Nimue Brown's Blog, page 387

Little life stories

For a long time I have carried secret shame around how feeble and prone to flaking out I am. It’s something I have tried not to make a fuss about because I don’t want people thinking I’m unreliable, and so I push through and get things done. This is a story about the kinds of stories we tell, and the impact they have.

Story 1) I am flaky and a bit rubbish. I base this story on the frequency with which I struggle to get things done, feel dreadfully short of energy, am painfully tired, just want to quit and go to bed. The consequence of this story is that I do everything I can to hide my weakness. I do this because of…

Story 2) If I don’t get things done, people will assume I am lazy, or don’t care, or that I am being attention seeking and making a fuss. There are people in my life, and mostly now only on the peripheries of my life, who have been clear about seeing me in these terms. This leads me to…

Story 3) My place in the tribe is conditional on being able to do everything people want done, without fuss or complaint. That has been true in some times and places, but I’m finding it isn’t always true, creating scope for…

Story 4) Not everyone requires me to be perfect and all powerful. In some spaces I am allowed to be fragile and limited, I am allowed to say no, and I am allowed to stop sometimes. I feel less stressed and miserable in those spaces.

But then there’s story number five, and we’ll just take a sample of a couple of days. Tuesday I worked from about 8am through to 2pm on my various, computer based jobs. I took a few hours off to read and do rag rugging, sorted food and shopping, and was at a meeting (which I walked to) from seven until about half ten. It took me a while to wind down and sleep, so on Wednesday I surfaced at 6am with a buzzing head, 6 hours sleep, worked flat out for 8 hours, did an hour and a half round trip on foot to fetch the boy’s PE stuff, and then yes, I flaked out in just the way I fear I will, and didn’t get much done for the rest of the day. I worked most of Thursday. Perhaps because of…

Story 6) I tend to assume that everyone else is doing more and working harder than I am, despite all evidence that a lot of people take time off in their weeks as a regular thing. Creating the possibility of…

Story 7) In which perhaps I do not need to apologise for not keeping up.

The stories we tell inform who we think we are and that shapes what we do. They are all just stories. We make them true by living them.

Author uncertainties

Some books I get all the way through writing with no trouble at all. Some stall – I have a novel just sitting around while I try to make peace with it right now. Druidry and the Ancestors went awry, and I had to go off between the first and second drafts and do a lot of reading. When a Pagan Prays (coming soon) took over a year longer than I’d expected because of the experiential stuff happening alongside it.

There’s a period (I’m in it) when I know a book is on the way through the physical process of making it, and I can’t change anything. Always, always and without fail at this point I want to change things. Often I feel that what I’ve written is silly, or insufficient, or obvious, or that everyone will hate it. In terms of getting out there and doing pre-book-release marketing this is, I promise you, a big handicap.

I’m never wholly sure about anything I write, because my thinking is evolving all the time. I’m still running into things I wish I’d read before trying to write Druidry and the Ancestors. Often half the problem is that in not knowing what I don’t know, I have no way of knowing how to find it and fill in the gaps… I am alarmingly dependent on sheer blind luck.

I really wish I’d read David Dilard-Wright’s At Ganapati’s Feet before I finished working on the prayer book, because there were a number of ideas about Hinduism in there that now have me pondering differently and wondering about other approaches. However, as the book was on pre-order still when I got my review pdf, I couldn’t have got to it sooner.

No book is ever truly finished and perfect, because there is always more to know. Often it’s a case of trying to pick the right moment to abandon them and make whatever I’ve got, public. No work of fiction is ever perfect either, and I often have similar processes. Next year I will know something different. My own path will have carried me somewhere else. I’ll have read something that shifted my perspective.

This also has the effect of making me very wary of other authors attempted authority. If someone says ‘this is how it really is’ I become cautious. The more certain they are about the ephemeral uncertainties of spirituality, the less I trust them. Anyone who has walked a little way and paid attention has some sense that they do not know much, in the grand scheme of things. Dogma, for me, suggests a lack of thought and insight which in turn makes me question how much the author can help me. “This is how it is for me” is a fair assertion. “This is how it is for all of us” is often really suspect.

A book is simply the best its writer could do at the time. For writer and reader alike, it can be nothing more than a stepping stone on a journey.

Just a hobby

Three small words with which we can crush people. Calling something “just a hobby” is often a way of degrading things which don’t make a lot of money. As though money is the only measure of worth. ‘Hobby jobs’ are simply those someone else considers not lucrative enough. If you make enough money (sum unspecified) you can be taken seriously no matter how pointless and worthless your actual contribution to the world is. Volunteers can be told they have ‘hobby jobs’ – it is a refusal to give respect, often tied to an unwillingness to treat them well. You don’t need help or support, this is just a hobby for you.

I’ve seen brilliant, talented, acclaimed people hit with the ‘just a hobby’ line. It isn’t just about belittling people who are starting out, it can be used to undermine anyone who does something they love and attempts to make a living by it.

The word ‘hobby’ tends to imply the trivial. It’s what you do in your spare time, to relax – to call something a hobby is to suggest it isn’t useful, and that it is instead an indulgence. Cooking, gardening and crafting are all described as ‘hobbies’ by people who do not consider this to be a good use of your time. Forms of exercise –  essential to wellbeing – are also called hobbies, and again their value is degraded by this. Being healthy should not be considered an optional leisure pursuit available only to those with too much time on their hands. Reading is described as a ‘hobby’ not a process of education, self development, inspiration and joy.

And then, if you get depressed you may get some CBT paperwork encouraging you to ‘get a hobby’. Distract yourself from the miseries of your real life with some pleasant trivia!

We need to reclaim crafts, skills, exercise and community activities as being essential to life, not some kind of distraction or bonus extra. We need to resist anything that measures worth in terms of scope to earn money from it, too. There are other ways of making life better for ourselves and each other. Don’t talk about hobbies. Talk about passion and dedication, life skills, community, resilience, creativity, inspiration, health, relaxation. Talk about quality of life.

Also, pause to imagine what would happen if we started to treat collecting money just for the sake of it (rather than to use), with the same wry, indulgent humour that we currently tend to treat the collecting of stamps. Money, we can argue, has a discernible use in the world where a stamp collection does not… but stamps were useful once, and money that has simply been collected with the aim of having a big collection of money, serves no purpose at all. It just sits there, helping no one. Perhaps money collecting is the one thing that truly deserves to be denigrated as a mere hobby.

The limits of love

Yesterday Jo van der Hoeven wrote a really thoughtful post on the topic of unconditional love  It is a term that gets bandied about a lot in a spiritual context, often without this kind of in-depth consideration. I struggle a lot with the idea of unconditional love.

Theists often (but not always) suggest that God or the gods love us unconditionally. We are to understand that this may not be expressed to us in any way we can grasp. Life may be cruel and unfair, but the Gods love us. If holding that thought helps you cope – all power to you. If it’s not how you are able to think, then the sense of somehow having missed out on the unconditional love can add to the existential angst a good deal. (I fall into the second category). I suspect that to experience a sense of unconditional and divine love it would be necessary to first believe that it existed and then believe that it could be directed my way. I can’t get further than ‘maybe’ on the first and really struggle with the second.

I have carried a desire to love unconditionally and wholeheartedly for as long as I can remember. However, humans are not perfect. That means when we love unconditionally we have to accept the shortcomings of the beloved. When ‘unconditional’ love is untested by circumstance, is it really unconditional love? Is it in fact entirely conditional on the other person continuing to be pleasant and decent? I know from experience there are things which can entirely destroy my ability to love a person. There are things I will not tolerate, and in face of them, all capacity to feel warmth and compassion disappear. In face of deliberate cruelty, I cannot love unconditionally.

More often it isn’t that extreme, but there are boundaries. There are people I have to approach in very calm and guarded ways in order for them to be comfortable. Love makes that possible, but the restrictions on open heartedness also limit what is possible. There are people whose personal issues make them unreliable, unable to deal with certain things, people I do not entirely trust, with good reason. I guard my own boundaries, and in so doing I hold the conditions of love very clearly. Step over my lines, and I will walk away from you and I may not come back.

Love is not a simple, flowing thing. To love one thing or person unconditionally might make it very difficult to love another in the same way. If we can only love one person unconditionally… that’s actually a condition. We are time limited, and that creates some very real conditions about what we can give. Love held as a well meaning abstract can be much easier to bestow on everyone, than something more immediate and active.

The love and time that I pour into politics is energy that I cannot at the same time also pour into my writing. That I am in a passionate and dedicated relationship puts certain conditions on all other interactions. There are not enough hours in a day to devote to all the people I am fond of, and I am obliged to make choices. I cannot do everything, and that alone creates conditionality.

Treat love as a spiritual abstract not to be sullied by too much contact with actual life, and expressing unconditional love to the universe is apparently quite easy. I’ve seen it done, as far as it is possible to tell from the outside. It is possible to have unconditional love for everything in a vague, abstract way, and really struggle to experience any kind of love in a more personal and immediate way – again, as far as I can tell from observation.

We do our best with what we’ve got, but as humans we are capable of imagining a great many things that are entirely beyond us.

Splendiferous stories

Where do you get your ideas from? It is perhaps one of the trickiest questions to answer as an author, because all too often I have no idea. Sometimes, however, I notice the pinging together of tiny electrons of inspiration.

It started before Christmas in 2013 when I was asked if I’d do some short stories for the nerdbong podcast. They’d been very enthusiastic about Hopeless, Maine, and had interviewed me, so I said yes. I didn’t have much material of the right length lying about, so I started gathering ideas and trying to squeeze them into story shapes.

One in the Oven began with a Sunday night listening to Genevieve Tudor’s folk program on radio Shropshire. As it was in the lead up to Christmas, she played a song about King Herod, which described his eyes as like saffron cakes. That stuck with me. Then a day or two later, Walter Sickert (Army of Broken Toys, not the deceased artist) expressed an intention to dress up as Krampus and lick people. Nothing logical or reasoned happened at this point. It never does. There is a wild and irrational jump from having a couple of disparate ideas to having something that connects up as a story. Sinister cakes, and a Krampus, and I was good to go.

I sat down to write with just those seeds of ideas – I did not know the shape of the story or anything about the characters.  However, I’d also been listening to Miss Von-Trapp’s murderous version of the 12 days of Christmas, and her other delightfully psychotic songs, and I’d got something of her voice in my head. So I wrote doing my best impression of her, and the rest of it fell out of me by accident with little planning. I redrafted and tidied it up, recorded, and submitted it.

Then, because I am just exceedingly fortunate sometimes, my good friend Professor Elemental piled in to do the introduction and rounding up. His words frame mine, and remind me just a little bit of Edward de Sousa’s Man in Black and my first (camp) horror encounters as a child.

You can listen to ‘One in the Oven’ here, and there will be more… http://nerdbong.com/nerdbongs-splendiferous-stories-slumber/

The trouble with temples

It’s solstice time, give or take, and it’s also a weekend. This means that lots of people will converge on Stonehenge, Avebury, and sites that are more locally famous. I expect Glastonbury will have been heaving, and no doubt lots of people went to Rollright. Some of them will be there because they are Pagan and seeking spiritual and tribal connection. Some will be there to party. Some to take photos and to revel in the spectacle. Some will come in uniforms, to police the whole thing.

I like a party as much as the next Druid: Which is to say – sometimes. I probably appreciate being policed as much as the next Druid, too – depending on whether they are helping me (as they have done several times now in tough circumstances) or if they are a threat to my democratic right to protest. I find footage from fracking protests really intimidating. I don’t enjoy being in situations where my spiritual practice is media bait or a tourist attraction – I have done rituals at Avebury, but it felt really weird. On the whole I prefer a bit more privacy.

For those who want to get out there with a lot of other people, the media circus and the police – best of luck to you. Whatever floats your boat and all that. It troubles me that so often these mass gatherings do not seem to be terribly respectful of the site – there are always images of people clambering onto stones. Mind you, that’s always an issue at Avebury, every time I’ve been there I’ve seen people letting their children treat the stones as an adventure playground. All issues of respect aside, some of the stones are not as firmly set in the ground as might be ideal…

There is always a tension between religion and consumerism – and all religions have this. You have to pay to get into many cathedrals. Everyone has a gift shop with some percentage dubious tat in it. Famous sacred spaces attract tourists, some perhaps more spiritually respectful than others. Temples of all kinds need funds in order to sustain themselves, and that makes tourism attractive. Big popular festivals are a chance to rattle the collecting tins and raise your profile through media attention. There are interesting questions to ask about what is lost and what is gained in all of this.

On the whole, I prefer to do rituals without the pressures a big and famous space creates. If you’re going to stand in the centre of Stonehenge, you’d better feel pretty awesome about what you’re doing and your ability to pull it off, or you’re going to come out feeling like a fraud and an idiot. The  little grove in your local wood will always be more forgiving. I prefer not having media attention – and not having to fear being misrepresented for freakshow entertainment. I have done rituals where the police tuned up – they were lovely and joined in, but the uniforms and high viz jackets make me nervous.

There are many things to seek at a ritual this weekend. Many of them having nothing to do with spirituality. Know thyself. Know what you’re looking for, and what that means. Be honest about it. Do whatever makes sense in light of that.

Grey water experiments

It bothers me enormously that we use drinkable water to flush toilets. Granted, the last winter was a very wet one, and extensive flooding can make it feel like water shortage is no issue… but all the water we use comes from somewhere. Whether depleting underground reserves or emptying rivers, human water consumption has a big impact on aquatic life. Our amphibians are not thriving. We hardly return water in decent condition, either. Loaded with poisonous chemicals, alongside all our more regular waste, and having been treated with chlorine, it has to be cleaned up before it can be re-released into the wild.

As Pagans we might honour water as one of the four elements, we might speak in ritual of the place water has in mythology. Our ancestors held rivers sacred, associating deities with them – because water was, and is, essential for life. If we don’t back that up by treating water respectfully in our day to day lives, it rather defeats the object. So what is to be done about the toilet?

I don’t have the option of replacing it with an earth closet – I live in a flat. I can cut down use with the old maxim of “if its yellow, let it mellow, if it’s a poo, flush it through.”

At the same time, used water from other activities is poured down the sink. So I’m throwing away already dirty water so that I can use clean water to flush away shit. A while back I started exploring possible alternatives. I have a 5 litre water bottle with handle, sourced for a different project that had now run its course. I have a cut off bottle top that makes a good funnel, and I started reclaiming used water to see what could be re-used for flushing the toilet. Here are my results.

Vegetable water doesn’t work because it can undertake to ferment surprisingly quickly, and gets smelly in hot weather. It can however be left to cool and used to feed and water plants – so long as you cook without salt.

Washing up water is too greasy and also can ferment and smell funny, and left an odd residue in the water bottle. Unless you can go straight from sink to toilet with no pauses, this seems not to be a good idea.

Shower water is tricky to collect. However, taking my water bottle with me into the shower I regularly harvest enough re-usable water to be able to rinse the bathtub out afterwards, which is a small win.

Water used when sterilizing bottles, jars, demijohns etc reuses very well.

Laundry water turns out to be the best. I’m handwashing, so it’s not difficult to put a water extraction stage into the process. Laundry water is stable, does not ferment, and tends to be a little bit soapy, which works well when flushing the toilet. Handwashing uses a lot less water than a machine would, but I can typically extract enough water for two flushes from each laundry load. That might seem small, but an efficient toilet uses about 5 litres a flush – as I do. So that’s ten litres a washing load. Just assuming I do one laundry load a week, over a year I’ve cut my water use by 520 litres. With two loads a week it would be 1400 litres. That’s a lot of water.

Non-dogmatic skin options

As an author, and a person involved with politics, I hear a lot about how you need a thick skin. I don’t have a thick skin, and I don’t want to sacrifice sensitivity for the kind of obliviousness that seems to make politicians less than compassionate. Apparently there are other stories to tell about skin.

I spent yesterday afternoon reading David Dillard-Wright’s lovely book At Ganapati’s feet. The story of how we even got to this point deserves a blog, but not today… One of the comments that leapt out at me, was about the skin of elephants, which although thick, the author says can be incredibly sensitive.

I’ve been wandering through the wisdom on the internet today. Apparently elephant skin can be up to 2 inches thick in some places, and is incredibly tough, especially on the soles of their feet. The baggy, wrinkled look increases surface area to help manage heat, so elephants have a lot of skin. They also have places where their skin is incredibly thin. Thick skinned doesn’t have to mean thick skinned all over, and it doesn’t have to mean insensitive. I really should have known this. I walk barefoot, my own soles are hide-like, and my fingertips lack sensitivity after decades of playing stringed instruments. Other bits of my skin are not thick, tough or unfeeling.

Left to its own devices, my body grows thick skin where it needs to, and doesn’t where nothing is required. I ought to be able to apply the same approach to my more psychological skins.

So why the elephants? Why was I reading about Lord Ganesha? That’s hardly indigenous Druidry… except that there were elephants in the UK after the last ice age. Smaller, furrier ones, now extinct. There were mammoths. It’s entirely possible that the Romans brought military elephants here.  There is elephant armour too; I saw it in the Tower of London, although I think it’s now exhibited somewhere else. There are elephants in our zoos and circuses, and have been for a long time, and thus there are also remnants of departed elephants in the soil of this land. If living and dying somewhere doesn’t create the option of being a spirit of place, what does? And since there are elephants, and have been for a long time… how could it possibly be undruidic to contemplate an elephant headed God?

Belief as a form of magic

Belief has a great deal of power. The person who believes themselves invincible will act very differently from the person who believes they are doomed. Belief in medicine gives us the remarkable placebo effect, belief in the stock market holds our economies together… or sometimes doesn’t.

From what I‘ve seen of chaos magic, there are systems in which cultivating your capacity to believe whatever seems expedient, is a source of power. I could easily say the same thing of politics. I have no doubt that our ability to believe has a huge influence on the world. If we used this power to improve things, it probably wouldn’t worry me so much.

We believe that the market will magically solve everything, acting with god-like intelligence to resolve all problems.

We believe that we can have infinite growth with finite resources and can persist in taking more from our planet than is sustainable and that somehow, magically, there will be no consequences.

We believe that polluting the air and the drinking water is not a problem even though we know that some 11,000 people have already died in the UK alone this year as a consequence of air pollution.

We believe that fracking is safe and will solve our energy problems, and not poison the water or really contribute to climate change, and we don’t really believe climate change is happening anyway.

We believe that short term profit is more important than quality of life and long term survivability, because the market is going to magically fix everything.

We believe that nuclear is a safe and clean option, telling ourselves that business in Japan was really unlikely and could never happen here, and not believing that the thousands of years required for the cleanup process will be an issue. It’s not our issue at any rate.

We believe that giving more power to corporations so that they can sue governments if their interests are harmed, will be just fine because the market will magically solve everything, and if business is happy, the market is happy.

We believe that poor people caused the recent economic meltdown and should be punished, while bankers are fabulous people who need a big pay rise to reward them for their mistakes.

Every now and then someone will try to tell me that Pagan beliefs are irrational. We believe in nature, in so far as one can do that. We believe in stuff that exists, all too often. But even the most exciting of fluffy new age unicorn Atlantis theories starts to look quite sane and harmless when you compare it with the beliefs western humanity seems to be holding about where the magical powers are and how the world works.

Taking things personally

Here’s an interesting balancing act. I’ve been working of late on not taking things personally. This is in recognition that there are people in my life who do and say odd things, for various reasons, and where, if I can just shrug and be ok with it, everything works better. I’m not talking about recognising that the world doesn’t revolve around me, but situations where it would be a good deal more obvious to assume intent or infer meaning. I’m interested currently by what happens if I try to avoid reading meaning in, and sometimes that works very well.

And yet, sometimes, and even sometimes with the same people, important things are expressed in understated ways and I very much do need to gently infer. Small clusters of words laden with significance, moments of exchange that seem weighty and then turn out to be… I come to the conclusion that what I really need to be is psychic.

Knowing when to infer meaning, and what kind of meaning to infer. Knowing when it isn’t about me and I’m getting something that pertains to someone else, or something else entirely.

How we make exchanges with people is representative of how we relate to them. To accept difficult thing from a person because that’s what they’ve got – the Grandmother who is going senile, the friend whose domestic problems mean they let you down – accepting this kind of thing and flexing around it is a gesture of love, and one that may never be noticed by the person you are gifting with your flexibility.

Some people are not terribly demonstrative, and small gestures mean a great deal. Without the inference, the whole relationship can vanish. Going the extra distance to infer care from someone who is not good at expressing it, or whose circumstances don’t permit that… is also a gift of love, and one that could well be noticed and mean a great deal to the person who cannot give more than these small but heartfelt things.

And then again there are the people who do not care whether their words and actions cause pain, and who are acting out of lack of care. There are the people who don’t show up because they couldn’t be bothered, who break promises easily, say things that were not meant and lash out when they feel like it. Sometimes they are honest enough about who they are to just own that – take it or leave it. Sometimes, to cover for having been shitty, and wanting to be thought well of, they will spin excuses, or more damagingly, reasons why it was all your fault anyway.

In the absence of psychic powers, distinguishing the well meant, entirely human failure from those who enjoy a bit of sadism is not always easy. The only thing I’ve come up with, is whether a person cares if they think they’ve hurt you inadvertently. That’s a tricky one to explore and balance up, too, because the person whose circumstances make it impossible for them not to hurt you sometimes – people who are dying, or have illnesses that affect personality and mental function being the most obvious cases… people in this kind of situation who do not want to hurt you, may try to send you away for your own good. You may not want to be sent away.

Learning not to take anything personally is not a good answer to all things. There are times when it is vitally important to be able to take things personally. If you’re hearing I love you, I need you, I treasure your friendship, then failing to take that personally is a huge loss. If you are hearing difficult things, then failing to take it personally can mean not making needful changes.