Nimue Brown's Blog, page 386

Weighing your heart

There’s a concept in Egyptian myth about how, in the afterlife, the heart of the deceased is weighed against a feather. A heart that is too heavy with sin and guilt will sink and is eaten, and thus endeth everything for that person. I have absolutely no certainty about what happens to us when we die, but I have read a few things that interest me around how the consciousness we develop might impact what we get when our bodies pack up.

So, with no assumptions about the literal truth of any of this, what might make our hearts weigh heavy, and what might lighten them?

It would seem obvious to think about the weight of pain we have caused to others as balanced against the love, joy and compassion we have brought into the world. How does that balance up? The odds are we do not really know. We can look at our intentions, and whatever feedback we get, but quite how we affect anyone else remains a mystery. Doing good things is no guarantee, because there are people who take offence at bleeding heart do gooder types. In being nice to people we can reinforce their most destructive behaviours. In insisting on thinking the best, we can become enablers of abuse. If we do not know the consequences of our actions, how does that weigh on our hearts?

‘Sin’ is a word I find difficult. The idea of sin is so often religiously based and doesn’t have as much as it might to do with how we treat each other and the planet. Which leads me round to the thought that prompted all of this. I woke this morning with the idea of a carbon balance in my mind. If there are gods who weigh and measure, what if the current balance is all about our carbon? How big is your carbon footprint? How many trees have you planted? How much carbon is there, weighing on your heart?

Celebrating

A birthday is always a wonderful opportunity to celebrate a person. Today my lovely bloke, Tom Brown, is officially a bit older. I am therefore taking this opportunity to embarrassing him in public a smidge by singing his praises.

I first met Tom through a publishing house, something like ten years ago. We were put together for him to do me a book cover – and while that didn’t happen for various reasons, we got talking and never stopped being interested in what each other had to say. We’ve faced many trials and challenges since then, survived some tough times apart, and some hard times together, and pulled through, hanging on to each other all the way.

Tom’s history has some painful stuff in it, which he shared the gist of here – http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/guest-blog-after-the-asylum/ But he’s managed to come back from some decidedly difficult things. Not only that, but he’s done so without becoming cynical, jaded, or otherwise on a downer about humanity and the world. Tom’s wilful optimism is an ongoing source of inspiration to me. His line, ‘we will have our revenge by being far better people’ has carried me through quite a few things now.

I wouldn’t be here without him. I would not have survived the ravages of serious depression. I probably wouldn’t have found the courage to get out of the situation that made me so ill in the first place. His belief in me kept me going when I had no belief. His courage and generosity held me together. And alongside that he’s taken his own intense journey from being a hermit and a bit of a lost soul, towards social confidence and a Penguin contract. It’s been quite something to see.

I am immensely proud of him, and profoundly grateful that he has chosen to share his life with me. Here’s to many more years.

Defining a life

We use labels to define ourselves, and many are the debates in the Druid community about who is and isn’t entitled to call themselves a Druid. Worry not, I am not poised to bore you witless with one of *those*. Instead, I’ve been thinking about how we chose our labels in the first place. Not even in terms of what we necessarily put into the public domain, but how we think about ourselves.

One of the things about being an author is that I have to cough up little biographical statements on a fairly regular basis. My twitter statement is short but typical “Ponderer, singer of songs, teller of stories, activist, author, chaotic Green Druid Steampunk folky wench. Attached in all ways to Tom Brown.” Almost all of that pertains to stuff I do in my working life, with a hint of achievement (that author and Druid stuff is no small source of pride) and my marital status. I think this is normal. Jobs, achievements, living arrangements, income, possessions, family… these are the markers we use to talk about who we are. And yet, none of that is ‘me’ it’s just some of what I do when awake.

In my late teens I would have self identified very differently. I hadn’t achieved much, had no money, a part time job, a lot of aspirations. At that time in my life, I constructed my identity around the people, activities and places I loved. There was no requirement to write biographies back then, so there are no examples, but if I had, it would have looked more like “passionate about books, and sitting on hills at night, playing Beethoven on the piano until my hands break, totally dedicated to my band, I love to dance, love cats, love my friends, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, and some other names I won’t add to protect the innocent…”

An identity constructed around love is not as vulnerable to what you achieve. It doesn‘t depend on externally measurable things, on success or possessions, or even on that love being reciprocated. At the same time, there is wild and ferocious energy in it. This is the identity that strides determined into each new day, and faces up to challenges with a passion. This is the self that knows exactly what matters most, and expresses that in ways that are as joyful as they are driven.

I’m still passionate about music, although violin and bouzouki have taken the place of piano and drums. I’m still passionate about books, although I’ve lost some things around my own writing, but perhaps I can find that again. I still love to sit on hills at night and am even more besotted with landscape than I was, which has contributed to my devotion to Green politics. I don’t dance so much, still adoring of my friends and if anything more obsessed with Neil Gaiman, and other people, whose names I won’t add, to protect the innocent… Steampunk, folk and Druid communities inspire and delight me.

I haven’t really changed that much. Most of what has changed is how I think about these things, how I frame those aspects of self. So I’m going to stop thinking about who I am in terms of what I achieve, and go back to thinking about who I am in terms of who and what I am insanely, obsessively, life definingly in love with. (Attached in all ways to Tom Brown.)

Breaking your reality

We do all to a certain extent choose our realities, because the way in which we interpret experience informs how we think and feel about it. While there are limits on how much we can change our reality by thinking about it (I am so not a chaos magician) the scope for difference is vast. No amount of positive thinking would turn this awkward body into a ballerina, but the ability to imagine I could be graceful would make the difference between dancing and not dancing.

We make theories about life based on experience. It is entirely possible to draw fairly reasonable conclusions that are entirely wrong. We try to find meaning in what happens to us, and that’s a very subjective process. Where we place the power in those judgements makes worlds of difference. Do I see an event of proof of failure and that I am therefore a failure? Do I see it is bad luck and worth another try? Do I see someone else as responsible for thwarting me? Get that wrong and I can start to build a reality that will get me into trouble. Believe I am thwarted and I might start feeding a paranoid persecution complex.

Sometimes, when a wonky reality is really embedded, the only way forward is to break. Sometimes there can be no tidy dismantling of the messy thinking. If your whole reality is a mess, based on dubious premises, then letting go of it will, for a while at least feel like madness. This is a huge incentive not to let go. Sometimes the road to sanity and health does require us to go a bit nuts first. I’ve been through some of this, needing to shift from a belief that I entirely deserved everything that had gone wrong for me. Holding everyone else blameless, I had carried guilt and feelings of being an absolute failure. For them to be right, and ok, I must be so awful that I barely qualified as a proper person. More like a straw doll. Changing that was quite a traumatic process, and it has redefined a significant number of relationships.

It doesn’t always have to be that dramatic. The process described above was one I had little conscious control over. My life and mind fell apart, there was nothing to do but work through that. However, choosing to dismantle a wonky reality, can be approached slowly and a bit more gently. We can set out to change our own thinking, and do that by changing what we do, or the spaces we move in. We are shaped by our environments, by the people we associate with, the things we do, or do not do, and small or modest shifts there can have considerable effects.

I’ve been working this year on changing my relationship with my body, and how I relate to people physically. Initially I thought that would just be about learning to do some things differently, but it is changing my thinking so that I can now see how my thinking needs to change in order to progress. At the moment I’m just trying to unpick what it is that I think and feel, because in understanding that, I might be able to make some conscious changes, or plan some experiments to help me find other perspectives.

Holding together all questions of reality, is that huge issue of “who am I?” Working out what of our experiences are a reflection of self, and defining of who we are. Working out what is just ‘stuff that happened’ and should not be taken personally. How much of that is choice? Do we simply become the bits of our life experience that we choose to internalise? If that’s the case, there is a lot of scope for choosing, and for shifting our realities.

Love magic

This is a year full of incredible challenges and opportunities. Sometimes it is not easy to express that rationally, so, this…

 

Love, unassailable, intense and wild,

Handwrites its letters on my every cell.

Becomes the bones on which my life is hung.

(Unready still for giving flesh to life

Enough to struggle with in bone and skin

Without what lies within, soft and unknown. )

This too shall be re-dreamed and thus remade.

Each cell in turn, surface to core, renamed.

Love inhaled, exhaled, spirit inspired.

No life without this breath, no tale to tell,

I am the stories seeded in each pore.

Obsessions worded to my warp and weft.

 

Somewhere outside, skin, boundary, lines define

Beginnings, endings neither yours nor mine.

Druidic surprise!

Today I’d like to try and make the case for why learning how to be almost perpetually surprised is an excellent Druidic virtue to cultivate.

We all get complacent about things, and the smaller and more familiar something is, the easier it can be to become complacent. Our most immediate environment and the people we spend most time with may be most vulnerable to this. These are in practice the things that matter most, which is why we get stories like the Wizard of Oz trying to remind us to treasure what’s on our own doorstep.

There are wonders everywhere. It is all too easy to imagine that magic, sacredness, wonder and delight happen some other place, and aren’t generally available. Nature is also too easily perceived as being out there somewhere you are not. All four elements are present in your kitchen. They are also present in your own body. Nature will sneak into your carpet, and is most assuredly right outside your door.

Even the most familiar views are subject to constant change. The exact way the light falls can entirely re-create a scene. Most of my view as I type this, is of a tree. I’ve watched its leaves fatten and unfurl. It has flowered, and now it’s underway with seed cases. Come the autumn there will be colours, then bare branches. Birds visit it, squirrels cavort in it and no two day are quite the same.

Being willing to be surprised opens us to the small beauties around us and gives us more to appreciate. Tiny jewels of insects in the grass. The scent of rain. The shape of a cloud. Stopping to really look at the people we spend most time with, to notice and appreciate them rather than taking them for granted opens the heart, pouring life into relationships. Take anything for granted and you will lose some of its magic.

So, I invite you to try a thing… Go forth today with wide eyed expectation. Step out as though you were walking into a fantasy world, into a mythic landscape or a heroic story. Be as attentive as you would be if you thought there could be faeries amongst the trees and the possibility of glimpsing unicorns. Be as open, and as willing to love what you see as if you had entered the most magical, mystical of ancient Pagan landscapes.

Because you have.

It’s all still out there, one way or another.

Songs from the heart

I like my music raw. It is the blood, tears, sweat and other bodily fluids a performer brings to their playing and singing that hooks me. Amanda Palmer might not always be perfectly in tune, but she’s very real. And then there’s Jacques Brel, dripping sweat and tears breaking his heart over Ne Me Quite Pas, which we’ve mostly had in bad translation.

The intimacy of this performance, the realness of it, the raw emotion… entrances me. But this is not how we normally present emotion in music.  This is the more familiar version in English –

The words are much calmer – ‘if you go away’ is very different from trying to sing the better translation ‘don’t leave me’. In this version, the emotions are tamer, softer, less alarming. No one actually cries. Singing a song with some expression isn’t that difficult. Getting up in front of a bunch of people and singing like your life depends on it, like your heart is breaking, your world hanging in the balance… making the emotion of the song absolutely real and immediate for those few minutes… is unspeakable difficult. Especially if you then need to change tack and sing from a different space for the next three minutes, and again…

The soft, tame songs make good wallpaper. We can happily half listen, barely engage, and not feel too much ourselves. The other way of doing it demands attention. It can make the audience uneasy, embarrassed even, it can elicit emotional responses in return. It’s not safe, for singer or listener.

I’m an intensely emotional person, and there’s a lot (and increasingly) in my life that affects me so deeply, there are days when I can really only manage that by singing. Bleeding into the steadfast container that is a powerful song, can be an incredible release around things that I barely know how to articulate to myself. At the moment, I’m doing that at home. I have no idea whether I could put that in front of anyone else, and no idea what would happen if I did. But I don’t usually let things like that stop me.

Not teaching Druidry

I started teaching Druidry many years ago – mostly because I was asked to. The more time I spend doing it, the more I find myself wanting to do as little as possible. The teaching of practical things makes a lot of sense – the nuts and bolts of regular ritual, being an obvious one. There are technical things around meditation that I can teach, nature identification, relevant local stories… but I’m increasingly aware that the things I find most important are not directly teachable.

What I’m increasingly inclined to do is take people into spaces – physical places, creative situations, even social situations that have the potential to teach something, or make something apparent or just have an impact. Holding a space in which people can just show up and do things, or not do things. Offering a frame and possibilities, I offer no authority, no certainty, now ‘how to’ most of the time. It requires me to suppress a good 90% of any urge to be in charge, such as that is. Druidry is all about relationship. I can no more teach that kind of relationship than I can teach any other.

If someone gets into a space and, by my understanding is ‘doing it all wrong’ it is not easy to leave that alone, but I’m increasingly convinced it is essential. If I direct them, they may just end up doing what I’ve told them to do. The person who comes to their own understanding of a place or opportunity – whatever that understanding is – has total ownership of their path. They know what they are doing, and why, and are being moved and led by experience, not by me letting them think that one way of being is somehow more Druidic than another.

It is so easy to accidentally diminish a person with too much enthusiastic teaching. We can give out the message that what they know isn’t as good as what we know. We can accidentally create dogma. My path is not your path. If I teach you my path, I may rob you of your own. I will create a dynamic that says ‘I am the teacher, you are the student’ and that’s a power imbalance, and an assumption of authority and not always a good thing.

In my writing and in more personal interactions, I’ve become ever more inclined to try not to teach people in any direct way. I make what I do as available as I can, but mostly prefer to leave people to do with that as they will. If someone asks me to teach them about a specific thing – that’s absolutely fine and I’ll do the best I can. I regularly reach out to other people for insight and learning opportunities in that way, sometimes asking, sometimes just hanging around to quietly soak stuff up.  I’ve learned a great deal from other people who were willing to just quietly share what they were doing.

If I don’t try to teach you how to do it my way, there’s every chance I can learn something about what it means to do it your way, and from my perspective, that’s a far more interesting outcome.

Do you know who I am?

We rate each other all the time. The criteria we use is an absolute expression of what we consider important. Thus for many, how much money you have, or earn, is an important measure. The size of your house and newness of your car, where you go on holiday and the shoes on your feet can all be used to place you on a scale. As we do that, we also place ourselves.

There are trickier measures around more subjective things –beauty and creativity, influence, skill. Not all of these things are fixed, either. Most are not. Today I may have less money and a bigger house. Today I may look even worse but have written a very good poem. All too often ‘meeting new people’ seems to be about figuring out what they value and then what we can say about ourselves that will impress them.

I am decidedly guilty of valuing people in this way. I try not to – I come from a folk background where there’s a culture of treating people equally regardless of skill and success. Nonetheless, I’ve struggled to put coherent sentences together on those few occasions when I’ve spoken to Ronald Hutton in person. I fear I would be equally unable to say anything if I found myself in the company of Neil Gaiman, and I was an entirely awed fan-girl when trying to talk to Peter Knight a few years back. Those responses are just as much about the value scale as any other ways of changing how we relate to people because of their perceived worth.

Mostly, no one around us knows who we are, what the best of us is, why we might be entitled to respect. The vast majority of interactions are fleeting and superficial. But we want to be known, to be recognised, valued and respected. The reality is so very different. If I do an event with a few hundred people and a couple of them turn out to have heard of my books and stop to say hi… that’s an epic achievement, in the grand scheme of things. For the majority of people at a gathering, the majority of others have no idea who they are.

We’ve evolved as tribal creatures. Look at herds and packs, and you’ll see complex social interactions where status does matter. Little wonder then that we can be so driven to find our place, and figure out where everyone else is. Our ancestors lived closer together, knew each other in multiple contexts, while we tend to have separate work, family, social, and geographical networks. So the people at work don’t know about your amazing garden, and the people you socialise with don’t know how important your job is, and your family don’t know how valued you are socially, and your neighbours don’t know how much your family depends on you, and so forth. So we get anxious about where we fit, and we respond by putting ever more emphasis on markers of success.

“Do you know who I am?” is the cry of the person who knows full well that the answer is ‘no’.  I wonder whether more recognition, more sense of being known and valued, would reduce our hunger for signs of wealth and importance. If everyone that matters knows you make the best cakes ever… (or whatever it is that you need your tribe to honour) maybe there’s nothing else to prove.

Wildlife encounters

I regularly walk a route that takes me down a cycle path and through a narrow strip of woods. Like many of the cycle paths round here, it’s a former train line, so the trees and undergrowth have probably reasserted themselves. The size of the trees suggests they are largely the same age, and while my tree-aging skills are not what they could be, I think 30-50 is probable. Interestingly though, the undergrowth includes a lot of the plant types you’d expect to see in ancient woodland. There’s far more to woodland than just the trees, and there’s estimated to be a fifty year window after the trees go in which you have a fighting chance of restoring the diversity of ancient woodland.

So I have this corridor of wood where the trees are clearly not ancient, but the woodland effectively is. Even though it is a very small wood, it is home to at least three deer. I only ever see them in ones or twos, but having seen two females together recently and a male on his own, three at least. I watch other path users pass by without registering their presence. The deer are wary, but not fearful, so on a number of occasions I’ve been able to stop a matter of yards away, and make eye contact with them, and have a few moments.

Today walking down the towpath (strip of path alongside a canal, originally for the men or horses who were pulling the first boats at the very beginning of the industrial revolution) I met a frog. It was a tiny frog, no bigger than a fingertip, and I stopped to ush it out of the path and into the safety of the undergrowth.

I have a knack for finding the wildlife. It’s not about keen eyesight. Today’s frog was no bigger than the many small stones on the path, and wasn’t moving. I had a moment of awareness and doubled back to check. Only when I bent right down could I make out the legs. I often know the deer are around before I see them. It is not something I can easily explain, but it makes for reliably interesting walks.