Nimue Brown's Blog, page 398

Pagans at Lent

Lent is a festival that exists in a context of tradition, and the cycle of the seasons. For our ancestors, Shrove Tuesday was the time when you used up the last of the fat, flour and eggs, making the pancakes. That which had been stored from the previous year would tend to run out somewhere around now, while new resources would not yet be reliably available. The thin weeks that were an inevitable consequence, became Lent. Making a virtue out of necessity, and a spiritual experience out of the hard times is a good, pragmatic response. It wasn’t a case of giving up one luxury of choice, it was a case of having very little to live on.

With our complex supply chains and supermarkets, the majority of us do not expect to feel the pinch at this time of year. We are disconnected from the cycles of the land. A Pagan might therefore consider joining in with Lent in order to connect with their ancestors, and to re-connect with an agricultural wheel that wasn’t persistently bountiful. Of course if you aren’t in Europe, you may have a wildly different seasonal situation to consider, and that should be taken into account.

For many, the quarterly power bills came out over the last few weeks. Winter is the time we need most light and heating. If you were a bit marginal with the money, it may well be that the coming of the winter bill creates a need to cut back and save money in the coming months. Modern fuel poverty may well re-invent Lent as a practical necessity for some.

When I was a child, back in the eighties, giving up something for Lent was common in the community around me. However, I did not see much of it as a spiritual practice. Competitive self-denial, self-aggrandisement through a personal martyrdom where the difficulty of the sacrifice was much emphasised… when you have a great deal, giving up some small thing is not as difficult or as noble as we might like to imagine. It’s also a very long way from genuine privation.

If you are thinking about Lent at all, it is worth sparing a thought for the many who are fasting and doing without luxuries. Not the people who do it by choice, but the ones so knocked down by life that they now depend on food from foodbanks. More specifically, the kind of food you can heat with water from a kettle, because they have no money for gas or electricity. For many, the experience of fasting and abstinence is not sought, or used for spiritual purposes. It is a harsh reality, and it will not magically end when the Easter eggs hit the shops.

To give up one chosen thing for Lent, as a personal exercise, seems highly suspect in this context. If you are going to make some kind of sacrifice, do it for the good of someone else who is in need. Giving your luxury foodstuffs to a foodbank for the month might be a lot more meaningful than just not buying them. I’m seeing online people taking this as a prompt to switch over to fair trade goods, or to bring other ethical considerations to their shopping.

Fasting as a practice was common for ancestors in many traditions across the globe. It has a very different feel and context when you also know what it means to give up and cut back out of necessity. We don’t have a good collective sense of the difference between necessity and luxury, nor much collective sense of what it means to lack for necessities. I think this lack of awareness contributes to our collective lack of action and compassion over people in abject poverty. Too many of us have no idea what that means, and when you look at undertaking it that way, fasting for Lent could be a very productive cultural activity indeed.

Gratitude and Druidry

It’s Thursday, and on facebook a lot of people I know will be posting Thankful Thursday pieces, acknowledging the things in their lives they are glad about. Practicing gratitude is something that happens across a range of traditions, but like everything else, some ways of doing it are more helpful than others.

Taking time regularly to recognise the things we should be grateful for helps keep life in perspective. I have so many things that others do not: A roof over my head, enough to eat, I can afford to heat my home, I am not subject to violence or bullying, I am not in a war zone, a flood zone or anything else threatening. In these things I am fortunate, and acknowledging that I must also acknowledge that others are far less fortunate than me. Much of the difference is just plain luck, and in gratitude for what I have, I can reach out a hand to try and make things a bit better for those who are worse off.

Too much gratitude is not a good thing though. When you become grateful for the pathetic scraps from someone else’s table, gratitude becomes part of a process that strips away your humanity, if you aren’t careful. I used to be so grateful that the guy I used to live with put up with me. He seemed such a saint for tolerating all my shortcomings and inadequacies. I was so grateful, for any small gesture of kindness, any moment of warmth, any time he could be bothered to spare me some attention. When what you are given dwindles steadily, and you are required, or require yourself, to maintain the same level of gratitude, all of reality starts to distort around this, and the consequences are damaging.

Practicing gratitude needs to go alongside a process of really thinking about entitlement. What should we be able to take for granted? Physical safety, perhaps. A safety net in the form of the welfare state. Rights to life, liberty and freedom of conscience. If you start feeling grateful for these things, their place in your life is not as secure as it ought to be. There’s a world of difference between being glad of good friends and being grateful for the people you feel are generously putting up with you, even though it’s clearly very hard for them.  With enough mental effort, a story of gratitude can be built around anything: He only hits me because he loves me, is a classic example. Therefore, the degree to which there is violence is the degree to which there is love, and therefore a person learns to become grateful for violence inflicted on them. These are not good lessons to learn.

A person with a sense of self-worth, is better placed to judge where gratitude is called for, and where it is not. A person with an inflated ego can readily fail to notice the things they should appreciate. So much of Druidry is about finding a balance, and this is no exception. The balances around gratitude involve the balance of self-esteem and developing a sense of entitlement that is fair. This is quite a process, but I think the best place to start is by asking not what we, personally should be entitled to, but what we think everyone should be entitled to.

Working time for gratitude into your Druidry is a really productive activity. It changes how we view our own lives and is all about our relationships with the world around us. Gratitude is a response, to people, to luck and opportunity, to beauty. It calls into question what, if anything, we should be able to take for granted. It requires us to ask what entitlements life might have, and in this way invites us to respect the sacred in all things. Ideas of gratitude are tied up with ideas of worth and appreciation, and with a sense of joy and delight as well as the needful stuff. Exploring it helps us become more alert to the good stuff, too. There is much to be grateful for, but it is essential to be grateful for the right things.

Connecting with nature

For many people who come to Paganism as adults, connecting with nature is very much part of the point, and also a key part of the work to be done. If you’ve woken up from insulated, urban living and realised you do not have any familiarity with the seasons, the agricultural year or what the trees are doing, that re-connecting can be the essence of Paganism. The Wheel of the Year festivals become important markers as you learn your way around the seasons, and may be the one reliable time you get out ‘into nature’ to experience it firsthand.

Having spent a while running assorted gatherings, I’ve seen a lot of this. People for whom time under trees was not normal. People whose lives had not allowed them to spend time wandering in urban parks getting to know the songbirds. Folk for whom the agricultural year was an arcane mystery, needing considerable grappling to get to grips with. We are, as a culture, sorely disconnected from the soil, from food production and from the natural world. Only on the occasion of severe weather do we reliably notice what’s going on out there.

As you get to grips with the basics, you start realising how much more there is to know. Specialism starts to develop, moving into tree lore or herb lore, perhaps, getting to know the exact habits of a certain river, exploring the creatures that live in a valley, learning the paths of a wood. We start to see the trees as individuals, small birds become species, genders, and distinct from each other. Generic leafy things become medicines, poisons and snacks.

This kind of work can keep you occupied for years. There is so much cerebral work to do, so much to learn that you can study for the rest of your life and never run short of new things to find out about. Learning about nature, so as to engage with it deeply and work with it harmoniously, are undoubtedly key parts of what Druidry means for a great many people. It is possible to overthink, though. To become unable to see the harmonious beauty of the wood because you are too busy making a note of individual species and their properties.

Not all learning happens in the head. Our current education system focuses on abstract thought as the pinnacle of human achievement, and it encourages us to understand learning as a mind process. Learning is being able to take things apart and name the bits in this system. It is all about function and utility and being able to say why, how, and what. Sometimes also who and when, depending on subject. There are other kinds of learning that we do not have a language for. It is not head learning, it does not lead to some intellectual revelation. It is the knowledge in the body that comes from sitting on a hill all night, or swimming in the sea. It is knowing what it feels like to hear a blackbird singing at twilight, and all that other emotional and sensory knowledge that comes to us simply by being and doing. The knowledge of being alive and present. It may, or may not teach you how to do stuff. There may or may not be philosophical aspects to it. I suspect it doesn’t matter.

I think we need both. We need the intellectual learning that brings us into rational relationship with the natural world. We need the experiential learning that brings us into emotional relationship with the natural world, and often the two go together very well. Do the book study to the exclusion of personal engagement, and you’ll know a lot, but it might not mean much to you. Focus on the purely experiential and you’ll have limited scope to express it, and you may miss connections and insights because you don’t know what you’re seeing.

As an example, I saw swans in flight on Christmas morning. They were lovely. Had I not known that the timing and the wind direction meant they must have been winter migrants, I would have missed the wonder of their flying thousands of miles to be there, and the emotive impact of realising that I was seeing them at the end of their long journey. Up until then, the migration had been more of a book-knowledge for me, I’d never seen a swan doing it, and therefore did not know how beautiful it is to see one ending its journey as the day begins.

History of the troubled mind

I recently read a book on witchcraft – looking at historical witch-hunters. One of the things that struck me is that there was a time when what we now call depression, could be interpreted as magical attack – the consequence of a curse, or being afflicted by malign spirits sent to harass you. The same book also referred to melancholia, the condition of unbalanced humours. Back in the days when a person had a mix of choleric, sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic that made up the balance of their personality and physicality, a person with too much melancholic influence, would be mournful. Depression explained!

Once upon a time, if you heard voices you were either divinely inspired or afflicted by demons. Now you have schizophrenia. Go back a few hundred years, and the uncontrollable voicing of obscenities would indicate you’d been attacked by a witch. These days, you’ll have Touretts syndrome. To be a lunatic, was to be under the strange influence of the moon. Today you might be diagnosed as having a psychotic episode.

The language of mental health has changed. It sounds scientific. You get syndromes, not curses. We talk of brain chemistry rather than lunar influences and humours. Sometimes medicating to rebalance the brain chemistry solves everything. Sometimes it doesn’t. Yes, the language has changed a lot, and how we relate to mental health has changed alongside the language. The very ailments that are labelled as ‘mental health’ issues would, in other times, have been understood as moral ailments, or afflictions of the soul, instead. Modern medicine does not like to think in terms of morality and soul. It prefers ‘healthy lifestyle’ as a term.

The same core issues remain. The labels have changed, along with the logic of the labelling. How we relate to treatment has changed, but not, really speaking, the way in which we tend to stigmatise the sufferer. Perhaps the biggest change is that, as a crazy visionary, you are much less likely to become a saint or prophet these days, that door is closed for now. You just get to be ill.

Perhaps there was a good thing about ascribing poor mental health to curses, and other magical influences. The afflicted person in this context was an unfortunate victim, but might not be responsible. They could have been cursed because of envy. In a world view that saw witchcraft as tending towards evil (and the mediaeval mindset most certainly did include this perspective) the victim of wicked enchantment is not to be blamed. On the downside, some poor scapegoat may be blamed instead, and the consequences when that happened could be dire, and probably of very little use to the person suffering from what we would understand as mental illness.

We’re not much better at curing malaises of the mind and spirit than were our medieval forebears. We are better at medicating people into compliance, but in terms of fixing afflictions, not a great deal has really changed. Tranquilising people is not the same as curing them. We have new words for some very old problems, but I’m not convinced we have any more functional understanding of it than our ancestors did. Yes, it may be more technically accurate to talk about a neurotransmitter in the brain, than a demon, but as I can’t see the chemicals in my brain, that’s as abstract to me as the little chap with horns and a pitchfork. Wonky brain chemistry or demon infested, there’s still not a heck of a lot I can do some days to put myself right.

It makes me wonder if we are in fact still as wide of the mark on mental health issues as our predecessors probably were with afflictions of unbalanced humours and malevolent witchcraft.

Novel forms of insanity

During the last few months, I’ve put the current novel to one side, in order to work on writing and recording the secret audio project. There are ten new short stories, and they will be happening in a way you can hear later this year. (More information when it’s happening!) I wrote those in response to a request, with some sense of an intended audience, and a desire to get some of my own eccentricities into the mix. The result seems to involve a lot of very dark humour.

There’s a practical limit to how many things I can do with my brain at a given time. Normal life involves this blog, plus other Pagan content at Patheos.com http://www.patheos.com/blogs/agora/category/columns/druid-thoughts/ and Pagan Square http://witchesandpagans.com/Nimue-s-Wheel/Blogger/Listings/nimue-brown.html. Most days I spend time working as a Press Officer for the Green Party – blogs and press releases, some of them requiring a lot of research. These things normally leave me enough time for some creative work, but if anything else turns up, it doesn’t take long for me to reach capacity. Frequently other things turn up. Books to review, requests for articles, and in the last couple of months, a book in edits as well.

It is undoubtedly easier to write a novel when the only thing you really need to focus on from one day to the next, is the novel. All the thinking time goes on characters, plots, interactions and world building. In an ideal world once you’re in the flow, you stay there, writing through the night if needs be, free to sleep when it fits the call of the muse. In practice, it is not usually like this, and the life of the writer does not actually allow a person to work in a way that most serves the next piece of creativity. Perhaps with a first book you can do this, but once you’re out in the world, or if you have to think about paying the bills, writing is not directed purely by ‘the muse’ but by when you can grab half an hour of thinking space.

Then what happens? Yesterday, the picking up of a novel I had barely thought about, much less worked on in the last six weeks. Trying to remember what I was doing and where I was going, and to find the same voice and the same flow. A half an hour dash of putting words onto the page, hoping they fit with the other words. While I’m doing it, novel writing is a high like no other. It absorbs me entirely, and I pour heart and soul into it. This is not to say that I love it more than other forms of creativity, but that each one is a very different process. Novel writing is a special form of insanity, involving the devotion of lots of time to things that do not exist but need to be plausible. Long conversations with imaginary people about things that did not happen. Deep emotional investment in that which never was and never will be.

That in itself is enough to do odd things to the mind, but then there’s the other process, of going from words written to a book manifest in the world. The need to shift gears, grab a business hat, study contracts, consider marketing, and get out there and sell the work: To an agent, a publisher, and then anyone who might read it. Dealing with the people who do not like it, trying to work out which bits of criticism are valid and which are best ignored. Performing the strange dance that is ticking boxes for commercial success and creating something that does not look as though it was made simply to tick all the boxes.

When I am writing, all else is forgotten. When I surface, all kinds of other things creep in. The doubts and questions. What is the point of all this? What good does it do? Is it merely delusion and self-indulgence? When you’ve just spent an hour talking to pretend people, it is not difficult to imagine that the idea of putting a book into the world is just as make-believe.

I know how much richer my life is for there being fiction in it. I have loved novels ever since I was capable of reading them. I have valued those other lives and imaginary worlds that other people’s writing has allowed me to enter. I’ve also seen how the joy of creating catches other people, and the effects of dealing with the non-writing side of the process too. Write, and go a bit mad, with the industry, the economics of it, the juggling. Do not write, and also go mad, with the not writing. If there’s a way round either, I have yet to find it.

Life skills and Druid values

There are a lot of things I’m good at. I can bake and brew, I’m good with textiles and at all manner of make do and mend techniques. I can tell different kinds of wood apart, even from bits lying on the ground and I know how to use them; what can be burned and what cannot, and how to make a fire. I can make a blanket, mend a sock, cook a meal from scratch over an open fire, I have a wealth of stories and songs to keep the people around me amused, and a grasp of first aid. I am good at problem solving and at reasoning things out. During most of human history, this skills base would have stood me in really good stead, making me a valuable part of any community. Not so now.

Our ideas about what is a useful and valuable contribution have changed a lot. I think this is because access to resources is now entirely about money, and has little to do with skill or prowess. How else could a man who does not understand that all children cannot be above average end up running the education department? We’ve come to assume that wealth and utility are one and the same. Someone who does nothing but pick up their dividends, is treated with respect, while someone poor, no matter how much good they do, is woefully undervalued.

I think in turn this is a consequence of no longer living in ways that connect us to our neighbours. When your individual success impacted directly on friends, family, fellow workers and neighbours, I think we all had a much clearer sense of who was useful and to what degree. What you did, and how well you did it was of far greater relevance in terms of everyone’s wealth, than your pile of gold. In a famine, that pile of gold may be entirely worthless. I think we also used to be a lot better at finding ways for everyone to be useful. The habit of consigning large numbers of people to the trash heap, is very modern indeed.

The more basic and essential a form of work is, the less we pay people to do it. The more abstract the work is, the more we value it. Thus toilet cleaning is not well rewarded, but you can lose vast sums for your bank, as a banker, and still expect to pick up a bonus. In some areas of life, we actively reward failure, with handsome pay-offs.

The more complex our systems are, the harder it is for anyone to understand them or have oversight of them. The more complexity we have, the more we seem to believe that we need ever greater levels of complexity. We must have guards to guard the guards who watch the watchers, and someone must be employed to manage them, and someone else must manage those managers, and a third party will be needed to make sure that the managers who manage the managers are doing so in accordance with a complex set of rules and requirements. And yet we have rising incidents of malnutrition in the UK. We don’t take good care of our elderly. Our roads are full of potholes, our prisons full of illiterate people, and our positions of power populated by idiots. All that work, and so little of any obvious use going on. But it is almost valueless to be able to cook a meal, or fill in a hole.

Whatever the answer is, I am certain that every greater abstraction and complication isn’t it. I remember reading a piece by Marx about how being a small part of a production line alienates workers from their work, and turns us into machines. We’d barely got started when he explored those ideas. We’re ever more obsessed with turning ourselves into the machine, and ever more oblivious as to where that machine is going.

Courage

Of all the virtues a person might cultivate, courage is one of the ones I find most important. Honour is the primary virtue cherished by Druids, but honour without courage doesn’t amount to much. If you can only be honourable when it is safe and easy, you won’t get very far.

Fear is a very destructive and damaging force in my life, and I know I am not alone in this. There are days when the fear is so bad that I simply want to shut down and refuse to engage with the world. To do so, would be to bring about personal disaster, there are no two ways about it. To be halted by fear, is to fail. So much of what I do depends on getting out there and doing it… if I let the fear overwhelm me, I am finished. It means that often, any kind of movement at all is far better than quitting would be.

For some, courage and bravery seem like an absence of fear. From the outside they tend to look that way. Conventional wisdom has it that courage is not freedom from fear, but the ability to overcome the fear that you have. Undoubtedly this is a useful thing, but it means living with the fear.

What is courage, as a state of being? Firstly it requires a capacity for hope. You have to believe it is possible for things to be better and that taking action will help. Without that fundamental belief, there is no courage. An absence of despair, or at least not very much of it, are necessary pre-requisites for courage. Even if you are heading out to face certain death, you have to believe that doing so means something, or you’ll just pull the duvet over your head and wait for certain doom to come to you, instead. It doesn’t need to be more than a fine thread of hope, a tiny belief that some small thing could be made better. However, that dash of optimism makes all the difference. Without it, courage seems futile.

Courage requires a degree of belief in your own power. If you don’t believe that you, personally, can make a difference by acting or doing your best, you will not find the courage to stand up and try. So for there to be courage, there must be a world view that embraces the potential of the lone crusader, or that sees how many little actions contribute to changing the tide. Gloomy acceptance does not foster courage.

Then you need to have a vision of something better, so that you know which direction to move in. It might be vague, it might simply be the idea that if you act honourably you will move towards those better ways of being, but there needs to be something. Courage without honour has no idea what to be doing, and can easily turn into something else.

Courage is not merely the business of overcoming fear. Determination can do that. Fear itself can make us overcome the paralysis of fear for fear of what might be worse should we fail to act. Courage is an inner condition that says ‘I can try and there is a point’. When you have that, you can see all the things it is reasonable, and less reasonable to be afraid of, but you have the means to challenge them. You have a perspective that makes it possible to stand up and act. That kind of courage is not bombastic or sabre rattling, but it has a great deal of power.

I do not think that courage as a virtue is simply a measure of overcoming fear. It is a state of being that is not dependent on how much fear you are feeling. It is a habit of mind and a cultivation of belief that enables action regardless of fear. One can therefore have courage without feeling afraid, or with it; the measure is not the terror overcome, but a particular inner quality that enables action.

Indoor Druidry

I worry about the kind of Druid work (or similar in other traditions) that revolves primarily around the imagination. I’ve commented before that we may be too quick to assume that the fruits of our own minds are indeed full-on shamanic journeys, and to ascribe external meanings to internal desires. Paganism, in its various forms, is nature based religion. What happens if you explore that by staying in your living room and imagining nature? The odds are you get something safe, romantic and comfortable that conforms to your expectations, and derives solely from what you already know. If you don’t normally get out much, what you already know might not amount to much.

However, the flip side of this is that not everyone is in a position to go out. Not all places provide wild spaces to safely wander in. Not all people are equally capable of being out and about. Any good practice can flex to accommodate pretty much everyone who might want to use it, so an approach to Druidry that demands being under the open skies excludes those who really aren’t able to leave the house, and that doesn’t work.

Nature does not have to be ‘away’. There is a fallacy in viewing nature as something distant, exotic and separate from us. If you have access to natural light, and can see it, or feel it, then you are able to engage directly with nature. If you can hear, then an open window will eventually bring you bird song, in all probability. Even in cities, there is singing, and the sounds of wind and rain. There is something to experience and engage with. I’m lucky in that if I open my bedroom window I can hear running water and at night there are owls, loud enough to be audible even with windows shut in deep winter.

We can bring bits of nature indoors. Flowers, plants, pebbles, fossils, dried leaves, nuts, berries, feathers, bones, and so forth. It is not difficult to get nature into the living room. Once you’ve got it, there is something real to engage with, to study, contemplate and learn from. I took some willow wands from a fallen tree. The fuzzy catkins are opening, and tiny roots are forming at the bases of the stalks. Day by day I’ve watched the small changes, and I know things about this kind of willow that I did not know before. As ever, the sheer tenacity of willow inspires me. They do not quit, no matter what happens to them.

I’ve seen a lot of guides in recent years advocating that we imagine inner worlds of nature. We will only make what we know, and if we are encouraged to make those inner realms pretty, charming, safe and clean, then we will. What we too often build inside our own heads is a sanitised version of nature that has more to do with wishful thinking than the world as it is. Do we want escapist fantasy, or do we want to learn? Are we prepared for the shit, decay, pain, chaos and unfairness of the actual world? Or do we want a painting of a forest full of flawless flowers and eternal maidens where nothing ever takes a dump?

Indoor Druidry does not have to mean disconnection or self indulgence. It is entirely possible to keep it real from inside a secure space, so long as you use your imagination to bring in the real stuff, not to replace it.

Druid for sale

If you find this post about the time it was written, then Druidry and Meditation is still on sale in ebook form. A mere 99p on the English Kindle site  or $1.65 on the American site. Otherwise, console yourself with a freebie! More of that later…

Druidry and Meditation offers a range of creative, and engaging approaches to meditation, looking at how it impact on body, and mind as well as the spiritual dimensions. There are guides to creating your own meditations and there’s information about group work, and meditation in ritual. There is also a paper version.

My other Druid title, Druidry and the Ancestors is also available from all the sorts of places you might normally buy books.  This is the amazon.com link if you get the urge to have a look. Ancestors are an uncomfortable subject for many people, and for Pagans there are all kinds of extra complexities. Not least, most of us have a lot of non-Pagans between us and our Pagan ancestors. This is very much a book about the stories we tell of our ancestors and how those stories inform our lives. At least, that’s what I was aiming for!  It’s not a how-to sort of book, more a selection of ideas to play with.

I have a smaller and broader book, in the form of Spirituality without Structure - amazon uk link this time. This is very much a tiny book with big ideas, exploring the difference between religion as a social structure, and spirituality as personal experience. It’s written primarily for people who are trying to carve out their own path – so often the way of it for Pagans. It’s a book of approaches, no dogmatic how-tos, just questions to ask and things to consider that might spare a person from re-inventing the wheel.

Then with my other, far less serious hat on, there’s quite a bit of fiction out there too. Intelligent Designing for Amateurs  is a bit of a Steampunk riot. There are comedy Druids – mostly inspired by the crazy revival folk, so if you’ve been a bit depressed by our actual ancestors of tradition and need a giggle, this one may be for you. Other fictions also exist, if you poke around in my amazon stuff there is also Hunting the Egret and a bundle of short stories.

Hopeless Maine is a gothic graphic novel series I do with my other half. It’s Tom’s work adorning the blog, including the cover for Druidry and the Ancestors. If you’d like to explore the world of Hopeless freely, then www.hopelessmaine.com has the first two books in webcomic form. For more Tom Brown, you can check out his deviant art page.

Finally, if you’d like some poetry, saunter over to this bit of Druid Life  and there are two poetry collections – Beyond the Map and Lost Bards and Dreamers which are free to download as pdfs.

Different threads of inspiration

The inspiration it takes to write an essay is not the same as that which is needed for improvising a tune, or writing a poem. Problem solving inspiration is still a ‘ping’ moment in the mind, but is sought out, often, in very different ways from the approach taken to writing a poem.

I used to be fairly passive about inspiration. I would wait for it to come along, and when it did, I would work with it in whatever way seemed to make sense. This is fine if you’re creating purely for your own amusement. However, when having to produce new things to order, courting it so that it turns up dependably becomes more of an issue.

I think one of the big differences between people who create purely for the joy of it, and people whose work revolves around creating, is the relationship with inspiration. I’ve struggled a few times this week and several well-meaning people have suggested I need to just chill out and see what comes to me. It’s not an option I always have, when pieces of writing need to go out in a timely way.

When you are able to just go with the flow and respond to inspiration as it comes, the creative process is a lot more relaxed. However, it also tends to be true that if nothing automatically turns up, nothing happens. That inspiration through grace process is easily lost, and you can spend a lot of time not having inspiration and not creating as a consequence – I’ve done it, sometimes for years. It’s not a reliably happy process.

I have to know what I’m seeking inspiration for before I start. It’s not a case of being open, but of being focused. If I need a blog post, there will be a logical going over of likely topics, recent issues, and whatever prompts I’ve been given to see if any lights come on. I deliberately poke about, testing ideas, because the flash of inspiration for a blog is more likely to show up if I am trying to figure out a blog. If I need a short story, I have to not be thinking about essays. I need to be playing with scenes, settings, characters or fragments of dialogue so that the right light can come on and start me connecting thoughts into narrative.

If I want to write poetry, the process is very different indeed, calling for entirely different thinking. I have to be less linear, less structured, I need a whole other thinking process with which to court inspiration.

It is very rare that ideas come to me unsought. If inspiration manifests out of the blue, I was usually doing something with my mind that enabled it to show up. Maybe I was remembering, or trying to unpick the sense of something. Perhaps I’d been speculating, or consciously empathising with something around me. Most likely, I was not being a passive recipient hoping for some magic to happen. Most of the time that leads to very little. I’d add that those pings of random, unsought inspiration are often very hard to use for me, because they don’t belong anywhere. I’m much more likely to get a great idea for something I was working on, than a great idea where I need to figure out the application and am able to follow through on that.

From what I understand of brain functioning, much of the important stuff happens at a not-conscious level. We are not privy to the majority of our own processing. Much of the creative process happens inside our own heads, whether you believe there’s a magical component, or not. If you are using your mind, the odds of your mind making connections between things, is much greater than if you just float around in a happy cloud of indifference waiting for some magic to spontaneously show up.