Nimue Brown's Blog, page 403

Re-writing life

Personal history is a story we put together as we go along. It explains who we are and how we got here. Often in making our own stories, we are limited to just that first hand perspective. How things looked from where we were standing defines what we think life meant at any given moment. However, we are not all knowing, and what we think happened, is not always what other people think happened. Changing the story can mean changing who we think we are and where we think we came from, and that can be powerful.

The stories other people tell us about who and how we are, can also be misleading. The earlier we hear those stories, the more they shape our perceptions, and the harder they are to weed out. While other girls were princesses, I was ‘funny looking’ and that assessment haunted my childhood and shaped my emerging teenage self. Having been told I was fat, unattractive and that no one would ever want me, I went into all relationships at a disadvantage, feeling that I had to please, rather than looking for people who might like and appreciate me as I was. The mistakes I’ve made as a consequence of that one story, have been numerous, and I suspect I do not know the half of it.

Once we start considering our history as story, it is clear that what we have can be rethought. That which might have seemed like a fact, can be re-identified as an opinion. However, the more important and influential the story was, the more serious the impact of questioning it. Break a big enough story, and you can take your entire sense of reality down. This is a messy and time consuming process. I’m finding it also to be a very good sort of process.

I’ve spent the last few years challenging every story I have about who I am and what significant moments of my history meant. I’ve dug out and poked defining observations, and I’ve collected fragments of insight from other people to give me possible new versions. Each round of this has knocked me about emotionally, alarmed me, confused and disorientated me. But critically, each round has brought me to a place of being a bit happier and a bit more functional. I was carrying a lot of really shitty stories, many of them gifted to me by other people. Stories about what an unappealing nuisance I was, and am. Stories about never being good enough, about being difficult, demanding, impossible and horrible to deal with.

The old story can be condensed down to an assessment that I was a bit of a failure as a human being and needed to do everything I could to compensate for my many, many shortcomings. I look back and see how biddable this made me, how readily I could be guilt-tripped into tolerating all kinds of things, and how it drew all the life, light and colour out of my life. The new story I am working on is that I was on ok sort of person, but that there were some people in my life who were not kind to me. Their reasons for this may have had very little to do with what sort of a person I really was, and everything to do with their wants and fears. I do not have to let that define who I think I am, or who I think I was.

The one thing I have learned as both a reader and an author, is that other interpretations are always available. This does not just apply to books. It is very much a life issue. I’ve lived with interpretations that have been crushing me. Other versions of my history exist. I’ve been helped in this by people who were there along the way, and who have shared other stories. I’ve been helped by people who have not supported the old story. I suspect there is more to rethink and figure out, but the path before me seems open now, rather than a scramble through prickly undergrowth with no obvious destination.

Jay Ramsay

I first encountered Jay Ramsay some years ago. I was sent a review copy of ‘Soul of the Earth’, an anthology of eco-spiritual poetry that he’d edited. It being a beautiful collection, he remained in my awareness. A chance meeting last summer allowed me a small fan-girl moment and I’ve had the pleasure of reading more of his poetry since then. Jay’s website is http://www.jayramsay.co.uk/ and he has a youtube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/jayramsaypoet which I really recommend checking out.

Jay very kindly agreed to let me share on one of his poems. So, here we go…

SACRED LAND

Everywhere we breathe

everywhere we stand

is sacred land,

is sacred land.

Everything we touch

everything we know

is in our heart

and it can show…

on a journey that has no end

till our eyes are open again

and the Earth is our friend.

Do you see what is reaching the sky

in flames and sparks as they die

where the stars shine on by ?

Can you see where rivers and roads

carry our souls as they float

and the land is what it knows ?

Sunset and sunrise,

a thousand years go by—

and still we’re learning how to dance

and still we’re learning how to cry

Full moon and star rise

alive in its tides…

and still we’re learning how to love

and still we’re learning how to die

This land is our land

this land is sacred land

this land is our land

this land is written in the palms of our hands.

And we are the ancestors

and the People of Light,

and we are the ancestors

and the People of Light.

Dec 10th 2011

lyric originally commissioned for ARC by Jay Ramsay

Breaking my heart

Of course there have been woundings aplenty along the way. Hurts and betrayals, the unrequited loves and the loves that turned out to be not as advertised. Experiences that I would have called ‘having my heart broken’ because I did not know enough to recognise that it was merely battering the surface a bit. Surface damage is a great way of toughening up, becoming thick and leathery. With time, that can turn into something colder, harder, more impervious. A grown-up heart. A sensible heart. A survivor.

I’ve been practicing breaking for a while now. Not in the sense of bruising the scar-laden surface though. Hill top views that fill me up so I feel I might burst. Moments with Tom that strip me to the soul, and leave me gasping. Moments of beauty and wonder that have made little cracks on the inside, although I had no idea what that meant or where it might be taking me.

A few days ago, I exploded. It was sudden, dramatic, heart, life shattering and it took me until yesterday to be able to start talking and crying where I needed to. Today has brought experiences to lever that exploded hole a little wider.

Pain is not the only way to break your heart. More often, pain doesn’t break you, it locks you in a box and wraps iron bands around the outside to make sure that you do not move too much. All too often, an excess of pain puts out the fire of being alive, and it shuts out the light and turns the rich potential of darkness into mere emptiness.

But this other thing, this breaking open, is a whole other experience. It does hurt, and there have been a lot of tears, but these are good tears. If this was a fairy story, these would be the tears that wash away malevolent forces in a river, or that clean a fatal wound. These are magical tears, and they are welcome. It doesn’t matter that I do not know what is happening. I know why it’s happening. After years of being shut down and reduced, I’ve spent the last few years changing direction, and apparently I’ve reached sort of crisis-point in that.

This time, I really am breaking my heart, and breaking it wide open to let out what is on the inside, and to let in all those things that were out there and I did not dare to trust before. The thing about keeping your heart in a wooden box, tightly bound with iron, is that the love and beauty that might otherwise be available, simply cannot get in. It is possible to become so safe that it kills you.

I do not know what happens now. Everything changes. I get the feeling that’s exactly as it should be.

Dear sir

Looking back over my life, it is apparent to me that one person above all others shaped me as a writer. I draw my influences widely, I read everything I can get my hands on and I consider the mechanics and techniques I encounter, so in terms of author influences, there are many. However, I did not arrive in this world naturally able to think about how books are structured and how characterisation might take place in dialogue. I learned.

My sense of language as a magical thing, laden with potential, was not with me from the beginning. I learned how words could be deployed to express layers of meaning. I learned about nuance, subtext, and connotation. Memorably, I had opportunity to describe beans on toast as though it was the most expensive of cuisines, and my home as though it was a palace. I learned that perception and language run close together, shaping each other. Turning Macbeth into a tabloid-style newspaper report, I learned about misrepresentation and how it is possible to say something that is technically true whilst making it sound entirely different. I therefore also became sensitive to the language of advertising, politics and media, and the ways in which those are used to mislead.

During those same years, I learned how to look at an argument from both sides, and how to present an evidence-based idea. I learned how to take my gut reactions to something (in this case a text) and then look hard at it to figure out what caused me to have that reaction in the first place. Alongside this, all manner of technical, structural things entered my understanding, and I became somewhat less awful at spelling.

Through most of my teenage schooling, I was blessed when it came to studying English. I went through with the same teacher. He inspired me, and gave me the tools and technical skills that allowed me to carry on in this direction.

In terms of what I write, there was one enormous input, in that he was critical of speculative fiction and ‘rabbit out of hat’ solutions. I remain drawn to the speculative, but that has stayed with me. Most of the time I do not write stories with magical ‘out of the hat’ solutions to them, unless I’m playing it for laughs. A major plot point in the second volume of Hopeless Maine actually hangs on this unwillingness of mine to use magic as the get-out clause for all things. I’ll use speculative features to set up a situation, but favour human solutions to problems. It’s a direct consequence of wanting to create something that this one, particularly inspiring teacher might approve of.

Teachers are not having a good time of it here in the UK. Everyone I know working in the teaching profession is struggling with the constantly moving goalposts, the pressures put on them from on high, the constant messing with the system, the endless demand that they do more, for less. We do not value our teachers properly, as a nation. The vast majority of us who go on to do anything in life will do so in part because someone else taught us essential skills. Someone taught us to read and count, someone shaped our thinking, inspired us to take interest in a subject, helped us get started. Who I am and how I am has been shaped in part by the people who taught me, and for that I am deeply grateful. I had a lot of good teachers along the way, and some exceptional ones.

There is no repaying that debt. But at least I get to say thank you. John, I would not have been able to do this had you not been a part of my life.

The universe loves you

The idea that deity and/or the universe loves us is one of those abiding features of religion, despite all evidence to the contrary for the vast majority of beings on this planet. The only way to square the idea of universal love to harsh reality, is to assume there’s a grand plan we cannot comprehend that would make it all make sense. I’ve long felt that for Pagans, the one lesson nature can reliably teach us, is that the universe is a hard place in which cute things die horribly, where there is no natural justice, and frequently little sense. Nature, when you get beneath the pretty surfaces, shows no sign of a grand plan, and no sign of total, all consuming, compassionate unconditional love. Lunch, yes. Love, no. And yet we cart this myth about.

You can’t discern that the universe loves you. It won’t say. You have to assume it instead, and interpret all experience in light of that. It’s a great way of feeling special and important, and of avoiding self-judgement. What does it matter if I’m a total asshole? The universe loves me! In terms of our relationships with all other things, how we behave does matter. All of our real and actual relationships with people, places, traditions, creatures, plants, depend on what we do. Love is not a given in any of those contexts. Do these hills love me? Does my cat? Well, he does when I feed or fuss him, but the rest of the time it’s hard to say. The hills probably do not even notice me.

What we so often seem to seek in love, is that which flows towards us. The ego-boost of being wanted and valued. We are only ever going to be confident of that flow towards us, when something obvious is going on. Words declared. Gifts purchased. Heroic gestures. Adoring fans. That sort of thing. The rest of the time, that urge to be loved is a hollow and unrewarding experience. Look around at what it does to our young celebrities, who so often melt down in drink, drugs and failed relationships, increasingly desperate for attention and for proof that they are indeed loved by the universe.

When do we feel love most keenly? Not as recipients, but as givers. Looking across the table at my soul mate, stunned by his just being there, and what he inspires in me, is a daily occurrence. What I feel is how much I love him. When he looks up and smiles back, and I know the feeling is returned, that’s glorious, but most of the force of feeling does not happen because I am loved. The intensity lies in the loving. It is the same when I respond to anyone. Realising that I am cared for is never as overwhelming a feeling as feeling love flow from me towards some other person. I can love deeply and fiercely regardless of whether that is returned. I can love the cat, and the hills, and this town. I can love the open sky and the river, the rotting leaves and the dead. I cannot tell how they feel about me, and it doesn’t really matter.

There is not much gain in persuading ourselves that we are loved by the universe. The hard things will still hurt, and life still won’t reliably make much sense. It is in the giving of love that we can most experience love. That doesn’t depend on anything but our own inclinations. Putting love into the world achieves more than sitting round waiting for it to flow towards us. And of course we can’t love everything because we are small, finite beings passing through time and we do not have the means. We cannot love everything because some of it sucks and will never inspire love in us. We can love where we are inspired to, and love where we feel generous, and love because it makes us happy, but not because we feel we should in order to live up to some spiritual ideal.

Perhaps enlightenment is just a matter of learning to love everything. I have no idea, those are such a distant possibilities for me. In the meantime I am entirely convinced that if you’re looking for the unconditional love of gods or the universe, you’re going about it the wrong way.

Soul retrieval

I’ve had a few review books about shamanism in the last few years. One of the concepts this has introduced me to, is of soul retrieval. When a person is deeply distressed by an event, a part of their soul can, in this perspective, be broken away and lost to them, which in turn will add to ill health, depression and so forth. One of the jobs of the shaman is to go and retrieve those lost pieces of self.

However, every book I’ve thus far read has suggested that we can heal ourselves and make the spirit journeys to pick up bits we are missing. The odds are your lost soul fragment will be at the place the trauma occurred, so you just spirit journey to there, and call it back, and reassure it, and bring it home. Easy! Umm.

The first thing to say here is that in genuine trauma situations, revisiting the memories is the worst thing you can suggest a person does. In cases of mild upset, revisiting will help resolve what happened, but do we really think mild upset causes loss of soul? Revisiting memories of trauma can readily cause traumatised people enormous suffering for no gain at all. Forgetting is often the best sort of healing for PTSD and encouragement to go back there is encouragement to go into hell and risk brining that hell back into your life. I worry about this advice, and what people are being encouraged to do.

Battered, lost, with my sense of self in tatters and my life in pieces, I did try some of this, in desperation and because I was told it was doable and a good idea. I won’t make any claims at all for my skills in journeying and I am no kind of shaman. I was entirely unable to help myself in any way by this means, and the revisiting of sites of old wounding did me more harm than good. It may be that someone who knows how to do the work could do that for me, but I cannot do it for myself.

However, what the last few years have also taught me, is that there are other ways to bring back my lost sense of self and put myself back together. Places of safety, laughter, love and friendship do far more to heal those wounds and tackle the feeling of loss than classic ‘soul retrieval’ work ever did. In remembering who and how I used to be, and seeking out the places of good memory, I have managed to re-find a lot of missing pieces. People who have been important parts of my life historically, and people who’ve come into my life more recently in good ways give me moments when I can quite honestly feel myself healing, growing over the holes, putting back together. Some of those have been really unexpected.

Whether you rationalise this as psychological process or want to think in terms of magic and soul doesn’t entirely matter. There is a process, and for me it has been a very clear one. Going back to the places of wounding just opens those wounds a bit further, feeding my feelings of loss, distress and anguish. Going to the places that are good for me, that feed my soul and remind me of who I am, and connecting with the people who allow and enable me to be something that feels like an actual me, not a fake, or a product of damage – that works.

We are far too quick to ascribe to ourselves titles that should represent years of deep and dedicated study. We are far too quick to tell each other that, once you’ve read this one small book, you can do all the work of the traditional witch, shaman, wise-woman… it is a dangerous line of thought to adopt, especially in face of any serious issue or wounding. When we are down and vulnerable, being told how to magically fix that is so tempting, and it is so easy not to question the wisdom of it, but it can be a costly mistake to make. It is the person being told they can do the shaman’s work for themselves, with no proper support from anyone, who is most at risk. This troubles me.

I wish that more writers of New Age handbooks took the time to find out about the impact of trauma and poor mental health. I suspect really these books are written for and by people for whom getting a bit upset is the greatest trauma they have known. We all measure pain by our experiences of it, but if life is safe, easy and brings little more than angst, it is not difficult both to treat that as far more serious than it is, so go and play at soul-retrieval, feel better and tell other people to do the same. It is not, I think, what the practice of soul retrieval was originally intended for.

Practicing intolerance

It would seem more reasonable to assume that we should be practicing tolerance, with a hearty side-order of peace, love and goodwill. When it comes to recognising that something is merely different, tolerance is a great thing. However, I’ve tried being tolerant in all things, and what it got me was a lot of trouble. So I’m now studying the methods and mechanics of intolerance.

I’m not interested in drama, in upsetting people or causing offence (outside of politics!) so I am not going to manifest my intolerance in ways that will always start fights. That said, if there’s an important cause to stand up for, if I think a person needs arguing with, I’ll pile in. I’ll say what I think needs saying and then do my best to remove myself. I’m not offended by differences of opinion, but I am deeply offended by hypocrisy, flimsy arguments and people who have nothing with which to back up their assertions. “I imagine this and therefore it must be true” is not a line of argument I have any time for.

So far as I know, I only get this one lifetime. Beyond it, there are no certainties, only ideas and beliefs. I am therefore assuming this could be a one shot deal and trying to make the most of it. Time I give to being bored, irritated, upset and frustrated to no discernible purpose, is not time well spent. Every hour that I let someone else suck up with pointless melodrama is an hour I do not get back. Every day I have ruined by dealing with someone who is dependably shitty towards me, is a day I have lost. It is around these issues that I have been carefully and quietly practicing intolerance for some months now.

I’m finding it incredibly liberating. The power to say ‘I do not have to put up with this’ gives me a sense of autonomy. It is my life, and I do have some right to choose. In giving myself the power to discard that which does not suit me, does not please me, does not interest, engage or enrich me in some way, has increased the amount of joy in my life. It’s also freed up a lot of my time. One of the things that offends me is having my time wasted. If I boot out the time wasters, I have more time to deploy where I want it – time for the people who need me, for the people doing fabulous stuff I want to support, for the people I like and whose company I enjoy.

I’ve learned to shrug, walk away and say ‘not my problem’ and that’s such a lovely feeling. Not all problems are automatically my problem. I have the right not to engage. Asserting that protects me from all manner of miserable things. Most of the time I do not formally announce my intention not to participate in something. That can be a way of continuing the problem, not solving it. Time spent telling a person that they make you really unhappy and you don’t want to have to deal with this or that, is actually time spent engaging very specifically with them and inviting more attention from them. I’ve had rounds of people who wanted to spend a lot of time telling me how they can’t cope with me and are upset by me, and who wanted to hold me in a place of being the guilty, useless albatross around their necks. It wasn’t until I realised the power of walking away as a choice I could make, that I also recognised that sticking around to complain about how much of a problem I am (or anyone else), is also a choice. They do not have to stay and I would rather people feeling that way left. Staying specifically to have a problem with me is not a choice I have to respect.

Martyrdom, real or self-constructed, is not a healthy way for anyone to go. A good dose of well-considered intolerance seems to me to be the best antidote to this.

Imagination and Meditation

I’ve recently read a Glennie Kindred book in which she talks about using the imagination to take you into the otherworlds and to have spiritual experiences. This is certainly isn’t the only instance of this kind of thinking. I assume that if you don’t use your imagination much in the normal scheme of things, then imagining talking to a spirit or travelling to the otherworlds will seem incredible, powerful, exciting. Of course it will seem like magic.

My trouble with this is that to a large extent, I live by my imagination and have done for years. I’ve been making up not just stories, but complex settings for them since childhood. Give me a bit of thinking time, and I can imagine my way into all sorts of places, consider how to empathise with whoever’s there, work out how they got there and where they might be going, and how it all works. Give me a throwaway line and I’ll wrap a story around it. I can imagine anything. I assume so could anyone else if they were using their imaginations regularly. As far as I can tell, the imagination is a bit like a muscle in that if you never use it, it gets weak and flabby.

Does my imagination take me to otherworlds that are meaningful? I can imagine my way into the faerie court, and I can go there as Tam Lin, or Thomas the Rhymer, or I can go there as a faerie, or create a person. At a pinch I could go as me, but that’s not as interesting. I can imagine a Stone Age tribe in the Severn Vale and walk between the hills and the river with them. I can see why it might be tempting to cast these imaginings as religious experiences. However, I’m also perfectly capable of imagining walking into Gotham City as Batman. Do we want to call that a religious experience, too? It might be, for the serious fanboy, but it isn’t for me.

I suppose if you’d spent all of your life sat in a chair because you had no idea it was possible to move (or it wasn’t possible for you), and then you found out about walking, and that you could do it, , those first stumbling steps would seem like (or be) a miracle. If you walk all the time, walking is something you take for granted. If you only walk between the house and the car, then a walk into the woods is a walk into an unknown, magical otherworld. If you walk over hills and through woods most weeks, you will love and value the hills and woods, but they will not seem strange in the same way. They won’t strike you as belonging to a semi-supernatural realm.

The same is true of imaginations. If you are used to meditating, visualising, daydreaming, and pathworking, then you will have some idea of what your mind is capable of. Your ability to picture walking into Mordor will not leave you feeling like you have, in some literal sense, walked into Mordor.

There are other levels. There are times, rare and precious occasions, when working deeply with the imagination does seem to open a door into something numinous. If you are used to using your imagination and aren’t being seduced by the frankly quite unhealthy idea that your thinking something makes it real, there is more room for the more wondrous. If you know what your everyday, regular imagination looks like, how glorious and wide are its wings, how truly soaring its potential, then you can appreciate that for what it is. You won’t mistake your imaginary chats with imaginary Druids for anything other than your mind talking to itself. And if for a second, you really do glimpse a white hart come out of faerie, or a tree murmurs a few words to you, then there’s a better chance you will know how to make sense of this.

Books of experience

I found Autumn Barlow’s guest post deeply resonant, yesterday. Partly because I’m crap at being told what to do, and the more strident the instruction, the more likely I am to prickle and resist. I hate being ordered about, and books are no exception.

Like Autumn, I read my share of magic books when I was younger, and I didn’t really get on with them. I had the advantage that there was Paganism rife in my family already, and I knew a few things. Most critically, I knew that magic is will, and that the methods of magic are therefore only a focus of will, so it really doesn’t matter what colour the candle is, and if needs be you can do it without one. I was not impressed by books of spells that were clearly more about prancing about looking witchy, than getting anything done. I also had philosophical issues with the whole thing – using magic as a short cut to get new shoes, exam results and boyfriends felt like cheating, and more importantly, like cheating myself.

I didn’t want a wand to make school assignments go away. I wanted to experience the numinous. I wanted to know and see and feel more, and I wanted there to be wonder, and none of the books I read held that for me.

In my twenties, I started reading Emma Restall Orr’s work. Here at last was a sense of someone really experiencing magic. She doesn’t write ‘how to’ books, but writes from her own life. A door opened, a sense of possibility crept in. However, there was nothing in those books to tell me how to live the mystical, magical life she apparently has. That was frustrating. Eventually, I went to OBOD and they were a good deal more helpful. Not least they made me realise I’d been doing a pretty good job already and had some sound foundations to build on.

The spiritual writing I like best is non-dogmatic. No instructions. No ‘thou shalt’. Authors who write from personal experience, in the first person seem far more credible to me than more distant, third person, perpetually authoritarian voices. People who own their struggles, challenges, mistakes and setbacks also seem a lot more real to me, and I can empathise with them. I am certainly not perfect and all knowing. It is comforting to find that wiser and more experienced Druids still struggle, too, still mess up, fall over, get up again. Tales of setbacks are really helpful, while writers who just bang on about how great everything is can be alienating to us more flawed humans.

Experiential writing reads like the results of an experiment: Here’s what I did. Here’s what happened. These may have been important variables. This is what it means to me. When this is done well, there’s enough information to strike out and do something similar on your own terms, but no sense of being ordered about by the author. There’s the freedom to do something different and the knowledge this will be just as valid. Perhaps more valid – we all need different things. I like it when authors write about why they do things, too. Authors who ask questions and leave us to find our own answers can be really helpful as well.

Mark Townsend. Joanna van der Hoeven. Cat Treadwell. Robin Herne. Rachel Tansy Patternson. Lorna Smithers. These are authors I am reading who keep bringing the personal and the theoretical together, who share from experience and experiment, as people on a journey not as figures of authority. I’m always on the lookout for other spiritual writers who take the same approach, so if there’s someone I’ve missed, do please give them a shout-out in the comments. I think it’s really important that we take the authority out of authoring as far as is possible, and make Pagan spiritual writing about sharing experiences and ideas, not about telling people what to do.

Where Books Start

Guest blog by Autumn Barlow

I sorted out my books this weekend. We’d added ranks of shelves to the alcove by the fire, and were able to finally give homes to about 300 books that had been teetering in piles since I moved in with my husband two years ago.

I was struck by how many pagan and alternative books I had, and how many of those I had forgotten about. The number I have read must double the number I own; books borrowed and books given away.

I was seventeen when I bought my very first book that could be considered “pagan.” I had read an article with a witch in a magazine and wanted to know more; the book suggested in the “further reading” panel was “The Complete Magic Primer” by David Conway. I was nervous as I ordered it in my local bookshop, and that nervousness was compounded when I gave my name to the bookshop owner and he stopped me before I gave my address: “it’s okay. I know where you live.”

Bugger.

After that, I went through Rae Beth’s “Hedgewitch” and Marian Green’s “A Witch Alone: 13 Moons to Master Natural Magic.” At university in Wales, I was distracted by other things and thought I lost my way.

Hindsight shows me I found my way. I became immersed in folk tales, culture, stories, myths and nature. But none of that involved circles and candles and spells so it “didn’t really count.”

The interest in magic matters reared up from time to time. Feeling lost and spiritually empty, I’d scour second hand bookshops and gobble up everything from Ly de Angeles to Caitlin Matthews. Alone in a cottage by a canal in the Midlands, I’d spend evenings on the internet, reading blogs that tended towards purple text on black backgrounds. The irony was lost on me. All I needed to do was step outside.

But it was cold outside.

I became an oral storyteller and I continued to grow herbs because my attempts at vegetables and flowers always failed miserably. I attended some moots in pubs and houses. I encountered a rather ill chaos magician and wandered into some online forums where everyone was a guru of their own universe and I was no wiser as to me, my place, or my point.

So I gave up. I stopped calling myself a pagan. I didn’t follow any of these books’ rules and I didn’t subscribe to any group and I didn’t have a membership card or anything. I clearly was one of those “dabblers” that are looked down upon so snootily. I had no path and no teacher and I didn’t even observe the Wheel of the Year with a homemade altar. I was just one of those “wannabees.”

Where Words End

As I moved around the country, I found solace in attending Quaker meetings. Here, the group sits in patient silence. Sometimes, someone might be moved to speak. Their words may, or may not, have resonance for others. Words are recognised as tricky things. Labels identify and deliminate – if “this” is good then “that” is bad. “This” is “here” and “you” are “there.” Marking the boundaries of our own experience with utterances that only really mean any truth to our own ears restricts our growth and our potential for connection.

“But it’s all we have to communicate,” I am told, “so we must make do with imperfect tools.”

I used to agree with that, and grow sad. The authors of all these books are struggling with all they have to share their visions and must be commended. It’s not their fault if we, the unwise reader, takes their words as – well, gospel, God’s spell – and follows them to the letter. They write with assurance but it doesn’t mean it’s true and what we take from them is our own business, right?

What nonsense. Of course we communicate without words and we have all had this, and it can be a truer experience than any poem or song or 500-page book. That glance. That shared sunset. That tear and that breathless panic. You don’t need words when you just know and this opens all communication up with everything.

No one can tell you how to communicate with a tree because firstly, it’s using words to describe wordlessness, like using cheese to make the sound of a trumpet. Secondly, no one can tell you how to communicate with a heartbroken child either.

You feel helpless, in either situation – tree or child – but you find a way. Somehow. Critical in both is pushing your own ego aside.

Behind Words

So I’ve put all those books up on the top shelf. There are nuggets in them; I’m not dismissing them. But I remember how I rushed from book to book, from author to author, searching for the one secret, the key, the wave of the wand that would reveal everything and make my life all wonderful and easy. It seemed easier to read than to do.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The books on the lower shelf are far more useful. Fiction and non-fiction, here are the how-to books with not a word of confident instruction in them. Yeats and Charles de Lint, Angela Carter and Marina Warner, Alan Garner and the most prolific author of them all: Anonymous, who, through the centuries, has gathered stories and fables, recipes and remedies, in collections and reprints.

I still don’t go to moots. I still don’t label myself with any one path or grade or level. I read, I walk, I dream, I sing wordlessly, I listen, I dream a bit more, I work hard, I ride, I sometimes think a bit. If anyone asks me what I am, I fluster and change the subject – usually to the topic of bicycles.

My scepticism about words prompts my finger to hover over “delete” even now.

But look. This is just my way. Your mileage… as always… may vary.