Nimue Brown's Blog, page 390

Having all the answers

I had a really interesting critique of my blog writing via linkedin yesterday. “I also wanted to thank you, Nimue, for another insular, slanted and largely unexamined piece. As an outsider looking in to the Druid life that you portray, it appears that your penchant for confusing fantasy, and your own distorted thoughts and feelings — for truth — is a continuing theme. I still haven’t figured out yet what your writing has to do with leading a loving, open, unified, spiritual life. But then again, only very special people are Druids!” (https://www.linkedin.com/nhome/updates?topic=5876276182550351872&trk=eml_comment__view_update&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=3Wn8O_ApzYlSg1)

I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’ve come to the conclusion that in many ways, that’s a correct assessment. Insular – absolutely, there is only one of me and I do not claim to speak for anyone else. Unexamined – well, no one else examines my output, and although I reflect on my own experiences to try and make sense of them, compared to a psychological, scientific or academic approach, I’m a lightweight. Penchant for confusing fantasy – I admit I do love Philip K Dick, although that probably wasn’t what was meant. I find life confusing, full of challenges, surprises, things that awe and bewilder me. I write sometimes to share that. Is it fantasy? I do not think I am in any position to judge! It’s nigh on impossible to be rigorously objective about innately subjective experience. Is any inner life more than fantasy if you are stood on the outside of it?

My distorted thoughts and feelings. That’s been a long and challenging journey for me, trying to ascertain what is mine and what has been imposed on me, what is fair assessment and what is distortion. There are days when I get it wrong, sometimes to awful effect. I have emotional responses other people sometimes find confusing, and sometimes I get very confused by how other people react to things. So yes, I have no doubt that other people will see some of my responses as distorted, that’s fine. My responses are what I’ve got, and while I acknowledge they may seem wonky, I don’t think that invalidates me as a person. I’m just a wonky person attempting to express themselves.

I don’t have a unified, spiritual life – guilty as charged. Doubt, uncertainty, maybeism and an absence of dogma frame my whole approach to spirituality so ‘unified’ isn’t really an option for me, and I’m fine with that.

Open… it’s funny that I can be all of those other things and not be open. I’m not sure I have the technical skill to offer more openness, perhaps this goes with ‘unexamined’ although I could be uncharitable and suggest the author of the critique hadn’t considered the inherent contradictions here.

Loving… ah yes. I love it when people come to me with all the open hearted love that allows them to write in this way – because we all know that this kind of challenge represents the deepest, most generous love that the universe can offer us, yes? Or perhaps not. If there’s anything that defines my life right now it is, I think the quest for the open heart, and the continual expanding into greater love. To do more, give more, be more, to love with few conditions and less regard for personal safety, to give, and give. But it’s not wholly unguarded and unconditional. Nonetheless, I really can love the challenge to try and make something good out of something that was clearly meant to wound me. So the only point in the whole thing I’m really going to argue is that I don’t lead a loving life, but, if this critique is what a loving spiritual life looks like, I am evidently some other thing and that’s fine by me.

I wonder what she intended and what effect she hoped to get. Why bother to write something like that? What does it achieve? A moment of relishing feeling superior, perhaps? Score one against the Druids? Why bother to read my stuff if it offends you that much? Why waste minutes of your life on me in this way? My curiosity about what makes people tick makes it hard for me to ignore something so utterly confounding. I’m confused still, insular, slanted, distorted… and unapologetic.

Dear women…

When we co-operate, we’re awesome, but there are things we do to ourselves, each other and to the guys that I’d really like to talk about. I’d also like to talk about them calmly, with the understanding that airing this stuff is not an act of breaking rank. All of these are some women, sometimes, so add that caveat a each round.

We shame each other over body shape and size, and aspects of appearance. Any statement that has the term ‘real women’ in it is poisonous because it implies there are some people who seem female but don’t really qualify. When that’s about body shape, reproduction or some other thing where you might or might not, it really sucks.

The people who taught me that being attractive to men, getting male attention, was more important than anything else I was, were women. The people who told me guys don’t find smart girls attractive and that I ought to wear makeup, were other girls. I was about ten when that started. If we only write each other romance stories and define happily ever after purely in terms of a man… we’re putting ourselves in a really problematic position, and we need to stop doing that stuff.

We need to stop apologising for and making excuses for the bastards. We defend the guys who hit us ‘it was only… he didn’t really mean…’ we defend the rapists if we agree that yes, it was a short skirt. We support the idea that men can’t help abusing us every time we teach our daughters how to avoid being raped rather than teaching our sons some self respect and self control. Men are able to choose and we need to be totally intolerant of the ones who think they can’t help it.

We have to stop saying ‘all men are…’ where we’re being negative. If our only story is that all men are potential abusers, we leave no space for a guy to choose differently (they can choose). If we refuse to accept that a guy might totally agree with us that women should be respected, we alienate our allies. If what you want to do is beat up on all men, that’s not feminism, that’s hate, and we don’t want hate, we’re trying to unpick hate against women and we don’t sort that by making guys into hate-objects. Some men are total bastards. Traditional rape is thing men do to women, and in that context, all perpetrators are men. However, not all men are perpetrators and we need to respect the difference if we want things to change. If we say all men are rapists, we’re actually letting the rapists off the hook – we’re telling them they are perfectly normal and there’s nothing they can do about it.

If we respond to sexism and patriarchy by being just as rude and unpleasant, we won’t get  culture of respect and decency. Thank you.

Dear Men…

Two scenarios. Contains uncomfortable stuff, maybe triggery.

We’re talking and the subject of the abuse, rape, and intimidation of women by men comes up. You are affronted by this, because it is an awful thing. It grieves you that such things happen. We talk about the cultural contexts. There is empathy and a feeling of comradeship and I feel profoundly grateful that you are in my life, and glad of the reminder that the vast majority of guys in my life are awesome. We can work together to improve gender relations, to raise future generations who honour and respect each other, to undo ancestral wounding and historical failures. These are people issues and it will take people of all genders, to heal this and change things for the better.

We’re talking and the subject of the abuse, rape, and intimidation of women by men comes up. You are affronted by this, because you hate the idea that someone might tar you with the same brush. Also you don’t want to believe it happens, and you start telling me about female violence against men, which you are confident is really at least as bad, and men’s rights, and maybe you get round to telling me how white, middle class men are the most disadvantaged group there is. (yes, I’ve had these conversations). I’m attacking you by talking about rape, and I’m making you uncomfortable and that’s me abusing you. I’m a horrible person, because I’ve hurt your feelings. I should shut up about this, because your being uncomfortable is what matters here. Your hurt feelings matter more than my physical safety, more than any woman’s physical safety. I do not feel safe. I feel like I should shut up and go away.

It is easy to silence people by taking offence at the subject matter. It is especially easy to (perhaps unintentionally) intimidate women into shutting up about abuse. The person who has been abused is easily persuaded that they are not in a safe situation and that it is better to be quiet and back off. If your main aim is to improve your own comfort by making the awkward stuff go away, this may be fine as an outcome. It is an awful thing to hear that your wife, lover, sister, mother, daughter, friend, teacher, neighbour… has been raped. It is an awful thing to have to consider that there may be men of your acquaintance who have raped people. Most do not get prosecuted, they are amongst us.

It is ghastly to imagine a woman might look at you and think you would, or could do something like that. I’m sure it’s unpleasant to hear women getting angry about sexism, abuse and rape. These are horrible topics, and there are some truly hideous things out there. If your discomfort in face of this is the biggest issue for you, please pause and have a little think about that. Also imagine how that might impact on someone for whom this is not a hypothetical issue, whose actual emotional and physical suffering at the hands of an abuser is less of an issue for you than the comparatively modest disquiet you are experiencing.  You probably don’t know the history of the person you are talking to.

Imagine what it might be like to go through this life knowing that not everyone would respect your right to say no, and that for some people, your body is in and of itself a invitation to violation. Pick the right thing to be affronted by. Thank you.

Women of the tribe

I grew up with a keen sense of not being any kind of normal female. I didn’t do pink and sparkly, or dress up as a princess, and from there I didn’t really get into makeup, heels, fashion and looking the part. It didn’t help that I was never thin enough for that kind of thing, nor attentive enough to what was ‘in’ and I wanted clothes that let me do stuff, rather than clothes to display my body, and I have weak ankles, so heels are a nightmare. Every now and then I’d try to conform to what I was seeing around me, and would mostly fail. I’m equally useless at looking smart, or elegant, for all the same reasons.

The time that many women put into their appearance, from keeping up with trends, and picking stuff out to applying it all… I have always wanted to use on other things. So I’m well read, I know a lot of songs, and so forth, but most of the time I am (as dear Professor Elemental would put it) a scruffy urchin. For people who want shiny, polished, framed and thoughtfully displayed feminine charms, I am never going to pass muster, and I’ve got to the stage in my life (and am exceedingly married) so that most of the time it doesn’t bother me at all.

On Friday I went to a sacred singing group – mostly Pagan chanting. It was a fairly even gender split. Very few women were wearing makeup – and those who were tended more towards the theatrical and playful than the overtly alluring. There were plenty of grey hairs, plenty of natural hair tones, and ways of wearing hair that made total sense to me. There were lots of colourful, expressive, practical items of clothing that made sitting on the floor perfectly sensible. Women dressed to be doing stuff, not to be looked at. Women who were very clearly comfortable about how they looked and made no apology for doing pretty much what the guys always do – wearing stuff they like, that fits the circumstances.

I was struck by how different this was as an emotional experience. I felt like I belonged. I was in no way a stand-out oddity. I didn’t seem so much a scruffy urchin in that context, more an earth woman with better ways to spend her time, like all the other earth women around me. Having a context makes so much difference. Having a tribe, and a feeling of belonging and of not being judged. I was also struck by how lovely they all were, how they all seemed innately interesting, approachable, in a way that heeled and painted women often do not, for me. I realise I am slightly intimidated by mainstream manifestations of glamour – I don’t know how to relate to the women who throw a lot of energy into painting, preening and constructing that very specific kind of beauty.

I like the other sort of beauty better, the sort that does not hide its lines or life marks, and that is not wholly about sexual identity. I take courage, encouragement and inspiration from knowing that I have a tribe, and a place where I fit.

Hope, not hate

If you’ve been following UK politics in the news, you’ll have been hearing far too much about the ‘success’ of the far right party, UKIP, and very little about how well the Greens have been doing. The media bias makes me very uncomfortable, but that’s an issue for another day. Perhaps in part due to the media hype, a lot of people did vote for UKIP; whose policies include getting rid of maternity pay, making rape in marriage legal, and blaming anyone ‘not from round here’ for just about everything. No doubt some of those votes were in protest against the mainstream, not meant as endorsements.

However, I’ve seen UKIP supporters online. Angry, anti-intellectual, resentful, frustrated, shouty… they do not inspire joy. This is not a party which brings out the best in people, but a party that calls the police to challenge someone who had posted actual UKIP policy statements to twitter. What do we do in face of this?

The temptation is to get angry back. It’s very easy to shout abuse at angry, destructive people who put their fingers in their ears and sing loudly if there’s any risk someone might show them evidence that doesn’t back their claims. I’ve hardly been complimentary in the last few paragraphs, but I’m also terribly aware that these are people. Somewhere in there, they have feelings, and there’s a good chance that for many, beneath the veneer of noisy anger is a deep seam of terror. Life is scary just now. Climate change is terrifying. How much easier it is to be able to blame all the big economic problems on powerless immigrants! It would be even more alarming if we had to look at how those with power are screwing us over. And all the while, those with power are no doubt rubbing their hands with glee as those of us who should have been working together for change are mired in fighting each other.

Getting angry does not cause angry people to magically become compassionate. It doesn’t get rid of hate, but entrenches it. Shouting at people and calling them bloody stupid, does not get many of them to engage productively. I suspect people are going to UKIP under the mistaken impression that this party cares, and is listening. These are people who have every reason to feel that the mainstream doesn’t care and isn’t listening. That needs to change.

In the normal scheme of things we hate people who have personally wronged us, and where we can see a direct causal link between them and the specific wrong. What we’re getting is a truly irrational mass hatred of whole groups of people. That’s not hard wired into any of us but is being constructed, and fed. It would be all too easy to make UKIPpers another hate group for smug people to look down on. Another vast generalisation and condemnation to feed the division and keep us all harassing each other.

Hug a UKIPper. They probably need it. We need hope, not hate. We need to co-operate, not tear each other down. We need to recognise and respect each other’s fundamental humanity – it’s fine not to like each other and not to agree, but that doesn’t entitle us to strip others of rights and dignity. There are some large and real problems out there just now – wealth distribution, climate change, human rights, our viability and future as a species… the more people there are working together to tackle that, the better. Hope not hate means having to work out how not to hate the haters – and that’s going to be really hard. We will not build a better world by chucking shit at each other, we have to inspire each other to do better. There is no other way.

(and, while the media silence is curious, the Greens actually did very well in the local elections).

Druid teacup

Inspired by Theo’s recent blog – http://www.wildyoga.co.uk/sanctuaries/, and by life, I’ve been thinking about being broken and imperfect. There’s a Japanese tradition of fixing broken pottery by putting gold in the cracks, emphasising and making lovely the breakage. That which is perfect, smooth and whole does not allow anything much in or out. Useful in a teacup, perhaps less so in a person.

There’s considerable comfort to be had in the idea of flaws as spiritual blessings that let the light in and make room for the gold. I‘m full of cracks and holes, it is interesting to see how much changes when I can imagine that as a virtue, not a failing.

What happens when you choose a path through life that means getting broken? Innately heartbreaking work, learning to love the fleeting and ephemeral, giving more than is a good idea, caring more than is safe…? I look back at my life choices, and see that I have very seldom chosen to do anything protective. I’ve been careless of my boundaries, I have not guarded against heartbreak and I have been broken open by grief more times than I can count.

Mostly my experience of that is not that I am turning into some kind of shining, saint-like entity. Mostly what it feels like is pain, and confusion. And yet I keep showing up to these, even when walking away would be really easy. I’ve done so my whole life, driven by passion, belief, hope, the need to try and make things better, the urge to give.

I get myself torn apart with predictable frequency. This is the point of the process I’m thinking hard about today. What would happen if I simply stopped calling that ‘failure’? How would life change if I viewed my inevitable breaking as a breaking open, not a fall from grace or a consequence of being naive, or too much, again? Perhaps I could be more graceful about cracking and falling apart. Perhaps that whole experience would feel very different.

The Japanese traditionally put gold in the pottery cracks. This is a choice. It is a way of seeing and understanding the holes as opportunities, not absences. The only way to get gold into those cracks is to see the cracks, and imagine there could be gold in them. It may simply be a case of deciding to be a different sort of teacup, the sort whose holes let light in to some good effect, the sort where the cracks are full of something good, or could be. Not a perfect teacup, but a perfectly flawed one.

Please vote!

Today (22nd May if you find this later) we have elections for many district councils, and for the European Parliament.  If you are able to vote, please vote. Not only that, please vote with your heart, vote for something you believe in, make the best choice with what you’ve got. If you’re considering a protest vote, make sure you know what the party stands for, because they could get in, and a big protest vote will influence the mainstream, so don’t push in a way you don’t actually want to go.

People have died to get the right to vote, and people still die for democracy. It’s not a perfect system, but it beats the hell out of feudalism and tyranny! Democracy only works if we all show up and participate – voting is only one part of that, but it’s the most obvious. If we don’t vote, the ruling elite has more reason to consider us a bunch of ignorant sheep which it can steer round and predate at its leisure. It’s important to make politicians aware that we do pay attention, we do have opinions and we do expect them to perform. Voter apathy fuels political arrogance. Let’s not do that thing.

Your vote counts. In the Euro elections, it’s proportional representation, which means every vote can make a difference. Europe is a confusing entity, and we don’t get enough information about how it works, which makes it hard to make informed choices, but failure to engage isn’t going to fix that.

At district council level, not that many people get to vote for each candidate in the first place, so every vote carries weight. At both levels, people who are elected are making choices about how your money is spent, how your resources are organised. Choices are being made that affect your life. If it bothers you that you don’t seem to have much say in that… here’s the opportunity to have some say.

Democracy is hard work. It requires you to pay attention, form opinions, show up, make your voice heard, and take part. It requires you to know stuff you may prefer not to know, and to have to think about things it might be nicer not to have to think about. The alternative is being a cog in a machine whose overall shape is a mystery and whose purpose is defined by someone else. There’s no mid-ground here. The consequence of not participating, is tyranny. In face of that, voting is the least you can do.

Tales of the Witchy Granny

Back when I was working on Druidry and the Ancestors, I was thinking as much about the stories we tell as I was about factual history. One of the great stories of modern Paganism, is the witchy Granny. I had one. You probably do too. And if you don’t, you’ve probably got a mad old uncle, or a semi-mythic great grandmother, or a more archetypal image to fill the gap. We need the witchy grannies, they fulfil a really important role.

The witchy granny stands between us (as disconnected moderns) and an ancient world of mystery. She has knowledge that evokes the Pagan past, and is closer to the land than us. Life has taught her compassion, but she probably won’t be too fluffy or nice. Hers is the compassion that can put a suffering animal out of its misery or can tell someone they’re on a hiding to nothing. She does not tolerate fools lightly, speaks her mind, knows her heart. Of course she isn’t perfect and the odds are she isn’t popular because she scares people. The witchy granny connects us to the past, roots us in our ancestry and tells us that nature worship isn’t some distant idea, but recent, alive and available.

Considering all of that, it doesn’t matter whether or not she was real in any literal sense, if she was your biological ancestor, or even if any of them ever existed. Witchy grannies are a modern myth of great value, so let’s embrace them as that.

Last week I read a wonderful ‘witchy granny’ story – Hexe, by Skadi Winter. It’s set in Germany after the second world war, so the granny of this tale is much more rooted in the Heathen tradition. Given how the Nazis tried to appropriate Heathenry (and still try) this book has a lot of layers, levels and implications in it. How do we reclaim a past that another group of people have approached in sacrilegious ways? How do we make connections with our ancestors when some of the more immediate ones are a real problem? How does identity connect to ancestry, and what happens when ideas around that become dogmatic and toxic?

Writing stories that help us explore the past is a really important process. The more difficult the history, the more important it is to get in there and try to make sense of it. All kudos to Skadi for taking on this period and these issues, and for sharing her insights.

If you’d like to check out Hexe, it’s here, while Druidry and the Ancestors is here.

Matlock the hare

I ran into this wonderful creative team on twitter, and lured them over because… you have to see this. So, a guest blog from Phil Lovesey…

Matlock Hare by Jacqui Lovesey

 

Some years ago, whilst teaching Swift to a disinterested group of English A-level students (it was a sunny Friday afternoon, and the lure of their oncoming weekend was far more powerful than wading though the symbolic significances behind Gulliver’s Travels) we came across “the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced . . . restive and indocible, mischievous and malicious…” the Yahoos in the country of the Houyhnhnms; perhaps Swift’s finest satire on the greed, barbarity and corruption apparently innate in all human life.

 

The ensuing conversation, I shall remember for a while, as a student at the back raised his hand, a perplexed look on his weary face.

 

“This book’s rubbish, sir,” he complained.  “You’d think this Swift bloke would have bothered to at least think up an original name.  It’s just lazy, getting it off the internet like that.  We’re not even allowed to Google essays, yet he just rips it off and passes it off as literature!”

 

Another student confessed to being ‘quite interested’ as she didn’t even realize ‘they had internet back then’; whilst a third at least tried to go with the theme, proposing that ‘Googles’ would have been a better choice than ‘Yahoos’, as really ‘nobody uses Yahoo no more – it’s like, so last year.’

 

It was an exchange which I like to feel that even the great J.S might have enjoyed, if only for its unintended irony. (As a footnote to this story – I met with a perplexed parent of one of the students sometime later who admitted being a little confused when I returned her son’s internet plagiarized essay, only to be told quite adamantly by said parent that ‘We only used Yahoo, like the book says – none of it was from Google, not a single word of it.’)

 

I was reminded of this Swiftean episode the other day when writing the second of the Most Majelicus series of Matlock the hare adventures. It had been a long day, and I was just finishing a chapter where our unlikely majickal-hare hero is crossing high above Trefflepugga Path in a hot-air balloon, accompanied by three ‘Snoffibs’ – creatures who content themselves with amassing vast amounts of majickal-wisdom for no other purpose than their own vanity.  I wondered if I was happy with the name ‘Snoffibs’ (a crude anagram of boffins) and duly consulted my wife – the illustrator and creator of all the Matlock artworks.

“Jacqui?” I griffled (or ‘said’, as you would griffle…)  “All these stories, all these characters, all this majickal-dalelore that we create – what happens if it gets changed around in the future?”

 

I told her about Swift, and how I suspected that perhaps he wouldn’t be too pleased to see his Yahoos transformed by a corporate multi-national internet giant into a glossy search-engine purporting to be your online ‘friend’ as it diligently obeys your every search whim like an obedient slave.  “I mean,” I griffled to her, “it’s hardly coming across as a mischievous and malicious, is it?”

 

At which point she put down her brush – (she was finishing an illustration for the new book featuring Ursula the white hare-witch, Proftulous the dworp, the dripple and Matlock having a crumlush brottle-leaf brew in his small cottage garden, deep in the heart of Winchett Dale) – and calmly griffled, “Surely it’s not really about what we think, is it? It’s about what the creatures would think.  What would Matlock think, or Serraptomus, or the dripple, or Proftulous, or Goole…or any of them?”

 

And this, of course, is why I love her – she has what can only be defined as innate, unflappable Dale-logic; for in the way of all things creative, we tend to people our majickal-world of Winchett Dale with creatures that perhaps hold closely to our own values.  And no, I’m not sure the creatures would be concerned or worried even the ‘oidiest’ bit….and neither would the Yahoo’s be, either…

 

One of the reasons Matlock stubbornly ‘bliffed’ his saztaculous way into our lives was because to our peffa-pleasant surprise, people wanted to know more about him.  Beginning as just a series of collectable miniature artworks Jacqui painted then sold on eBay two years ago (and still does – somehow managing in between everything else to produce a new artwork or Matlock sculpture every week) people simply wanted to know more about the majickal-hare – where he lived, what did he do, what adventures did he go on, who were his fellow creatures in Winchet Dale?  They wanted maps and handmade books.  We developed a language – Dalespeak, using ‘griffles’ for words – then set about to create majickal-dalelore,  blending hare legends and myths from across the world to begin to define the system of all hares’ ascension, the most-majelicus tasks they have to undertake, together with other majickal-dales Matlock and his ‘clottabussed’ but loyal friends would be taken to during his saztaculous adventures.

 

In the course of the last two years, the world has grown, and as quite contended middle-aged luddites we set about to create a website and try and master social networking and the beginnings of a weekly Matlock blog.  Our teenage ‘leverets’ have helped (born to the digital world – a saztaculous resource for folk like us), together with the support of family and friends.

 

My previous books were published with HarperCollins – my agent refused to  even show the manuscript for ‘The Riddle of Trefflepugga Path’ to them, thinking no doubt the whole notion of Matlock as hare-brained – so we decided to publish it ourselves, and to date reaction to it has very pleasantly surprised us.  It’s not pretending to be a great work of modern literary fiction, it’s simply what it is – a four hundred page journey into another world – one that Jacqui and I have the most ganticus privilege being able to bring to all out here, in what the creatures of Winchett Dale call ‘The Great Beyond’.

 

The other day, Leveret number 3 came up to us and said ‘I put Matlock the Hare into Yahoo.  It came up with loads of results.’

 

Jacqui simply smiled, saying nothing, and it was only then that I truly realized the wisdom of her griffles…

 

www.matlockthehare.com   and https://twitter.com/MatlockHare

Voting Green

On the 22nd May we’re voting in local election and for the EU. I’ve been working for my local Green Party since last summer. I’ll be voting Green, because I want a fairer and sustainable future.

 

 

 

Green Parties exist across the world, and collaborate intensely in Europe, because the shared core values make that easy to do. Many of the issues we care about are cross-border. Climate change, pollution, human rights – these things are not about countries, but our future depends on them. Wherever you are, the odds are you have Greens.