Nimue Brown's Blog, page 39

Reflection and Druidry

(Nimue)

There aren’t many things I’m dogmatic about, but the importance of reflection and contemplation for anyone on the Druid path is definitely one of those things. There are a great many ways of approaching this,however, so it’s not very prescriptive in practice.

Reflection is key to understanding. If life is going to be more than a series of random things that happen to us, then we need to take the time to reflect on our experiences and how those experiences impact on us. Making considered and deliberate choices depends on this.

It’s all too easy to be a consumer – we can consume nature, landscape, spiritual experience, spiritual merch… To be a Druid you have to go deeper, invest more, feel more, think more – you can’t just skim the surface of life. Time spent contemplating things takes us further into them. We can approach our experiences in a contemplative way, slowing down to really invest in them, and we can contemplate after the event, internalising what we’ve learned.

For anyone on the bard path, reflection is essential. The process of taking what you know, and what you’ve experienced and developing that into something creative requires some time spent looking inwards. To put something out into the world you have to first go inside yourself to work out what to make and how to make it, and to turn the spark of inspiration into something coherent.

When we make quiet time to sit – in meditation, in reflection or in prayer, it creates space for magic. Time spent quietly inside yourself exploring your own thoughts does not cut you off from everything else, and can have the opposite effects. In the quiet, introspective moments we are most likely to get flashes of inspiration, and connection with that which goes beyond our everyday thinking. If you have a notion of ‘higher self’ or of the voice of spirit within you, this is when such parts of yourself are most likely to be visible to you. For those who seek communion with deity, or spirit, the process of turning inwards is the process that invites the divine. 

When you turn inwards to reflect on the world, and your experience of it, you become more able to fully engage with the world. We need both, and we need to explore these things as a shifting dance, and interchange. We bring the world into ourselves, and we bring ourselves into the world and at each stage, reflection gives us the means to do so. 

The virtues of hope

(Nimue)

Recently, I was reminded by philosopher Brendan Myers about the powerful, ethical reasons for staying hopeful. (If you aren’t familiar with Brendan’s work, I can recommend his books.)

The evil things humans do comes from many motives, including greed, selfishness and disinterest in the wellbeing of others. When people slide into apathy and feelings of powerlessness, they become enablers for whatever awfulness is going on around them. Doing nothing is a choice that supports whatever is going on.

Hope is a good antidote to this. Hope for better things, and the ability to imagine how the world could be made better go hand in hand. We won’t make meaningful change if we neither imagine it nor believe in it. 

With this in mind, the value of cultivating hope becomes more apparent. The personal battles to resist despair become distinctly political acts that have implications for the world as a whole. If you cannot do anything else, fighting to hang on to the idea that there is hope for better things and that keeping your hope alive matters, is important. At the same time, those of us who are better resourced can do our best to lift and encourage anyone we see struggling.

It’s easy to rubbish things, to knock people down, sneer at their dreams and meet their hope with unkindness and cynicism. Doing this takes little effort and no imagination. It calls for no wisdom, skill or insight. It gives a certain limited power to people who feel unable to act in positive ways. For the person who feels powerless, the path of cruelty and destruction clearly has its temptations. I believe it’s often a consequence of not feeling good about themselves.

Breaking things is easy. Creating things takes skill, knowledge and time. One of the key things for giving people hope is helping them to imagine that they have it in them to be a force for good. If you can imagine yourself making a good and welcome contribution I think you are more likely to want to invest in that. There isn’t much real pleasure in being destructive and no one will love you for acting in toxic ways. 

Creating hope calls for creating community, and space for people to share and to shine. When we work together to improve something, our combined power becomes larger than the sum of its parts. When we affirm each other and amplify each other’s efforts, we get more done.

Hope is something we can create together, and hang on to together. Sustaining hope is itself a meaningful act of resistance against all that is wrong in the world, and it gives us the foundations from which we really can build something better.

Feeling blessed

(Nimue)

A few years ago there was a Druid I’d see fairly regularly who usually commented that he felt blessed, and that his life felt very full, and very rich. I always felt that was a powerful thing to be able to say, but at the time it also felt alien and unobtainable.

It doesn’t work just to declare it. That can be a toxic positivity move. If life feels tough, miserable and draining and you try to tell yourself that you feel blessed, that can make everything worse. It is basically trying to gaslight yourself into believing something that isn’t true. If you are struggling with real problems then re-framing won’t magically fix that and it can leave you feeling unrooted and more unhappy. I have tried this approach, more than once and it has never taken me anywhere even slightly good.

Practicing gratitude is good; Being alert to the small beauties, the wins, the little joys can make worlds of difference. If your problem stems from a lack of gratitude, this can be a healing process. If you’ve internalised capitalism so much that you can’t enjoy what you have then investing time in noticing the blessings already in your life is an empowering, life enhancing sort of daily practice. 

If you have to work hard to find the good in a day, then that may be because there isn’t enough good. If you’re dealing with constant pain, with overwhelming work stress, economic precariousness, cruelty, insufficiency, loss and so forth then you can’t gratitude your way out of that. You can’t get on top of this kind of thing by being grateful for the lessons if you truly have no way of learning those lessons to improve the situation you are in. It is a good idea not to feel grateful for a life that keeps knocking you down.

A blessed life is not a life free from struggle. There are always going to be challenges and setbacks. If you care about anything you are also going to experience loss and grief. What I’m finding is that when life is informed by love, these things seem meaningful. To struggle for a reason, can be meaningful. To struggle when it feels futile is soul destroying. Difficult, painful things work in very different ways when you feel loved, supported and understood by the people around you. Struggling as part of a group is very different to feeling alone with it.

How we take care of each other has a huge impact on how we experience life. Care and support might not solve all the problems, but entirely change the experience of dealing with them. Feeling loved, valued, held makes worlds of difference to how setbacks land. When you don’t have to haul yourself up from the blow, when instead people reach out to help you get up and get going again, those knockdowns aren’t so brutal. When life is a process of lifting and supporting each other and responding to adversity with kindness, compassion and love, then whatever comes can be faced.

This last year or so has brought me a lot of challenges. It’s also been the happiest year of my life so far, and for the first time in my life I find I feel blessed.

Trust and Healing

(Nimue)

One of the things that has become apparent to me over the winter is the significance of self-trust for mental health. Learning to trust myself has been a key part of my healing process. After many years of suffering mental/emotional anguish I’m now in a much better state. A lot of mental health advice centres on the idea that the sufferer’s wonky thinking is the problem and they could be fixed if only they thought about things differently. This has never worked for me, because my mental health issues have been caused by things that have happened. I didn’t need to change my thinking, I needed to not be continually hurt.

Not being able to trust myself was a major contributor to the considerable depression and anxiety I used to suffer with. I did not get there by myself. Not being taken seriously was a major factor. Flagging things that were harming me and not being believed or having that acted on made me mistrust myself. If you are regularly treated as though you make no sense, or want unreasonable things it really undermines self confidence.

My instincts are good. My reasoning is solid. My feelings and needs are not especially outrageous. I know what I need. When I’m allowed to have what I need to function, I function pretty damn well. It’s taken me a while to feel able to say all of this, but I have learned to trust myself and to trust that I really do know what’s best for me.

We’re all very susceptible to how the people around us treat us. Much of this relates to how we all handle difference. If someone is reacting differently to how you would, that doesn’t make them wrong, or a drama-llama. It doesn’t make you wrong, either. There are reasons why things impact differently on different people. For example, men are often unable to see why women find some situations threatening – because they are safe situations for men. People who have experienced trauma are often responding in a way that is totally proportional to their traumatic experiences, even if it doesn’t make much sense to anyone else.

There’s a lot that we can all do to avoid needlessly invalidating each other. Simply accepting that other people experience things differently is a really good thing to take on. Allowing people to talk about their difficulties is good, too. Shutting people down because what they say makes you uncomfortable adds to the problems I’m describing. It’s a very common experience for people who are struggling to be told to shut up by people who are fine and do not want to hear anything troubling. If you don’t have the resources to respond to someone else’s struggles there are plenty of ways of handling that kindly. In my experience it’s not under-resourced people who tend to be cruel in this way. It’s people who expect everything they encounter to revolve around them.

Kindness gets a lot done. Saying things like ‘I am sorry you are having a hard time’ can be a powerful, supportive move. “I don’t really understand what’s going on here but I recognise that you are struggling. If there’s anything I can do to help, please tell me,” is a gift to someone. “Shut up, you’re making me uncomfortable and I’m sick of how miserable you are,” is going to make things worse for the other person. “That can’t be true,” is incredibly destructive.

Never under-estimate the power of small acts of kindness. A warm word, or just hearing and witnessing can make a lot of odds. Treating people as valid is something that enables healing. Telling people they shouldn’t feel the way they do can actually make a person less able to trust themselves, and consequently, more unwell.

Mental health problems exist in contexts. Healing depends on having the space to heal.

Dance Away

(David)

It’s early summer 1979. One o’clock of a weekday morning, with work tomorrow, but we don’t care. We’re down in the Harbour Lights, and the nightclub’s bar shutters have just rattled closed while the DJ chooses his record for the last slow dance.

It’s been quite a year. Life has changed almost out of recognition, and one result of all the changes is that you’ve become one of the carefree cool crowd. Temporarily, because everyone’s lifestyle is mobile and that’s a significant part of what makes this bunch so electric and exciting.

The first measured notes sound, instantly recognisable, Dance Away, which is your favourite current song. You lived your tumultuous teenage years to Roxy Music, and now in your early twenties when life has blossomed into something very different it feels kind of fitting that this might be the group’s swan song, because they too look like they’re moving on. That isn’t important though. What’s important is you and she catching each other’s eye across the dance floor and smiling as you meet to dance in each other’s arms.

She’s cooler than you are. Others might not know it, but you do. You’ve been together for a few months now and have shared secrets about your childhood traumas. Those secrets, you think, are what generates a reserve in her that is part of the coolness others can see. A bigger part than superficial things like her resemblance to Debbie Harry, as lovely as that is. The private sharing of those secrets is the most intimate thing you’ve ever experienced.

Will you stay together? You hope so. Dearly. She hopes so too, but who knows what life will bring?

Will you marry, two years from now? Will you have children? Will you survive storms that arrive out of nowhere and batter you almost numb, but every time one of you is struggling the other will be there to haul you in to safety? Forty-five years from now, will you still be together with grandchildren adding to the love that fills your family home?

Yes, you will. You can’t know it while you’re enjoying this late-night slow dance together in early summer 1979, but yes you will. Life will be good. Even the difficult bits will turn out good in the end, looked at in a certain way. Peace and love and trustworthy strong companionship will be yours, together.

Dance away, kid.

Trees and the wheel of the year

(Nimue)

Each kind of tree responds to the spring in its own way. Hawthorn, blackthorn and elder tend to be the first to leaf, and even though it’s only February, I’ve seen a few doing just that already. Oak tends to be the last to leaf in my part of the world.

While each tree species is different, every individual tree will respond to spring in its own time. Exact conditions where the tree is will have an impact – how much light and shade there is depends a lot on the shape of the land. A tree in a sheltered, sunny spot will start leafing sooner than one of the same species in a more exposed or sun deprived position.

All too often, I’ve encountered Druids talking about trees in relation to the wheel of the year as though it’s a single narrative. What trees do is diverse. Some trees are flowering already – the beautiful white flowers of the blackthorn are out now. Hawthorns don’t flower until May, oak flowers in June. Hazels have catkins as flowers, alder have totally different catkins. 

It is easy to reduce the cycle of the seasons down to some simple ideas, especially if you focus on the popular eight festivals. However, relating to vague ideas about nature doesn’t bring us into a close relationship with the natural world. To have that, we’ve got to engage with what’s around us. The wheel turns every day, and it is much more meaningful to connect with those everyday shifts.

I think it’s a lot more meaningful to get to know what’s around you than to work with ideas of the wheel of the year. That can be done in really simple ways – listening out for bird song every day. Finding out how the tree or other significant plant nearest to you goes through the seasons. Being alert to the daily shifts in light levels. 

You are not an idea or an abstract concept. You are a living being, experiencing the turning of the seasons in very precise, individual ways. Your journey through the year will be unique to you, and informed by every other experience of the year going on around you. You might be ready to blossom at the first opportunity, or you might need to wait a lot later. You might feel blessed and energised right now, or you might need a lot more sun. Just like the trees, we are all different in terms of how we respond, and no response is wrong.

The Magic of Wolves

(Nimue, review)

This fascinating book by Robin Herne explores the roles of wolves in magic, folklore and spirituality. The content draws widely from European and Asian sources, and ventures into ancient Egypt. Robin is explicit that there is too much Native American wolf material for him to do it any kind of justice in a book like this, and that the same is true of African wolf lore. I think it’s really good when authors own their limitations and don’t try to represent material from cultures they don’t have enough insight into.

Having followed Robin’s work for many years, I’m aware of him as a well read and insightful person in matters of Pagan antiquity. This is a thoughtful book that draws on that considerable knowledge-base and presents the material in an engaging, very readable way. It is a very dense text with a lot of insight in it, and it does come thick and fast so I had to take it slowly to try and absorb it all. It’s a funny thing that shorter books are often slower reads for this reason.

I did not know how widespread ideas about werewolves are, nor how far back they went. Robin brings a lot of interesting ideas to this issue of human shapeshifting, and his speculation on the topic is persuasive. There are many different ways in which people from wide ranging periods and cultures have been portrayed as also being wolves, and there’s lots to consider here. While we can never know what authors from the distant past really means when they talked about wold people, it is good to explore the possibilities, and the ways of viewing the world this opens up. There is far more to wolf magic than shapeshifting, and wolves have played many different roles in human stories.

I can very much recommend this book for anyone interested in wolves. If your spiritual practice involves wolves in any way, there is a great deal of value here and the book also provides a solid jumping off point for further reading and exploration. For anyone interested in folklore and prehistory, this is well worth considering as a text.

More on the publisher’s website https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/our-books/magic-wolves

Having better mental health

(Nimue)

Here we are at the end of Keith’s six week cancer treatment. Both of us worn and tired, both of us doing far better than anyone expected. I’m not going to be talking much about Keith’s experiences – he’s shared that with friends on Facebook, I’ve been bringing things to the blog that we both thought might be useful to other people.

Ahead of Keith’s treatment we were both worried about how I would cope. My mental health has been a lot better since we’ve been living together, but this was always going to be a very stressful thing to get through and there was the risk it would wipe out whatever had fixed me. We did not know what exactly had made the critical differences. We know now. I went into this afraid that my mental health issues would make me a liability. What I’ve learned has been really surprising.

I had a few wobbles along the way but no more than you’d really expect from a person whose beloved is dealing with cancer. I was an asset, not an additional problem. I was able to do a lot to keep Keith’s spirits up and to help him cope. My experience of physical illness, depression and anxiety meant I had knowledge to draw on that proved useful. I know how to push through difficult things.

I’ve had to radically reassess who I think I am. I’ve turned out to be strong, resilient and supportive, not the fragile nuisance I thought I was. This is a very big deal for me in terms of self-esteem, confidence, and my ability to trust myself.

In the past there were a lot of years when I suffered burnout, meltdowns, overwhelming depression, overwhelming panic and ongoing distress. I thought that was me. I thought that was because of historic trauma, failure to recover, intrinsic weakness, and that there was nothing anyone could possibly do about it. I used to have appalling mental health collapses at least once a month, it was exhausting and horrible. The last few months have been stressful and difficult. I have had panic attacks and there have been slides into depression, but nothing I couldn’t handle. A pretty reasonable response to the circumstances. I’m not the mad, broken person I thought I was.

I’ve found out what makes the most critical difference and what it is I can’t do without. I struggle a lot with being under-stimulated. I need physical contact for my brain to function properly. I just need to be held. Maybe more than average, but not a preposterous amount. If I have a panic attack, and I’m held, I calm down. If I’m depressed, and I’m held, I cope. It’s absolutely reliable. After many years of struggling, it is a surprise to me to discover that the answers to my issues are so simple.I’m not the difficult, high maintenance person I thought I was.

Keith is the sort of person who, facing cancer treatment, worried about everyone else. He’s a remarkably kind and thoughtful soul, and was determined that I would not get into difficulty while all this was going on for him. Between us, we figured out what it takes to keep me entirely well and functional – precious insight that changes everything for me. From here we have ongoing work to do keeping him well and dealing with recovery and whatever comes next. This is a five year process, at least. Still, a corner has been turned and from here we’re very much focused on what we can do, and not just for each other.

Telling partial stories

(Nimue)

How we tell stories is of course a significant consideration for anyone on the bard path. However, it’s an issue that affects everyone. What we miss out of a story is often as important as what we reveal. This can be considered both as a structural story issue and as an ethical issue.

On the fictional story side, the gaps we leave are the spaces in which readers or listeners add bits of themselves. Stories are a collaborative process and it’s worth thinking about what space you create. This is why excessively tidy endings don’t always work. Sometimes its better not to explain everything. Suggestion can be more powerful than clarity – this is especially true in the horror genre. When you make people do some of the work they can end up a lot more invested in your story than if you hand everything to them on a plate.

We all tell stories about our lives and experiences. Here the question of what gets left out has very different implications. The absence of key details can easily change the impression a story gives. One obvious example is that when women murder their partners it most usually happens in a context of the woman having endured long term serious abuse. Miss out the abuse part of the narrative and the shape of the tale changes dramatically. It’s often an issue around all kinds of abuse – if the person telling the story is able to miss out the thing they did that started it all, that can have a huge impact on what’s understood when their victim finally cracks under unbearable pressure.

We all see things from our own perspective, and will tend to foreground our hurts and our triumphs and not draw attention to things we messed up. Clearly there’s a degree of ordinary human mess that we should be allowed to get away with! Where it becomes an ethical issue is when our omissions impact harmfully on someone else. If missing out your actions or words makes someone else look irrational or more to blame, or it it gives the impression they’ve acted inappropriately, that’s not honourable.

I think what’s tempting about this is that it isn’t an outright lie. If you do it, you haven’t actively maligned someone, and it is harder to blame you for being misleading. If you tell people how hurt you were by a partner having an affair but don’t mention that you’d neglected them for years before that happened, you create a really misleading impression. If you’ve dumped an impossible workload on someone but only flag up that they didn’t manage to do something you asked of them, again that’s highly misleading. If you don’t mention that you said you wanted something and then get cross when someone acts on that information, you’re ducking responsibility. There’s a lot of that out there, especially around politics and hate crime.

In fiction, leaving bits out of a story can be a good choice. It can make more room for your audience. In real life the implications are vastly different. Speaking with integrity means acknowledging your own role in things. If you are developing bardic storytelling skills its important not to misuse those in ordinary life. Being able to tell the story of what happened tends to go with being a victor, and this is not a power to use lightly or selfishly to the detriment of others.

The child and the gun

(Nimue)

I saw a thought online recently to the effect that you should always back the child against the gun. No matter whose child. No matter whose gun. It’s one of those things that I think should be entirely obvious, and yet somehow isn’t to far too many people.

Most of the time I try to do my politics softly. I think it gets more done. I talk about alternatives and possibilities, I try to share things that foster kindness and that might inspire people to do better. On some social media that means I share on a lot of nature photography from other people. Relentless activism is exhausting, and often results in conflict. People who feel exhausted by other people’s relentless activism are more like to shut down than to engage. I try and make it comfortable, and easy where I can. I’m having to change tack at the moment.

You should always back the child against the gun.

There’s an awful lot I can’t do. But I can share and amplify. I can challenge. There is never a moral case for killing children. Never. I don’t think anyone should be trying to justify killing any civilians. Genocide is never the right choice. It shocks me that anyone needs to say this in any context.

Terrorism is hideous, but if you use it to justify genocide, what you’ve got is still genocide.

When humans do terrible things, there’s always a justification. There’s something we tell ourselves and each other that helps us feel justified and like it’s ok somehow. We have to do this. We are good people. This is the lesser evil. I’m not sure how anyone can persuade themselves that the murder of thousands of children counts as a lesser evil, but that seems to be happening.

It’s easier to do terrible things when you believe in the virtue of your actions. Making sacrifices is easier when you’re sacrificing someone or something other than yourself. The people who strut about in public talking about the hard choices they have to make aren’t usually the ones to suffer the actual hardness of the choices.