Nimue Brown's Blog, page 402

Who we are

The world inside a person’s head may have very little to do with reality from anyone else’s perspective. We are all lead protagonist in the movie of our life, and for some people, the distance between imaginary self and actual self is so wide as to be dangerous. How do we know who we are?

It is really easy to be persuaded by all the things we think we are. We may have decided that we are nice people. Kind, good, generous, etc. Anything we do can be interpreted in that light, and so we cast ourselves as such martyrs, such heroes for making the slightest effort or putting up with the terrible demands of the people around us. The result from the outside, can be that we make our nearest and dearest feel useless and miserable.

Some of us spend a lot of time imagining what we’d do. This is often an issue in Pagan circles, where the lines between the make-believe life and the spiritual life are blurred at the best of times. I’ve met a lot of people who have told me they think they could write a book, and who have a big emotional investment in that statement. There is a long way between imagining yourself as a hugely successful published author, and having written a book. In our heads, maybe we’re doing book tours across America and fending off fans, but if we’ve not written a book, much less got one published, reality and sense of self can become sorely disconnected.

It is easy to let who we think we are and what we think we do replace the actualities. That can be just as easily a negative process. If, for example I think I’m a lot less attractive than I am, my scope to mess up interactions with people is vast, because I will misunderstand signs, and misread intentions. I may have done this along the way, I am unsure.

While an entirely self-referential sense of self is easily held, getting any sense of who we are in the world is incredibly difficult. Seeing through my own beliefs and assumptions to even be able to experience a different view is hard for me. I have recognised that I am far too quick to embrace negative feedback and far too slow to recognise the positive. This is just as harmful to my relationships as imagining myself some kind of irresistible goddess would be. There is no virtue in under-estimating your influence, or in undervaluing your strengths. Modesty and being humble may have been touted as Christian virtues, but they aren’t Pagan ones, and they are a real barrier to honest and open interaction. The virtuous path lies somewhere balanced and in the centre.

Taking time to try and see what we do, and trying to hear how others respond to that is an uneasy process. It can be challenging. Whether the feedback is good or demoralising, if it is a long way from where you think you are, it’s equally disorientating. However, good relationship depends on good flows of communication.

Alongside this, it is also important to try and share honestly with people how they affect us. If someone inspires or uplifts you, if someone enchants you, or gives you hope, taking that moment to tell them is worth a lot. Having been on the receiving end of this is a huge morale boost, it gives reason and meaning to what I was doing, and a sense of where I fit in the world, and I assume the same will be true for everyone else. The more we share and connect, the better. The more we lock ourselves into little, private reality bubbles where our imagined selves dominate, the less visible to us our actual lives will be, and the less control we therefore have over them.

Only in our actions can we know ourselves. Who we think we are, is guesswork. What we actually do is the real measure.

Working for free

All self employed, and creative people, alongside those who work within spirituality, come under a lot of pressure to do it for free. We hear frequently that we should do it for love, that love of craft and of labour should be reward enough. How dare we sully art/religion/music/dance/literature/teaching/etc with our petty, money grabbing?

Anyone who thinks about this for long will work out that if a thing is to be done or made, there’s a cost in terms of time, energy and often resources. Time spent doing things for love, is time you can’t spend earning the money to keep a roof over your head. We all have to eat.

All too often, someone else is making a profit. The lone creative is the last person in the chain to make anything. Booksellers all take their cut before the author sees a penny. There are plenty of people who will offer to publish you, for no payment but ‘exposure’. Well, exposure is something you can die of in other contexts. If you are making a profit, getting a financial advantage, or saving on paying someone else then it is not ok to ask for a freebie.

That said, there are contexts in which I will work for free, and these are my rules.

1) I will work for free if it really seriously hasn’t cost me anything and no one else is exploiting my work for a profit. People re-use writing from this blog for not-for profit sites and publications. That’s fine.

2) I will always consider working for free or for minimal expenses if you are a not for profit outfit (most Pagan magazines fall into this category) or a charity. You’re doing it for love, if I have time, I may be able to spare you some love, too.

3) I will work for a trade off that isn’t money based – a typical example would be doing talks or workshops in exchange for being able to attend an event and have some table space to sell books. I might cover my costs, I’ll take the gamble, especially if I like the look of your event. I do not like being asked to pay to attend an event so that I can freely provide you with entertainment. That sucks. Cake, accommodation, and other trade-offs are always worth a thought.

4) I will work for a profit share. If you can’t pay me upfront, but there’s a fighting chance this will raise money, and you want to pay later when you can, that’s negotiable. Especially if you’re doing it for love too and you getting paid also depends on it working. If I like the project, I will share in the risk. Most publishing works this way, in essence.

5) I will work for affordable donations rather than fixed charges where that seems fairer.

As a simple rule of thumb, if you are gaining from something, and most especially if you get a financial advantage, it is not ok to ask other people to facilitate that at their own expense. A fair exchange is called for. There are many shapes that can take, but the guilt trip of ‘you should be doing it for love’ is not acceptable. I’ll do it for love when I feel like it, and if don’t feel like it but you want something from me, you need to put something on the table. To offer recompense in some form, is a gesture of respect both to the person and their creativity. That recompense might be as simple as a favour owed, but where we honour that, life is a lot happier.

Working with energy

For me, working with energy is not some kind of esoteric or magical practice. It is a daily concern about how to manage my energy levels so that I can do as much as possible. It’s not a wholly practical issue either. Energy is a basic necessity of life, so treating it as a more supernatural issue seems really bizarre to me. But then, much of my take on magic has far more to do with life as experienced, than that which cannot be pointed at.

I’ve learned some simple, practical issues around how much sleep I need (a lot in the winter, less in the summer) and what kind of diet actually sustains me. Getting that right has helped me a lot. I’ve looked at how I pace myself, moving between different kinds of work in order to stay mentally fresh. I’ve found I may be more of a morning person than makes emotional sense to me, but working late into the night burns me out far faster than starting early does. There are no one-size-fits-all answers here, it is a case of exploring and finding what works.

I’ve spent the last ten years and more trying to run flat out, writing, working, parenting, keeping a home, volunteering… I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve misjudged and burned out. The last few years I’ve been trying not to do that. Exhaustion is my single biggest trigger for depression and anxiety, and I’ve got to a point where body and mind simply cannot endure much more of that. It is essential for me not to spend too much time in that state. I get really ill. And so managing my own energy and learning to work within its limits, only pushing those edges gently and some of the time, has become vital for my viability.

It is clear to me that there is only so much I can do by getting the physical underpinnings right. Sleep, diet and exercise are important, and if I get those wrong I suffer. However, they will not do the whole job, and sleep especially is affected by my emotional state. If I am demoralised, if I feel unvalued, if the people around me give me a hard time and feed feelings of uselessness, then nothing works. Equally, if I have the right kind of engagement with people, my energy levels rise dramatically. What I need are intense, emotionally honest, heartfelt interactions with people. Preferably enough people to feel a bit like a tribe. Soul friendship, sharing of life and self, people who are being authentic… this makes worlds of difference.

Thus far 2014 has really brought into focus for me which relationships in my life give me this. I’ve been able to step away further from connections that make me feel tired and low, investing more in those heartfelt interactions that feed my soul. I am seeing the effects on my output. I’ve written nearly a novel’s worth of short story material in the last month, I’m writing non-fic at a pace, I’m doing arty crafty things, and it’s all flowing. My morale, which is rooted in my relationships, is what makes this possible.

There is an incredible magic in connecting open-heartedly with people. New thoughts and feelings, new experiences, are possible. It’s not your wand waving magic of spells and determined change, but a more organic and unpredictable magic, no less life-changing. Energy work… it’s not all auras and acupuncture language.

Welcome to our circle

In Druid rituals, and other Pagan gatherings, we tend to start by inviting other beings in. The powers of the four directions, the three worlds, the spirits of place, ancestors, perhaps our gods. “Hail and welcome” we call out in cheerful unison. I gather other traditions will summon the guardians of the watchtowers and call to other things, welcoming them in or demanding their presence.

I am increasingly uneasy about this.

The elements exist. Earth, air, fire and water are present in this world in any habitable place where you might realistically try and have a ritual. Spirits of place, by their very nature are that which exists in a place. Our ancestors we bring with us, in our DNA. None of these things are absent when we start a ritual. Maybe the gods are absent, but that’s a whole other conversation about the nature of deity that I’d like to skip over for now.

When we walk into a space to do ritual, everything else is already there. We are the incomers. We are the oblivious ones who need to open our awareness, to actually think about the earth beneath our feet and the sky above our heads. What we do when we call to the spirits of place is not, in any real sense, invite them to join us. They were there already. It is their place. What we actually need to be doing, is opening ourselves to being more aware of everything that is not us, and that is not part of our more mundane concerns.

Nature is always with us, in the air we breathe, the materials we use. No matter how deeply we go into human constructs, every last thing humans make, has been constructed from the natural world. We are never away from nature. What we frequently are, is oblivious to it. Therefore when we enter a ritual space, asking nature to show up is utterly ridiculous. What we need to be doing is shifting our own perceptions, and to do that, we need a completely different ritual language.

Modern Paganism has, to a large extent, grown out of magical organisations where the point was very much to try and conjure and control. We’re inherited habits of language and speech from those traditions, and we use them without really looking at what they mean, how they position us in relation to the natural world, and whether they are of much use.

You do not need to summon the spirits of the earth. The earth is there, underneath you, every step of the way. All you need to do is become aware of it. The air is with you, in every breath drawn. The fire of the sun drives all life upon this earth. There is water in your own body, and usually in everything around you, too. These things exist, they do not need summoning. If you postulate ‘spirits of the earth’ as something not universally present in the earth but coming from ‘away’ and needing raising up, make sure at least that you understand how your cosmology works, and why you think the important bits of nature are somewhere else and not immediately available to you. I am suspicious of that thought form, too, it encourages us not to see this world as inherently magical, inherently sacred, but to imagine all spiritual stuff is ‘away’.

Not recognising what is here, in this earth, this air, underpins a lot of human abuses. We need to take the land beneath our feet a lot more seriously as a species, and we would benefit from doing that in our rituals, too.

Studies in trust

For me, trust is everything, and it’s also something I find very difficult. It’s not especially the issues of practical trust – will people do what they said they’d do? I’m able to roll easily enough with the natural forgetting and error that is part of life for all of us. The critical balance for me lies around the trust-truth-acceptance dynamic.

Part of my problem is that I’ve been sorely messed about by people who were not truthful, and who did not accept me. Pressure to change, and rejection of how I am as a person whilst wanting either my body or my utility, having been reoccurring themes. I’ve learned a lot about how not to get caught up in that, and am doing better, but the legacy of it remains.

I find it really hard to trust people in any way. Most especially I find it hard to trust that I will be accepted. I am easily persuaded that silence equates to rejection, when probably it doesn’t. I tend to assume that my emotional openness will be unwelcome, and as a consequence I am less honest than I could be. I undermine the trust-truth-acceptance dynamic every time I lie by omission to someone I care about. Most often the thing I lie about in this way, is exactly how much I care. It says a lot about some of the people in my history that I have learned to be fearful around this one, and to feel that saying ‘you really matter to me’ is likely to cause affront.

It is so easy to cart victim/survivor status about, letting things that have happened in the past define what I do now and how I see the world. Holding the belief that I will not be acceptable and should not be emotionally open is actually a safe space, a cheat. If I stay in that view, I need take no emotional risks. I do not have to be vulnerable for anyone, or face my fears of rejection, or deal with the complexities of how other people feel and what they need. The more carefully closed I am, the less likely I am to invite emotional honesty and trust from anyone else, either.

Last year I ended up on my knees at one point, utterly convinced that how I am is fundamentally toxic to other people and that I should batten it all down and hide it as much as possible. It’s taken me a long time to think this through. Is it fair or reasonable to base all future relationship judgements on the words of one person? Is it fair to the other people who are in my life, or who come into my life, to assume that they will all, without exception think and feel in this way? Clearly they don’t. My husband Tom is an ongoing source of affirmation that I’m not some monstrosity that should be hidden away. Other versions of how I am perceived are available and I can choose which story to trust.

The bottom line in terms of why I find it so hard to trust other people, is that I do not trust myself. The reason I do not trust myself is that a very small number of people, half a dozen or so across my life, have really gone to some lengths to undermine my confidence. I know in some cases it wasn’t even personal, it’s how they treat everyone. In other cases its likely a consequence of being lost and messed up themselves. I realise that only if I can learn how to trust myself, to trust my judgement, my honour and my integrity, then I will be far less at the mercy of the people who want to take me down for the hell of it, and far more able to be open to those who might genuinely accept me as I am.

Power animals (sacred cows)

When choosing an animal ally, spirit guide or totem, it’s odd how often we Pagans find ourselves picked by glamorous top end predators, and how rarely someone admits to being guided by skunks, jellyfish, worms and other, less romantic life forms. You’d imagine, if the animal spirits were doing all the choosing, a few more people might have been called by slow worms and sparrows than seems to be the case. I dare to suggest that all too often we pick our animal guides based largely on how we want to be seen and what qualities interest us.

It’s worth considering the difference between a power animal, and an animal we happen to like and feel fond of, or wish to emulate. I happen to be very fond of owls. I know a lot about owls, and hearing their calls gives me goosebumps. Once, in a piece of deep visualisation work I was eaten by an owl, which led to a few very strange days. It’s not an easy thing to have to handle in your normal life. Actual spirit creatures, I assume, cannot be relied upon to fit neatly round the day job and family commitments. I have no idea how owls feel about me, really, and that tells me there is no magical special thing going on here.

I don’t have a ‘power animal’ – I have creatures I am fond of and interested in, and that’s fine. It is not a necessary rite of passage. We have far too many books telling us that we should all be performing the role of the shaman and collecting this and that symbol of power, and special guides for otherworldly travelling. Never mind that most of us to do not do the work of the shaman, have not been trained that way, and are not called that way. Some people truly are. We do not honour them by purloining the appearance of their work without actually having been called to it.

I like hedgehogs. I am inspired by the work of earthworms in breaking down the old to release nutrients into the soil. I think soil fungi are amazing in their interplay with trees to create forests. I have a longstanding love affair with beech trees, but am also fond of oaks and a bit intimidated by yews. The natural world is full of wonders and lessons to be learned. There are countless examples of life and ways of being. I choose to look around me and to draw what inspiration I can from all that I encounter. In this sense only, can I claim to be ‘guided’.

It is not my path to have a spirit guide. I know this, because nothing has ever come to me in that way. I do not feel in any way inferior or reduced by not being able to point at a creature or plant and claim its spirit as my own. This is simply how I am, and I have other work to do. There is no reason to assume that we should have anything at all. It is not a case of going out there to collect a patron god, a power animal, a medicine plant, a rune, an ogham, as though by cobbling together a set of special things we will in turn become special. We get what comes to us. I am blessed with a lot of inspiration, and for me that is enough.

What the body knows

We’re encouraged to think of body ailments as symptoms to be managed, and as a nuisance to fend off. We have a vast array of pain killers, stimulants and tranquilisers available to make our bodies behave in prescribed ways. What we’re not encouraged to do is to assume that if something is awry with our bodies, there may be a perfectly good reason for this. We are not encouraged to seek those reasons out, much less tackle them.

Sleep deprivation is widespread, with many people not getting the 8 hours minimum our bodies need each night. Many of us have stressful, sedentary jobs but don’t have the energy to release that in physical activity. Stress gnaws away at us, creating anxiety symptoms that crop up randomly, to be drugged into submission, or ignored. Exhaustions breeds depression symptoms as our bodies try to reduce energy output. Missed meals, poor diets, lack of food education and the greater availability of poor quality food, all contributes to reducing health.

Then there are the issues of what the body knows. We take in a vast amount of sensory information all the time. We filter out most of it because it is more than we can consciously handle. Sometimes less conscious bits of our brain are still chewing on that input, and eventually respond to it. Our bodies learn to throw up if we eat something we’re allergic to. Sometimes they also learn to throw up in response to people who are emotionally toxic as well.

There are patterns of behaviour that cause me bodily panic. At first I felt uncomfortable about this. It was socially awkward. What panics me is people whose words and actions manifestly don’t fit together. Historically, this has been a danger sign for me. Having taken the time to pin down why I panic, I realise that serious emotional dishonesty is not something to take lightly. People who make grandiose statements they do not mean are not emotionally safe for me to be around. I will be forever mislead, always having to second guess, never able to trust and that’s no kind of relationship. I eventually concluded that my body is right, and where I get those reactions in future, I will quietly step away.

Some of it is less rational. The sound of footsteps on the stair in the flat makes me edgy. Rather than ignoring this, I worked out it stems from a time when the sound of footsteps on the stair really was a thing to be edgy about. A warning of impending unsafety. These days it isn’t, so when I feel that fear I remind myself that things have changed, and my body calms. It is becoming less of an issue. Sometimes we hang onto triggers long after they are relevant, but its only by taking them seriously that we can find out what they mean and then gently unpick them.

If we do not take ourselves, and our bodies seriously, we are easily manipulated. If we are not allowed to trust gut reactions, or to draw breath and figure out why we are uncomfortable, if we have to keep calm and carry on, we are vulnerable to mistreatment. Our bodies know things. Millions of years of evolution have shaped our fight and fight responses to help us stay alive. Those tap into office politics as readily as they do to possible tiger attacks. There is wisdom in our bodies, but only if we take it seriously, and listen to it.

What do Druids do?

Knit! If my circle of female Druid friends is anything to go by at all, wool has become a frequent feature of a modern Druid path. I have friends who spin, who weave, knit and crotchet and make the most beautiful items. Many of them talk about the whys and wherefores of this, because it is not a necessary thing to do at present, given what’s available. It is an act of connection, engaging with female ancestry. It takes a lot of time and work to go from raw sheep to wearable jumper and for the women who came before us, this was a big feature of life.

I’ve had a go at spinning, but am too tense, so I over-spin. However, I can see the hypnotic and meditative aspect of spinning. I learned to knit as a child, and have been doing some fairly basic crotchet, so I know how the rhythms of that act on my mind and body, how I can fall into it. Anything can be undertaken as an act of devotion or as an expression of spirituality, but there are many reasons why working with wool to produce clothing functions in this way. As a Druid with a desire to add beauty to life and to work with inspiration, woolcrafts have a lot to offer.

Except that I’m not terribly good at it. A few weeks ago an opportunity came up to try a pattern for a lacy knit. I’ve never knitted from a complicated pattern. I realised both that I wanted to do it, and that I firmly believed I couldn’t. It would be beyond me to make something delicate or pretty. I could not handle a difficult pattern. I would fail. I took these assumptions out and had a good, hard look at them. I recognised voices not my own, and assessments of me as an awkward, graceless creature that had not come as a consequence of ever trying something like this and failing.

Trying was an intimidating process. I had two false starts as I got to grips with what the pattern meant. Both times I very nearly gave up, with the proof in my hands that no, I couldn’t follow a pattern, just like I’d been told and no, I could not make a pretty thing. Finding the will not to quit was not an easy journey for me. Third time round, and I only messed up very slightly at the beginning, and it’s not wholly obvious from a distance. Third time round I knitted the pattern, and it came out ok. (It’s the stripy thing tied across my hips in the photo)

This year has already had me challenging some long held assumptions about who I am and what I am capable of. It’s a disorientating process. By doing that, I can grow and change. But then, that’s also what Druids do.

The life of a book

No two books happen in quite the same way. However, people who don’t write, and people who are trying to can have a lot of unhelpful misconceptions about what they, and others, should be doing and how it *should* work. This is true for any creative form, and also for spiritual paths. What we get, is our own journey.

Last summer I started thinking about a book. I had a working title (Her Other Life) since abandoned. It was going to be a Steampunk Time Travel novel. (It isn’t.) I had a few thoughts about characters. Then I moved house, so no actual writing happened.

In the autumn I read Molly Scott Cato’s fascinating book ‘The Bioregional Economy’ and that got me round to thinking more about dystopian futures. A prompt from Theo had me thinking about technology, and some actual technology developments confirmed this for me. Not a word had been written.

I handwrite all of my first drafts for books. However, I’m fussy about my notebooks, because a poor paper quality or a bad cover can be off-putting. I therefore can’t start a project until the right notebook turns up. In October, I found the perfect notebook for a non-fiction project I had also been pondering, so I started work on that one.

About half way through November, with others stacking up their NaNoWriMo counts, I found a nice purple notepad and realised I could start. As I was handwriting, I can’t say anything about word counts. I brought the non-fic book to a point of needing to do something different, so I had space and wrote intensely on the novel. Early December was productive, then the festive period knocked me out.

Around then, I was asked to write twelve short stories for an audio project. I switched over to doing those. No sane author passes up an opportunity to get work out in favour of the unplaced work in progress. Along the way, I also had to spend time touting the new books (Hopeless Maine vol2, and Spirituality without Structure) I had books to review and blogs to write and some business possibilities to chase. I also, outrageously, had some time off.

We’re past the middle of January now, and since Christmas, I have added a single paragraph to the novel. I am entirely untroubled about this. I’ve gone back to the non-fic project, which is more on the boil now, and nearly finished the audio. I’ve just promised to get my attention back on a co-written project. The novel will happen, as and when bits occur to me, fitting in around the rest of life and the more immediately paying gigs. Write one in a month? I don’t think so. Having this drawn out, shambolic approach gives me time to mull and ferment. New influences come in, my ideas grow and develop, and I enjoy the process more. I hate writing books under pressure. Other people thrive on deadlines and writing things to order, but not me. I can write short things to order, but that’s a very different process.

Professional creative people have to be business people. That means balancing the paying gigs against whatever it takes to sustain you creatively. There’s no point writing five novels a year for peanuts if after two years you’ll be so burned out you can’t function. There’s also no point writing epic, self-indulgent books that no one will ever buy. If you’re doing it professionally, you mostly end up cobbling together a strategy based on what’s available and what suits you. No two of us end up with the same way of working, and that’s fine. If you’re doing it as a hobby, it’s a case of balancing it against the rest of your life, in whatever way turns out to make sense.

Music and Magic

I’ve always found a great deal of inspiration and a sense of wonder in music, both as a performer and sat in the audience. Music has a transcendent quality, able to get beyond language to express something of soul. I’ll listen to almost anything so long as its live performance. When it comes to recorded music I’m more picky, because there isn’t that experience of something shared in the moment.

I’ve had some incredible times sharing music with people. It’s not an easy thing to explain, but when there is openness and flow between players, a certain kind of magic occurs. With the right person, it doesn’t matter even if I have never heard the song before, I can just get in there and play. There are certain people I could follow anywhere, and very gladly did when opportunities arose.

There’s a lot of emotional intensity to that kind of playing. Only the moment, the music and the other performers exist for me at times like that. I barely know what I’m doing, only that music is pouring through me. The feedback for such music has been positive though.

For me, something happens beyond the normal joys of music when people are open to each other. It is like opening a door to another place, and letting something in. It has been one of the most potent ways of connecting with another person that I’ve experienced. Sometimes that’s happened in jamming sessions with people I did not see before, or since. It’s also one of the spaces where I am at my most raw, immediate and real. There is no doing this kind of music without emotional honesty, at least for me, and it also requires and generates high levels of trust.

There’s a lot that can be done between people in terms of non-verbal communication, and sharing music always calls for that. Alert to each other’s body language, to cues of facial expression and movement that say where we will be going next. Singing with someone often means breathing with someone, and that’s a very intimate thing to be doing. But there’s also another level, something that goes beyond the readily explained, sometimes. To write about that would be like trying to explain a dance form through the medium of cake. But I can at least allude to it, because those other levels of being and sharing are hugely important to me.

To those of you I have shared music with along the way, my deep thanks. Hopefully there will be more in the future.