Nimue Brown's Blog, page 380

Dreaming a future

Lives are made of choices, and the small, day to day ones often shape the larger issues and inform the options we have. Who we are is fashioned from one hour to the next in the small details of how we choose to live. Our dreams are a part of this. What do we aspire to? Where do we see ourselves being this time next year? What are we moving towards? What are we trying to leave behind?

We live in a culture where the selling of small dreams is an everyday issue. Adverts don’t just offer us specific products, but try to imply a whole lifestyle that we are to desire. And what are we desiring? A certain kind of body shape, sofa, kitchen arrangement, a holiday. A nice, well behaved and clean looking child, a partner who brings flowers… It pays to stop and think about the casual daydreams.

There’s nothing wrong with dreaming small. Having just the right thing can make worlds of difference. The slow cooker, the wok, a ball of yarn, the right mattress… Knowing how those small dreams fit into the totality of your life is important. At the moment I’m dreaming a wormery to deal with kitchen waste and a bin to grow potatoes in. Small dreams that relate to a much bigger idea about living lightly. In our little dreams we are building the shape of our choices. When the opportunity to dream big comes along, the small dreams will help you birth the big ones.

In magical practice, will is everything. Will without a grand plan can get you into all kinds of trouble, though. Toddlers tend to have a lot of will coupled with entirely short term thinking. Left to their own devices, this combination can prove fatal! Will must be shaped by intent – clear, well considered intent that will hold up to challenges and scrutiny. You can’t work magic of any sort with a half-arsed plan in which you’ve not invested much attention. All of this also depends on self knowledge. If you do not know yourself, you will not know what you want or need, what methods of chasing it would suit you, and if you get there you may find it wasn’t it anyway.

Paying attention to the small dreams helps develop self knowledge. What do you crave? What are you missing? What are you working for? It’s also far too easy to get into the trap of running hard, working hard, and that becoming an end in itself. Get too tired and downtrodden and there may be no space for the idea of working *for* something, you just crawl from day to day. Survival replaces living, and none of us would aspire to that, if we recognised the choice.

The tougher things are, the easier it is to have no time to create even the smallest dreams. However, this is the time when a bit of dreaming is most important. It is the dreaming that will help us spot better opportunities and see a reason to go for them. It is dreaming that helps us hold a sense of self not wholly dependent on our most immediate circumstances. In terms of getting through a crisis, that can make all the difference.

Look after the small dreams. Give them time and space to grow. Let them show you something of who you are and where you want to be. If your dreams turn out to be full of other people’s product pitches, you can choose to lay them down and try some other vision.

The Hopeless Vendetta

Five years ago, Tom and I launched the webcomic Hopeless Maine: Personal Demons. It led to a second narrative arc – Inheritance, both of which have since been published in hardcover. It also had a lot to do with our falling in love and getting married. Before the webcomic even landed, there was also a weekly newspaper for the island of Hopeless – The Hopeless Vendetta.

The Hopeless Vendetta ran small stories as flash fiction, weaving bigger plots and connecting to the timeline of the webcomic once that got going. Sometimes, as a consequence of pacing in the comic, time gets a bit bendy.

As it got up and running, a thing began to happen. Islanders started turning up and making their opinions known. Strange figures like Professor Enoch Swaine, Bocan, Shrove Tuesday Jones, Henry Covert, Incompetence Parsons, Jimmy Misanthrope, Little Lizzie, and Mithra Stubbs started to appear, bringing their own stories of island life and conflicting views of events. This was wholly unexpected and really exciting.

I love collaborative projects. I do a lot of working with other people, and opportunities to play tend to inspire me. I realise that I need more play in my life. We’ve decided to re-launch The Hopeless Vendetta this autumn, and to run it more collaboratively so that more people can get involved. Keep an eye on the site for information about how to do that if you are interested.

The main story arc for Hopeless Maine is already written, and won’t change, but there are many other tales to tell about the strange little island. I look forward to finding out what those are. After years away from this project, it feels a lot like going home.

Divination lessons with Poe

I was listening to Omnia’s version of ‘The raven  a little while back, it struck me what a pertinent piece of writing this is for anyone engaged in symbol interpretation. It’s a bit of a crash course in things you really don’t want to do, and I thought it might be both entertaining and useful to poke around in that a bit. If you aren’t able to listen to Omnia, here’s the text version.

We start out with a chap in a state of angst and melancholy. Moods colour perceptions, and if you are depressed, pretty much everything has the potential to look like a harbinger of doom. He has a fair sense of his own mood, so has no excuse. If you know everything looks shitty and feels doomed, try to avoid reading messages into things because you will just see portents of everything going to hell in a handcart. Had a dancing rainbow unicorn turned up, he would probably have seen something terrible in its eyes.

Clearly he’s looking for something or hoping that something will come to him. Perhaps the ghost of dead Leonore, but he has both a mood of gloom, and an agenda, which informs how he understands everything. It’s easy to see omens when you are specifically looking for them, and the stronger desire is, the less reliable your interpretations will be, so at the very least you need to factor that in a bit and not get too carried away.

He asks the bird its name, it answers ‘Nevermore’ and he instantly rejects that as the name the bird goes by, because it does not suit him to accept. If we are led by our assumptions, we are going to get things wrong. We should not assume otherworldly beings will have the same conventions and habits as we do.

He says a few other doleful things, the raven repeats ‘Nevermore’ and he at once assumes there must be innate meaning in its saying that. The more logical conclusion is that the bird knows one word, and this is it. Again the agenda is allowed to inform the interpretation even when other possibilities are clearly present. He then proceeds to ask an array of questions to which ‘nevermore’ would be the least helpful answer he could hear. He’s setting himself up to get the depressing answers that on some level, he evidently wants. Gloomy man confirms his gloom.

The bird stays. Never once does he consider that the bird might be benevolent, a guardian, or connected to Leonore in some way. He assumes it is there to torture him because he is busy torturing himself. Had he asked ‘how long must I suffer?’ the raven’s ‘Nevermore,’ might have sounded like a blessing, not a curse.

“Will they make me eat tapioca again?”

“Nevermore.”

Without an open mind, any form of divination can be a lot like seeing what you were looking for.

Moon in Taurus

I tend to be sceptical about astrology. Actually, if we’re going to be fair I tend to be sceptical about everything, with the notable exceptions of Ronald Hutton and caffeine. The idea that my life was in any way pre-destined does not sit well with me.  I don’t accept the idea of a mechanical universe rolling out its ore-ordained events. It’s entirely possible that’s what we’ve got, but I prefer the idea of free will, and obviously if it is a mechanical universe I don’t have much choice about having gone down the wrong route here…

I had a tough weekend. Sunday into Monday, the weight of the world on my shoulders was especially keen. Yesterday’s blog post was full of despair. A few comments here and on facebook made it clear it wasn’t just me. Not all of those comments were in response to the blog, either. Then, to my surprise I spotted a status update from a friend: “waiting for the Moon to move out of Scorpio into Sagittarius 6pm tonight….can’t wait….too intense, not everything is “Life and Death’.” Curious.

Sometimes it does feel like there’s something in the air. Sometimes there does seem to be a distinct vibe, that catches a lot of people all at once. There are moments in history when a lot of people suddenly get moving and it’s hard to talk about that without resorting to the language of tides.

I don’t want the shape of my self to have been dictated by the position of astral bodies at the moment of my birth. And yet I am willing to accept the idea that I might have a fundamental self, an intrinsic nature that I did not create solely through my own choices. Stopping to look at that I realise it doesn’t quite add up. I’d be ok with an underlying nature shaped by my biology. Biological inevitabilities seem tolerable to me. I do not entirely like the idea of being a product of my environment, not least because I’ve seen plenty of people transcend their origins, and others fail to fly despite being launched well, so I don’t think that’s it. The idea that I might have an enduring soul that has its own character seems fine, so long as I don’t get into where any of that comes from.

Is it any more irrational to assume my identity was made by the stars, rather than some other agent? Which brings me round to Moon in Taurus. There was a ritual at Druid camp, where people were encouraged to find out where their moon is. I didn’t do the ritual, but I did check the sign. It fits me uncannily well, and my bloke is the same.

The trouble with the stars is that they’re out there all the time, going through their complex dance moves with the planets. That means if there is an influence, its constant, and that seems a bit much most days. Part of me occasionally thinks that if there is a flow, we must be touched by it. Part of me would like to be largely responsible for the mistakes and successes of my life. I’ll mention now that I’m a Gemini, and we’ll see what floats back…

Ends and means

My general starting point is that the ends should not be assumed to justify the means, because that’s a slippery slope down to doing whatever you want in order to get your own way. It works with the assumption that ‘winning’ is everything. If you want to go through life as a passably ethical person, then you have to allow for the idea that you can be wrong, and that other people’s needs and views are just as valid. Getting the result by any means just doesn’t fit with that world view.

Most of the time that works just fine. I approach almost all things with an eye to acting in a way I find acceptable in order to work towards outcomes I want. However, we live in troubling times. Eco-suicide is a distinct possibility. The damage our species is doing shocks me on a daily basis. Human injustice, underpinned by greed and apathy, haunts me. Sometimes the urge to shake people and scream at them to wake up, is huge. Not that this would be a likely strategy to achieve results.

All too often, the slow approach of winning people round, being the change and so forth is just too slow. I lie awake at night listening to the boy racers speeding their cars up and down the hills and I know there are far too many people out there for whom the idea of responsibility is a joke. There are so many of us who feel entitled to have whatever we can pay for, no matter what it costs someone or something else. There are so many of us who just can’t keep up with the ethical issues of each choice, either. Doing the best you can with what you have is an exercise in compromise and complicity. I haven’t given away everything I have to feed the hungry. I honestly cannot afford to buy entirely organic.

Which leads to the questions of where my own life fits in this balance of means and ends. The ideal outcome for me would be a gentler, more sustainable world with a good-enough standard of living for all. Time to rest and play, the scope to be well of body and mind. Happiness, community, friendship. I don’t want to live in a world where people work seven day weeks and ten hour days and tend not to have the time, energy or money to go out of an evening. I don’t want to live in a world where people are always expected to push through pain and tiredness to get the work done.

There are so many causes. There is so much needs doing. So many things we need to be more aware of. I’ve adopted a more sustainable lifestyle (no car, no fridge, no washing machine) but it costs me in terms of time and energy. If something needs doing, I’ll show up and give it my best shot. As a consequence, I haven’t had a whole day off given over to rest since the middle of July. I make a point of having some rest time each day because otherwise I court mental dysfunction, but there are still more things to do than there is time, and I end up worn and ragged on a regular basis. How to be a good citizen, a good pagan, a good activist, mother, wife, friend, member of society, and to earn a living, and to have a low impact lifestyle… and needing more hours in the day.

The easiest things to drop are the ones that I enjoy – time out for music, reading for pleasure, sewing for fun, just going to bed early. I’ve had patches historically when the only way to keep going was to withdraw energy from the stuff I did just for me. That way lies the collapse of self esteem and the loss of inspiration. I would like the time and headspace to write novels, but the wild elephants are in peril, and our yellowhammers are nearly gone and I am desperately worried about the hedgehogs, and UKIP are running public meetings locally and people are responding to all that is wrong with hate. No matter how wound up I get, I must not fall into hating, and it would be so easy. People are not an innately loveable species.

If I am not part of the solution, then I am part of the problem. But if I do things I think are wrong in order to go after the ends I believe in, how can I not undermine what I’m trying to do? And if I put me first, at all, those are minutes I’m not giving to trying to help with something, trying to change something, and there is so much work to do, and so much to try and understand about what’s going on. I have no answers.

Democracy is in danger, from us

Yesterday I was out in the streets of Stroud with a lot of other people, raising awareness of the Trans-Atlantic trade deal under way and its grim implications for democracy. I think big corporations have too much influence as it is, giving them more power is not a good thing. http://www.38degrees.org.uk/ttip is you haven’t signed the petition yet.

I had a lot of really good conversations with people. I had a lot more where I said ‘this is a real threat to democracy’ and people shrugged, or said ‘I’m not interested’ and walked away. I can’t help but feel if I’d said ‘this is about a real threat to your television watching’ they would have cared. Such are our priorities.

People died to get us the democracy we have. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than many of the options. And yet we’re so complacent about it, and so blind to our own power and responsibility. We’ll abdicate power to any outfit that wants it. We’ll shrug, not wanting to make the effort to know, not wanting the inconvenience of getting involved. I can’t help but feel that if we act that way, we will get what we collectively deserve, namely a ticket back to the dark ages with our hard won rights stripped from us.

We all have power and we all have responsibility, it’s just that the vast majority of people prefer to ignore it. If we all decided, today, to fix all the inequalities in the world, sort out long term sustainability, deal with climate change and protect species from extinction, we would be well on the way to fixing every problem there is within the week. All we have to do, is do it. All we need, is the collective will, and that collective will is made up of individuals getting their bottoms into gear. Democracy is us, and if we bare our necks to the teeth of the corporate vampires, we really shouldn’t be surprised if they bite us.

I love 38 degrees. People led, people funded, doing what it can, and getting results. Every time you see a UK news item where the government have changed direction, there’s usually been a campaigning group in the mix, pushing for just that. Hundreds of thousands of people have roared, and something has shifted. Some of those wins are small, but every win counts. You can tell it works because they’re trying to legislate to shut us down around elections.

I think crowd-based campaigning, coupled with crowdfunding, are the future. When we come together to make things happen, we make things happen, and that enables a lively, active kind of democracy. Anyone who shrugs and walks away loses their voice in that, and may not like what it gets them, but that’s also part of what democracy means – choosing not to speak up means choosing not to have a voice. If enough of us can’t be bothered, then a small minority rules unchallenged. It’s like feudalism, only without the leprosy. Although saying that, if we privatise health so that the poor cannot afford care, (and TTIP makes that more likely) we open the door to get our mediaeval illnesses back. Because everyone loves the romance of weeping sores and untreated cancerous growths, right?

Debates, arguments, disagreeing and the such

I thought it would be worth posting some thoughts on this for all you more recently arrived blog followers. Here’s how it works.

I don’t expect people to agree with me. It’s lovely when I find someone who shares a perspective, and I really enjoy the further sharing that can come from that, but at the same time I don’t expect it. What makes sense for me, and what works for me may well not work for someone else. If your experience is different, please do say. I love learning, and I learn a lot when people share alternative views. I also know that I can get things totally wrong sometimes, through not knowing, or dodgy assumptions. It is helpful to me when people catch that. Alternative takes on things are always welcome.

I love diversity. I love that we are all different. Dogma is dull!

I know I sometimes wind people up, for all kinds of reasons. I say things that push people’s buttons. Sometimes that’s deliberate, sometimes I do it in all innocence. Usually if I’m writing about someone specific, I will either name them, or contact them privately so they know it’s them. With problems and issues, I try to avoid writing about experiences with individuals, but will look for comparisons across an array of experiences. So if you know me a bit offline, and I post something that in places sounds a bit like you but mostly isn’t… I request that you don’t take offence. It’s not total failure to understand you, or a character assassination, the odds are I was thinking about five other people as well and a thing I read.

If I wind you up and you take it personally and need to vent, come back and talk to me – publically or privately as you prefer. I would rather know. If there is a crossed wire, we can sort it out. If I have messed up, I can do something about it. If you just needed to vent, I’ll survive. I do not in any way censor comments to the blog if they relate to what I’ve posted. I don’t need you to agree with me, and if I don’t know you personally, I don’t need you to like me, but at the same time I would rather deal as smoothly and honourably with you as I can.

I don’t particularly enjoy being trolled, hassled or trashed – having had rounds of those. It really does all come down to manners. I’ve had some fantastic, inspiring disagreements; to argue does not have to be to denigrate.  For example if you track Jo van der Hoeven and I across our blogs, we disagree about a lot of stuff, but we also respect each other. We may bang out the arguments now and then, but it is all about the ideas, not about ‘winning’ or putting the other person down, and I love her for that. Turn up and tell me I’m worthless and useless, and there’s not a lot to debate… and frankly it doesn’t engender the best reactions because I am flawed, and neither saintly nor masochistic enough to actually enjoy that sort of thing. I may respond with sarcasm rather than compassion.

I do sometimes censor comments on those rare occasions when someone is shitty to someone else who posts here. It doesn’t happen very often because for the greater part I seem to get lovely, splendid people with meaningful insight to share, not trolls. Troll me, if you must. Not anyone else. Debate, discuss, exchange – it’s all fab and I get really excited when there are conversations going on in the comments. We had a round recently of someone attacking another poster though, and I didn’t let it through, nor will I.

Art or Craft?

This week I did a post for the local Green blog about the politics of art.  This is a follow on, because I have been mulling it a lot, and the issues are many.

So, what is the difference, between art and craft? Both are visual, both require skill and are generally intended to result in something pleasing. So why do some activities get one label and some the other?

As far as I can make out ‘Art’ is something rich men pay other people – usually also men, to do for them, and it should have no particular practical application. Craft is made by the poor, and by women. If a very wealthy woman does it then (historically) you’d whip out ‘accomplishment’ as a term instead. Not having so much space or spare resources to lavish on decoration, those of us who are not wealthy have always tended to favour getting beauty and utility into the same item. Quilts. Rag rugs. Pottery. Gorgeous baskets. Beautiful shawls. These are crafts.

Here’s a thing though, because if people with money suddenly get excited about a craft – Shaker furniture, historic quilts, etc, then they can buy it for silly money, put it in an art gallery or display it as an Art item, and magically it becomes Art and no one uses it for its intended purpose any more. Only when we stop valuing an item in terms of utility will we see it as a beautiful piece of Art and want to display it. I think there’s a very interesting reflection of the human condition in all of this.

We tend not to value small beauty, or beauty in the mundane, or the grace of everyday items. We value things that someone can be persuaded to pay ridiculous amounts of money for. We treat utility as ‘common’ and innate uselessness as attractive.  I could take a sidestep and rant extensively about women’s footwear on these terms, too.

There is also beauty in effectiveness and efficiency. There is beauty in age and durability. There is beauty in the love that goes into crafting. I am in no way opposed to Art as a form of creativity, but I am increasingly uneasy about where it sits in terms of affluence, gratuitous displays of wealth, consumerism and smug superiority.

Historically, that which is deemed ‘great art’ has mostly been funded by either the church, or the nobility. Patronising and patronage are related words, it is worth reflecting. Our history of great art has a lot to do with who was willing to pay up, and our history of artists is frequently one of struggle and abject poverty while they were alive. The best career move an artist usually makes, is to die. They become more collectable when you know they won’t make anything better. That’s hideous, when you think about it, and the whole underpinning logic seems very wrong to me.

Pagan Puritanism

When the subject of Pagan Puritanism came up in a conversation recently with Robin Herne, I initially thought of it as a bit of a joke. As a bunch of people we’re far too fond of dancing, shagging and drinking to fit with any of the images in my head of Puritans. But of course those images I carry are innately Christian. Robin suggested that Pagan Puritanism is about obsessively low impact lifestyles and diet. That pulled me up, because if that’s the measure, I may well be one.

Generally as a culture, we fear extremism. We understand ‘extremist’ to be other – foreign, worshipping other gods, or worshipping familiar ones in unfamiliar ways, or irrationally fanatical about some other thing to the point of being willing to blow people up over it. I think it’s worth noticing that you can pollute the air, poison the rivers, destroy irreplaceable landscapes and slaughter people in droves with all of the above and not be considered any kind of extremist at all if you do it all in the name of profit and personal greed.

We don’t tend to generate much in the way of fundamentalism – having such a wealth of histories, cultures, pantheons and belief structures to draw on, it’s hard to get all ‘one true way’ as a Pagan. Not having any formal financial structures, the hassle of recruitment in the face of no material gain means we’ve not developed a conversion culture either. Or, being a touch less cynical, I might suggest we’re just respectful of other people’s beliefs. So apart from the odd over-zealous soul, we don’t really do fundamentalism, and if we did, we’re just not organised enough to agree enough for it to have much impact. I like this about us. Generally speaking, fundamentalism is a group activity where belonging to the group is key to its functioning. Again, these are things we are not so good at.

Puritanism can be viable as a much more personal project. In other religions it means a move to try and get back to the true meaning of the core text. As religious bodies get affluent, decadent and self important, counter movements evolve to go back to the imagined simpler, more authentic vision – except these probably never do take us back, and are just as capable of becoming decadent over time. I give you North America…

We don’t have a core book, and the stock Pagan answer is to say ‘nature is my book’. Arguably a Pagan Puritan who is going back to the book… is going back to nature in a really determined way. Zero waste, recycled knickers and no flying, bean sprouts (organic and home grown) for breakfast. Pagan Puritanism suggests fanatical devotion to trying to live in harmony with the planet. I can happily give fundamentalism a miss, not least because it tends to be so tedious, predictable and destructive, if other religions are anything to go by. I may be more inclined towards Pagan Puritanism than I might have previously assumed.

I’m a long way from being really hardcore though – I do still have my computer, I can’t spin, I don’t have the means to heat and cook directly from a fire – although I have done that in the past. I aim to reduce my impact all the time, it is a bit of an obsession. Fortunately, the dancing, singing and shagging are entirely compatible with this agenda, so as Puritanism goes, it should be fairly cheerful.

Meditations on time and space

Normally I am more organised about the blog, setting up posts in advance when I know I have a mad day ahead, writing early so they go up before they show up. Time management is utterly key for me – as it is for most self employed folk and people who work from home. There is no one else to supply the discipline and structure, working out what has to be done when and in what order, how to get the most mileage out of resources, be efficient and get some breaks.

Frankly today is not going to plan. But there is a blog post (of sorts) and I have now dismantled my old bed and am drawing breath before it leaves and the new one turns up. This is part of an epic plan to maximise space (by most people’s standards, this is a VERY small flat for three people). It’s also the first time in our married life that Tom and I have a bed we both picked and that is specifically for us. Given both the practical and symbolic role of the bed, this is a bit of a moment.

Time management… space management… there’s not as much of either as would be optimal, but both raise similar questions about how to get best use, how not to be cluttered up with needless things. Knowing what’s important, what’s needed, what’s negotiable and what isn’t. Getting to that knowledge as a couple, exchanging ideas and finding out who we are individually and collectively in this space, in this time.

Arguably this is a dull, mundane day full of housework things. It would be so easy to let this be sheer grind, and to let it all pass by without reflection or consideration. Everything is an opportunity to grow. Everything is an opportunity to let go of something, to be lighter and more liberated. In this case we’re letting go of bed size, because we don’t use it. There’s self knowledge in the letting go. Everything is an opportunity to ponder and contemplate.