Nimue Brown's Blog, page 389

Forever People

If you’d asked me twenty years ago who I thought would always be in my life, I’d have got it very wrong. It was the sort of thing I used to think about as a teenager, although from a position of inexperience and not much insight. The three people I might have hoped would be around, and had grounds to think might stay part of my life, didn’t. Others did, and some of that’s been very surprising, in awesome ways.

At any point in your life, all you have for reference is what you’ve experienced. The most in love you have ever been is your measure of what’s possible on that score. Twenty years hence, will the people I thought were forever still be in touch? Some of them may not live that long. We never know. I’ve lost several people to death who I did not at all expect to lose, but their impact on me and my memory of them binds them into the continuing fabric of my life. There have been people I’ve spent little or no time with in person whose legacy will stay. Some of them died long before I was born and are only available to me through their work.

As a teen I would have thought about my forever people in terms of actual people I spent time with. The internet was not a feature of my life then, and even though I was besotted with Beethoven and George Eliot, I would not at that point have considered them part of my emotional tribe. It’s taken me a while to figure out that I am much more shaped and defined by who I continue to love than by who I necessarily continue to interact with. In that context, death and absence are no real barrier at all. It is enough sometimes to love the work, the ideas, the legacy or the memory. It’s about what we choose to let in.

There are people who have affected me so deeply that who I have become is in part consequence of connecting with them. I cannot know if I am always fully conscious of that process, and sometimes an influence is slow to show itself. There are also people who have caused me to grow in order to move away from them, and while I do not want to honour them as people who are part of my heart tribe – as they have been far short of honourable – that refusal to be as they are or to co-operate has also become part of me. In choosing who to honour, and who to forget, I am engaged in a curious process that shapes how I feel about my life and myself.

Very few of them have any idea of how important they are to me, of the ones I know, or suspect are forever people. It is often unsettling enough to a person to say ‘I love you’ when that isn’t an amorous proposition. Perhaps being this intrinsic to another person is too disorientating, too strange a thing to know and carry. Somehow, when I was a teen it was easier to talk about these things. I have become more careful with age, and also more aware that ‘forever’ is something I might be able to say truthfully, and not as a moment of misguided hyperbole.

Druid Grove misconceptions

The desire for working groups often exceeds the availability. One of the reasons for this is that all too often people who have not been in a Grove, much less run one, have unrealistic expectations about what that should mean and do not realise they could just dive in and make something happen, or there is a Grove and it doesn’t live up to expectations and that causes discomfort. Today we will be taking pot shots at straw men…

“You need two Druid-Grade Druids to start a Grove.” You don’t. This is an OBOD concept that has accidently been allowed to escape into the wild. To run an OBOD Grove, you need two OBOD Druid grade folk, otherwise you have to call it a seed group, but it still does all the core things a Grove would do. Other Orders have different requirements – you usually need a few Order members to count as a Grove of a given Order and there will be things to uphold. Otherwise, some Druids or proto-Druids who want a Grove, is the only necessity.

“Groves celebrate the wheel of the year.” They can, they don’t have to. They might celebrate lunar cycles, meet on the second Tuesday of the month, or be entirely about study. Unless you’re an ADF Grove – where celebrating the wheel of the year in a publically accessible way is, to the best of my knowledge, a requirement.

“You can learn Druidry by joining a Grove.” A given Grove might or might not offer formal teaching. If you are paying attention, you’ll learn something, but depending on how idiosyncratic the Grove is, and what strikes you as important, that may vary. You don’t need to be able to teach to start one.

“A Grove is the best place to find wise and learned Druids resplendent with knowledge and insight.” It probably isn’t. On the whole a Gove is a good place to find enthusiastic people who are keen to learn, share and get together. This is the social end of Druidry. Longstanding Druids immersed in their paths can sometimes become much more solitary, and are not necessarily attracted to Groves.

“A Grove is a place of peace, love and safety.” It should be, but basically a Grove is a gathering of people and is therefore subject to all the things that can happen when you put groups of people together.

“I can’t set up a Grove because I am not an experienced Druid.” Yes you can, so long as you do not pretend to be other than you are. A Grove can happily be a place of aspiration, learning and sharing, you do not need an ‘expert’ to make it work.

“We must meet in the woods in the dead of night.” Well, you can, but lunchtime is equally fine and if the weather is awful you can meet in your living room, or a cafe. Getting outside is good, breaking your ankle isn’t, and Druid wisdom is all about balance, not masochism.

In short, yes you can and it does not have to be perfect to be worth doing.

Understanding the nature of deity

The short answer would be, that I don’t – but as that’s not much of a blog post, let’s keep poking about! My sense of what deity is and whether there really is any varies from one day to the next. There are days when my rational inclinations leave me with a more atheistic perspective. The universe is complete unto itself. I can go from there to a feeling that the sacred force in the universe, is the universe itself and that we are all part of a growing consciousness. However, the scale of that is so daunting and impersonal that it’s not unlike having no gods at all.

I do however have this unshakable sense of the sacred, that stays with me on my most questioning, uncertain and atheistic days. It comes as a response to land and ancestry, to experiences in the moment and is informed by a sense of wonder. There are several personified deities associated with the land I live on, so I have a sense of them as both forms in the landscape and historical presences.  But as distinct consciousnesses with intentions and powers… I really don’t know.

I am aware that many Pagans experience deity as discrete individuals with whom it is possible to interact. The sense of deity as something anthropomorphic and human orientated, interested in our concerns and able to interact with us in ways that make sense… makes more sense with some deities than others. Many of the figures in ancient pantheons come across as being human-like – very much gods of the tribe. However, the gods of nature, or the possibility of the divine in nature clearly isn’t going to be so innately human-centric. Gods of earth, sky, seasons, gods of storm and sun seem very unavailable to me. I might experience them, but I do not feel much hope of understanding them or sharing with them in reliable ways.

This blog over at Corvid’s viewpoint has had me pondering though. If consciousness begets physical reality, and not the other way round… then what might that consciousness be? My small consciousness clearly isn’t creating much reality. In the warp and weft of existence, perhaps the gods are the underlying threads onto which the rest of reality is woven. Perhaps the gods are the loom, or the wool. I like craft metaphors such as this.

I still have no idea how reality works. No matter how much pondering I do, I will not come to a place of certainty, because my uncertainty is one of the few things I’m a bit dogmatic about. Other people may know… I do not.

Sleeping with the stream

I’ve always loved running water, always been drawn to paddle feet or hands in it, to sit near it, listen to it. Stroud is wonderful on that score, with its many small streams. There are even a few small waterfalls. I’m especially blessed in that I can hear water flowing, from my bed.

As a lot of my prayer and meditation practice happens around the edges of sleep, I’m very conscious of that space as an environment and I pay a fair bit of attention to how it impacts on me. Being able to feel a connection with the natural world, from the sacred space of bed, is powerful for me.

I’m conscious of a transition as I settle at night, as I cease to be sociable, and gradually stop thinking about whatever’s been running around in my head. I know I’m settling when I become aware of the stream, and every time this happens I also become aware of just how much I filter out with my waking perceptions. The stream has a music of its own, coming down from the hills and heading out towards the Severn River. As I listen, I have an awareness of water as life, water as cleansing, and moving water as a journey towards other worlds. Letting the stream carry me, I drift towards sleep.

Often, waking is initially a process of becoming consciously aware of the water. I often start to surface before the dawn chorus. Awareness that I am waking is often awareness that I am hearing the stream, that it is calling me back to the waking world.

Having lived on a boat, I am very aware that water is often silent. Moving water can be remarkably hard to hear, even when there’s quite a significant flow. What creates the sound is not just the movement, but the interaction between water and something else – plant matter on the bank, stones in the river bed. Mostly what I hear is water passing over a small weir. Where water passes for long enough, it smoothes a silent passage. Stand by the River Severn, and there’s surprisingly little sound. But then, nature is often busiest at the margins and the places of interaction.

Reading poetry

Reading is a skill that goes far beyond assembling symbols into sounds and letter clusters into words. Being able to infer and read between the lines, and also knowing when to take the words at face value. Placing historical context from language, assessing characters from speech – I think we learn how to be better humans by learning how to be better readers. But then, I’m an author so I’m probably biased.

In the last few months I’ve been trying to become a reader of poetry. That’s brought up a number of challenges. I’ve got plenty of great poetry – that bit was easy. How to approach a book of poetry? If I sit down and read page after page, as I might with fiction, or non-fiction, it doesn’t quite work. I need to pause more often, at the very least. There’s usually no continuity between poems, so there’s no momentum to move one to the next, none of the ‘page turning’ effect so popular in genre fiction. A lot of poems I end up reading two or three times – something I seldom do with sections of prose writing. Sometimes, having read them silently, I feel the need to read them out loud.

I find it isn’t possible to consume poetry in the same way that I would other writing. It requires me to slow down, to think, to sip rather than gulping. I have to think differently as well. There is no scope to lose myself in a plot or an alternative reality for any length of time. I don’t read much epic poetry, and I find shorter work draws me back to the moment and requires me to think a bit more about how what I’ve read relates to everything else.

We expect fiction to make narrative sense and provide us with recognisable characters who are doing things. Non-fiction is equally required to offer coherence and also clear meanings. Poetry is not obliged to do any of this. There may be meanings to discover, obfuscated by layers of symbolism, and metaphor. Sometimes those aren’t apparent. Sometimes it is the experience of the sounds and words that seems to matter most, the emotional impact of the moment, not an intellectual unravelling of clues. In this way, poetry is a lot more like life than other forms of writing. Life seldom announces its meanings or intended direction.

How to do it? How to set aside the right amount of time to read a poem or two well, and not fall into the trap of trying to read a poetry book like any other kind of book. How to make that part of life? How to engage with these words without trying to gobble them up? How to slow down enough. A life with poetry in it is clearly very different from a life without poetry, and learning to be a reader may be going to take me a while.

With other hats on

Over the last few weeks, the political work I do has mostly taken over my life, leaving little time or headspace for anything else. I’m not natural politics material – I very literally do not have the right kind of hats for this, but at the same time, with so much going awry out there and so much need for change, I really feel I have to show up and do what I can.

Nonetheless, it’s a bit of relief taking off the political hat (metaphorical for now) and putting on other ones instead. This photo was taken by author Jonathan Green at a Steampunk event in Frome last weekend (where by comparison to others, I was still a scruffy urchin even with this on…). Tom and I did a workshop, aired our gear, sold books and hung out with Mr Green.

I wear a lot of different hats – some more actual than others. I’m working on becoming a marketing department for people who need a bit of that now and then. I’m aware that the people who most need marketing support are often those least able to pay for it. The blogging hat seems to have grown recently and can now be pulled down over my ears (more on that another day). I’ve acquired an art-assistant hat, I’m occasionally useful to Andrew Wood but now also doing a lot of shading for Tom as part of the Penguin graphic novel project. Apparently I’m good at feathers.

The parent hat is fairly low maintenance these days, apart from helping steer the boy through the emotional challenges of his changing body chemistry. The Druid hat is waving at me – it is that sort of hat, it might not be corporeal but it is certainly animate. I have a new book coming out soon, and I’m now a lot more involved with Druid Camp than I had thought I would be – I’ll be looking after the Green Grove which is all about walking your talk, and will include a talk from Molly Scott Cato neatly coming back to the political stuff… And I’ve been getting the music hat out and finding people to play and sing with, which is wonderful.

Somewhere at the back of the cupboard is the author hat. The one for writing fiction. It used to be a comfy hat, but then I stopped wearing it and now I’m worried it doesn’t suit me, or that if I go looking I won’t find it, or it won’t fit… It used to be the most important hat I had. This was the hat that defined me as a person for much of my life. That needs a proper re-think. It’s not my Steampunk hat, because I write a lot of other stuff too, nor is it the same as my Druid hat. So, in the spirit of authorial procrastination, I need to figure out what it looks like, and start wearing it again. It occurs to me that an actual hat might be really helpful in this regard. Suggestions?

On Being a Scruffy Urchin

Why would you take pride in being a scruffy urchin? I was asked this after the Women of the Tribe post went out. Why indeed? Pride in appearance is something we understand collectively in certain ways – we should be clean, neat, tidy, ideally dressed in new looking clothe or at least clothes in a good state of repair. Elegance and beauty are things we are to aspire to. We should be fashionable, visually appealing. To clam ‘scruffy urchin’ as a thing of pride is so at odds with that as to not make much sense to some people.

It all comes down to *why* I’m a scruffy urchin, and that’s all about the relationship between my clothes and my lifestyle choices, and my politics and beliefs. Walking is my primary mode of transport, so I wear clothes I can walk in, and most usually what I have on my feet is a pair of sturdy walking boots. When I can, I go barefoot, and nothing says ‘urchin’ like bare feet.

To enable the walking I most usually wear leggings or jogging bottoms, although often I have a skirt, dress or tunic over the top. Given the English climate and the walking, there’s often a smear of mud around the ankles. I’d have to change my clothes several times a day to avoid that, with my lifestyle. I tend to wear waterproof coats, and may need waterproof trousers. It’s not an elegant look, but it does what I need it to.

A lot of what I wear looks a little bit old and shabby – because it is! Today’s tunic is twenty years old and I’ve re-sewn it twice in that time. My lacy cardigan thing is 11 years old, bought not long after my child was born. Many of my clothes are this old, and therefore totally unfashionable. I buy second hand, as well. Much of what I own was never in fashion. I hate the way fashion drives us to throw away perfectly good clothing; that seems wasteful to me. I also have choices to make about how I spend my money, I can’t have everything. Why buy new clothes when the old clothes will do the job?

My skin and hair look a certain way because I try to minimise my use of chemicals, and I walk everywhere (you may be noticing a theme) so my hair is seldom perfectly sleek and tidy. It isn’t styled, I don’t go to a hairdresser (money and chemicals again) so I never ever look like I just stepped out of a salon. My hands are a bit rough because I hand wash clothes, hand sew all sorts of things and have callouses from stringed instruments.

Most of the time I wear very little ornamentation – occasionally when going out I’ll throw on a bit of costume jewellery, and I sometimes put pretty bits of cloth in my hair, but mostly I don’t do jewellery. This is a habit that came because I had ten years where my social life revolved around being a musician. Rings are an irritation for me when playing, and all other things can bang unhelpfully or catch on the instruments or their straps. It’s not worth the hassle. I tend to carry a rucksack, not a handbag because I often need to carry stuff, because I don’t have a car to fall back to.

How I look is part of how I live and is therefore an expression of who I am. I’m colourful, eccentric, playful in my clothing, but also intrinsically shabby, repaired, worn around the edges, windswept, mud spattered. A scruffy urchin and not ashamed of it at all.

Peace love and joy, or else!

I know plenty of people who are all about the peace, love and joy, and express that by doing it, by keeping away from drama, accepting what they get, being nice to people, being tolerant, not picking fights and so forth. That’s all lovely, and consistent and there’s nothing much to argue with.

Then there’s this whole other thing I run into now and then, where people get angry if you aren’t lovely enough. They don’t want negativity and darkness, they want light and positivity, dammit! How dare you come along and suggest that the world isn’t perfectly lovely? How dare you not be exuding joy? Everything is perfect and lovely and good and how dare you piss on my bonfire by inviting me to consider that it might be different. I hate you. Leave me alone. You’re ruining my day.

I can’t help but feel if other people’s shortage of peace, love, light and joy makes you angry, then something is awry. Spirituality is not a magic bubble to escape from all the woes of the world. It’s not a special blanket to insulate us from all wrongs. If you’ve got the inner poise and compassion to be full of light in face of life experience, all power to you. If the pain and injustice of the world makes you sad and angry – that’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, there’s a world of difference between getting angry over the sources of cruelty and injustice and getting angry about having your nice bubble burst.

There will always be death and suffering. While we are mortal, there will be loss, grief and pain. While we are struggling to be better humans, there will be cruelty and injustice. Having a sense of light and love being present in the world is not about getting to pretend that the bad stuff doesn’t happen. The light and love in your world is the light you carry inside you and the love you bring with you. If it all starts to feel a bit dark and grim, the most likely reason is that you’ve gone beyond your own capacity, somehow.

While we can turn to each other for love and support – and should – it is down to each of us to carry what love and light we can. We all have low ebbs when we need someone else to inspire us, but that’s different from requiring everyone to be full of love and light. If there is only darkness outside your bubble, if you are furious that other people aren’t helping you feel good about the world, and sick of them bringing you down with their negativity… look in a mirror. If you can’t find a spark of warmth, a flicker of compassion, a whisper of hope… for yourself, for them… where on earth is it going to come from?

Revolutions in thinking

I’m currently reading about the early fossil hunters – Mary Anning et al, and the huge shift in consciousness they caused. Until the 1800s, the Christian west had understood creation as perfect and unchanging. Awareness of extinct dinosaurs, mammoths and so forth brought into question the whole story. Why would God make things and then not keep them? A perfect God could not make imperfect creatures and have to give up on them! A perfect God would know exactly what he was doing from the start! Why would God make things and allow them to become extinct? It made no sense.

Taking on the implications of the past – that the Earth is older than the Bible suggests, that extinction happens, that things are created imperfectly and can change, that there is evolution, rocked the Victorian world. More than a hundred years on and there are still people who prefer any explanation for fossils but the most logical one. Everything we once thought we knew, was wrong. We went round similar cultural upheaval dealing with the idea that it isn’t a flat Earth, and the sun does not go around the Earth. We killed people as heretics over that, I believe. We struggled with recognising that people are people, no matter their skin colour and that we all evolved from ape-like ancestors.

It is worth looking at how in the past, we resisted new thinking. We fought against feminism and women getting the vote, insisting for decades that women are too silly to handle anything much. As with the folk who haven’t got to grips with evolution, sexism and racism still hold sway in some minds. Often the same minds. Every good idea, every moment of progress has been accompanied by fervent denial, ridicule of the new stuff, through to actually murdering people for daring to disagree. The first guy to translate the Bible into English died for that. We’re so frightened of having our old stories challenges that we kill to protect them rather than accept change, or new insight. That’s not a glowing endorsement of us as a species.

So we’ve spent decades adamant that climate change science isn’t real, and isn’t happening. We’re still having the same maddening debates about equality and tolerance on all fronts and there are still people who think God put the dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith. Assuming we get our acts together and face up to the challenges of our times – climate change, pollution, poverty, resource allocation, our whole relationship with the natural world… Assuming we get that right and there are future humans who can look back, they will no doubt line us up with all the other idiots of history who refused to read the writing on the wall, and who preferred death to changing the story. The only difference between us and our reactionary ancestors, is that this time if we get it wrong, there may be no one in the future to look back at us in bemusement and wonder how on earth we failed to grasp the blindingly obvious.

Getting it wrong

Mistakes are an essential part of learning, but only if we use them that way. I have a story to tell, there will be some sort of moral at the end.

A bit back, I messed up, hugely. I knew that I’d messed up because I got an email that made this very clear to me, and it wasn’t stuff I could easily fix or undo. I went through a fair amount of angst. The simplest response to the email was just to stay away – admit I was of no use and leave it at that, doing nothing else that could cause further discomfort to me, or to the person I’d offended. That might have been the end of the story, a small chapter unhappily closed, while I tried to learn how not to make the same mistakes again.

I could have gone back and checked, or asked or clarification that I was understanding it right, but I was afraid of taking more damage, and afraid of making a further nuisance of myself. Plus, I thought I knew what I’d got. Fear, and an odd sort of over-confidence a work there.

I was very lucky, in that some pretty random events conspired a couple of weeks later to make me go back for another conversation, about something else entirely. Around doing that, it became evident that yes, I really had cocked up. What I’d got wrong, above and beyond all else, was how I’d understood the key email. I’d come to it with all my baggage and history. I’m used to being told I’m too much and too difficult; people genuinely have said things like “our lives should never cross again” to me. So I expect to find that, I expect to be a problem.

I hadn’t been told to go away. I’d been given an option on doing something that might be protective of me, that might make my life easier. What I’d done in response made it look like I’d accepted that offer. I created an impression I did not mean to make. It all took a bit of unpicking, and that unpicking required some abandoning of pride, and that was well worth doing. What it cost in feeling exposed, it more than made up for in getting through to a better place.

Language is a very imprecise thing. We don’t all use words in the same way. Not all of us are word people, and many have to interpret into words from however they actually think. I’m very wordy, but that’s no guarantee that what I mean will come across as intended. We all bring our own stories, baggage, beliefs, assumptions, fears and hopes to every conversation. Taking that into account it may be some cause for wonder that any of us manage any deeper communications at all.

I went through a lot of grief for the sake of some misunderstood words. I probably also caused a fair amount of discomfort at the same time. The only way to do differently required courting a potential humiliation, and I nearly didn’t risk it. That kind of self-protection isn’t worth much. It only lets us imagine we haven’t been humiliated because we didn’t go back for seconds, rather than facing the real cost. There is so much scope for getting it wrong. Next time, I will just go back and ask.