Nimue Brown's Blog, page 373

Words to change your world

Every language manifests a set of concepts. There are things we can say with some languages that just don’t exist in others – which makes translation an interesting challenge. English, it is worth noting, is not a good language for emotion which is why we so often have to resort to metaphors. Without the word, and the concept, certain lines of thought may never be available to you and by this means your culture and language inform what you are able to think. The philosophical and practical implications here are vast.

‘Ponyo’. It’s a Japanese word, and I encountered it because it is also the title of, and a character in, a Miyazaki film. What it means is ‘chubby’ or ‘plump – but not with the connotations of criticism those words have in English. Ponyo indicates cuteness. Something adorable.

As a child, I had round cheeks. Some children do. I wasn’t excessively fat by any stretch of the imagination, but my body tended towards softness, roundness. From as far back as I can remember (somewhere before being three) this was a source of shame and misery to me. My chubby cheeks and rounded child body ruled out attractiveness and, as I understood it, made me difficult to love. As a consequence, I spent my childhood, and teens, and twenties painfully self conscious about my body shape eating. I wanted to be skinny and thus loveable. I feared being blamed for the shape of my face. I still find social eating difficult and I worry about what people will think of me, especially if I am hungry. Dainty, bird-like picking at food never came naturally to me, either.

If the word ‘ponyo’ had been part of my childhood reality, I would have been an entirely different person. Simply to have known that for some people, in some contexts, childish plumpness could be a form of cute, would have started me in life with an entirely different body image. One word, and I would have been a different person. Growing up, I had no idea that anyone, anywhere could find something tubby endearing. Ponyo would have given me hope. Looking back over my teens and twenties I’m aware of how many of my less-good choices had everything to do with poor self esteem.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is such utter rubbish as a statement. Words shape our interactions and inform our life experiences. The presence, or absence of a single word can shape your world view. The language you experience colours your life. There is a lot of difference between being exposed to angry and aggressive language, and being exposed to gentler, more sympathetic language. If all you hear is the language of commerce, all you know to look for is the money. We tell each other stories all the time about what matters. Our social exchanges are usually made of words, and the availability of words shapes the conversation. One word, can change everything.

Doing it for money

When you work a normal job, unless you’re in a shop or the sales department, there’s no direct relationship between how you spend your time and getting paid. Most people in regular employment do not have to show up in person to get their money at the end of the month, nor do they even have to ask for it – it just turns up. The odds are if you work in a regular way, the only times in your life you’ll ask about money are when applying for a new position, and, just occasionally, asking for a rise. Mostly, the money happens.

Now, for those of us who are self employed, it’s a whole other game. We only get money by asking. We have to put a price tag on what we do, and deal with people who think it’s too much, or not fair, or who think we should work for free. We have to ask, every single time we’re hoping to get paid. Having done both… it’s a very different experience. It makes you acutely aware of the relationship between what you do and what you earn. It alerts you to all the things you do that do not pay, and it means you spend a lot of your time asking for money.

There can be something of a clash between the self employed culture and the paid employee culture. I suspect it comes because if you’re paid, you are a little bit disconnected from the process of money. A good book sells itself, right? So the person banging on about their book all the time is either an egomaniac or a shit writer…. Except in reality nothing sells itself and businesses have marketing departments, but if you’re not one of the minority working in that field, it’s largely invisible. It’s supposed to be invisible. You are supposed to believe you’re buying things because they are good, not because you’ve been seduced by the marketing hype of a pro.

If you never have to ask for money, then asking for money can seem like begging. It can seem like the poor option, the response of the not-good-enough. You never have to ask for money, so you have a cultural pre-disposition to finding the request a bit odd. You will pay if there’s a cashier, a door, a counter, something that looks like mainstream conventional checkouts and box offices, because you have also been cultured to consider this normal. The more separation there is between the person you give the money to and what you are paying for in fact, the easier you are likely to feel about the whole process. If the person creating the product or service is stood before you with their hand out, the odds are you’ll feel less comfortable.

For all the same reasons and because we are part of the same wider culture, self employed people often find it hard to ask for money or charge for services. It doesn’t help that we’re competing with the prices of the mass produced low quality mainstream and have to make a case for why our three times the price lovingly handcrafted alternative is worth your while. Even then, we don’t make a fortune. It doesn’t help that we can’t compete with the ability of big business to mass buy raw materials at a huge discount, as well. And of course, we don’t have marketing departments.

My suspicion is that if your own flow of money happens somewhere out of sight, as if by magic, you are more likely to find cash transactions distasteful. You are more likely to be uncomfortable about other people asking to be paid, and about dealing with people where there’s a more direct relationship between work done and money moving. The regularly employed are quite literally removed from all of that, and do not have to go through the humiliation of asking to be paid what they are worth – little wonder if that confers a sense of superiority over those who do have to ask.

Skyclad

I usually give my poetry away – Lost Bards and Dreamers, and Beyond the Map are both freely available as ebooks via the blog. I thought this time I’d try something different so have recorded my new collection – Skyclad – and put it on bandcamp as an audio file. It gives me an opportunity to express more in terms of tone and pacing, and I think in many ways poetry works better as a voiced form than it does on the page.

I started this collection last winter, because of Stroud poet Jay Ramsay and it was also heavily influenced by reading Robert McFarlane’s the Old Ways, and Storytelling for a Greener world (anthology). Green economist and MEP Molly Scott Cato was a big influence, too.

Having written the whole thing, I entirely lost my nerve about it. The project was rescued by input from John Conway. His feedback helped me sort out what needed to change, and gave me the confidence to stick with the collection. I am much indebted there.

Art for this, as for other recordings, comes thanks to my other half, Tom Brown. This is an old image of Salamandra, from www.hopelessmaine.com, back before she was a little girl. (She started out as an older character and we went backwards). She’s not exactly skyclad here, but it’s enough of a suggestion.

I’m not and probably never will be a happy naked Pagan. Physical exposure makes me very nervous, and the intensity of really engaging with another living being can be just as naked, just as vulnerable. So, these are some ponderings from the journey. I’m not quite sure why it sounds like I recorded it in an ice cave. I didn’t, honestly! But it sounds like I should have had an audience of bears and seals. That would be fun. I should do that next time…

 

 

 

Glitterati Pagan

It’s a term I ran into recently. ‘Glitterati Pagan’ – a term of resentment, devaluing and dismissal. – I’m not sure if it was being applied to me – laughable to imagine that anyone who has met me could consider my shabby, unshiny self to be some kind of glittering creature of the limelight… but then I struggle to think of any Pagans I know who could be called Glitterati. I also remember there were (and possibly still are) folks who though those volunteers in charge of the Pagan Federation were on a salary. So, you never know.

There are a fair few professional and semi professional Pagans out there – authors, teachers, healers, organisers, public speakers, celebrants, craft people. Anyone this involved does things that take time and skill and, in other contexts, you’d probably have to pay for. Everyone has to eat. Most Pagan things happen because volunteers put in their time and energy, but if that becomes a full time commitment, it becomes necessary to consider the balance. Either people do less for the community, or they ask for something back. Either choice should be acceptable.

As a case in point… Most Pagan events cannot afford to pay their speakers enough to cover transport and accommodation. Someone might be able to put you up and feed you, which is a great help. If you travel and pay for accommodation, and your costs aren’t covered, you rely on selling books to pick up the slack, perhaps. Authors get books at 50% of cover cost, usually. So on a £10 book, an author can make £5. If I’m on the train and far enough from home that I have to stay over, that’s going to cost me £100, easily. I need to sell 20 books (heavy to carry by myself). All I’ve done is break even. My time, effort going into research, developing a talk, delivering it and what I did to write the book  – the odds are the Pagan in front of you makes little or no money for doing that. They could well be doing it at a loss and subsidising that loss through other paying work. Most professional Pagans do other things as well to pay the bills.

I know a lot of people who run things and have met many more. Moots, groves, covens, conferences, organisations, camps magazines… And they are tremendously hard working people. Even when they do get paid, it’s very little in consideration of the time and energy they put in. We don’t tend to pay a living wage to people doing the work in Paganism. Most will not pick up the minimum wage, but we ask them to be dedicated, capable, educated and inspired.

Every now and then someone gets all ‘great-I-am’ and ponces round (usually online) being self important. These are not the people (usually) who do the work. At any given event, at the back of any given organisation, the people who do the work are too busy running round doing the work to have much time for posturing and attention seeking. The hours and hours that go into crafting, writing, creating ceremony, have much the same effect. I don’t see much glamorous posturing at all. Perhaps I hang out with the wrong people.

But I also don’t know what I look like from the outside. I don’t know what anyone else sees when they look at the Pagan Federation, the Druid Network, the camp organisers, or anything else. I don’t always know what they assume, and what they imagine. I do know if they have ideas that are far removed from the truth, and filter what they see through those ideas, they won’t see what I see. They won’t see the stress and anxiety, the exhaustion, and all the other costs. But then, if you label the more visible Pagans as a bunch of attention seeking media whores, that changes your relationship to them. I’ll leave the implications dangling.

Sitting with anger

My normal response to anger is to crush it down, denying the feelings and giving them no space. If it does manifest, depression, or the more immediate tears of frustration are likely. I’ve lived in spaces where everything was dependably my fault, and also learned how to work that out for myself – it saved a lot of time and stress, where expressing anger would lead to a lengthy, miserable browbeating and the same sorry outcome.

Other people work differently with anger. I have been on the receiving end of anger as justification for action. I’ve been shouted at because I had ‘made people angry’ and I’ve been hit in that context, too. I’ve felt physically very threatened by other people’s anger. What happens here is that the feeling of anger is identified as being caused by the other person, which justifies anything you do to them in response. I never want to do that, so what does that leave me in terms of handling rage when it erupts within me?

I’ve been trying a thing. I get myself some space as quickly as I can, while the anger is still boiling and fresh. I sit with it, and I listen to where it’s coming from, and I ask questions. Why, exactly, am I angry? The mostly likely answer is that I feel threatened and vulnerable, my anger an attempt at defence. I may feel ignored, put upon or mildly mistreated. I might be reacting to injustice. It’s entirely possible that someone has pushed an old button for me, and done so in all innocence. Like a small child, I keep asking why. Why does that hurt? Why does that threaten me? Why am I offended?

By this means, if I am trying to defend wounded pride or justify being in the wrong, I eventually face up to this without savaging anyone else, first. If I am dealing with a triggering of history, I spot it, and do not swipe back at someone who, from their perspective, really wasn’t intending any harm. Last but by no means least, if my careful reflection identifies someone who really was taking the piss, I firm up my boundaries and calmly work out exactly how best to deal with it. On the whole this is getting me results I am happy with.

Anger denied and anger not permitted makes a person vulnerable. If you can’t fend off what isn’t welcome, you are settling into a victim role and are easily mistreated. It’s not a way to live. Anger denied has, for me, largely transformed into self hatred, and I’ve carried destructive levels of self-loathing for a long time. Maybe I don’t have to be that person any more. When I let myself get angry for the right reasons, think it through and take non-violent and productive action, I feel better in myself. I feel stronger, safer, more capable. With time I think I could stop carrying this internalised violence towards myself that has come from swallowing other people’s aggression. Worth a shot at any rate.

(Previous ponders of anger are here – https://druidlife.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/anger-management/ and here – https://druidlife.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/angry-druid/ )

Liminal Nature

In terms of wild places, the margins are where there is most action. The liminal places, neither one thing nor another, see the greatest diversity of life when compared to what’s around them. It’s the bit of sand and rock that is sometimes sea bed that has the most life on a beach. Edges of woodland see the most insect life. One of the reasons hedges are so good for wildlife is that they are all edge.

Locally, I have the tidal Severn River. At low tide, a vast, shining expanse of wet mud emerges from beneath the river, attracting flocks of wild birds to feed. This landscape in the UK used to be a lot more marshy – drained for agriculture, it is a lot more fixed and predictable than it was. Marshes are perhaps the ultimate liminal spaces – shifting worlds of not quite water, not quite land, fluctuating with rainfall and seasons, sometimes drying into stability for a while, sometimes becoming entirely aquatic. Wetland creatures have to be flexible. Anything liminal is subject to change, to becoming one thing or the other temporarily, permanently.

Harvest mice, which we associate with grain fields, are actually creatures of the wetland. The little nest balls they weave in the corn were originally made in reeds, keeping them safely above the shifting water levels. A heroic adaptation to a shifting landscape, that.

As a species we’ve worked hard to take out the liminal, make things firmly one or another. Collectively, we favour straight, tidy, clear cut edges. It’s an exercise in sterility. It’s in the chaos that the most interesting things happen.

The saddest songs

There are a lot of songs about the First World War, and most of them really get to me. The tragedy, waste, grief and pathos is almost unbearable. And so it should be. It’s really important to have these expressions in our culture, and the mainstream does not do anything like enough of it. There is a power in this kind of storytelling that goes far further to honour and remember than the laying of wreaths ever could.

Human lives are full of disasters, from the personal errors to the catastrophic horrors of war. These are things we need to know about. We need to meet them head on, and feel them keenly. By this means we are able to learn from each other. We can reflect on the things that have broken other people’s hearts and wrecked their lives, and do something different. The more we sing about the incomprehensible slaughter of war, the less willing we will be to rattle sabres and send our own children off to die. As Pete Seeger sang ‘when will we ever learn’? Well, the short answer is that we won’t if we steadfastly refuse to even think about these things.

We want our entertainment amusing, pleasant, distracting, easy. This is without doubt a very good thing to have in the mix, but if we have a culture that only wishes to be amused and refuses to look at anything dark or painful, we miss these chances to learn and to do better.

It may be uncomfortable to weep for the dead of wars that happened before you were born, but sometimes a song can help us do just that, and we are all the better for it.

This is a fairly upbeat sounding song, if you don’t pay close attention to the lyrics. Words by A.E. Houseman. And if for any reason, you can’t play or listen, here are the words…

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,

There’s men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,

The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,

And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.

There’s chaps from the town and the field and the till and the cart,

And many to count are the stalwart, and many the brave,

And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart,

And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave.

I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell

The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;

And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell

And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.

But now you may stare as you like and there’s nothing to scan;

And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told

They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,

The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

Doing things naturally (sex and paganism)

There’s a great deal we do fairly naturally – walking, talking, singing, swimming, making love, and a whole array of other things. So long as your body is equal to the task, there are many things humans do that come reasonably naturally. Most of us get at least some of them. However, having been through the learning process with these, and helped others learn, there’s a lot of distance between ‘natural to us’ and ‘automatic’. There is a lot of learning to do, even when the scope for that learning is pretty much hard wired.

I struggled with walking – born with my feet crushed against my shins, it was hard for me, and my ankles remain a tad wonky and unreliable. Afraid of water, I had a tough time learning to swim and the less said about bicycles the better. Skipping did not come naturally to me, nor did throwing and catching balls. Everyone’s list will be different, but all of us struggle with something.

I’ve taught people to sing, and I’ve written erotica, which is a genre in part for exchanging knowledge and insight about sex. I learned a great deal from reading erotica, too. Things I might never have figured out by exploration. Perhaps most usefully, I learned about the sheer diversity of human feeling and experience, the breadth of desire, the commonality. I learned it is best not to assume too much about what anyone else wants, and a damn sight more productive to ask well ahead of time. From erotica, I learned to talk about sex as a way of finding out whether I wanted to get someone into bed in the first place. I suspect this spared me a lot of heartache and disappointment.

Much the same can be said of Paganism. A big part of what makes Paganism itself is that it is about our natural responses to our natural experiences. You shouldn’t need books, or a priesthood or a set of instructions, you should be able to just get out there and do it. Except, very little works that way for humans. Most of us have to learn how to even breathe well.

I’m not keen on situations where people tell me what to do, how to think and what to feel – sex and Paganism are much alike in that regard, for me. However, with both, I gain a great deal from hearing other people’s insights. I get ideas, find things I want to try, recognise things I need to stay the hell away from, and generally save myself a lot of time. I get to make new and different mistakes rather than the ones other people have already tried and tested. I also get the reassurance of something to help me place my wider experience in a useful context.

I’ve mentored Pagans and Druids for many years, and the most commonly occurring theme is the need to know whether what your doing would make any sense to anyone else. Is this Paganism? Am I a Druid? The desire to do it right, do it well, and in a way other people would recognise and respect, also seems to come naturally to us, and without the sharing of experiences, it’s hard to tell. Am I any good in bed? Are my desires normal? Am I any good in ritual? Is my poetry a bit shit? (Rhetorical questions, I’m not looking for answers!)

So, when I hear that Paganism should come naturally and that we should not need books, courses, teachers, experts… I remember that walking did not come naturally to me. I remember all the people I’ve worked with who were sure they could not sing. Just because we can work it all out from scratch doesn’t mean we should be obliged to, and for me, the essence of community comes in

My hobby is subversion

Consider these things: Baking, knitting, growing vegetables, making clothes, rag-rugging, brewing, decorating, embroidery, growing fruit and making jam, paper making… it’s not an exhaustive list. If you do these things privately for the benefit of home, family and/or immediate tribe, you have what will be understood socially, to be a hobby. Only if someone else pays for your output, is it serious and worth calling ‘work’.

This could use thinking about. All of the activities listed above, and everything akin to them, results (once you’re good at it) in good quality, entirely original things for less than it would cost to buy new. Many of the above give you an option on recycling materials, upcycling, re-using and generally being a bit greener. But these are ‘hobbies’ and not to be taken too seriously. They are not generally viewed as an economic option, or a way of life. We are to view them as amusing and perhaps a little self indulgent and not very practical when compared to buying something readymade off the shelf. Paying for something someone else has made, is convenient – that’s the story. We may be encouraged to think it will also be better than anything we could do for ourselves.

Well, when we start out as independent craftspeople mastering a new skill, the first few projects may be less than perfect. This is fine – this is the necessary investment in learning your craft. With time and practice you get better, and the more you do, the better you get. The bread I make costs about half as much as regular sliced supermarket bread, but is much superior in terms of quality, keeps better, creates less packaging to recycle and has no troubling added ingredients. All the same things can be said of my cakes, pickles, and the meals I cook on a daily basis.

In terms of usefulness to home, family, tribe and self, the things we make for ourselves can have great worth and utility. Being custom made to fit requirements, they are always a better match to what we needed than the best fit we can get from a mass producing outlet. There is a huge value, and an even greater potential value, in crafting at home. Go back before the industrial revolution, and our ancestors did a lot more for themselves. I recall reading in William Cobbett’s ‘Cottage Economy’ his feeling that there was something shameful about a household that could not answer its own basic needs and forever needed to employ other people to sort out the necessities. He was passionate about home bread making, too.

These days it is normal to pay someone else to sort out the basics for us. It is normal for a person to have a very narrow skills base, and be paid for those narrow skills, and have to pay everyone else for their skills in return. Most of us do not know how to do most of the things that we find necessary for day to day living, and as we get ever more technological, specialist and complex, we become less able to fend for ourselves. It’s not a robust system. This makes for very fragile structures that cannot flex easily in face of dramatic change or challenge. And yet our wider culture refers to this as ‘progress’.

The Transition movement, by contrast, is all about re-skilling, and learning the essential things that help us fend for ourselves. It’s not a case of knowing where the candles are in case of a power cut, it’s knowing how to make the candles.

If we were more interested in what makes life good, what adds value and comfort, what truly enriches and pleases us, then we might be more interested in being able to make things of use and beauty for ourselves and our friends, and less interested in making money for other people.

Turn with the year

I wasn’t planning this chant at all. I was pottering about in the kitchen doing something else entirely, when it happened to me – most of the words and most of the tune simply landed in my head. Full on awen, and considerable surprise!

Turn, turn, turn with the year, turn with the seasons, turn with the earth.

Turn, turn, turn with the tide, light into darkness, death to rebirth.

It’s rather short, and singing it three times as it is would be dull, and still rather short – and this is so often the problem with chanting. However, I knew the tune would take harmonies. There is only one of me, and I do not have headphones suitable for recording with. So the only way to do this was to write the other lines singing against the idea of the tune in my head, record them one after another and shunt them about in garageband. I also did a bit of a round. I like messing about with chants in this way when there are other people to sing with, and most chants can be played with. What I’ve done here is by no means the definitive ‘how to do harmony on this chant’ more some examples of the kinds of things that can be done, to this one, and to others.

In chanting, remember, there are two kinds of harmonies. There are the warm, familiar affirming harmonies, and there are the spiky, unexpected and exciting harmonies. And with that philosophy, there are no ‘bum notes’.