Nimue Brown's Blog, page 378

Somebody else’s problem

One of the key things for holding effective boundaries, is knowing what is yours and what is not. Other people’s emotional responses create a real challenge here. On one hand, the person who is made responsible for how others feel can be subject to control and abuse, on the other, the person who pays no regard to their impact will likely become abusive and problematic to others. There’s a very delicate balance here. What are we responsible for, and what are we not? There are no tidy answers, but a lot of important questions to ask.

It flows both ways – because we are affected by others, and affecting others all the time. We experience, and we react, and to some degree that reaction is a choice. If something causes us to be angry, then we may say ‘this makes me angry’. If something hurts us, ‘this makes me upset.’ Our own thoughts can (but not always) play a part here. If we’ve had to infer or interpret in order to suffer, we’re partly responsible. “You said that, which means… and therefore… and now I am in pain.” Making other people responsible for our interpretations is hardly fair, but if we are not especially self aware, we can infer without noticing that we’re doing so, taking things that were not meant as we imagine and reacting accordingly.

Equally when what we do and say has an impact other people don’t like, we can all be really defensive about that. We justify it – we are not responsible for their feelings. We are giving them a helpful and useful challenge. We are just being honest and telling it the way it is. We cannot be expected to walk round on eggshells just because they are a bit delicate. We cast our behaviour as reasonable and theirs as irrational in order not to have to feel uncomfortable or consider changing.

The person who is too influenced by how other people react can become a ‘people pleaser’ – unable to express their own feelings, needs and wishes. Put a people pleaser with someone who can never be wrong, and they will suffer horrendously. If they are fortunate, they will have a story about how heroic, noble and longsuffering they are. If unfortunate, the story will be that they are useless and undeserving, such that they end up expressing gratitude and apology to the person who is hurting them.

We are all works in progress, all flawed, learning, prone to error. We all have our stories and wounds, our needs are not always obvious, neither are our fears and vulnerabilities. To do more than chafe along another person’s edges takes time and effort. It requires the trust to be honest about how we react, and the trust to listen to how other people see things. This isn’t a blame game, establishing one party as good and right while the other is bad and wrong. Blame games perpetuate relationship problems. If we start by assuming that what is heard is not always what is meant, what is intended is not always what manifests, what is painful is not always an attack, and that it is entirely reasonable to be asked to change and make effort in order to further a relationship… there’s a place to start building.

The person intent on digging in and being right, or huddling down and accepting they are wrong no matter what… cannot create good relationship. Only when we start taking into account that we are messy and flawed, and so is everyone else, can we open the way to working out how to relate to each other. We do have some responsibility for how we inspire each other to feel – for well and woe. Our behaviour is our own business, and how we choose to manifest feelings must be laid at our door. Unless a gun is held to your head, no one is ‘making’ you do or say anything, but in the desire to protect ourselves from perceived attack, it is all too easy to go on the defensive. I am inclined to think that if our culture favoured co-operation and did not reward competition so enthusiastically, this would all be  good deal easier to sort out.

Have an ego trip, save the world

The odds are that you, like me, spend most of your time feeling not very important. Our votes change nothing. Big corporations and international agreements move the world in direction we are powerless to resist. If you aren’t a chart topping best selling, box office breaking in the news and on the magazine covers kind of person, you know that what you say and do doesn’t add up to much. You know this because it is reinforced every single day, mostly by the media. There’s the great and the good, who set the agenda and make the decisions that matter, and there’s the rest of us.

Most of our ancestors would not have spent their lives feeling so small. When your world is a tribe, a village, even a small town, your scope for mattering is much improved. If you’ve living the marginal, tribal life then any one person’s choices or actions can make or break, kill or save for a whole community. For most of human history, our choices mattered greatly to the survival options of our nearest and dearest. We evolved with our opinions counting for something to create this culture that treats most of us as interchangeable and irrelevant.

However, the ‘irrelevant’ 99% of us represent a lot of life lived and choices made. When you look at what we do collectively, we clearly do have a lot of potential for power, much of which we squander because we’re so busy buying the idea that what we do doesn’t make much odds. If we all pulled in the same direction, everything would change.

My invitation to you, is to have an ego trip. Start treating your personal choices as though you were making decisions for all of humanity. Start acting like you are a king or queen and that the fate of many lies in your hands. See each choice you make as powerful and important, and hang on to that no matter what you hear to the contrary.

For a start, this one life is the life you have, and your experience of it is the most important thing that will ever be available to you while you live. You are entitled to take that seriously. Within your own life, your choices are of vast importance, and you do have the power to make changes. Even if the wider political scene isn’t going the right way, you can act to resist, and will feel happier for upholding your own values even if it does seem like a drop in the ocean compared to what’s needed. There is always the possibility that if more people act with you, larger scales of change become possible, and in living what you believe you will encourage and inspire others to do the same. Small stones thrown into ponds can make huge ripples.

In Paganism we tend to say that we are all our own priests and priestesses. We take spiritual roles that would once have belonged to rulers. Arguably, democracy puts all of us in a position of sovereign relationship with the land. So why not embrace that fully and take that sense of power and significance into the rest of our lives, to make changes?

We are continually bombarded with messages of our own irrelevance. Every news item that tells us how somewhere, far away, other people are making choices that will affect our lives, tells us that we are lesser. We do not have the power. Feeling powerless, we are encouraged to think we have no choice but to go along with what we are told. We always have choices. We do have power. We need to claim it.

Who are you, anyway?

People fascinate me. We have a social habit of constructing ourselves according to who we are with. Our professional at-work persona may be very different from who we are with mummy, and who we are in the dungeon – to offer a possible array. For many Pagans, the spiritual self is held separate to the everyday self, as a necessity. Being at odds with the mainstream, we often find it essential to lay that bit aside for many activities. We all hold our social groups separately. We do not want the boss to meet mummy and we sure as hell don’t want mummy to know about the dungeon… It makes the idea underpinning facebook’s ‘real name’ policy’ seem rather childish. Of course many of us have multiple identities. Of course we don’t want to make everything we are available to everyone. Life would be miserable for a lot of people were that to be forced upon us.

Even in close knit communities where there is an appearance of everyone knowing everyone else rather well, we do not always share our secret selves. The intimacy of our spiritual experiences, the privacy we build around our sexual lives, our darkest fears and most treasured hopes are not available to everyone all of the time. Rightly so. No one should be obliged to share anything. There is power in both the sharing and the withholding, and the right to choose how we do that is of great importance.

Sometimes we wear masks, and sometimes we are soul-naked honest with each other. Sometimes what personality we express is part of a complex, even contradictory character. Sometimes it’s what we did because we thought it was expected. Acting roles or baring hearts, we construct ourselves from moment to moment, scene to scene. Often we do that based around habits and notions of normality, and without much thought. At the same time, we’re trying to decode what everyone else is doing, trying to figure out what they meant, if they were truthful, if that whole encounter was real.

No wonder we get so tangled up and confused sometimes!

If someone shows you an array of faces, it raises interesting questions about which ones are ‘real’. What of that was meaningful? What of it should inform all future interactions, and what should be disregarded as white noise or conformity to expectation? In Pagan contexts we may be tempted to big up our Pagan qualities. If everyone else apparently has a spirit guide, totem animal, deity spouse, angelic guardian, witchy granny et al it’s tempting to re-craft what we have in order that we might fit in. Humans are predisposed to wanting to fit in. I have argued before that our most authentic self is the one we aspire to be, but we have to watch out for the person we want people to think we are – which may not be the same at all.

Working out who ‘the real me’ is in all of that can be difficult and confusing. Working out the reality of anyone else is nigh on impossible. And yet it is from these shifting sands that we try to build relationships and communities. It probably explains rather a lot.

Of soul and inspiration

When inspiration comes, it comes as a flow, bringing clarity and a sense of purpose to my thoughts. I know what I’m doing, and I can see how to do it. Whether that’s a scene in a novel, a political press release, the plan for a day… it is discernibly the same process happening. When it happens I am both happy and highly effective. Often it doesn’t happen. Today, the wheel is barely turning and I have no idea where the hamster is.

I know, because I land here often, that there are some basic rules at play. Nothing is an infinite resource, and that includes inspiration. I can’t pull energy and ideas out of (where? The ether? My subconscious?)  forever if I put nothing in. I have to take time to feed my inspiration with beauty, ideas, good music, rest, space to daydream. If there is going to be high quality output there has to be high quality input as well. Unfortunately I don’t always get my life to balance out such that good stuff in sits well with what I’m trying to put out. That in turn leads to days when there are a lot of things I really have to do. With no flow of inspiration to carry me, I have to do it by pushing (or quit). That’s slower, leaving me less time to recharge, increasing the imbalance further. If I let that continue for too long, I will break down, one way or another.

Today’s jobs seem important. They always do. If I leave them, there will be problems. Tomorrow, more jobs will come in. When the inspiration flows, this is fine, but on days like today, it becomes frightening, overwhelming.

And yet I find myself not doing any of what I should be doing, but instead on facebook trying to reason with people for whom a climate change march seems stupid. Comments like ‘if you walk everywhere, you obviously don’t work’ and accusations of smug elitism hurled at protestors. This is another great energy stealer, but unless we convince the apathetic majority, the inertia laden many who are offended by any suggestion that they might need to change… we aren’t going to win, and everything else I’m doing becomes less feasible, too.

And I know, when I read the heartless, souless words of people who just want to get online and ridicule other people, when I see protestors slapped down and good causes mocked… I am seeing people who have no inspiration. I am seeing people who go through every day with no vision or insight, nothing to grant perspective or a sense of purpose. I guess if you can’t imagine anything else, you have to cling in fear to the status quo. If you don’t have the inspiration to picture something better, you will assume this is as good as it gets. If nothing has ever shaken you to the core and thrown you headlong into something that matters, caring may well seem ridiculous.

For all that I struggle with inspiration, I find it hard to imagine what a life entirely devoid of it would be like. How hollow, empty and unrewarding such an existence must be. I’m fairly sure that I’m seeing them, lurking around online, and out there in the wider world, too. Laughing at those who care, mocking those who try, and resisting all change. Not because their lives are so great that any change would be for the worse, but because they cannot imagine it.

Aware that the tides of my own inspiration are so dependent on input, I have to wonder if those I encounter who seem cripplingly uninspired, are malnourished. What comes into their lives to uplift them and feed their souls? What helps them picture a kinder, better, more sustainable world? What encourages them to strive, to try and be better people and to live more rewarding lives? But why would they need any of that? After all, they probably all have televisions.

Of Facebook and real names

While I’m unlikely to have any problems personally with Facebook’s current exercise in enforcing ‘real names’ (I’m using two thirds of my real name) I have a lot of problem with it conceptually. In most aspects of life we are free to use whatever names we want. As a writer or performer you can quite legitimately have more than one name. So long as there is no criminal application, call yourself as you please, so the demand for ‘real names’ is an infringement of a right we otherwise have.

Names have a cultural component. This whole ‘real name’ malarkey is already showing signs of impacting on people who do not conform to white western name standards. It doesn’t matter whether you can prove it’s your ‘real’ name, it is not ok that you get asked just because of cultural difference. Facebook is already flirting with racism on this issue, from what I’ve seen online.

Apparently the use of ‘real names’ reduces risk of online bullying. However, Facebook is not requiring all of us to prove who we say we are, it’s only if a name seems suspect to someone’s mind, that it will be questioned. So you sign up as John Smith, Alice Jones, or the like, and it looks like a regular ‘real name’ giving you all the cover you need to spew hate. This, incidentally is the same Facebook that couldn’t see any problem with a ‘sexy little girls’ page a while back and took some considerable persuading to close it down, doesn’t mind images of violence against animals or pictures of murdered girls hanging from trees. This is the Facebook that finds breastfeeding offensive but won’t shut down hate speech against women. It has some very interesting variations in standards.

Yes, predators use fake names. So do victims who are in hiding. So do people exploring their identities, people with unsafe living arrangements or a need for privacy. “Someone might use it to do a bad thing” is an approach the does not let any of us own anything harder or heavier than latex. You could kidnap someone and tape their mouth over with duct tape, so we’d better not have any more duct tape. It is not the anonymity of a false name that enables trolls online. It is the anonymity of being a tiny irrelevance in a big place, one in a thousand Lisas from Essex, or one of the innumerable Bobs and Daves from the Midlands. Anonymous because we are many, and the net huge. Some people use fake names to do bad things. Some people use guns to kill people (it’s not like they have a vast array of applications). Facebook takes no issue with pro-gun material. Some of us claim more interesting names as a way of standing out – and why the hell not?

Of course Facebook isn’t the only show in town. The power it has at present stems from being as close as we get to ubiquitous. However, that only holds up while it is a place everyone can use. Start drawing rigid lines and making demands, and there are other places to go. I also have a presence on Twitter, Linkedin and google+ and if Facebook becomes too aggressive, unreasonable and demanding I will use other spaces. I won’t be the only one. No one is obliged to show up there, and it is worth pausing to remember myspace, and before that, the yahoo groups. Nothing is forever, not even Facebook.

The right to express yourself is important. It includes the right to use whatever name you wish. It is the oldest trick in the book to bring in controlling laws on the basis that they are for your own good and to protect you. We don’t have to co-operate with that, on Facebook or anywhere else. You can stand around demanding real names, and wait for Rumplestiltskin to run off with your baby – or in this case, your supply of people on which the whole thing depends. People are the key resource here, not the website, and Facebook (like a good many governments around the world) would do well to bear that in mind.

What are philosophers for?

It would be fair to say that Alain de Botton has been a big influence on me in recent years. I’ve read a lot of his books. He’s an atheist thinker, but happily not that interested in the tired old anti-religion arguments you can get from too many other atheists. Instead, he is much more interested in questions of how to live a fuller, richer, more satisfying, more meaningful sort of life without having to refer to deity, afterlife and so forth. With my heady mix of existential and maybeist tendencies, I’m deeply attracted to this approach.

I’ve read some ‘proper’ philosophy along the way. You know the sort of thing, that gets so bogged down in trying to define who ‘I’ is and what we mean by ‘being’ and ‘consciousness’ that your head is aching long before you’ve picked up any tips that might be meaningfully applied to life. I’ve read philosophy that seemed like a foreign language, full of unfamiliar jargon, references to things I hadn’t read… an impenetrable thicket that made the outpourings of Robert Graves look clear and easy. That kind of philosophy has taught me one thing and one thing only – that I do not have what it takes to be a reader of such work, much less a participant in the process.

What is philosophy for, if it is too difficult for some of us even to sit down with it? While I may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, I’m by no means the bluntest either, and am prepared to bet that what I couldn’t get to grips with would prove indigestible to a lot of other people as well. Which means philosophy is just for the highly educated, super clever elite and we lesser mortals should just knuckle down and do what our betters tell us. (That may in fact be the gist of Plato’s Republic).

Oddly enough, that doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm. Wilfully impenetrable writing on entirely abstract and irrelevant topics doesn’t do much for me, either. This is why the discovery of Alain du Botton has been so important to me. He’s incredibly readable, for a start, tending to assume that his audience doesn’t have a doctorate in philosophy. Plain English abounds, as do real life issues. You can read something of his and apply it to your own life. You can read it and dare to think that, given time and effort, you could put together a passable bit of philosophical insight on life yourself. You can aspire…

What really, is the point of philosophy if it does not put philosophy within the reach of everyone who has some interest? What is it for, if not to help us live this life in this world? And what are we here for, if not to reflect a bit on our experiences?

When I first added ‘philosophy’ to the topics list here, I half expected that the Philosophy Police would show up (complete with togas and long beards) to tell me I wasn’t allowed. Not having a doctorate in that subject, I had no entitlement to claim any insight at all. (For the record, I have no such problems or chips on my shoulder when poking about in other subjects for which I am equally unqualified, I think high level philosophy is inherently elitist and exclusive.) It hasn’t happened. Not least because *that* sort of philosopher may not exist, and if they do, they probably don’t get out much, or online. Philosophy is the art of thinking about stuff in a way that is useful. Being a philosopher is being a person who thinks about stuff in ways that are useful. Expressing that in ways other people might grasp is a gift to the world. So I’ll stick with Alain du Botton, and John Michael Greer, and with anyone else who turns up and makes sense, because I’ve come to the conclusion that if philosophy fails to make sense, the philosopher hasn’t done a very good job of it.

For further inspiration, can I direct you to http://www.thephilosophersmail.com

Creating my own reality

We have beliefs about the ways in which, by action and sheer will, we can change our reality, and we also all have beliefs about the ways in which there is no scope for change whatsoever. Some of these are more sensible than others, and I am picking some examples that strike me as especially nuts.

A great many adult humans spend vast amounts of money on products and interventions which promise the illusion of youth. We are all getting older, that’s a key feature of being alive. Rather than accept this process and work with it gracefully, we expend vast amounts of human time, energy and resource on fighting it. This tide will not go back no matter how we shout at it.

On the other hand, we’re willing to treat human constructs as inevitable and unassailable. We’ve built a vast and complex house on the sandy base that is cheap energy. When the oil runs out, we’re in trouble, and yet we do not consider changing the system. We’ll look anywhere for answers, no matter how short term and suicidal rather than even consider the systems we built might have to change.

All too often, we don’t believe we can change our health by changing our lifestyles but will pay for pills that claim to do it for us, and never mind the side effects. Death is inevitable but we want a magic pill to chase it away.

Too many of us no longer believe we make a difference by voting, while far, far too many are happy to trust decision making to the dubious few who put themselves forwards.

We believe that there’s no money to feed and house our poorest people, while at the same time we’re also happy to believe that spending £100billion on nuclear weapons and the capacity to kill 45 million people is a prudent investment for jobs and future security.

Look at the things we seem willing to believe as a society, and the quantity of cognitive dissonance is astounding. 97% of scientists say man made climate change exists and yet we still consent to be ruled by people do not believe in it. England, if we were a person, we’d have to be medicated to the eyeballs and put in a padded room because our delusions are vast, and our beliefs so shockingly irrational.

With our beliefs, we create our reality, and by this means we shall have a vast array of nuclear weapons and people in poverty killing themselves. We shall have miracle anti aging face creams and continue to die younger than we might have done as a consequence of obesity, air pollution and road deaths. As for what we’ll do when climate change and peak oil wash away the foundations of sand – that’s anyone’s guess, but I don’t have much confidence that at such a time, we will collectively wake up and think clever thoughts. We’re just not in the habit.

And then there’s that merry band of us, Cnut-like, shouting at the sea of humanity to go back. Try something else. Irrationally optimistic that we can get people to change their beliefs. Wet feet it is, then.

Diseased Druid

Yesterday I was too ill to make it to the desktop computer, so there was no blog. One of the plusses of being self-employed is that this very seldom happens. When I’m merely a bit ill, I can keep working. That I need to is part of the downside of being self employed – if I don’t work, there is no sick cover. I’m paid for what I do, more often than not, but if I get ill and can’t work for a long period, this is unnerving. Usually I’m not so ill that I can’t push through it.

‘Can’t’ is an interesting word though, and one we all bring into play at different times. I tend to be fairly literal about it – ‘can’t work’ tends to mean fever, inability to actually sit in an upright position, so sleep deprived that I can’t concentrate and the like. I also know from experience that if I have to, even that level of  ‘can’t’ can be pushed. I’ve done school runs on foot, feverish with tonsillitis because there wasn’t any other option that day.

‘Can’t’ is more of an option when you have a safety net. If someone else can catch the critical things that are challenging, it is easier to lie down and quit for a bit. The winter before last, when I had pneumonia, Tom did all the shopping. Long cycle rides in the rain to fetch groceries. A task that normally required us both, he took the extra load, quite literally. But then, there are some illnesses (and pneumonia is one of them) where stoically battling on can kill you.

I marvel at the array of different human responses to discomfort and disease. The people for whom a bruise or a cut is worthy of comment, through to the other extremes of people who push through chronic and even terminal illness because there are things they want to achieve. The worst thing we’ve endured is the measure of what we know we can take, so those who are relatively pain free and healthy tend, in my experience, to make a lot more fuss about minor setbacks than people for whom those small things might be less of an issue than what constitutes business as usual.

Our baseline for compassion also has a lot to do with experience. It’s easier to empathise with someone if you have some faint clue as to what their experiences may feel like. Those who have lived well and pain free, for whom a scrape and a bump is the worst of it, sometimes find it very hard to make sense of the people for whom pain is a constant. And so you can get into situations where the relatively unscathed demand a lot of attention for minor ills but do not take seriously the ongoing suffering of others.

One of the things I notice about people I know who live with pain, restricted mobility and serious ongoing health challenges, is they often learn not to make much fuss. Partly, I suspect, because the baseline for normal shifts over time and with it shifts the point at which it feels worth saying something. There is the fear of being seen as a nuisance, by those who are not suffering and who will be bored or offended by the details. There is pride, and the determination to be independent, as far as possible.

What a person says about their struggles, illness and difficulty, of any variety, is not any kind of absolute measure of what they are up against. We’re very quick to judge each other, especially if there are questions of our time and energy being required to cover for someone else’s illness. It is inconvenient. They may be making a fuss about nothing. They may also be making far too little fuss about a great deal and it’s worth remembering (having seen a few very close calls with other people) that this degree of stoicism can prove fatal.

Magic from the bottom of a hole

One of the interesting things about being at the bottom of a hole (emotionally speaking) is how hard it becomes to think anything other than the hole exists. There’s a feature of human psychology underpinning this. When we are in any given emotional state, we tend to recall most clearly the other times when we have felt that way – which in turn tends to reinforce the mood. For this reason (and others) it is as well not to do exam revision whilst drunk but sit the exam whilst perfectly sober.

Much of our thinking is associative in nature. A significant amount of what occurs betwixt the ears is not a rational development of logical and causal links, and it is worth grasping the implications of this. You may be familiar with Pavlov’s dogs, who learned to salivate when they heard a bell ring. We all do this, and there is no inherent logic. We feel associations between things that turn up together. There may be no real relationship between the bell and the food, but if they seem to correspond, our bodies will start to assume kinds of causality. Much of our ‘thinking’ has this bodily quality and it informs our choices and expectations.

If you can persuade a creature or person to do one wholly irrelevant thing in the hopes of getting the coincidental outcome they appeared to get one time… that’s generally called superstitious behaviour. Touching your lucky socks, or doing a little pigeon dance before tapping the bird feeder. Not because there’s a causal link, not because it makes any real odds but because the first time we did the pigeon dance and hit the button, some grain appeared. Maybe we aren’t sure whether it was the dance or the button that got the result. Maybe we are a bit afraid that if we test it, the universe will be cross with us, and decide not to deliver. Obsessive compulsive behaviours are one possible outcome here.

For the person interested in magic, this can go several ways. Are we practicing a superstitious action that makes no difference? Or are we tapping into the greatest bit of superstitious magic there is, and getting an entirely real placebo effect? Or is something else happening?

Any kind of superstitious behaviour has the potential to give us the self fulfilling prophecy. This is especially true for the person in a hole. If you already think that everything is shit and you are doomed, the odds of pulling a bunch of metaphorical flowers out of your equally metaphorical magician’s hat, are not good. Belief can shape our chances. The person who is in a profound state of disbelief cuts off certain options for themselves. The person who thinks they have lost already is unlikely to come up with a winning move. When you can’t win because there is just no way you can win, that circular trap can take some breaking. It’s just as true that imagining you are all powerful and invincible does not make you bullet proof in any literal sense. Overconfidence can be just as dangerous as a sense of doom.

We think with our bodies. Quite a lot of what happens in our brains has already done some of its shaping up other places, in our central nervous systems, and our conditioned physical reactions to stimuli. You can teach the body to react in ways the mind finds abhorrent, and it is worth recognising this as one of the features of our animal selves. That animal self tends to have very basic needs and wants, though. If you can, snuggle it up in a warm place with some decent food, and let it have a rest, then tomorrow it may not be quite so certain that it is standing at the bottom of a really big hole.

A Druidic personality

Coming to Druidry, one of the things a person will do (if they are serious) is explore the changes to self that bring thoughts, feelings, and behaviour in line with Druidry itself. This is not unusual – all religions offer us such approaches. If you successfully align thoughts, feelings and actions along spiritual principles, your personality will change. One of the things religion shows us is that personality itself is really quite malleable.

Who we are is a cobbled together amalgam of many things. Our genes have an influence. The family environment we grew up in gave us our baselines for what’s normal and what isn’t. Wider cultures, brought to us through school, television, what happens around us, media, what we are told happens around us, what we read. The things we imagine also help to shape us. From that vast array of input we make vast numbers of tiny unconscious choices about what to believe and reject, what to ignore and uphold. Dissect your personality and most of what you have you can trace back to influences, experiences, choices and the habits of your first household. Personality may be intrinsic to how we think of ourselves, and it tends to inform and filter our whole life experience, but much of it is an unconsidered fabrication.

To varying degrees, religions expose the illusion of self. Buddhism is really explicit about doing this, while monotheism seems much less so, but all offer ways of being that align a person with whatever the faith considers optimal. Submission/ subservience to higher powers and by extension, the priesthood of that higher power is frequently encouraged and a significant part of why atheists find the whole business so objectionable. However, if your identity, personality and relationship with the world is an improvised, unconsidered selection of random accidents, this is perhaps not helpful to you either.

For a person coming to Druidry, there’s not a lot of upfront information about who you are supposed to be. The wise old Druid archetype offers a possible endpoint, but clearly you can’t start there. Nature offers an array of models – to be natural can mean anything you want it to mean. Poisonous toadstools are natural. So is the partner-eating mantis. Human nature allows for all imaginable variations. We talk about being ‘authentic’ but when you arrive at Druidry with a tangled mess of self built up from everywhere you’ve been and your reactions to everything you’ve encountered… ‘authentic’ can be a bit of a mystery.

Simply, there is no behavioural template to magically align your personality with the principles of Druidry. Nothing we do actually works that way, which can be disorientating, demoralising, and frustrating. There are no easy measures to tell if you are doing it ‘right’ even.

“Know thyself” – which is a Greek instruction, not a Celtic one – is probably the most important piece of religious instruction out there. Find out who you are. Make sense of your reactions and feelings. Become the text that you study, and cross reference that to other texts, human; papery and nature based. Find out what makes you tick, and trace those threads of thinking and feeling. It will take years. You may well never manage the whole job, but that’s fine.

As you go through, finding out who you are and how you got to be here, you will find some of those sources please you more than others. On reflection there will be aspects of you that you like and wish to cultivate, and other bits you want to change. You will find virtues, values and vices, strengths and weaknesses, habits that help and habits that hinder. As you work out who you are, you will inevitably start to think about who you want to be, and how to get there. Slowly, over time, this self scrutiny and contemplation will lead you not to some one size fits all Druid model of how to be, but to your own, personal model of how to be the person you want to be. One of the things I have come to think from this journey, is that the person we choose to be is our most authentic self, and the only version of self not dropped on us from outside. The act of choosing makes something far more ‘me’ than the unconscious absorption that is the more usual method.