Nimue Brown's Blog, page 374

The tyranny of harmony

I’m currently reading Martin Shaw’s Snowy Tower (and very much enjoying it) in which he talks about the tyranny of harmony. It’s an idea that stands serious consideration. Achieving inner peace is a goal in many religions – all well and good. I imagine inner peace is an excellent thing to possess that probably makes you a much easier sort of human to be around. I’m a long, long way from achieving it. I pray and meditate and try to cultivate the right kind of thinking, and try to avoid psychological violence as well as being physically non-aggressive. Inner peace? Miles away.

However, being a publicly spiritual person, I do feel a degree of pressure to come across as being really spiritual, especially when some of my peers seem to be so much more together and enlightened than I am. So, fake it until you make it, right? Do everything a person who has achieved inner peace would do, and you’ll look the part and get closer to your goal as well. Win. Right?

Except…

The surface appearance of peace is not the same as holding it within you, and there are some shortcuts to creating that impression. Cultivate apathy or run with your innate laziness and the ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’ outlook and you can be very peaceful about every challenge and problem you encounter. Be nice, fit in, go along with what everyone else is saying, avoid conflict, suppress any problematic emotions, smile beatifically and pretend that it’s all groovy.

What you get to be at this point is not spiritually enlightened, but complicit in every wrong thing that, in your silence and conflict-avoidance, you let continue unchallenged. I have at times dabbled in this kind of peacemaking, and I’ve seen plenty of it. This kind of ‘nice’ very precisely lets bigots into power, turns a blind eye to abuse and smiles serenely in the face of injustice. This, I think, is part of what ‘the tyranny of harmony’ means.

We are full of conflicts. Our biology and life cycles pretty much make that inevitable, and there is more thinking I want to do around how we relate to this conflictedness, but that’s for another day.

I am seriously wondering whether inner harmony is all it’s cracked up to be, whether it is the right thing to strive for (for me) and what the implications of striving are. I know, that I have deliberately sought to suppress emotions that do not fit this intent. I have put more work into seeming calm than into being calm, and as I continue to struggle with anxiety issues, I’m clearly not winning this one.

Perhaps I just don’t have what it takes to be filled with light and inner peace. If that is so, I need a different way of working that allows me to function a bit better and that gives me a way forward rather than a nagging sense of inadequacy. I know that I am no longer interested in cultivating a surface appearance at the expense of what lies beneath. What does that give me? It gives me back my conflicts, my fears, passions, desires and obsessions as something I might be able to work with as part of my path, rather than things to try and get rid of.

Time to take a deep breath, and start dismantling everything I have experimented with thinking, and trying something different.

Qualities of weariness

It’s worth noting that our bodies are set up to handle physical exhaustion, and have nothing like the same mechanisms for responding to mental fatigue. One, we evolved for, the other we didn’t, and it’s the one we are not equipped to deal with that has come to dominate modern living. Not one of our better plans, that.

First up we have the lovely endorphins, the body’s natural pain relief. Bounce around being active, and you’ll kick of a chemical reward system designed to leave you feeling satisfied. You’ll also get shot of your stress chemicals, so even if you are wiped by the end of the excitement, you’ll feel good about it – satisfied and relaxed. Mental exhaustion does not deliver any chemical rewards. It just leaves a person feeling depleted and flat.

If I have a day of intense physical activity, that can leave me in pain. This is a good thing, because the next day I have a fair idea of what I won’t get away with. Mental exhaustion is not as self announcing, and shows up in apathy and reluctance at first – all things it is easy to feel obliged to overcome. If I keep pushing, so long as I am eating and sleeping well, my body will adapt and toughen up over time. You can keep pushing against mental exhaustion until you have a nervous breakdown. My body, I have observed, is much more willing and able to toughen up in response to a challenge than my mind is.

Certain kinds of thinking are more problematic than others. I can use my mind a lot and be fine if I can go at my own pace. Time pressure and stress create issues. Time pressure and stress is how we build our workplaces and careers. They are the most reliable raw ingredients in the mix. If I can think about things when my head is in the right place, I do a better job and suffer less. Again, most conventional jobs don’t allow this. I do better with interesting challenges to chew on, but what many jobs give us is work that requires effort and energy, stress, focus and thinking, but not problem solving or anything that produces a sense of achievement. Just churning it out, endlessly.

But then, ‘work’ as a social construct does not exist to improve the human condition. We don’t do it to solve the problems of our tribe, or take care of our home. We don’t do it for the glory of achievement, most of us. It’s not about some heroic outcome, but about making money, usually for someone else. Most of western human life revolves to an alarming degree around work. Work that leaves people exhausted, apathetic, demoralised, with no feel good factors. As systems go, it’s a shoddy one, and it is well worth wondering if we might come up with something better that could deliver a better quality of life to the vast majority of us. Not the absence of work, (because that depends on exploiting someone else) but work that has value enough to cheer us, and patterns that don’t make us sick.

Please Don’t Feed the Trolls

My good friend Professor Elemental is crowdfunding to produce a music video with an anti-bullying making the world a better place sort of message. Truth be told ‘crowdfunded’ is more accurate – the money needed is raised, but there’s some days to go, and all the extra cash that the project delivers is going to three awesome charities helping young people. If you want to be part of the splendidness, hop over to https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/don-t-feed-the-trolls-the-music-video

The startling chap on the left (for those of you who can see him) was created by my other half, Tom Brown, and is a poster exclusively available via Don’t Feed the Trolls. He may remind you of someone. Of course all resemblance to any Prime Minister, living or dead is wholly coincidental, but there’s a political point to make here. This is how we see internet bullying – it’s poor, overweight, ugly and probably still living with its mum. We’re used to looking for bullying when it shows up like this, and we find it harder to spot when it’s got a suit and a PR department. Put this troll in a suit and you’d be more likely to accept what he says as reasonable. Even as he eats you.

Take the troll out of the suit, and he looks like something else entirely. We’re surprisingly susceptible to the messages encoded in costumes. Power and money do not equate to the right to bully others. However, when bullying tactics are an integral part of the political scene, and are offered on TV under the guise of ‘entertainment’ it’s little wonder so many people get online and do all the same things, and feel entitled to name call, abuse, denigrate and threaten.

Not feeding the trolls is not just about avoiding the sad souls online who spit poison. It’s about taking a long, hard look at the culture we’re helping co-create, and the far nastier and more subtle trolls we’ve allowed to grab positions of power.

Not so mindfulness

Over the years I have explored, repeatedly, ideas of mindfulness and being fully present in the moment. It’s a popular strand in meditation. I also have an interest in psychology, and a work life where seeking inspiration and making creative jumps is an essential part of what I do. Here are a few thoughts on how these things collide.

The human mind tunes out for more than it pays conscious attention to. If you sit still in a room, you have sensory information from all your nerve endings. You have visual input – which you can reduce by shutting your eyes. There are sounds. Your own heart and breathing, sounds in the building, sounds from outside. The more fully present and aware you are, the more sound you will notice, but the more invested you are in that, the less you may be able to also process about how the air smells and the exact temperature of your skin.

There’s a practical limit on how many things we can be aware of in one go. In practice, being mindful is a selective process – more or less conscious – about which bits of ‘the moment’ you are paying attention to. This is more viable when you are motionless in a quiet and controlled space, but as soon as you start moving through the world, you will miss more than you notice.

The more I focus my conscious attention on one thing (eg my breathing) the less able I am to notice other things. It’s exactly the same as the famous psychology experiment (you can google for it) where participants asked to count ball passes in a game fail to notice the person dressed as an ape. This is us. This is the human mind. It focuses really well, but at the expense of wider experience. So if we are too focused on one thing, we can miss a lot of what is actually happening ‘in the moment’.

Inspiration does not come with focus. It is not achieved by pushing. Again this is about how our brain functions. The conscious mind is just a bit of what we’ve got, and that’s not the bit doing the ‘Eureka!’ thinking. The experience often called ‘the light-bulb moment’ when everything clicks into place, does not come when we push for it. The light bulb moment is Archimedes in the bath and Newton sat innocently under a tree. It’s also me in my kitchen just pottering about and not thinking very much at all, and suddenly finding that the greater part of a chant and its tune have just happened to me. Bang. No conscious thought, no warning.

I know, because I spend a lot of time working with both the necessity for mental focus, and the need for inspiration, that it’s usually one or the other. Focus is needed to get things done but does not invite creative thinking. I have my best ideas when I’m not trying to push for them, and not dwelling much on anything else, but pondering, imagining, daydreaming, wool gathering. At my best, I am the point where past and future make their exchanges. I am all that might be, rubbing against all that is. I am transforming regret and nostalgia into what we are doing better tomorrow. I am observation, speculation and playfulness fermenting together. Pay too much attention to any one thing, and it all falls apart.

It’s important to work out what you want and need from your life and your meditations. You may need stillness and inner discipline. You may need space for your chaos. You may need to be present but not too focused so that you can notice all the things you did not know to look for. There is no one true way, only what we choose, and whether that does what we want it to do.

For the love of gothic islands

Back in 2010, Tom and I were contacted by some people who were making a web-tv series about a spooky island off the coast of Maine. Back then, www.hopelessmaine.com had been going for about a year as a webcomic, also featuring a spooky island off the coast of Maine. We eyed them up and concluded that we fictional gothic islands should stick together. And thus began a beautiful relationship.

Ragged Isle  is made of love and enthusiasm, a startling plot line, and wonderful people. It goes to show what truly amazing things can be done when you have great ideas and motivated people. You don’t need massive special effects budgets to tell a good tale. The whole story is now available to watch online, and I heartily recommend that you do just that thing.

People who look very closely may spot the Hopeless Maine orphan reading a book called Ragged Isle, and may also spot Hopeless Maine on a bookshelf in Ragged Isle. When book 3 of Hopeless comes out, you’ll see another tie in – we borrowed Ragged Isle’s Deputy Dan – Eric Moody – as a model for a character. And, in what isn’t that startling a coincidence, Tom’s son Cormac recently did the soundtrack for a short film Eric was staring in (more on that another day). We’ve formed friendships between the two islands, and I look forward to seeing what Eric Moody, Barry and Karen Dodd, Greg Tulonen, Rick Dalton and others get up to in the future. They’re a very talented bunch.

 

A novel year

It’s November, and around the world, vast numbers of people will set about spending it trying to write a novel. I won’t be one of them. I started a novel in November last year – not because of NaNoWriMo, but because I’d been pondering and planning for a while, and felt ready to start. It’s nearly a year on and I haven’t finished writing the first draft. I’ve written a lot, I like where it’s going and I could wish it had got beyond this stage by now, but at the same time, I’m not enormously troubled. It’s been a busy year.

In the same time frame, I saw a co-written novel come out (Letters Between Gentlemen) and started work on the sequel. I wrote ten new short stories and recorded them for www.nerdbong.com ‘s Splendiferous Stories for Slumber. Non-fiction title ‘When a Pagan Prays’ came out, and I’ve nearly written my next non-fic. I wrote a poetry collection, although am not quite sure what I’m doing with it, and a story that won me a place in Stroud Short Story competition. On top of this, I was a small part of the huge team effort that got Molly Scott Cato elected as a Member of the European Parliament, and took on managing two blogs for John Hunt Publishing. I spent a month working as a studio assistant. I’ve gone back to editing as well – the day jobs are many.

Alongside that there’s the more personal labours around being wife to a massively talented artist whose epic contract this year has meant he really needed me to keep the home front running smoothly. I’m also mother to a budding maths genius, with his rugby generated laundry and need for interesting and educational out of school options.

Along the way I’ve had several bouts of block with regards to the novel, a crisis over my creative work, and some serious run ins with depression. These are not unusual afflictions for authors, either. I’ve had patches where I needed to step away from the book to reflect on the structure, characters, and direction. I would not have had a clue how to finish it without some personal experiences this autumn that have made me realise what was missing, and what, therefore, will happen next.

It takes a lot of material to write a rich and engaging novel of decent length. I read all the time, I study people, absorb ideas and influences, and sometimes that radically impacts on what I was doing. What I set out to write is seldom what I end up with because I learn so much on the way. If I tried to write a draft in a month, I would lose all that space for learning and reflection. I would lose the real life events that feed into what I write. I know there’s a logic that says get something down and then hone it, but that doesn’t work for me. I need to like what I’ve written. It has to be good enough to justify the time and energy of a redraft. If I don’t give it my best the first time around, I won’t feel inspired to stick with it.

I notice that I do my best work when it can go at its own pace, when I can have a range of creative projects on the go – music and crafting, kitchen projects, learning things – at the same time. I write better when I have a good diet of creative and inspiring input, when I have time to read, walk, go to gigs, dance, daydream. To write a book in a month, and honour the day jobs, and care for my family, I’d have to write about 2000 words of fiction most days. Other things would have to give. What I’ve learned this last year is that when I give up that balance of things to focus on whatever is supposedly more important, my creative output goes down, and so does the quality.

We’re all different in terms of how we think, feel and create. If running flat out for a month at the expense of everything else works for you – fine. But if not, there are other ways. There are always other ways.

Songs for Samhain

The folk tradition offers a wealth of material that works very well in a Pagan setting. Yes, there is more out there than good old John Barleycorn! Folk songs speak of the dead – the heroic dead, the war dead, epic accidents and tragedies, mundane passings away, execution, and rather frequently, death by over consumption of alcohol. Death is a common theme in folk songs, it being the one bit of drama every single life can be relied upon to produce.

If you’re on the bardic path, then seasonal song is something you may be thinking about. However, the most famous folk song mentioning all hallows eve isn’t about the dead at all, but about faerie. Tam Lin is the story of a mortal man captured by faeries, (which allows him to spend his time seducing young ladies at no cost to himself). When he gets young Janet pregnant and tells her the faerie horde mean to sacrifice him to Satan at Halloween, she undertakes an epic rescue mission and wins his freedom. Our mediaeval ancestors invested a lot of time in figuring out how the faerie realms and the Christian representations of evil related to each other – a topic bound to give anyone headaches, and much less of an issue for the modern Pagan.

I don’t really celebrate all of the 8 standard festivals at the moment. I’ve always struggled to work up any kind of enthusiasm for the fleeting balance of the equinoxes. Imbolc and Lugnasadh don’t especially resonate with me either. Solstices, Samhain and Belatain I tend to quietly honour whether I’m part of a celebratory group or not. Having songs to sing as part of that, has always been important to me. And so I ended up writing this one, quite some years ago, and singing it at my folk club and at rituals. It’s one of the few songs I’ve written and not discarded. It’s recorded in my ‘home studio’ (ie the bedroom). Drumming is also me – it’s a small Turkish drum borrowed from my son, and the whole thing was laid down in one go. Partly because I have no mixing desk skills, partly because, being a folk person, I like that raw, one take approach to music.

You can listen for free as often as you like (assuming you like) there’s a small charge for downloading.

 

No martyrdom in Druidry?

I have on a number of occasions described Druidry as a tradition which does not reward or encourage martyrdom. There are no tales of Druid martyrs, and there is no encouragement to suffer. Except…

I’ve also been thinking lately about how many Celtic stories feature heroic death. Heroism was celebrated in many of our ancestral cultures – the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples were big on it too. Proper heroes risk death, for a cause, for the tribe, for glory, to uphold their honour… and may well encounter it.

Martyrdom and heroism both work on the same basic principle that acting well and upholding your beliefs regardless of the risk or cost, is more important that whether you suffer or die. We tend to see martyrdom in religious terms and heroism as more worldly, but when your spiritual path doesn’t separate the spiritual from the physical, that division isn’t worth much. Heroism suggests personal glory, martyrdom is supposed to be more self effacing… except I think we know that doesn’t hold up because religions with martyrdom elements celebrate their martyrs.

It’s not even clarified by the issue of death – yes, martyrs normally die for the cause, but the Celts invented the White Martyrdom – leaving your ancestral community for the church, which was such a huge personal sacrifice that it counted as a form of martyrdom.

In fact, regardless of which term you favour, ‘sacrifice’ or the willingness to be sacrificed is definitely part of the deal.

‘Martyr’ can be flung as an insult where ‘hero’ lends itself far less. Calling someone a martyr can imply needless suffering, a form of attention seeking, smugness, holier than thou attitudes and other less desirable things. To make ‘hero’ an insult depends on using it ironically, and does not come so easily, I find.

Both are social constructs. If no one is looking who cares as you bleed to death, you will be neither hero, nor martyr, just corpse.

I realise that I would like to be heroic. I would like to do potent, risky things for good causes. I would gladly risk my life to protect others, or to make the world a better place, but there’s just not much call for that where I am. I know other parts of the world could use heroes, but my lack of language skill, physical prowess and political insight are something of a barrier. Dying uselessly for a cause has never seems that appealing. And so, unable to express anything heroic, I step up to things that look a lot more like martyrdom. Things that come into my life as slow exercises in being stripped of skin and bled dry. It’s not proper martyrdom, because there is no one to celebrate it, the way (for example) the quiet martyrdom of many mothers of small children goes unnoticed. The martyrdom of those who go without in small ways so that others can have what they need.

It might, on the whole, be a lot easier for me if Druidry did offer a martyrdom tradition that would allow me to feel differently about what I end up doing. The concept of martyrdom can, at least, convey a degree of dignity and nobility to situations that are otherwise entirely devoid of those things.

The allure of victimhood

There’s nothing attractive or desirable about suffering a crime, cruelty, or oppression. However, there are attractions to casting yourself in that role, or staying in it if bad experience puts you there. Some of those attractions are more problematic than others in terms of impact on your own quality of life, and impact on people around you. I write this probably not exhaustive list all too aware that I’ve done at least one of these, and seen all of the others in action. That most reasons make sense (from a certain perspective) makes them all the more alluring. They tend to harm the victim more than anyone else.

It’s the biggest thing that has ever happened to you, perhaps the only thing you consider to be of interest or note, the only thing anyone has given you attention for. It becomes tempting to stay, and easy to have it be the story that defines your life.


Having little or no self-esteem means that victim status confirms that you are undeserving. This may be more comfortable than considering unfamiliar alternatives.


It is the only way you have found to elicit compassion, kindness, help, comfort or attention.


By taking the role of the victim, you guilt trip your elected oppressor so that you get your own way. Especially productive if you favour passive aggressive approaches to relationships.


You are in a culture that competes to be the most martyred, the worst off, the most mired in drama, and so you feel socially rewarded for being a victim.


You genuinely believe your life is ruined and/or entirely defined for the future by whatever has made a victim of you. (Especially likely in the short term after trauma, but possible to recover from nonetheless).


Your spiritual path rewards martyrdom, or you see suffering as innately noble and therefore worth hanging on to.


Your victim status is used to explain (at least to yourself) every other thing that goes wrong, or that you do not do. It becomes the ultimate, unassailable excuse.

There is a time, after any injury to mind or body when a person needs to hole up, whimper a bit, heal, grieve and generally get to grips with the experience as best they can. We are all wounded in some way and at some time in our lives. No one gets through unscathed. There is no universal right answer for how long that takes, or when you should start to feel safe and more functional again. Having time to take whatever healing journey you need is really, really important. There are some experiences that don’t heal readily, or perhaps ever, but there is a huge difference between carrying wounds and scars, and carrying your victimhood. With one, it is still possible to go on and make a life, with the other, it isn’t. Victimhood seeks pity. Wounds seek compassion. Victimhood seeks power over others, in slightly perverse ways. Scars seek peace.

Surfacing

I thought I knew the tides and habits of my own depression. Normally I can see it coming and take evasive action, or just slog through, knowing it will run its course. A few weeks ago I found myself like a cartoon character, running madly in mid air having overshot the cliff edge, and then plummeting to the inevitable crash. There had been no real warning. Sure, I knew I was low and struggling, but no more than usual. Apparently these things can be cumulative, too.

Knowing I was short of options, I pulled back from everything that was being too difficult, rested more, slept a lot, moved gently, got in extra time outside and walking. It’s taken me several weeks of really working at it to even stabilise. I usually pull away from social contact when I’m down, but I’ve not even wanted to spend time with people I am usually very comfortable with and fond of. Going in to town – I had an eye test – was a real challenge, and strangely exhausting. Through those weeks of struggle, I knew that I had to be well and together enough by the evening of the 26th October to get up on a stage and read an emotionally difficult story to about 80 people.

No pressure, then!

I managed that, and to honour a firework meet-up that enabled my son to hang out with some old school friends. The fireworks were amusing. My body does not handle loud explosions well at the best of times, but getting those reactions without the usual side-order of adrenaline is just plain weird. Poking about online, I have all the symptoms and then some of adrenal burnout, a condition that mainstream medicine is clear doesn’t exist. Fun and games! Fortunately, the ‘alternative’ cure for this ‘fictional’ problem is primarily rest, and stress reduction, so all things considered, I have nothing to lose.

I know I have to surface. I know I have to invest care and attention in fixing my burned out mind and compromised immune system. Stress is not good for your ability to fend off minor ailments, and I just roll from one bug to the next with a few days respite in between. That has to change.

There are questions to ask about why I get into these cycles in the first place. They are not comfortable questions. At some point I need to deal with the answers. There are questions (not unrelated) to ask about the sort of person I am, and the sort of role I might have. This recent round of crash and burn is just one in a long line. It was more physically dramatic than usual, with anxiety induced chest pains and heart palpitations – things I’ve had before, but not on that scale. It was a bit of a reality check.

It’s left me thinking something that, for me, has largely been unthinkable. I am thinking that being this ill is not an acceptable price to pay. I’m thinking that perhaps I do not deserve to be pushed to breaking point at every available opportunity. I’m looking at the kindness and support that has come from some of the people around me, and although I’m resisting it because I don’t really want to go there, I know I need to sit down with that, and how it compares to some of the historical stuff, and see if I can imagine myself on different terms.

I don’t want to be here again. I don’t want to live in this burnout cycle anymore. It is no longer enough to be increasing the time between collapses. I want out. It’s not going to be an easy path to walk, but I need to start believing that it is walkable, rather than assuming it would be futile to seek after anything different.