Nimue Brown's Blog, page 401

Triggering and justice

I do not have any kind of formal PTSD diagnosis, although it’s been suggested a few times by people qualified to say, that it might be an issue for me. To get a diagnosis, I’ve have to show up and answer questions, and I have resisted this strenuously. This week really required me to look hard at what’s happening there.

I’ve just had a wholly different situation in which professional scrutiny was an option. It went fairly painlessly, and well on the day, but the level of anxiety, panic attacks and flashbacks beforehand were startling. I haven’t been like that over anything in a while. If you suffer from PTSD, then you will have triggers that give flashbacks and really bad reactions. I do seem to have these symptoms, and it would appear that professional scrutiny is a trigger for me. This makes it nigh on impossible to bear the prospect of asking for proper help.

How I might have got here is no great mystery. People who experience trauma and who are not helped are more vulnerable to being further traumatised. There is nothing worse for a trauma victim than being made to revisit the memories, but for several years, I was repeatedly forced into contact with professional people who demanded I did just that. Every new professional in the equation wanted a retelling of the worst things that have happened to me, so they could come to their own decision about whether or not I was telling the truth.

What that adds up to is ten different occasions when I had to talk in detail about traumatic experiences. There was also one hideous physical examination. Most of the professional people I had to deal with were not professionals when it came to dealing with my issues – they had other roles, and no training in how to minimise the damage for me. Several of them were disbelieving and hostile, putting me in situations of having to revisit trauma whilst being told off, blamed, humiliated and otherwise made to feel awful and responsible. Several were keen to minimise both the physical and psychological impact of what I’d experienced. Perhaps because they did not understand and were unable to imagine. The one additional round of talking to a professional who was in the mix just to help me – a counsellor – resulted in being taken seriously, but by then I was so damaged and demoralised by how I’d been treated by other professionals, that I found it difficult to make good use of her time.

In any compassionate situation, what happens to a trauma victim post-trauma is that support is given to make sure they do not carry a sense of blame or responsibility for what happened. This is key to recovery. However, we have an adversarial court system, and what I’ve been put through is the exact opposite. I had years of a process of being blamed, held accountable and told it was my fault and my failing, or that I was lying. The idea of professional scrutiny has become unbearable to me, and there is now no way I could now bear to submit to letting anyone try and help me with this.

What troubles me most about this is the certainty that it won’t just be me. All victims of crime are vulnerable to feelings of distress and trauma. Victims of violent and sexual crimes are likely to be traumatised by their experiences, and to need professional support to overcome this. What we have instead is this adversarial justice system that exposes victims to hostile questioning, requires them to repeat, in great detail the worst things that have happened to them, thus increasing the trauma, and where attempts to humiliate and discredit are pretty much a given. This is not justice. Even if you win, having to endure the process is not justice. Given our increasing levels of understanding about human psychology, this whole process needs a radical rethink. I do not have any answers, but I feel strongly that we need to be asking questions.

Unexpectedly in charge

Many of the things I have ended up doing in terms of service, and running activities, has not been sought. I set out to write stuff. Along the way, volunteering jobs plummeted from the air like grand pianos, often having a slow impact when eventually they hit me. I’ve been lured, guilt tripped and, most often, just asked nicely to have a go at things, and so I end up entirely out of my depth, doing things I am in no way qualified or experienced enough to do, because there’s no one any better qualified to do the job.

From what I’ve seen of the Pagan community, this is entirely normal. The new Pagans have always massively outnumbered the experienced teachers. The need for events, rituals and gatherings is always greater than the supply of confident and experienced people able to make them go. The result is a lot of cobbling together, and the person least quick to decline getting the job.

I started running meditation groups years ago because my moot expressed interest in doing meditation sessions. As I’d been meditating for some time, and had been to organised meditation groups so knew roughly what it was supposed to look like, and because I was also young and foolish, I assumed I could do this. My automatic default when faced with a thing I do not know how to do, is to try and find a book about it. Where there are plenty of meditation books out there, I couldn’t find much that was innately Pagan, or about running meditation groups and writing pathworkings. I found Pete Jenning’s Pathworking book and it got me started, but nonetheless I spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel.

There are lots of places to go to learn all kinds of spiritual things. What there aren’t, is resources for dealing with all the practical stuff around finding yourself in charge of a thing. Pagan leadership, running meditation groups, writing pathworkings – much of this isn’t glamorous. There’s a lot of hard slog involved and tons of fairly mundane and tedious things which, if you don’t pay attention to them, will mess up your esoterica. Left the phone on? Got a big enough room? Prepared for the vegans when it comes to the catering? Prepared for the vegans and the dedicated omnivores to get really angry with each other and then expect you to sort it out?  You probably aren’t. I mostly wasn’t, and no doubt the peculiar art that is running things will have plenty more surprises in store for me in the future.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned to expect when running Pagan things, it is to be caught off-guard in some way. Not always in a bad way, though. The imaginative, eccentric and innovative nature of Pagans can create some glorious surprises. So, I wrote Druidry and Meditation (cheap on Kindle just now) in the hopes of sparing other people from wheel invention. I’m also teaching a course over at Patheos  sharing what I know about the practicalities of trying to run things. I’ve spent a lot of years learning things the slow, hard way – for which read making a lot of mistakes because I didn’t know any better. If I can use that to spare someone else some hassle, that would be a lovely thing!

Human Sacrifice

This is a highly speculative blog post, I’m not claiming any of this is ‘right’ but it may be a productive way of reimagining a more uncomfortable aspect of human history.

I’ve been watching ‘Planet Earth’ recently – as a box set arrived over the festive period. I’ve seen great herds of wildebeest crossing rivers and being eaten by crocodiles. I’ve seen vast flocks of bats, and the snakes who wait at the mouths of their caves. Seals being eaten by sharks. Pretty much every creature that gathers in large groups to travel or feed, seems to get these predators. The large numbers improve the odds of survival for any given individual, but also attract the hunters.

We are a soft and squishy species. Our hides, teeth and claws really aren’t up to much. Tool use, developing into weapons of both hunting and defence, have changed the game for us considerably. Once upon a time, we must have been wandering ready-meals. No doubt we faced all the same issues as the wildebeest and seals. We’re also smart, we have a knack for thinking about cause and effect, a habit of seeing patterns, that will show us patterns where none exist sometimes.

Imagine if the wildebeest figured out that by deliberately giving someone to the crocodiles, the majority would pass safely. Nature takes its tolls and tithes, and more often than not, these are fairly predictable in terms of timing and location. Whether they wanted to or not, our human ancestors were losing people to the wilderness. Storms and floods kill, so do famines. It’s not a great leap of logic to go from pacifying the crocodiles in a very literal way, to trying the same trick with the sea.

Oddly enough, I suspect giving human sacrifices to other dangerous things may have worked to a degree for wholly pragmatic reasons. Every time you do it, you pass on a degree of knowledge that you are dealing with something dangerous here, something that will have its tribute in blood. Every time you do that deliberately, you remind everyone else not to get complacent about the river, even if it hasn’t killed anyone in ages. You enact the dangerousness, you reinforce the need for respect. You quite possibly do reduce the chances of other people dying there.

The world was a much more dangerous place for our ancient ancestors. It strikes me as possible that the practise of human sacrifice would have started out as a much more pragmatic activity, much more immediately connected to life as experienced. It’s only later, when you get away from the immediate needs and start to build institutions around the process, that you might develop something innately sinister. As a species we don’t really know when to stop. We find something that works, and default to the assumption that scaling it up, doing it more often and in a more organised way will be even better. We have an innate assumption that more is better.

In just the same way we’ve gone from useful bartering tokens to money systems that people kill for, and that bring about numerous deaths around the globe every year. We needlessly kill and maim vast numbers of people on the roads each year, for the sake of going further and faster. We are still practicing human sacrifice on a large scale. We’ve just labelled it differently so that we can uphold our illusion of being more civilised now.

The History of a book

It’s curious looking back at where I was then, and how much has changed. That was the winter Tom arrived in the UK, and we married. It was the winter before the narrowboat, at the beginning of a hard journey that would take me years and teach me some painful lessons about life. I thought I was broken then, but I was only beginning to be taken apart, and I had a long way to go before healing became an option.

That winter, we were living in a cottage belonging to my family. Seven out of the last 8 generations lived there, but now it’s no longer in family ownership, and houses have been built on the orchard behind it. I would not have chosen this, but I had no say. It was a cottage in much need of love and restoration, single glazed and with a woodstove for heating, we struggled with the coldest winter I have ever experienced. We got through it. During those hard, freezing days, with snow thick on the ground, I started writing Druidy and Meditation.

At that point I’d been writing Pagan articles, essays and blogs for years. I’d never attempted a non-fiction book before, though and the new challenge was a welcome distraction from the many things in life I did not want to have to think about. Writing took me back into good aspects of my history, private practice that I had always enjoyed, and groups that I’d run where I had mostly been happy in what I was doing.

Contemplation and pondering are very much part of Druidry for many Druids. Conscious engagement with the world, seeking relationship through empathy and exploration is key to what we do. There are a great many ways in which a person can meditate, so if your impression of meditation is of just sitting there trying to empty your mind, that’s only one of many options. I’ve been exposed to all kinds of traditions along the way, and have shared meditation with many different people. I’ve been a student far longer than I’ve been a teacher, and I’m still very much in the process of learning. There is always more to discover.

During February, my book, Druidry and Meditation is available on Kindle at the knockdown price of 99p. 

You can also buy a discounted ebook version on amazon.com

I wrote that book with no idea if any publisher would take it, or whether anyone would read it, much less like it. At that point I didn’t have much of a name, the blog was small, and my self confidence was in tatters. It took all the courage I had at that time, to try it, and to hand it over. Moon Books offered me a home, and I haven’t looked back.

I’ve worked with many different publishers over the last fifteen years or so. Some barely talk to you. Some are more efficient than others. Some are supportive. Weirdly, some are not as focused on selling books as you might expect. In Moon Books I found a supportive publisher, and a community, and from that the encouragement to keep writing and exploring. The good experience I had in working with them influenced the choice to keep writing spiritual books. There have been two more since – Druidry and the Ancestors, and Spirituality without Structure. There will be a prayer book this year.

Three winters ago I was a lost soul with no sense of belonging here. My work and my choices have brought me into contact with people I value, and communities I feel proud to be part of. That’s been quite some journey, and it has changed me considerably.

The trouble with Chakras

I’m going to come right out and say it: I do not have any chakras. I was first introduced to them as a concept when I was sixteen, and nothing at all happened. Since then (twenty years!) I’ve been meditating, visualising, working with my body’s energy, and every so often being talked into having another go. I am entirely certain that nothing resembling chakras is happening down the front of my person. No one is going to persuade me otherwise.

The trouble with chakras is that they are treated as a universal truth. What was originally a feature of Hindu belief, has been embraced wholesale and turns up everywhere. It doesn’t seem to matter what path you claim to follow, someone will be waving it at you. The New Age Movement treats chakras as fact, as indisputably how your body works and I cannot begin to tell you how sick I am of finding it thrown casually into all kinds of books where really it has no place or point.

Other ways of thinking about bodily energy are available. I was exposed to Tai Chi fairly early on (I was about 20). There are no chakras in Taoism. Instead I was introduced to ideas of energy flow, of the circular nature of energy as it moves through the body. That makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve listened to Theo Wildcroft (http://www.wildyoga.co.uk/) talking about physical structures in the body, creating flows and connections in ways that, while I don’t grasp visually too well, make a lot of emotional sense to me. Acupuncture works on a theory of energy meridians in the body, and those aren’t lined up down your middle like the standard ruddy chakras.

But then, actual, Hindu chakras don’t have much to do with New Age chakras either. What the original idea of chakras offers is a complex and subtle system of body energy, and when you start looking at that it compares rather coherently to the meridians and flows that I’ve run into other places. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chakra for a quick sense of what’s really out there).

What has happened is that the western New Age movement has latched onto a complex ancient system, picked on the ‘important’ bit – those ‘main’ seven chakras, hauled them out of context and proceeded to deal with them with no reference to the systems, bodily and spiritual that they actually pertain to. We in the Pagan community are all too guilty of picking up the western seven chakra rubbish and passing it on as an absolute truth, without even knowing properly where it comes from or how it works. This is shoddy in every way.

If you’re going to do chakras, throw away the books that tell you how there are seven of them, and how to clean them, and flowers to associate with them, and precious little else. Go back to the original culture, and learn this stuff properly. If you want to do body energy, you have a body, and energy, and sitting down with what you’ve got, to contemplate it, ponder, study, experience and investigate it will serve you perfectly well. And if it turns out that you do not feel like you have chakras, and that you see and understand your body in some other way, you are not alone!

A life full of riches

Wealth does not equate to happiness. Look around at everything at everything you have. Your grandparents, or maybe great grandparents if you’re a lot younger than me, had far less than you. There were no telephones or television in my mother’s childhood. My Gran talked about the arrival of hot running water. Outside toilets, single glazing, no central heating, no fitted carpets, most of them did not have cars, foreign holidays were rare or non-existent. We have so much more material wealth than they did. If it is owning stuff that makes people happy, we should be living in bliss. And yet, we aren’t, and depression and anxiety are widespread.

People with very little can be surprisingly happy. History was not a uniformly miserable place, for all that life expectancies were shorter, diseases often uncurable, and not a one of them had a games consol. On the whole I think our ancestors were better at enjoying what they had and making the most of things, than we are.

My grandmother was born in 1920, and lived through the second world war. She saw poverty, and shortage, rationing, and difficulty. She never had much money and there were many things that were hard for her – poor health especially. But she took joy in music and natural beauties, in the colour of a sky, in friendship. Her life was not devoid of happiness.

We are constantly being sold the idea that what we’ve got isn’t good enough. From our bodies to our diets, our cars, kitchens, decorations, homes, gardens and holidays – we are told to want more, bigger, faster. All the time. We are exposed to a constant stream of messages that tell us to be dissatisfied with what we’ve got. And so we end up working long hours to pay for things we have little time to enjoy. I recall a friend some years ago in a job that wrecked his social life and destroyed his sleep and health, telling me he could not afford to stop. He had to pay for the car, and the sofa and some other things, he was in a ‘wealth trap’ as he called it, and there was no way out. This is the reality we build for ourselves.

When I’ve blogged before about wealth and happiness, I’ve had people tell me that no, really, for them the money and what they can buy is joy. It is the point of life. I’ve been told I am only happy with an open horizon because I make the best of being poor, if I had the money to spend on better things, I’d never look back. One chap who was especially vocal on this, was working 50 hour weeks and more to pay for the things he wanted. He never struck me as being terribly happy, for all that he claimed otherwise.

There is no peace in the constant need to have a new better faster shiny thing. There is no peace in the fear that your stuff is out of date and that people will judge you over it. You do not rest easily at night if the pressure to own and work leaves you no time to wind down. Get that wrong, and the bills, and the debts will leave you anxious if not worse. We pay a high price for our luxuries. We pay in time and life, in happiness, and we pay over and over in terms of the quality of life we live. Yes, a big screen TV may seem like a wondrous luxury, but if all you can do is stagger to the sofa and collapse there in a weary heap between working and sleeping, maybe that’s not such a great deal.

We have more wealth than our ancestors could have dreamed of. What do we do with this? We watch other people pretending to live.

The more I give away, the lighter I feel. Paring my possessions down to that which is needed, useful and life improving, is liberating. I don’t want much. I’m happy with what I have. I feel no lack, and little desire for the things that occupy other people’s time and money. I make ends meet, I get enough of a life, my health is decent. I spend time with my child, and my partner. I have a kind of wealth that would make sense to my ancestors, and I’m not sure how many modern westerners can actually say that.

Tribal creativity

While it’s true that some authors (and probably other creatives) do their best to hide in a writing cave or retreat to an ivory tower, most creativity cannot be wholly attributed to just the person doing it. None of us exist in a vacuum, and those of us who try to, probably do ourselves more harm than good.

We’re all influenced, by the ideas and creativity of other people, by critical feedback of our own and other people’s work, by our teachers and peers in all kinds of subtle and less subtle ways. Even at times when we think we’re being totally original, the fingerprints of those who shaped us are all over our efforts, and this is a good thing. It is in no small part because ideas flow between us all that we have a shared context for also understanding each other’s output.

When there is more creativity about, that becomes a self feeding thing. You read a book, and it inspires you to create a painting, and someone else sees the painting and writes a song, and another person dances to that song, which inspires someone to write a poem…. and on it goes. Not always in such a tidy way, but ideas feed ideas and in an environment rich with inspiration, it is a good deal easier to become inspired in turn, and do a thing. That thing may be a cake or a blanket, a short story, a herb garden – inspiration manifests in many ways.

Meanwhile alone in the ivory tower, I would have nothing to feed me. Granted, there are no distractions, but there are also no inspirations. It’s just me and the inside of my head. Maybe I’m able to keep pulling things from there, maybe I have a lot of old experience to draw on. I have nothing to excite me into new styles or forms, and no one to measure myself against so I could notice if I am stale and tired, clichéd, obvious… If I sit in my ivory tower, I don’t have a tribe and I don’t belong anywhere. It’s a lonely place.

If my tribe is just authors, I risk the thinking becoming a bit incestuous. They same would be true in any tightly boundaried community. Too much worrying about copying and not copying, too much awareness of whose sales are good and whose are not and who got the most stars and who the fewest. If I am the best poet in a tiny community of poets, I might develop a distorted view of where I am with my craft and life. I might come to forget that there is more to life than poetry, and that not everyone cares about it anyway.

Being part of a creative tribe, means engaging with, recognising and valuing all kinds of creativity. I am deeply inspired by the beautiful woolcraft many of my friends undertake. I love the music talented friends write, the art of the many brilliant artists I know. A fabulous cake is no less an act of inspiration and creativity. A beautiful space to gather in. The examples are many. There is more to life than words. There is more to creativity than the small areas in which I have some skill. The more I open myself to what other people are doing, in all its glorious diversity, the less precious I feel about my own stuff, and the more inspiration I find to work with.

I do not create in isolation. It is the experience of other people and the exposure to other ideas that allows me to do what I do – more and less original at different times, but always rooted to some degree in community, relationship and shared experience.

To be a better Druid

We all develop in different ways and our paths take us each in different directions. No two of us will have quite the same definition of what it means to grow, improve, or whether ‘better’ is even a relevant word to apply. Nothing in nature stays still unless it is dead, and even the dead change. Growth, change, and movement are inevitable then, and choosing the ways in which we do this can be an important part of how we approach our Druidry.

At the moment I find understanding is critical for me in a lot of ways. I need to understand my own journey, and to see how experience has shaped me. There are aspects of self and behaviour that are not what I want, but to change them smoothly rather than hacking at them, I need to make sense of how they formed in the first place.

Understanding other people is of great importance to me, too. When things go wrong, I find I need to know why. I need to understand what created that situation. If I’ve messed up, I need to know so that I can fix it. If someone has messed me about because they were acting out of their own history, fear, pain or similar I want to understand that. I have a better chance at responding with compassion if I know what lies beneath anger, or negativity. I also have a better chance of responding usefully. Some people can only usefully be walked away from, but if I can say with confidence ‘that happened because…’ I don’t have to carry much away with me as I go.

Wider things in life come to be, as a consequence of all kinds of tiny connections, threads, histories and intentions. The more I can see of that, the more able I am to work with the possibilities rather than getting at cross-purposes with others.

I think about everything, a lot. When it comes to the issue of understanding, what I have to do a lot is guess. Analysing someone else’s words or actions is not unlike analysing a poem. You can come out at the end with a really impressive theory but it might be miles away from the poet’s take on things. Speculating about whys and wherefores is an inexact science and I’ve seen people get into trouble because they believed they were better at that than was the case. And of course people change, and they can wait until you thought you had it all figured, and come up with something you did not anticipate. Like the poem, the poet/person might tell you what they thought it meant and that be so far from how you experience it as to be irrelevant.

Relationships with hills and horizons tend to be a lot easier than relating to people. It is enough just to be there. But, people are a big part of my life, and trying to make sense of what happens and why remains key to getting the Druid stuff done, for me.

Of heroes and dragons

We know the imagery. The hero (of any gender) turns up with a bloody great weapon and slaughters the evil beast, and saves the day. There is much rejoicing. From our earliest fairytales onwards we are taught how good it is to put down the bad guys, and that a hero is someone who destroys monsters. In real life, it doesn’t always work out so well.

“I feel so proud of myself for standing up to you.” “I’ve been wanting to say this to you for a long time now.” Two different scenes. Two different furious, self-righteous women who have just taken down a dragon. The dragon in question is evil. It makes awful demands. Its words can be inferred as being critical. It is not happy with how things are and it said so. It is such a selfish dragon! It was long overdue taking down a peg or two, and they pause to take pride in a job well done. They are triumphant. The dragon is crushed.

The dragon in question is not actually dead, but slinks back to its cave and cries, and feels dreadful. It picks over everything it has said and done, testing its perceptions against the accusations and wondering if it really is that awful, and if it really did need taking down. It looks at its dragon face in the mirror and wonders what is so innately wrong with it and why it is so hateful. What has shocked it most is the sense of how pleased the dragon-fighters are. They are so certain that they have done a good thing, bravely taking down its monster self.

Sometimes it pays to try and look at a story from another angle. How much do you have to hate a person, or feel jealous of them in the first place to enjoy crushing someone else’s spirit? Where are we in relationships when landing a punishing blow on our designated dragon feels like such a win and a source of pride? Where are we in our humanity when seeing someone else crawl off, wounded and confused, feels like a victory? How can that possibly be a win?

We don’t have stories about negotiation. No one says ‘maybe if we stopped cutting down the dragon’s forest and replacing the deer herds with our cattle the dragon wouldn’t bother us.’ None of the fairy stories of old tend to suggest that the dragon may have had feelings and needs too. When we take other people and turn them into dragons so that we can righteously fight them off, we forget that they are people too, and that there were other feelings and needs in the mix. The dragons want things that are not convenient, not comfortable or welcome. Does that make them monsters to be fought? If your dragon is trying to kill you then yes, you fight it off. If what your dragon said was ‘I could really do with some help tidying up’ or ‘I wish you felt you could be honest with me’ then putting on the armour and preparing to do battle is not the best response.

All too easily, we turn into monsters those who are merely guilty of being inconvenient, or not doing enough to feed our egos.

I’ve been the dragon. I’ve watched people glow with pride when they’ve wounded me. I’ve seen people delight in taking me down a peg or two. Or feeling proud of putting me on the floor, because they stood up for themselves, and this is automatically a good thing, in their minds. I’ve crawled back to my cave enough times to try and work out where I went wrong, and years on, the scars from the dragon-hunters remain, and the more recent ones still bleed sometimes. And yet there are other people for whom I am no kind of monster at all.

I try not to stay in spaces where I am cast as the villain and set up as the bitch to be taken down, the ice queen, the monster. I don’t want that role in anyone else’s life. I don’t want to provide anyone with something to test their metal on, I don’t want people trying to prove things by cutting me down to size. It took me until this winter to realise that maybe I do not deserve to be someone else’s dragon, and that maybe the problem in all of this is not actually me.

A quest for poems

I was very young when I started writing poetry. I was encouraged at school and at home, and as it did not require so many words or so much plot as a story, there were obvious appeals. I learned something of structures. In my teens, looser verses became a way of venting and managing my emotions. Poetry as therapy isn’t unusual, but it’s often best if that material never falls on anyone else. I went to poetry classes at uni, both studying poetry as a writing form and getting opportunities to have a go. There were more structures to learn.

While I’ve worked hard with other writing forms, I confess that poetry has mostly been a hobby. I’ve used it as a place to pour out emotion, and to try and make sense of things. I’ve used it on occasion to court people (not always very effectively). It occurs to me that I haven’t written poetry for other people in the way I write short stories, essays, novels and non-fiction books.

A whole other voice comes into play in the poetry I like reading. It bypasses the banal in search of an essence. It speaks from soul to soul, and is more innately spiritual than story telling. Evocative, sometimes moving towards incantation, it breaths life as well as ideas.

I’ve started to think of poetry in terms of a desire to communicate with other people. Not just in a ‘would like to get in your pants’ sense. That in turn raises questions about what it might be worth saying. What can I not capture effectively in a blog post? What wouldn’t be better told as a short story? Sometimes the answer lies in the brevity. There’s a lot more intensity in a small poem than in pages of text; a sense of distillation and focus. If I really want to make a point, then sometimes the limitations of a poem are vastly useful in terms of getting right into the topic. There are issues of utility, too. I can take a poem or a short story to a ritual, but not an essay or a novel.

I have dabbled in putting poetry out in public, there are some print collections over at Lulu (free downloads in the book section of this site). They were written as and when they occurred to me, with no particular intent. I’ve depended on emotional energy and inspiration as and when it turns up. I’m experimenting at the moment with setting out to write poetry, and I do have overall intentions to guide what I’m doing. So far it seems to be going along passably well. I’m learning how not to feel too precious about first drafts. In any other form, the first draft is just a jumping off point, but I’ve tended to either hatch a poem at first try, or give up on it and move on. Learning how to go back and work at it is interesting. I’m learning to take notes, jotting down odd lines, phrases and ideas when they occur to me, and seeing if I can connect them up in a meaningful way at some later point. It’s a bit like sketching.

What any of this achieves remains to be seen, but I like to feel that I’m stretching myself and trying new ways of writing. Whatever else comes of the poetry, I know that focusing down on my use of words will improve me as a writer, and exploring other forms of expression helps keep me fresh, and stops me getting into ruts and habits.

I’m also taking it as a prompt to read more poetry, because I feel very strongly that if you don’t read in a subject or form, your scope for writing it well is much reduced.