Nimue Brown's Blog, page 393

Love and spirituality

When religions and spiritual practices are at their best, they teach us to love. Who and what they teach us to love and in what circumstances in many ways defines the essence of that religion. My feeling is that anyone who practices hate in response to any religion, is doing it wrong. Sadly there’s a lot of it out there, but no religion has core tenets that teach hatred. Whether we find the inspiration to love or to loathe in our religions really says far more about us as individuals than it does about the religion we happen to be working with.

Druidry directs our capacity for love in many different directions. With the best will in the world, loving everything and everyone is not something most of us will ever manage, but there are many different paths to explore.  We may fall in love with the land – very likely with a small and specific area that we relate to closely. We may come to love deities, who might be associated with that land, or with the traditions of our ancestors. There may be a modern Druid tribe that we come to love, or some other community where we feel involved and connected. Causes and ideas, dreams, visions, facets of the natural world… we are surrounded by that which we might love if we choose to open our hearts to it.

Love is a word that gets horribly misused. All too often ‘love’ is marketing hype for ‘consider it ok’ or ‘quite like’. I’ve grumbled about that before. A very narrow depiction of romantic love otherwise dominates. The love stories we most often tell are about the first flushes of attraction between a young couple, usually to have a happy ending. The couple will normally be heterosexual, white and passably affluent westerners and they will face a few more or less plausible challenges before getting it together.

That kind of falling in love is a brief high in the body-chemistry. A couple of weeks manufacturing your own private love drugs for a bout of madness and euphoria, and then it wears off, sometimes leaving nothing at all but a sense of loss. That can be addictive, leading to lots of short term and ultimately unsatisfying encounters with other humans. To love is to open the heart deliberately, and keep it open. Not for a couple of weeks of self-induced high, but potentially for the rest of your life.

Love understood in this way is a day to day choice. It is all about commitment, dedication, and a practice of being open hearted. That can be held and developed through or alongside prayer, meditation and acts of religious devotion. Mostly the Gods do not show up for most of us, most of the time. To learn to love a deity is to learn to love that which might not respond in kind. Choosing to do that anyway, choosing to care, to feel, to be open to some other thing, is a powerful process. Be that a landscape, another person, or a piece of music, love as a deliberate choice is available to us.

That’s not to say it is in any way safe, tame, comfortable or easy. Rather the opposite. In the lunacy of a short-term chemical attraction, there is no sense of choice or control, and that can be liberating. Opening up deliberately is in many ways more exposed, and more exposing, much more interesting, far more sustainable, sometimes terrifying.

Making changes

I’m very much a work in progress, trying to figure out how to live, how to relate to others and make sense of things. No doubt I’ll still be doing this to my last day. Part of the challenge is figuring out what I want, because without that, it’s impossible to make any sense of what I should be doing.

On reflection, I want to be able to push further and do more, and I think that’s viable if I’m clever about it. That means making changes to my diet so that I can sustain better levels of energy. I’m taking Sundays off – at least from the computer. It helps me clear my head, and I think more effectively for time out. Blogs like this one are set up in advance. I’m making a point of getting time off, and time outside. I’m also getting back to swimming, not just for the fitness aspect, but because being in water makes me happy and always has.

I need challenges, and also ones that can be met. The nearly impossible fires my mind, but the actually impossible can get depressing. I’m doing better at finding good challenges, and people to work with.

There is something happening, and I feel it, even though I can’t name it. Shifts beneath the surface of my awareness, rising up as a run of intense, colourful dreams, utterly incomprehensible, but loaded with implications nonetheless. The curious feeling that something at the surface of me has softened a little – like a seed shell expanding with water and ready to split in germination. A week ago I would not have said I had some kind of rigid and dead outer layer, but that may simply mean I had not noticed it. Only in becoming a tiny fraction more flexible does it become evident that something – I still don’t know what it is – had ossified rather.

The answer is to explore, experiment and see what comes next. The sense of something stirring, the feeling of potential growth – this has a large spiritual dimension to it, for me. I do not know where I’m going or what I’m doing, and that’s entirely fine. There is just a sense of having been called to step up, and to let go and see where that takes me.

Contact and Consent

To be able to give consent, in any context, we need to be making a choice freely, from a position of being properly informed about what we might or might not be consenting to. It needs to be as possible to say yes as it is to say no. I have a lot of issues around political consent, and the differences between what you’re told you’re voting for and what happens when people get into power. I think manifestoes should be legally binding.

For the last four years or so, learning to say ‘no’ when I want to has been a big part of my journey. I still have learning to do around how I manage other people’s needs, and learning to say ‘no’ when I’m exhausted and so forth – but  generally I’ve been getting better at all this. I avoid situations where I do not have the right to refuse, and I keep away from people who have dubious ideas about what consent even means. I am more well, and more at peace in myself as a direct consequence.

As I’ve commented before, I’m not a massively tactile person. Arty, folky, Pagan and Green communities can all be rather huggy places, and some days I manage that better than others. If it’s meant, and felt, then a hug is something I’m usually fine with. What I struggle with is hugging people I don’t really know, and faking what for me, would properly be a small emotional intimacy.

It occurs to me that I’m usually very passive around social gestures of affection. Even with the people I would be glad to hug, I wait to see what they do, more usually, and I don’t offer. The notable exceptions are the people with whom I have deep and well-established relationships anyway.

I could become someone who can comfortably offer and seek affection. It’s something I intend to explore a bit, picking people I trust and feel safe with, people who speak to my heart and with whom I would like to be more open. I will probably be painfully awkward and like a creature with far too many elbows, but I would like to be able to do this gracefully, and my only option is to learn.

The freedom to say ‘no’ is only a part of what consent means. Now I need to start working on the freedom to also say yes.

Hope, skill and beauty

I’ve known Loretta Hope since she was a child and have had the privilege of watching from afar as she’s crafted the life of her choosing. Loretta is an artist, using her body in a range of ways to bring beauty and a sense of amazement to those who see her in action.

All too often, images we’re offered as depictions of feminine beauty are fragile. We’re encouraged to be emaciated, not fit. Loretta personifies strength and grace, and that combination of physical prowess and elfin looks makes her a much better sort of representation of the feminine than those strange, photo-shopped giraffe women who seem to be taking over visual media.

Watching her hang upside-down from silks and ropes is just one of those things that reliably brightens my day.

On Twitter she’s @LorettaHope

Her facebook fan page is here – https://www.facebook.com/lorettahopecouk?fref=ts

Curiously conflicted nature

It eventually occurred to me that I am a tad prone to treating physical as natural and that which happens between the ears as at least potentially artificial. What the body wants and does is natural, and as a Pagan I should respect that. What the brain does… I am suspicious about. Let’s sidestep the debate about whether it is actually possible for us to be unnatural, and get bogged down in the dualism a bit instead.

We can thank Descartes and those who followed after him for the whole idea of mind-body dualism. How different would our culture be if we did not usually draw lines between the two, treating them as separate, unrelated things? It is, when you get down to it, all the same body chemistry. I know this, but the habit of dualism is so ingrained in me that it affects my thinking and I don’t always spot this happening.

There are frequently conflicts between my head and my body. My nature is passionate, driven, obsessive and will run flat out and keep trying to run flat out even when my body just plain can’t. My body is unreliable to say the least – bodies often are, from observation. They get tired, hungry, sore and no matter how much will you have, if you work them flat out and do not look after their needs, bodies fall over, and sometimes cannot be persuaded to get back up again. Ignore the body and you can easily destroy it. For me, ambition and intention always outstrip capacity. It doesn’t really make any odds what my capacity is.

I’ve realised, in the last few days that my habit is to treat my body as ‘natural me’ that I should be honouring, but never take proper care of, and my more psychological and emotional aspects as some kind of unnatural control freak that needs taming. It finally dawned on me that this is bloody stupid. My emotions, will, determination, and drive are no less part of my natural self than the physical restrictions on the energy I can muster. It occurs to me that the constant tension between intention and capacity isn’t something to overcome, it is a key part of who I am. I am someone who pushes at the edges, all the time and who, as a consequence, misjudges that and falls over every now and then.

The falling over and burning out can be inconvenient for those around me. There are many who are kind and encourage me to go gently, and I appreciate the warmth and good intention there, and I do listen to the advice about how to do better. I confess that I listen with the intention of squeezing a bit more out of me at the next round. There have been a few who have found either the physical collapses or the emotional vulnerability that goes with this process, to be a nuisance and an affront, and take the time to make sure I understand what an unreasonable pain in the arse I am for not organising my life and energy to make things easy for them. Well, feckit, I get a lot done, even when you average that out over the days where I don’t get much done, the trade off is good.

There is one thing I can do for me in all of this, and I’m going to do it. I’m going to stop apologising for being the kind of person who runs flat out until they fall over and then gets up and does it all again. This is a fundamental part of who I am, a key aspect of my nature, in both body and mind. I’m always trying to learn how to manage it better, how to perfect that balance between pushing and not falling, and I get it wrong, and will keep getting it wrong. There will be days when I whimper and feel sorry for myself, but not many. I may find eventually I can’t get up again after all, but so be it. I’m going to stop fighting and resenting and apologising for things that make me who I am, and put that energy into the crazy stuff, where it belongs.

Being professional

What does being professional mean to you? There’s some obvious points around getting the job done well, to meet deadlines and budget, and mostly that’s not something I have any trouble with. I’ve spent more than a decade now writing to word count and deadline, finding words to promote other people’s work and generally making myself useful.

It’s the personal side of being professional that most often foxes me. Most of my adult life, I’ve worked independently. Often I have been part of teams, online and in the real world, but people-contact has tended to be by email, or in short bursts. I realise I’ve not had much exposure to workplace culture, and I don’t have much idea what normal people do when they’re at work. Except that friends with normal jobs seem to be on facebook all the time.

I find the ways in which we modify ourselves according to space are fascinating – perhaps more so because I tend to do it less than I think is normal. Who are we for our families, and is that the same as who we get to be at work, and is there another person who we let ourselves be when socialising, and does that change if we’re drunk? Is there another, secret person who lives inside our heads and is far better, cooler, more attractive and successful than all our other selves put together?

What further muddies the water for me, around how to act in a work context is that what I do is often meant to be emotive. There are songs and stories where really what I’m aiming for is to make people cry. I found with recent audio work that letting my voice crack like my heart was breaking, or letting notes of frantic insanity creep in, was wholly necessary. When I’m working with other people – be that political, to promote a book or get an event advertised, there tends to be a lot of emotional investment. If I’m reviewing a book, I’m dealing with something that represents the life and soul of the creator.

None of my assumptions about being calm, cool and collected actually work terribly well around a lot of the work I find myself doing. That in turn has me wondering about those spaces where you couldn’t care less about the company, the output, or anything except that they pay by the hour and it makes life possible. I have done a bit of that along the way. Sometimes it feels easier not to have to care too much about the people or the work around me, but after a while that starts to feel hollow and pointless.

Stood on the outside, the cool collected professionalism that seems to be what so many people are after, sometimes looks suspiciously like not giving a shit.

Religion is people

One of the things that occasionally drives me nuts with a small number of atheists, is this idea that religion is the root of all evil, and if we could only get rid of religion, the world would be a much better place. Anyone who has read Spirituality without Structure will know I’m no great fan of organised religion, for all the same reasons many atheists take issue. However, religions are not something that have a terrible influence on people. It is important to remember that religions *are* people – made by people, and run by people.

Take away religion and the world would not magically become a better place. All of the people currently using religion to justify prejudice and cruelty would not suddenly get over it and become lovely. They’d find other spaces supportive of their hatred. Race, culture, politics, countries, languages even…there are plenty of other things humans make that can easily be co-opted to the same effect.

It’s also worth noting that while religion can be a force for good in many lives, so too can culture, politics, patriotism and all the rest. Love for and devotion to anything can turn out to be a force for good.

It is one of the particularly bat-shit crazy things about people, that we invent stuff, and then convince ourselves that the stuff we invented now means we have to do something, or can’t do other things. Not because they are right or wrong. Not because they are helpful or cruel. Not because we want to do them, or loathe the idea, but because the book we wrote says so.

It’s not religion we need to get rid of, but the idea that having power over other people is a good thing. It’s not all belief that is the problem, but the more specific belief that in some circumstances, cruelty, violence, abuse and prejudice are perfectly acceptable. If we could shake off the idea that there can only be one truth and that making people believe yours is therefore acceptable, religion would be no problem at all.

People make religions. That gives us the possibility that we could do a much better job of it, and while we’re at it, a much better job of all the things we’ve been using religion to disguise.

Something cyclical, something ceramic

It’s an odd thought that this time a week ago, Andrew Wood was nothing more than a name on a rather unusual job-poster, and I knew nothing whatsoever about fine-art ceramics. Both have rather taken over my time and attention since then. I have a knack for finding opportunities to get entirely out of my depth in short time frames, so that in itself comes as no surprise at all. Looking back it occurs to me that most of the important things in my life have come about from sudden decisions to jump into things I was in no way equipped to deal with. Apparently I like the challenge of a steep learning curve, and opportunity to see the world from a new angle.

Andrew Wood is a Stroud-based ceramic artist with quite a history, which I am now in the business of becoming fluent in. I confess this blog is partly a warm up because later I will be writing press releases for his open studio event in May. I did not know, until after I’d landed myself this opportunity, that Andrew founded Prema arts centre, in Dursley. Prema is where I saw The Tempest, with a minimal cast and a lot of hat swapping. It’s where I studied Tai Chi for 2 terms – both significant events in my life. An arts centre in a village, Prema was a place of magical possibility and wonder in my childhood and I can’t begin to unpick all the threads of influence there. Grow up with an arts centre on your horizon and the world is a very different kind of place, and being a creative person seems like a much more viable option.

I’ve always loved clay work. I have something bordering on a fetish for hand-thrown pots (there was an awesome potter in my childhood as well) and nowhere to put them. I have a longstanding fascination with the fine end of art, although I’m fairly uneducated, but I like to look. I did once hold a ceramic ash-tray made by Picasso. What I’ve never encountered before is clay worked very much in 3d and yet presented on a wall almost like a flat piece of art. I’ve also never previously encountered anyone painting onto clay with oil paints. The art I’ve been looking at over the last week is like nothing I’ve seen before. I’ve dusted it, getting to know the colours, textures, shapes. I am reminded of the suggestion that writing about any other form of creative expression makes about as much sense as dancing about architecture.

You can see some images of Andrew’s work here – http://www.andrew-wood.com/the-shape-of-things-to-come but it really doesn’t do the experience justice. The photographs don’t capture the intensity of colour or the physical scale of the work – it’s big. The free-standing piece at the bottom is nearly as tall as me.

One of the things I’ve learned in the last few days, is that a process has been underway in the fine art world that seems entirely comparable to what has happened in publishing and music. A narrowing of possibility, a closing of doors, a caution and conservatism that limits scope for everyone involved at the creative end. Twenty, thirty years ago it was a lot more viable to make a living by making art – be that fine art, literature, theatre or music. It was also a good deal more feasible to make a living at the popular end as well. Something has gone awry there, and it is right across the creative industries. I had been nursing a hope that some other spaces might be different, but the recent crash-course and what I’ve been picking up about high brow literature and theatre indicates a depressing universality.

Perhaps it is in part because I grew up with an arts centre in my awareness that I am so convinced that collectively we need art, and we need it to be viable for creative people to make a living out of what they do. There’s a curious circularity to all of this.

Unfriending

Once upon a time if you fell out with someone, there was no simple mechanism for expressing this to your wider community. No symbolic divorcing was available, and either you avoided them in person, or you couldn’t and life went on. The word ‘unfriend’ did not exist, nor did the concept. I am fascinated by the way facebook has changed things for those of us who frequent it – and those other social media sites as well.

There have been seven people in my life who were known to me personally and whom it became, at various times over the last five years or so, necessary to unfriend. We’ll leave aside the spammers and the random internet connections that didn’t work because those would never have existed pre-internet anyway. Seven people I just didn’t want to interact with any more. There were reasons, some more serious than others, but it boils down to a quality of life thing and not wanting to be messed about or made needlessly miserable. In many ways the whys are irrelevant, and also too personal to share. The mechanics of it are the more interesting bit, along with the emotional impact.

Unfriending is in many ways a ritual and symbolic action of rejection. If we have friends in common and do not go so far as to block, there will remain a degree of mutual visibility. Even a blocked person in touch with mutual friends does not disappear entirely, sometimes. So the tools of the internet do not deliver total separation and freedom from the person who was driving you nuts, if they are part of your wider network.

Phrases like ‘you’re not my friend any more’ have echoes of the school playground to them. The youthful ease of acquiring and rejecting people perhaps has online parallels. Perhaps the ‘adult’ version is to be more tactful, less honest, more passive-aggressive in our dealings with people who are physically present but no longer liked or valued. Perhaps there was more honesty, integrity and utility in the childhood drawing of lines, the willingness to be affronted and the aptitude for walking away. Perhaps being socialised into tolerating what drives us mad, accepting what wounds us and putting up with those we find offensive is not as wise and mature as it’s presented.

I’ve tried it both ways, online and offline, and I am increasingly a fan of deliberate, considered unfriending where appropriate. The world is a big place and there are more people in the small town I inhabit than I could ever meaningfully interact with. Why not walk away when people do things I am really uncomfortable with, hurt by or unhappy about? We are not such a small tribe that we must of necessity work together.

The counter arguments are many. The challenge is supposedly good for me, they’re doing me a favour really. Well, I’ve come to the conclusion this is for me to decide and not for anyone else to tell me. I’ve run into the ‘this is a good person so you shouldn’t be hurt by what they do’ line a few times. That’s bullshit. If it’s necessary to defend someone as ‘a good person’ I think there’s very good odds they’re a lousy person who makes a lot of noise about how good they are. I get plenty of helpful, meaningful, growth-inducing challenges from people who do not make me miserable, so I’ll be sticking with those. I’m very suspicious now of anyone who thinks I’m so crap as to need taking apart and knocking down, but who still wants to be around me. That’s a combination I now run away from as soon as I spot it.

The other argument is that maybe these people need me in their tribe, to challenge and help them. I’ve had it suggested to me, and I’ve given it some thought. I just don’t have enough of a Jesus complex to hang around martyring myself for people who don’t seem to like me much, or value me, or have any actual use for me. There are plenty of other people, why expend all my energy on the high-maintenance few who don’t even like what I do? That’s just silly.

The ritual of unfriending has a lot of symbolic and magical power. It is a strong statement, not to be used lightly and better not deployed in haste or in anger. But sometimes, drawing a line and saying ‘enough, thank you,’ is a powerful and liberating thing to do. Now, onto the good things with the lovely people…

Druidry and destruction

One of nature’s lessons is that new life depends upon the collapse, death and decay of the old. Destruction and creation go hand in hand and are mutually dependent. Nothing grows forever unchecked – even the cancer will have to cease expanding when the host dies.

We tend to celebrate the growth and the up swings. Partly because they make us happy, but I suspect they also make us happy because they are socially reinforced. To be in a decay stage, falling apart, diminishing, withdrawing, and the such is associated with failure. Our stories link progress with growth, expansion, accumulation and increase. Therefore if we’re going the other way, there’s something wrong with us and we should hide it and feel shame.

I’ve spent my adult life with phases of burnout, meltdown and full-on collapse. I’ve spent a lot of time hiding them, and I’ve spent time dealing with how uncomfortable some people are if I even admit I have problems. Gods help you if you want to work with the falling away, because then you’re self indulgent, wallowing in it, feeling sorry for yourself. When did we mostly agree that being relentlessly cheerful and progress-orientated was the way to go and that anything else is suspect?

Breaking down is part of the process of being alive, and it is utterly necessary. You have to break open a seed before it can shoot. You have to break down the old leaves to make new soil. Changing our minds, feelings, world view is a big process and you can’t do that without dismantling the self. These are the autumn and winter parts of the soul’s cycle. Our Wheel of the Year stories do not tell us to howl, go mad and burn our house down. They tell us to rest, to be still and quiet through the gentle darkness, not screaming and rending.

There is a needful place for the tearing and yelling, for the breaking of things, of self and mind. Those lovely fluffy chicks of spring do not get to hatch unless they can savage the egg they are in. Consider what that might be like, when you’ve lived inside an egg your whole life and now you have to destroy the egg, or die.