Nimue Brown's Blog, page 399

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.

Wool against Weapons

c. Jaine Rose

I spent Sunday afternoon at beautiful Hawkwood, an amazing place on the edge of Stroud that does all manner of courses in a gothic venue. There were apparently about 60 of us there, sewing bits of wool to other bits of wool, and eating cake. This may strike you as an odd way to spend a Sunday…

Wool against Weapons is an incredible protest project. The aim is to create a seven mile long pink scarf, as a protest against renewing Trident. The scarf will join the Women’s Peace Camp at Aldermaston and the other Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield, Berkshire on August 9th 2014. It’s a wild thing to be doing.

As a Druid, I am very much pro-peace. I appreciate there are, however, counterarguments. Mostly they go ‘evil, terrorist nations will get nuclear weapons and if we have no means to defend ourselves, they will blow us off the face of the planet.’ It is a consideration. However, the UK is not a superpower. Maybe it’s time we accepted that we are not a world-dominating giant and started thinking more realistically about our place in the world. If we are bombed to hell, as an island, we’re dust. Yes, some guys in a submarine can exact revenge, but so would every other nation on the planet. America is a much bigger consideration for rogue governments than our couple of submarines ever will be.

In terms of weapons stockpiles internationally, we are all holding far more than can possibly be justified by the rogue nations argument. I’m very conscious that making and storing weapons is not a risk free activity. Weapons that exist can wind up in the wrong hands. Things can go wrong with them and accidents happen. When you are playing with weapons of mass destruction, small mistakes are very dangerous indeed. Humans, being flawed, fallible, sometimes deluded creatures, would do well to consider the implications. We could do with being a lot less arrogant, and a lot less willing to stash great supplies of methods for slaughter. The thing about nuclear, is that it reliably kills a lot of civilians. It is not a targeted response to rogue leadership, it is a means for mass slaughter. There are better ways to defend ourselves.

Replacing Trident is going to cost some 80 billion ponds. We can’t afford to take care of our poor and vulnerable (allegedly) we can’t afford to maintain our flood defences, and we’ve cut funding for the arts, for tree planting, for libraries and leisure centres. 80 billion pounds is a lot of money. I wonder at our priorities when we are happy to accept an epidemic of malnutrition, but we can afford to replace weapons that we probably wouldn’t ever use. They’re a deterrent, to use them would be to plunge the world into mutually assured destruction. They are a bluff. An 80billion pound bluff, while the number of homeless children rises. This is insane.

So I went along and sewed, and I shall have a go at making a segment as well.

http://www.woolagainstweapons.co.uk/ and https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wool-Against-Weapons/570747079617581?fref=ts for more.

Balancing, wobbling, sometimes falling over

There are days when I have a keen sense of direction. Most days, I do not. If I can concoct a grand plan to get me as far as lunchtime, I’m doing fairly well. There are days when this worries me, and days when I feel all live-in-the-moment, and it seems ok. Most days I worry about whether I’m making the right calls, or balancing things wisely. There are a number of variables to consider, and if I get one of them badly wrong, nothing is going to work at all.

Much as I would like to live in a world where resources are distributed according to need or merit, this is not the size of it. Trying to find things I can do that make sure we’re viable financially, is an ongoing one. Every project I take on, I have to consider the time involved, what I can’t do if I’m doing it, and the chances of it paying. There’s a popular assumption that published authors earn decent money, but the truth is that the vast majority of us do not. Do I spend today selling books, or writing them? I have do both, and I need to get the balance right.

I’ve tried doing work purely for commercial reasons. I’m better off doing that over stuff I do not feel strongly about, rather than trying to take my inspiration and bend it repeatedly into money-making shapes. Again, there are hard balances to strike. I strongly believe that good art is also entertaining and accessible. I’m no kind of elitist. However, pop culture seems to be full of reboots and revisits, with little room for innovation, and pressure to produce new things that look just like the old things, only with more explosions. It didn’t used to be like that. Once upon a time innovation sold, and exciting new ideas found a market. I feel like we’ve gone badly wrong somewhere.

There are more causes out there than I can count. More things that need doing than I can contribute to, much less fix. There are more people who need help than I can reach out to. I see more problems than I know how to tackle, and sometimes the biggest problem is picking a place to start and maintaining the belief that there is a point. Small differences matter, but the more time I spend on the politics, the more aware I get of the enormity of all that is wrong in the world. There are times when what I need is to retreat into some safe and comfortable place – a good book, an engaging film – somewhere to escape to where I do not have to do anything. I can see why some people seek oblivion in a bottle or a needle. I don’t do it, but there are days when I can very definitely see the allure.

I’m sure life didn’t used to be like this. Partly it is because we all have too much information now. Crusading grandmothers had one or two causes, and some idea of where they fitted in the world. They did not live under constant bombardment from advertisers, nor were images of international misery pumped into their homes on a daily basis. They had plenty of other problems to contend with, no doubt. However, there are days when the idea that it would be enough to have clean laundry and dinner in the pot, is very appealing. It no longer feels like enough to raise a child and keep a home, I must do a lot of other things as well and even so, I have no sense of direction. No idea of what I need to be doing, or where to push. No sense of what would be sufficient achievement on any front. That may be a symptom of something that goes far beyond personal experience.

I’ll pull on the press officer hat for an hour or so. Then I’ll see about audio recording. I don’t know beyond then. Back to domestic work perhaps. A thousand causes and no place to start.

Being difficult

In the last year or so I’ve found myself in all kinds of new situations, dealing with people who do not know me well. I wanted to be able to jump back into the world after my hermit period, bringing all the energy, enthusiasm and stamina I used to have. The trouble is, I do not reliably have all of those things all the time anymore. I have to be careful around getting enough sleep, or I get ill. I don’t handle conflict, aggression or controlling behaviour well, either.

Admitting that I am a flawed and fragile thing, and flagging up in advance where I am likely to struggle, has not been easy. At first I hated how useless it made me feel. Arty, bohemian types often keep late hours, and trying to say that really I can’t start working in a thinky way at nine at night, felt really difficult. Especially not if I was ill and tired to start with.

As I’ve explored this, I’ve found there tends to be one of two outcomes. Option one is that the people around me take this seriously and budget it in, they plan extra time for me to manage energy levels. I get afternoon meetings, and if I’m flagging, it is ok for me to go curl up somewhere. A lot of the time, being honest about what I can and can’t do, simply results in the people around me gently flexing to accommodate that. No judgement, no criticism, no pressure, no problem. It’s an incredibly liberating experience.

Now and then, the outcome is very different. I might get a lecture about how I should not ask anyone to walk on eggshells around me. I might find people blithely overrun with timings and expect me to still be viable starting much later. I might be treated as though I’m letting the side down, being selfish or making a fuss about nothing if I can’t keep up. The assumption that I’m being wilfully awkward has caused me a lot of hassle along the way.

What has made it hard for me, is the feeling that if I own up to having serious but intermittent restrictions on what I can do, people will judge and reject me, assume I’m faking it, or otherwise think ill of me. There are definitely people who do that, but realising this is neither acceptable, nor inevitable has changed a lot for me. I can choose, and I do not have to choose the people for whom I am simply too much trouble and not worth bothering with. Why should I bother with someone who cannot be bothered with accommodating me?

In the last week, I’ve faced major anxiety sources, and done so with easy-going support. I’ve had some outrageously late nights, and watched my body seize up by slow degrees. So I’m back to the sleeping a lot, ready for the next big thing I want to do (Tuesday). As I can pace myself, this is no problem. If the people around me take on trust what I can and cannot do, and feel no need to tell me it’s not good enough or I should try harder, its fine. If no one treats me like a failure because I can’t run flat out all the time, life is a lot easier.

It’s been a bit of a revelation for me, over the last year. I’ve watched how people around me treat me, and react to me. I’m voting with my feet. Any space that can’t flex to accommodate my fairly modest needs, is not a space I need to be in.

Notes from the adventure

The last few days, I’ve been gallivanting about, and you’ve been seeing blog posts I set up at the start of the week. It’s been quite an experience, so, here’s some of what I’ve been up to, and a few reflections along the way.

On Wednesday we went to the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards at the Royal Albert Hall. It’s a huge, Victorian venue, and it was sold out. We saw Bellowhead, Full English, Martin and Eliza Carthy, Fisherman’s Friends, Clanad, Susan Vega, Peggy Seeger and others. I’ve spent my whole life in and out of folk things, and this enthusiastic celebration of the modern folk scene is lovely in the extreme. What really struck me was the little acceptance speeches from winners of various awards – warm, measured, not self indulgent at all. Every single one gave a sense of a person rooted in the community and the tradition. What makes folk go is not the big and famous names, but the many, barely heard of people who pass on songs and tunes, run clubs, sing floor spots and show up as an audience.

Folk is very much a grass roots thing, and even as the awards celebrated the big names, there was a real consciousness that they are the flowering of something that is much, much bigger. We could use a bit more of that in mainstream culture, both in terms of the grass roots spaces where new creative folk can flourish, and in reducing the massive egos that tend to dominate celebrity culture.

Thursday saw an expedition to Brighton, to see the sea, and the gothic skeleton of the old pier. It was also an opportunity to hang out with Professor Elemental and plot good things – Tom and I have been working with the Professor for some time now, and there’s a lot more of that to come. I was very taken with Brighten – a colourful place with lots of unique shops and a really vibrant atmosphere. So many high streets are turning into clones with near identical collections of chain stores, so it’s great to go somewhere with diversity and character.

Friday saw us travelling back, a journey on which we spotted half a dozen red kites. These beautiful birds had all but vanished from the UK when I was a child, so their comeback is something to be really encouraged by.

As I type this, we’ve just learned that comics journalist Bill Baker has died, suddenly and of natural causes. We never got to meet Bill in person, but he championed our work, and his energy and enthusiasm helped us, both in terms of raising our profile, and also in terms of morale. A kind and generous chap, he will be sorely missed.

It’s been a strange few days, much of it good, the last bit not at all so. Treasure the lovely people and the good stuff, there is no knowing how long you have with anything. Life is short and precious.

The challenge of Jack Monroe

For those of you outside the UK, Jack Monroe is a single mum who has given a face and voice to UK poverty. She is also completely at odds with right wing myths about the poor, which makes her very important indeed.

Jack is a blogger, and you can find her here – http://agirlcalledjack.com/ she has a book, and does things with Sainsburys and talks at Green Party conferences, and these days probably doesn’t go hungry any more. But she’s been to the bottom, and she knows what it’s like to have nothing but debt.

The right wing story about poverty, is that the poor are feckless. The poor are poor because we are lazy, ignorant, work-shy. When we have money we blow it on drugs, fags, alcohol and tattoos. We have no pride, and no work ethic, but delight in fleecing the system and getting something for nothing. With a story like that, it’s very easy to justify not giving money to the poor. We’d only waste it. So easy to say there is no point even trying to help us because we are too stupid and lazy to help ourselves.

Jack’s story paints a very different picture. She was unlucky. It really is that simple. She didn’t make especially bad decisions or irresponsible choices. She didn’t get herself pregnant (think about that for a moment) to get housing. Things went wrong for her and she got into a lot of trouble and for a while her life was hell. Because she is also strong, brave and determined, she turned her life around thanks to a bit of help in the form of food bank aid, amongst other things. She got lucky, off the back of her hard work (you need both, usually), her blog became a book and her story brought her work and a new start.

It’s not a unique story. There’s another famous one, the lone single mum, unable to afford to heat her house, writing in cafes, who went on to become a legendary author and one of the richest people in the UK for a while.

Most people who fall on hard times are simply unlucky. Most people who get the breaks Jack Monroe and JK Rowling did are just plain lucky. The vast majority of people who get into trouble are trying not to be, until or unless they succumb to despair. Most people want a decent quality of life, and some dignity.

Anyone can fall. No one is so secure that a run of bad luck could not put them in the gutter. Whether you get to stay in the gutter, depends a lot on how able you are to get up, and that in turn depends to a degree on whether you get any help. If you write people off as useless, the odds of them staying down are really good. What Jack Monroe and JK Rowling demonstrate to the world is that if you take care of the people who fall on hard times, they can pick themselves up, and amazing things happen.

We can choose to punish the poor because there are a few people who abuse the system, or we can choose to support the poor because there are some people who go through hell and come back to do amazing, powerful things that have huge benefits for us all. It probably comes down to whether you enjoy punishing people, or you enjoy giving people a chance to thrive, and the current culture in the UK seems to take far too much pleasure in the suffering of others. There’s little to be proud of in kicking people who are already down, but all too often, that’s exactly what happens.

Folk Druid

One of the big influences for me in terms of how I do ritual, came from my experience of sinagarounds in folk clubs. Normally, someone runs a singaround, choosing who will go next and, if they know who does what, trying to get a balance between songs, tunes, stories and poetry.  Of course people sometimes do other than is usually their habit, so it’s an inexact science!

When someone runs a singaround in this way, they are central to the proceedings and their personality tends to dominate. There is very clearly one person in charge, and though many other people will be active participants, there’s a definite power balance.

What changed everything for me, was that I had a baby. I was still organising and promoting the folk club, but I needed an option on racing out the room if the small one became uncooperative. I needed to dismantle my own authority and replace it with something egalitarian, that would work perfectly well if I found myself absent for ten minutes now and then. So we sat in a circle, and just went round.

A number of things happened. Firstly, knowing when it is going to be you takes the pressure off the rest of the time. That tends to make things more relaxed. Knowing it’s going to be you next has musicians reaching for instruments, and people grabbing whatever else they needed in the gap or two that would come before their turn. Consequently it was a lot slicker and we wasted far less time with people dithering over where their guitar was, and what to sing. That was a quality improver.

There were knock on effects. In a normal singaround, it’s only the organiser who tends to comment on material and compliment performers. When the singing is just going around, it results in anyone who feels moved to speak commenting on songs. Again, there’s a distribution of power here, and it works well. I found that if I needed to hop out for a while, the whole thing just kept going. All I really had to do was start the evening off, call half time, start the second half and wrap up the end. If we had a little time to spare but couldn’t go all the way round, even that could be democratised by inviting people to request performances of specific songs – tending to result in the best performers getting some extra time.

Many of the same things apply to ritual circles. No matter what the purpose of the circle, it will be more robust if everyone involved feels some ownership, and therefore some responsibility for making it go. Distributed ownership seems more innately Pagan to me than more domineering forms of leadership, as well.

Folking about

I’m not really here. This is a blog post written in advance to maintain the flow, because I am offline, gallivanting about. This is quite a big deal for me, because I can’t remember when I last had a whole day off, and there’s going to be one of those, and probably two half days to keep it company.

This is a story that begins on the narrow boat. Canals are lovely in summer, but in winter, with no surface on the towpath, and no lights, those winter nights are isolating. When the weather is bad, getting out of an evening can be difficult. During the boat period, we did not get out much during the evenings in winter, and those evenings were long. What kept us sane and connected to the world, was a little wind up radio, with its aerial wired to the curtain poles.

It was a lesson in ancestral life. Electrical lighting and cars have not been with us that long, when you think about it. We take for granted being able to see of an evening, and being able to easily travel from our homes of an evening, should we so wish. Street lights, and predictable tarmac surfaces, are also great facilitators. For most of our ancestors, the roads after dark where unlit, and fairly dangerous places where thieves and wild creatures might be lurking! The further back you go, the more dangerous it would have been to go wandering round at night. The little circles of light and civilization become ever more important.

The modern western human spends the winter at home, and for the majority, light and heat are available at the flick of a switch. A sense of connection with the rest of the world comes readily when you have a TV, with up to date news, and human voices. To be out, isolated by the dark is less usual, but still available. Poverty and/or location can deliver. Sometimes there were no friendly lights near us where we moored. In the darkness, with bad weather battering the boat, we would have felt very isolated indeed, had it not been for the radio. Our contact with humanity. Our opportunity to feel like normal people. For Tom and I, working from home exacerbated this because we missed those daytime opportunities for normality that I think many boaters benefit from.

One of the features of those two winters, was BBC Radio 2’s Wednesday night folk program. A welcome dash of culture and community in our weeks. Two years running, we listened to the Folk Awards, and dared to imagine that there would come a time when, with lives, finances and travel options better organised, we could go to that. It was our shared Cinderella-goes-to-the-ball type daydream, only without the silly shoes.

So, this autumn, we were listening to the folk show from the comfort of the flat, and via the computer, and not having to wind it at all. The shout out came for tickets, for the Folk Awards, and we just looked at each other, and then we started scrambling to get on the website. It is easy to get to London from here, and so we are going. There will be adventures. We’ve come such an amazingly long way from where we were this time last year, and the prospects ahead of us are looking really good. In the meantime… there will be folk.

Exhaustion, bees and depression

A total absence of energy is often taken to be a symptom of depression. Based on experience, I am inclined to think this is not a simple case of cause and effect. Exhaustion can be as much a cause of depression as a symptom of it.

Every other mammal rests. The creatures that work flat out – the busy bees and their fellows – have very short life spans. We humans have got into the idea that some of us, should be working like bees, despite the fact that our mammal bodies really don’t handle this well. We are meant to rest. If we do not rest, then eventually we fall over. Based on watching my own cycles of burnout and depression, it tends to be the case that I get depressed when I am exhausted, and not the other way round. Exhaustion is not a symptom for me, it is the root cause. There are days when it takes all the will I can muster to get up and keep doing. Continue that day after day, with no proper breaks and no respite, and body and mind alike will eventually falter.

We are sold the idea that hard work is both a virtue, and the answer to all risks of poverty. Hard working people are celebrated by politicians, while those who are not able to be working hard enough are denigrated with words like ‘scroungers’. If hard work were all it took to be successful, I would be significantly more successful than I am. If hard work were the magic answer, those years my other half spent working two jobs and only getting a few hours sleep a night, would have made him rich rather than damaging him.

I know a lot of people who work very hard, and many of them are not especially successful. There’s an influence in choice of job – if you set out in life to get a job that will pay a lot of money, you’re probably doing better than someone who answered a calling to teach, to help, to put something of beauty and innate worth into the world. Medicine seems to be an exception there. If we measured people by the value of their contributions, teachers and nurses would be a good deal better paid, and football players would not, I suspect, have quite such vast incomes.

Work hard, throw all of your energy, passion and inspiration into what you do, and one of two things will happen. Either you will see no significant benefit, or you will get somewhere. The difference in outcomes may have more to do with luck than your own efforts. To work hard and soulfully in any capacity, and see no return, is soul destroying after a while. Depression seems an entirely natural response to this. To be unvalued, not well remunerated, not going places, seems to invalidate not only the work, but the soul and effort that went into it. This is always an issue for creative people, and very often an issue for anyone who gives a damn about what they were doing.

We do not live in a meritocracy. How good you are and how hard you work often do not count for much. The loudest, angriest voice often wins the argument. The person with the most buying power pays for the result they want. The person willing to do whatever it takes to make the profit, makes the profit and never mind the exploitation along the way. We spend our school years being told to try our best, work hard, and strive, and then we get out into the real world and find those rules frequently do not apply. If you want to be successful, you’re much better off getting someone else to work hard, while you cream off the profits and sit back. That way lies respect, power, and kudos. Work hard, and all bets are off as to what may come from this.

Nothing offends those in power like poor people with no desire to work themselves to death as busy little bees, enabling someone else to make a fortune. I am not a bee. I want a culture shift.

Putting down the baggage

Baggage is heavy, it slows you down and is easily tripped over. I’m finding at the moment that an array of baggage I’d not noticed I was hauling, is making life hard. The baggage announces that things are bound to go wrong because I’m not good enough and will be judged accordingly. It borrows the voices of everyone who has ever ridiculed and denigrated me, to tell me that failure is inevitable. Important things will go wrong, and they will go wrong because I am inadequate, and letting the side down. But then, no matter how well I’ve done and no matter how difficult the circumstances, there have always been people keen to point out how I should have done it so much better, faster, etc. My mistake was to listen to them.

The baggage I carry most readily is caused by feeling that I’ve failed. The mistakes I have made, my weaknesses, shortcomings and insufficiencies are what haunt me. I can often let go of unkindness that has come to me from other people. I can quite often forgive and forget, or find excuses and justifications for them, that lets them off the hook. I let the people who wound me get away with it, and shoulder a bag full of it-was-all-my-fault, and heft it about. Sometimes the weight of these squashes me and I struggle to move.

It’s taken me a long time to learn how to be wary. I’ve accepted people who have asked me to shoulder the blame. I’ve been reduced to weeping, panicking distress and let myself be persuaded it is my fault for being weak, emotional, demanding… Those are difficult bags to put down. They grow into you after a while. They have become me such that putting them down feels a lot like tearing my own skin off.

I’ve found the best solution is to pick things over and look for other possible explanations. I know I get things wrong sometimes – we all do. It is important to me to understand those mistakes so that I can learn and improve. Mistakes are key to learning. Someone who cares about me will help me make sense of things when there’s a problem. It’s a very basic manifestation of care, that. I do not want to avoid the baggage by deciding that I am always good and right, because that would prevent me from seeing my mistakes, and turn me into someone who requires everyone else to shoulder the blame. That would not be ok.

So I pick things apart, and I look for the exact points at which my judgement was wonky, or I was working from insufficient data, and I try to make sense of them and see what can be learned. So long as I’m not dealing with people who require me to be innately wrong so that they get to always be perfect, the unpicking works. I can make sense of things, resolve things, do better next time. Sometimes I act in haste or in anger. Sometimes I am not as compassionate as I would like to be. Only in owning and holding that can I move forward and change it. Owning it hurts, always. Failure to own it causes a lot more damage. I have learned that I can own and hold a shortcoming, work through to understanding it and then stop beating myself about the head with it. I do not have to drag every failure behind me as I go. I just have to learn and do better next time.