficially like the imaginary people we’ve hated on, become targets. We blame them, and if we do it as a community, people can and do die as a direct consequence of this process.

Hold your boundaries carefully, and hold them where you need them, but be alert to your own power. Think about who you welcome and who you exclude. Think about how you might be (even unconsciously) using your community as a power base. It’s all too easy to be complacent about such things, and when that happens, we favour growth at any cost, into ever larger and less wieldy groups, more need to control our groups and more risk of hating people we’ve put on the outside.

A CONTEMPLATIVE DRUID EVENT

Nimue Brown:

For people in the UK interested in experiencing Contemplative Druidry in a friendly and supportive environment, an opportunity…

Originally posted on contemplativeinquiry:

Thanks to the interest generated by Contemplative Druidry, members of the Gloucestershire contemplative group have set up an entity called Contemplative Druid Events. So far we have a blog at http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com/ and a forthcoming retreat.

The retreat is being held on the weekend of 17-19 April 2015 at Anybody’s Barn, Birchwood Hall, Storridge, Nr. Malvern, Worcestershire WR13 5EZ.  Details of the retreat can be found on the blog.

I am excited by this prospect. It provides the opportunity to work with a larger group of people and to learn from them. Contemplative Druidry doesn’t come with a long specific tradition or an inherited set of practices and teachings. As modern Druids, we are engaged in an exploratory and co-creative enterprise. Events will extend the experience and understanding of participants and facilitators alike.

At the same time we do have a vision of what we are offering, and a sense of how the retreat…

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