Nimue Brown's Blog, page 377

Stroud Short Stories

One of the things about being an author is that you spend a lot of time doing things you know are long shots, and probably won’t amount to anything. Every approach to publishers, agents, magazines, media outlets, competitions, bookshops, festivals and so forth feels that way, and all too often what you send out into the world disappears in silence.

It doesn’t help that the stories about writing are all about the successes, because no one likes to talk about failure, or the streams of setbacks, the frustrations and moments of being so demoralised that you want to quit. No one talks much about the people who quit, either. There’s a lot of it out there.

Obviously some of my long shots have worked – I’ve got books with Moon Books, I’ve had two graphic novels published, there’s the Prof Elemental novel, I write for Sage Woman blog and Pagan Dawn Magazine and podcast stories for nerdbong… and that’s all very visible. What is less obvious from the outside is all the things that don’t work out. For everything that went somewhere, there are dozens that didn’t, submissions and entries that didn’t match the project, events for which no one was interested in me, book signings that were quiet, bookshops that come back and say ‘you’re not commercial enough’ (Nailsworth!) or ‘I don’t like graphic novels’ (Gloucester). It can be bloody frustrating some days.

It’s so easy to build a bubble around a few books and imagine you’re getting somewhere, but in reality for all that I have an array of books to my name, I only usually get things done by banging on people’s doors and asking, and that’s true for any creative person who isn’t a household name. Even those who appear to have made it can find, a few years later that they’re back to banging on doors and passing round hats again.

I’m saying this for context. Much to my amazement, one of the long shots hurled into the wind actually came to something. I entered Stroud Short Story competition a while back. Apparently in all there were some 64 authors submitting 82 stories. My story got through, and I will be reading it on Sunday 26 October at SVA (Stroud Valleys Artspace), John Street, Stroud GL5 2HA. Doors open at 7.30. Prompt start at 8.00. It’s £5. As I’ve done a fair amount of reading for the nerdbong podcast, and have some experience performing as a musician, the reading in public part isn’t as intimidating as it might be.

It’s a first person story, so it means I can really use my voice as an instrument. I wrote it for the contest, aware that the end result *could* be a public reading, and that influenced my approach. First person works better than third if you’re voicing something, it creates immediacy and drama. I’ve listened to a lot of spoken short stories, to storytelling and to radio drama, and it doesn’t work in quite the same way as the written word. I think somewhere after the 26th, I’ll either record it, or put it on here for people to read. It is a dark tale. I’ve been doing a lot of more comic stuff lately, for the podcast and writing with Professor Elemental, so it’s good to change track for a while and do something different.

Here are the readers for the 26th, in (librarians’) alphabetical order by title -

Barry Parry – Andrew Stevenson   (Nailsworth)

Erosion – Michael Amherst   (Tewkesbury)

The Handmaiden – Stephanie Smith   (Broadwell, Forest of Dean)

Imaginary friends – Nimue Brown   (Stroud)

J – Laurence Cotterell   (Cam)

Preparing for winter – Ali Bacon   (Emersons Green, South Glos)

Public transportation – Jo Bousfield   (Stroud)

Signing off – Alice Jolly   (Stroud)

The Tigers’ ball – Joe Eurell   (Cheltenham)

Trog and Kron attempt to re-fuel – Philip Douch   (Stroud)

 

http://stroudshortstories.blogspot.co.uk/

Gather Around The Flame

Guest blog by Bia Helvetti

Bring your blanket, bring your brew, I will spin a yarn for you, the moon rides high, the stars are bright, gather around the flame tonight…

The harvest is nearly over, “the veil grows thin and the dark draws in” as they say and we simple folks we huddle inside, draw the curtains, and fill our halls with light and warmth and laughter and try to forget, right? We try to forget that the dark and the cold, that space beyond our fire’s gleam, exist.

We turn up the central heating, snuggle deep down under duvets with microwaved popcorn and our favourite film, we loiter in the kitchen by the kettle’s perpetual froth of steam and we cook soups and stews and hot apple pie. We cling to the hope and comfort of the flame just as our ancestors have always done and no matter that our flames are hidden now inside electric ovens or combi-boilers or the flickering simulation of the plasma screen.

In times gone by the winter was a dark and lonely time for most. Rural life was the status quo and when snow and rain and biting cold made the country lanes impassable families and friends would be cut off from each other for weeks; the flickering window lights across the valleys providing the only reminder of life outside the circle of your own hearth.

Travellers forced out into the cold would rely upon those lights to guide them safely across miles of uninhabited heath, forest or farmland to places where they might, possibly, if folks were kind, find shelter or warmth or the opportunity to barter food.

Sometimes the young or irresponsible would think it sport to carve out turnip lanterns and hide them in the hedgerows as dusk began to fall. These false lights must at first have seemed a bright hope for a road-weary traveller. Imagine their horror and dismay as they drew near, only to find a lurid demon, grinning mockingly down on them from the black branches of a briar patch.

Sometimes modern life can seem like this can’t it? An uncertain trek through a cold, dark and often lonely wilderness. We are drawn instinctively to the bright and hopeful flames of love, family, career, success… but sometimes these flames that we have invested so much of our energy and will pursuing turn out to be false – the love who leaves us, the family who turn away or are stolen from us by circumstance, the company for whom we put in all those extra hours of commitment and toil that suddenly deems us expendable, or crashes to the ground taking us down with it – and we are left alone in the dark, uncertain where to turn or which new and distant flickering flame we may trust.

SHELTER is a charity which helps people who find themselves in just such a situation; people from all cultures, backgrounds and demographics who suddenly find that their basic needs for warmth, shelter and security are being threatened.

Every year SHELTER helps millions of people who are facing homelessness or housing difficulties by providing free, expert advice through helplines and face-to-face services which are freely available to everyone. Their team of solicitors offer expert legal advice, help fight possession and eviction, and can attend court to defend people who are at risk of losing their home. They can challenge local authority homelessness decisions, and step in when councils aren’t doing enough to support those in housing need. They also defend tenants by helping to pursue claims against landlords where disrepair is causing a serious risk of harm or in cases of unlawful eviction.

Where families are concerned, SHELTER has a specialist support network to offer services to  families who need more in-depth help to keep their home, or to settle into a new one after being homeless. These teams work with families over time, giving them the full, practical support they need to get back on their feet. As well as working face to face with those affected by housing problems, SHELTER also campaigns for changes in the law which will tackle the root causes of the housing crisis.

Homelessness can happen to anyone. In 2013 more than 81,000 households in England were found to be homeless, but an estimated 67% of homeless people are thought to have ‘slipped through the net’ of statistical collation. These figures highlight the importance and relevance of the work that SHELTER does, not only helping to re-house people but working to prevent homelessness in the first place.

Gather Around The Flame is a collection of short stories – folk tales, fairy tales, stories of myth and magic, wisdom and wonder – which has been put together in order to raise funds for SHELTER. Most of the contributors have experienced homelessness and housing problems first hand and so it is an issue about which we feel passionately and hope to do all we can to support. The book is divided into seasonal sections and is designed to be an ideal anthology of amusing and inspiring tales for friends and family to share around the campfire or hearth – or just with a nice cup of cocoa at bedtime!

Water can keep us alive but fire sustains the soul – by purchasing a copy of Gather Around The Flame you will be helping SHELTER to continue its vital work in making sure that all those who feel lost and alone have a place of bright hope and comfort to turn to for support.

Wishing you blessings as you gather around your own flame this season,

Bia Helvetti

Gather Around The Flame is available in paperback from Amazon, priced £5.99

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gather-Around-The-Flame-campfire/dp/1497541034/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411718377&sr=8-1&keywords=gather+around+the+flame

www.shelter.org.uk

Depressed elephant is in the room

Let’s imagine that whenever people got violently mugged, our culture would blithely comment on the bruises and sudden shortage of money as though the victim was largely to blame, and with no reference at all to the mugger. That would seem ludicrous, yet when it comes to mental health, something all too similar is happening.

Earlier this year, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer published a report which explicitly linked rising mental health problems with work stress. This may be news to you. The papers picked up on some obesity issues in the report and entirely ignored the mental health bit. I only know because I hunted down and read some of the original documents. some mental health problems are entirely chemical. Many are brought about by life experience.

Work stress makes people sick. This is not difficult to ascertain. I watch so many friends being asked to work longer hours and take extra responsibility with no additional money in the mix. With jobs still scarce, no one in a job will risk protest if the demands are too great. Sure, you’ll stay on late tonight, and tomorrow. Sure, you’ll do the job of the full time person who left and isn’t being replaced, and you’ll do it alongside everything you were already doing, because if you don’t, you might not have a job. With the way those on benefits are stigmatised, punished, and pushed deeper into crisis, who wouldn’t be terrified of going there? And if you can entirely hold your mental health together in face of the threats, pressures, humiliations and deprivations of falling into debt, unemployment or both, you’ll be an unusual creature indeed.

There are many implications to rising ill health in your populous. It’s not a viable way to run a country. Depressed people are not resplendent with energy, enthusiasm or innovation. Anxious people often end up with distorted thinking around risk. Having poor mental health does not, in my experience, contribute to making the best choices. Everything gets progressively harder.

Even if you can’t muster the compassion to care for the vast amount of human suffering this causes, there are profit implications. Exhausted people don’t concentrate as well. They make mistakes and cannot work quickly. The more you pile onto a person, the less able they become to do it. We all have limits and we will all break sooner or later. Break a person badly enough and they don’t fix. They become too ill to work – which has a financial cost to consider if you can’t muster any sympathy.

All you can get out of our current approach, is to squeeze some short term profits out of people. Long term, the cost will be high, in terms of broken health and shattered lives, a workforce too ill to work is not going to turn anyone a profit. Push people far enough and they can crack up entirely, which can result in death – suicide, murder or both. It’s not a way to run a country.

The depressed elephant is well and truly in the room. It is large, heavy and crushing people. We have a sick work culture, and we need to be talking more about the brutal amounts of pressure some people, many people, are enduring.  If you’re being routinely mugged by a workplace, know that the bruises (which may be psychological) and the shortage of cash is there for a reason, and that reason is not you.

Know thyself

Like many things in Paganism, the instruction to ‘know thyself’ looks really simple at first glance, and gets more complicated the more you engage with it. How we establish who we are is one of the issues that has been keeping philosophers in paying gigs for a very long time. So to ‘know thyself’ you have to start out by deciding on what terms you will do that.

We might undertake to know our bodies through action and physical discipline, and that will also reveal to us facets of mind and character. We could use the tools of psychology to try and understand our minds, and introspection to become more aware of our emotions. We can seek the opinions and insights of others, or go into a process with our biographical history, our ancestral history as well. We can study the norms, assumptions and habits of our culture to see where we fit. We can take on cultural, philosophical or religious stories about who we are. Fallen or evolving, reincarnating, sinning, full of inner light, sparks of the divine or probably damned, we might also consider, in light of that, who it is that we want to be, as well.

As we wander through life, we pick up labels and stories about who we are, what we do, what we’re useless at and where we fit. Much of how this works depends on how you match with your culture. The gay child of fundamentalist monotheists will have a very different initial sense of self to the gay child born to fluffy hippy people. In some cultures, a set of behaviours will get you drugged and incarcerated, in others you would be respected as a magical person. Further, not all of the people who label us do so kindly, or accurately, so it is very easy to wind up with a set of labels that have nothing to do with who we are, and everything to do with the people who disliked us. Many cultures tell women that they can’t be leaders, sporting heroes, career people, great thinkers, or responsible for choices about their bodies.

I don’t think there’s a ‘pure’ untainted inner self that we can somehow find and get back to. We start with our genes, and perhaps a spirit that informs character (I’m unsure) but from the moment of arrival, experience teaches us stuff about who we are and where we fit, and because we are inherently communal animals, we internalise a lot of that. We learn that certain things are not for the likes of us, or we learn that some things are beneath us, and those influences can be subtle and far reaching.

The only thing to do, if you are not happy with the sum of yourself, is to unpick, unravel, try to understand, trace threads back to origins and work out what, of the things you have swallowed, you might be able to cough up and leave behind. Experiment with who you are, try thinking and acting differently, because change is always possible.

I had been given to understand that I’m not very practical – not safe with sharp implements, not capable of thinking technically. I was intimidated by power tools from an early age, which didn’t help. I spent most of my life thinking I had no skills for anything mechanical, technical or requiring a bit of engineering. In the last few years I’ve had more opportunities, and no one telling me I couldn’t… and it turns out that I can do a good deal more than I’d assumed. It also turns out that I’m especially good at taking things that are otherwise rubbish, and rigging them up to be useful.

That makes me something very specific…

That makes me a womble.

Breaking News!

Nimue Brown:

This is such exciting news…

Originally posted on Down the Forest Path:

TDN to join Inter Faith Network

On the 29th of September 2014, at the Annual General Meeting of The Inter Faith Network for the United Kingdom (IFN UK), The Druid Network (TDN) was admitted to Membership.

IFN works to promote understanding, cooperation and good relations between organisations and persons of different faiths in the UK.

In April 2012, IFN refused the first application for membership of The Druid Network due to its current membership policy restricting membership to the ‘big’ nine faiths.  This refusal resulted in TDN becoming involved in dialogue with IFN, with a view to reviewing their membership policy to become both more inclusive and to remove any suggestion of discrimination against minority faiths.  Other interested parties also took up this challenge and this led to a meeting, hosted in the House of Lords, discussing religious freedom within the UK. This meeting was held in November 2012 and representatives of some twenty…

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A facebook guide to working

It has struck me in recent weeks that facebook is an interesting study in how money works. While the platform was created by a small number of people, and its hosting is sorted out, this is not what gives is an economic value. What makes facebook attractive to advertisers, and therefore lucrative, is the sheer number of people using it. No matter how much effort the original makers put in, it is the presence of the multitude that creates the cash flow.

Similar things happen in all industries. Someone puts up the money and the starting ideas, but without the flow of the multitudes – as workers and as product consumers, there is no economic success. The financial benefits flow to those who start the process and there is little recognition – financial or social, of those on whom the business depends. Workers and consumers are pretty much the same people.

It’s also worth pausing to note at this point that profit is the difference between what you pay to get a thing done and what you can sell it for. The more you can cut wages and increase hours, the greater profit you can extract from workers. The higher a price you can put on your goods, the more profit you extract from consumers. So having had your work undervalued you then get overcharged, because we are all workers and consumers (well, we 99%). We get shafted both ways.

We don’t work for Facebook, but our contribution (what we want to share) gets squeezed so we are pressured to pay for hits, The other price we pay is in the adverts forced onto us and shoehorned into our feeds. Of the profits… we see nothing at all. It’s a lot like the rest of life.

Now, you can argue that without the initial idea and the capital, there would be no business so it is only fair that those who put up the money and the initial plan should take the lion’s share of the benefits. Hands up everyone who has never had a good idea. We know full well that great ideas are not in short supply. What is in short supply is the funding to turn great ideas into viable businesses for people to access, and one of the problems here is that often the things that it would be most useful to fund (for about 99% of us) are not things that can readily be exploited to make a profit for some of us (say about 1%). Nonetheless, we’re trying to run health, education and the environment on those very principles of exploitation, and no doubt there are some people who’d love to privatise the police and armies… there is no money to feed and shelter the hungry, protect species, keep the air clean or safeguard the water.

What we have, is a system. Not an unassailable reality, but a set of assumptions glued together with money. We could have something different. Just as facebook is not forever, so business models that screw the majority for the sake of the few do not have to be our eternal destiny. I’m tired of being exploited for the benefit of others.

Second hand Graves

Elen Sentier’s guest blog got me thinking about my own relationship with Robert Graves, and the wider implications for Pagans. Like Elen, I first came to Graves through my family. I recall my father reading The White Goddess when I was a child. Ideas of maid, mother and crone entered my mind, uncritically. The sacrifice king, the oak and holly kings, all got into my mind. Only later did I find out where I’d picked all of that up. I didn’t acquire the Celtic Tree calendar or the issues of Ogham as a sacred, ancient and Druidic language as a child, but for second and third generation modern Pagans, that’s easily done.

When I finally read The White Goddess, and enough of the Golden Bough to develop an impression (I hated it, was mostly my impression…) it struck me that Graves was writing poetic truth. Taken on those terms, his work is amazing, awen-laden stuff and well worth your time. It suggests incredible magic just beyond your reach, and the desire to grasp that may keep you fruitfully questing for the rest of your life.

However, the trouble with Graves, is that a lot of people seem to have taken it as history. Ideas from The White Goddess have leached into Pagan writing to a remarkable degree. I’ve seen dashes of Graves all over the place. His interpretations of Ogham shape the consensus understanding now dominating modern Paganism. His tree calendar has gone distinctly feral while the sacrificial kings he acquired from Frazer are now so well established that we’ve all accepted the folk song ‘John Barleycorn’ as a religious expression. Having grown up with folk as well, Mr Barleycorn always struck me as being a personification and celebration of the beer – not ancient Paganism, but part of that innate human inclination to celebrate.

Most of us will first encounter the ideas of Robert Graves second hand and out of context. The odds are it will be the tree calendar. If you’re a Druid, you might get crane bags, the battle of the trees or the ogham interpretations. Drip fed the ideas of Graves, they become part of your world view, and if you get round to The White Goddess having internalised a few of these, it’s all too easy to read uncritically, miss the poetic, and invest in the idea of Graves as History.

We have made modern myths. Myths are in essence stuff people came up with, and the measure of a myth is not its age, but what it gives to us. In that regard, a modern myth can be just as helpful as an old one. How helpful is Graves? The idea of working closely with trees, and the possible pattern is definitely useful, but the dogmatic approach that ties trees to months regardless of what grows where you live, seems counterproductive to me. I have great personal dislike for his triple goddess archetype – maid mother and crone divides femininity into pre-kids, breeding and no longer breeding, trapping women into a restrictive identity story. I do not like his attitude to women, muses or goddesses. Woman as passive, inspiration giving muse/goddess, man as inspired creator and poet underpins his thinking. Stuff that! And then there’s the sacrifice kings, another narrative of heterosexual power exchange, male sovereignty, passive goddess overseeing…  it does not speak to me. I do not want a role in this story.

If you find Graves inspiring, as myth or as poetry then go for it, enjoy. My concern is that we’ve used his work to restrict ideas of goddess, femininity, gender roles and ideas about what it means to live this life as a Pagan.

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The Five Valleys walk

Yesterday, we three undertook the Stroud Five Valley’s walk – 21 miles, with a lot of going up and down steep hills. It’s a demanding annual event raising money for Meningitis research and the rebuilding of lives shattered by the illness. I’ve done it before – once, about twenty years ago. Tom hadn’t done it, and with my lad being 12, it represented a huge physical challenge for him.

There were a lot of people walking that route. It’s a very different experience to be out with such numbers of walkers, all sharing the same intent and journey. There were many conversations with strangers, and a sense of camaraderie pervaded the whole event.

We walked through some gorgeous Cotswold countryside, with the beech trees just starting to turn. The route took us through Lyn Chadwick’s sculpture park  – not usually available for public viewing, and a remarkable experience. We also had an incredibly close encounter with a deer, which ran past us, just a few feet away. I found a small lizard sunbathing on a rock, which was also lovely. With that many people on the move I’d not expected to see much wildlife, so these were happy surprises. There were lots of fungi too, and many glorious views along the way.

Today I am sore and weary. The last four miles were really hard going for all of us, and it took a long time. I have epic blisters, but am on the whole in better shape than I expected to be. James has already raised nearly £300 in sponsorship, which is brilliant (www.justgiving.com/tigerfish should you feel so moved). We spent a lot of last night considering what lessons could be learned and how to do better next year. (Buy chips on route, put halts in different places to improve speed on the flat, and better prepare us for the section we found toughest.) It hurt, and it was hard, and there were several times when I had no idea how I was going to get to the end… but we did, and I have no doubt that we’ll try it again next year.

A life without challenges, without epic adventures, trials and victories, would not be much of a life. On the whole, the cost in pain is well worth paying for that fuller, richer, more alive, more intense experience of being alive. A challenge faced, a challenge overcome. I don’t have a great relationship with my body, and I spent some of the walk deeply envious of the beautiful graceful gazelle people who were running a route it took my every effort to walk, but at least I can walk, and I’m grateful for that. My body held up better than I expected, which is reassuring. If the epic blisters, which I had no awareness of whilst moving, are anything to go by, my pain thresholds are nothing to be ashamed of either, and that brings me a perspective on other things. All in all, it was well worth the effort.

Robert Graves – an anarchist’s perspective

a guest blog from Elen Sentier

As someone who is married to a scientist who used to work at the Rutherford-Appleton Lab in Oxfordshire, and is the daughter of an engineer I find the “arts-type” view of “facts” amusing and somewhat disquieting.

What is a fact?

How many real facts can you list – I’m not absolutely certain I can think of one!

Scientists work with hypotheses, that’s Greek for damn good guess that has been shown to fail yet. Well actually perhaps, that it only fails in certain cases which we know very little about yet such as relativity/quantum. And anyway, we have observed that light is both particles and waves – which seems to most ordinary mortals to be a pair of diametrically opposite things and therefore impossible. Yes … well … umm … growing up in a household where this kind of thing was normal breakfast conversation makes a difference to how you look at the academic Arts mind. And then marrying someone who was involved in experiments where the boss PhDs concluded that the only way to explain the experiment was a particle going backwards in time … I dare say you’re getting the idea *grin*.

Science and engineering work on the principles of observation – not on the priciples of footnotes and what people have said in the past.

I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Professor Eric Laithwaite (who invented the linear motor and explored the spin-energy of planets as an energy source we humans might use). He began one lecture at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in London as follows …

‘I likes taking to school children. I don’t like the teachers, I like the children. Very often I begins by dropping me keys from one hand to another [he demonstrated]. Sooner or later some little tyke at the back says, “Hey, mister, what you’m droppin’ them keys for?” to which I reply, “I’m always hoping they’ll go ooop!”…’

And all this in his glorious Lancashire accent *smile*.

Laithwaite finished the lecture by putting up a cartoon; it showed a learner driver, a young woman, sat in a car beside a young man who was the instructor. It was a wee bit odd because the car was bowling along above the road at tree height! Laithwaite has the instructor saying to the young woman, “Now then Mrs Postlethwaite, don’t you worry none, but when we gets back to the ground just try and remember exactly what it was you did!”

It’s well worth looking here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Laithwaite – see more of what he did, he was a wizard, a real magic man … and he was a scientist.

What has all this to do with Robert Graves? For me, and for my dad who introduced me to Graves, and my husband who walks between the worlds of Boolean algebra and Graves as breakfast conversation, the point is about the tyranny of so-called “facts”. It is so, so easy to climb into the box of accepted wisdom and so many scholars do precisely that. Footnotes and end-notes and scholarly tomes were written by people, including Graves. People have their own axes to grind and their own additions, adaptations, and enhancements to make; many of them write from a political background – most of the Roman writers for instance. And, all history is written by the winners!

I used to be a senior project manager building computer systems for the MOD, back in the day some 25 years ago! It was fun, then, and we all had wonderfully cynical perspectives and sharp humour. We had a couple of perennial jokes that exactly illustrate my feelings for footnotes and tomes. The first is …

The battle commander needs to send a message. He tells his adjutant, ‘Send this message: send reinforcements, we’re going to advance.’ The adjutant passes it down to the lieutenant who passes it to the sergeant major, who passes it to the sergeant, who passes it to the corporal, who passes it to the squaddie who is the Sigs Op of the night. The Sigs Op sends the following message, ‘Send three-and-fourpence, we’re going to a dance’ …

My point … things that have been written down ages ago and then translated many times from the original language can end up as Chinese whispers and very likely do. Add in that everyone has their own opinion of what the ancient writer means … As Clint Eastwood says in one of the Dirty Harry movies, ‘Opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one!’

Our other perennial joke is …

Definition of an expert – an “ex” is a has-been, a “spurt” is a drip under pressure!

Yeah … well … LOL and who hasn’t felt that then? My point is that it is only to easy to feel oneself to be an expert, especially if you have alphabet soup after your name (and yes, I do too! I just never mention it!). And it is only to easy to act like a drip under pressure if you feel your academic standing is threatened!

Graves went round breaking rules and threatening everyone with his ideas and insights. That was right up my anarchical parents’ street and my hubby too and, of course, myself. I really learn things well when I observe, not when I try to learn from books. That always feels like learning someone else’s script to me and I’m really useless at living in someone else’s way … actually (with my psychotherapist hat on) so are most people. We do conform because if we don’t we find ourselves out of a job, with no money for rent or food or heating, and quite possibly out of friends too as we’re not doing what they think we should. Question … are such folk really friends?

So, back to Graves … he not only climbed out of the box he largely ripped it to shreds and turned the remains on its head and then set fire to it. For some of us a phoenix rose out of those ashes. For others he is anathema. And some ditz between the two *smile*.The scientific perspective will be that nothing is proven, ever, everything is always changing and growing and evolving, there are no tomes, no stone tablets, that cannot be broken. That feels like life to me; life is always changing and growing and evolving, it’s never the same from one moment to another … and I don’t want it to be. I’m reminded now of the Incredible String Band and their song “This Moment” … “this moment is different from any before it, this moment is different, it is now”. I think many folks forget this, quite possibly find it very scary and unsettling, they want a “stable base” from which to be. But we live on the third rock from the sun that’s hurtling through space like a ball on the end of a string at some 67,000 mph! Yikes! The Earth herself is spinning on her axis at about 1000 mph – double yikes! And we think we’re staying still ??? Umm …

I’ve always found Graves to be like contemplating all that, all those impossible things that are utterly real, like light being particles and waves, like we’re spinning at 1000 mph and flying through space at 67,000 mph, like wouldn’t it be fun if when I drop my keys they go up and gravity works backwards? Yay, all scary stuff … but wow is it exciting *big grin*.

The lovely sleep of winter. Or not.

And so, with the autumn equinox behind us and the nights growing longer we begin the lovely, restful descent into peace and darkness where we will dream up future plans ready to send forth our shoots again next spring.

If you’ve read anything on Paganism or Druidry, the odds are you’ve run into that sentiment. Evidently it works for some people – for the autumn and winter fans this is a happy time of year. If you have a warm, comfortable dwelling, are insulated from the excesses of weather, confident you can pay your heating bills no matter what, and in a state of good mental and physical health, winter is no bother at all.

My seasonally affected friends are watching the loss of light with the grief that inevitably brings. There are so many people more vulnerable to depression in the winter months, due to shortages of sun-induced serotonin in the brain.

For anyone in poverty, winter is a nightmare, and there are a lot of people in poverty just now. Not having enough food is tougher in the cold, and the issues of heating bills are many. Cold properties invite damp, mould and sickness. There’s a social impact – you won’t invite anyone else into your cold, damp, mouldy home if you can help it.

My seasonal challenges are akin to the ones my female ancestors have probably always faced. I do not have a tumble drier, I depend on sun and wind to dry my clothes. Wet winters make laundry slow and difficult, again with the lingering damp invitation to moulder. I don’t have a car, and walking everywhere can be an exercise in getting very cold, or wet through. At least this year I have a decent waterproof coat, but that hasn’t always been the case. I know people who jog, go out there and get soaked to the skin as part of their sport, but that only works when there’s a hot shower and a washing machine to come home to – not everyone has those, none of our ancient ancestors did. For most of human history, the threat of being cold and wet has been considerable.

The story of winter as a gentle, restful sleep time is a story of modern western privilege, only available if you have money and resources to block out the cold. If you’ve got to keep a fire burning for the next four months and have to source your wood (again, our ancestors mostly had to sort this for themselves) winter means more work, not less. Food supplies depend on stores – grain, apples, whatever else you dried. Mice become a real danger in such a context. If the harvest was poor, then you’d head for the winter knowing there was every chance you’d starve if spring was late. Elderly and fragile individuals would know they were especially likely to die. Our winters are not like that at the moment.

For me, our attitude to approaching winter is one of the most overtly modern aspects of contemporary Paganism. It is far from what you get when living marginally. For our ancestors, winter was a tough time, demanding, difficult, and threatening. The cold could kill you. Hunger could kill you. Hungry predators might try and kill you. The threats and challenges of winter have only been mitigated in the last hundred years or so, and even then – only for those who have the money. There will be plenty of people in our affluent societies who will die if this winter is a cold one – the elderly are often victims. There will be people going cold and hungry who cannot afford to heat their homes or cook their food.

The veneer of civilisation is thin. If the power goes off or there isn’t fuel for cars, most of us will be rapidly heading towards more ancestral-style experiences of the dark half of the year.