Nimue Brown's Blog, page 408

The Quest for Happiness

Thinking about what makes us happy has been the business of philosophers pretty much as long as there have been people sitting around thinking about stuff. The quest for the good life underpins many religious ideas and political approaches. What makes us happy? What is truly good? In our consumer orientated culture, we are sold ideas about the happiness we can purchase, but I’m not at all convinced it’s working for most people.

I’ve realised two things on the happiness front in the last few days. Firstly is that I am happy when I’m working. I have no problem working long hours and having demanding, difficult jobs to do. I need to feel that the work is valued and useful. It’s all about morale, so I am vulnerable to certain kinds of feedback. Given me a worthwhile job you need doing, and I’ll run for you. Criticise me and undermine me, and, faced with the same job, I am half as useful, maybe less. When morale is low, it sweeps across all areas of effort; I don’t compartmentalise. If something really makes me miserable, it can wipe me out across the board.

As a consequence, I realise I am happiest when working with honest and straightforward people who are mostly fussed about getting needful things done well. They don’t have to be nice to me. They don’t have to be gentle, or reasonable in their requests. They do have to make sense and I need to be able to see what the point is. That is all. I can be really happy working for a focused tyrant who has a really important vision and demands the nigh on impossible of me. I like the challenge, the sense of purpose, and the things that can be achieved. I’ll take that any day in preference to dealing with the person who sounds nice, but whose thinking doesn’t add up, or who is more interested in appearance than action.

It occurs to me that the people I like most, are for the greater part, an arsey and difficult bunch. Opinionated, passionate, with high standards around key points. People who ask difficult questions and aren’t afraid to say when something isn’t good enough. People who care enough to be grumpy when things are wrong. People for whom getting it right is more important than upholding the illusion of being right, or the illusion of being nice.

I have also realised that without exception, the meanest, most difficult, unreasonable and selfish people along the way were all intent on seeming nice. Each one of them cultivated an impression of niceness, and were willing to get the knives out, behind backs, to keep that impression viable. People who wish to seem nice won’t be honest, if the honest answer is a tough one. Right up until the whole thing goes too far and explodes. The nice mask crumbles, another face emerges. Then afterwards, you have to pretend none of that happened, or that there was a perfectly good reason to explain why it was not their fault.

Kind people are entirely different. Kind people know that you have to put suffering creatures out of their misery – which is seldom nice. Kind people know about the not-nice puss, shit and tears that come as a side order with genuine care sometimes. Kind people understand the brutality of certain choices, and are often willing to fight for what they believe in. I like kind people, although most of them are not superficially nice all the time.

It gives me a clearer sense of where I fit and what I need. Perhaps more importantly, I’m getting a much better idea of who I need to stay the hell away from, and why. Other people will undoubtedly find they need different balances, and that is as it should be. It is important to ask, not just what makes you happy, but who makes you happy, and why?

Laundry for the revolution

If we take the solution of moving back to hand-washing as the greener solution, what happens? We use less water, less electricity and we have to use milder chemicals or we trash our hands. That’s a step down in terms of environmental impact. I’ve been doing this for a while. There are three of us, and none of us has continence issues, which makes it viable.

I was laundering this morning, thinking about how much time it takes. If I had some busy, well paid, high powered job it would be tempting to hire someone else to do the scrubbing for me. Someone less busy whose time is worth less money than mine. This is the great British solution to energy and work – servants. Take away the labour saving devices, and paying someone else to do it for you is the next logical step. Actually that’s not very comfortable.

Once you start paying people to be substitute washing machines, you’re going to start thinking of them as an underclass. These are the folk destined for drudgery, for the work that is beneath you. Thus we create our untouchables. The most essential work is often the least well paid and the least respected. Where would we be without waste collectors and toilet cleaners? What assumptions do we hold about the people who end up with those jobs?

Historically there’s been a lot of gender politics here, too. Laundry has been women’s work. It is women’s quality of life and freedom of time that has been most affected by labour saving devices in the home. It is still the case that women do the bulk of the domestic work, even where both partners also have employed jobs. Take away the washing machines, and there’s every reason to think this trend would continue, forcing women back into unpaid, time consuming, exhausting work.

Turning the clock back is not the answer to any of our modern issues. There is simply too great a risk that you bring back the ills that went alongside the previous solution, rather than making actual progress. In the case of laundry, the attendant ills are gender disparity and class divide. That’s a hefty risk to run with the issue of who is sorting out the underwear.

The way forward has to be about getting smarter, more efficient, more joined up in our thinking. I want a washing machine. I want it powered by a static bicycle. Currently people drive to gyms in order to use static bikes where nothing is done with that energy. I want places were static bikes sit next to washing machines and spin driers. Slow pedalling for the less athletic, while your hyper-fit gym bunnies run the spin driers. More fun and efficient than scrubbing by hand, no underclass and no gender divisions.

But for now I’ve got some wringing out to do.

 

(Anyone worried that I am living in a patriarchal scenario that means I get an unfair share of the domestics, I should mention that Tom does all the toilet and cat litter related stuff, it is an entirely workable trade-off!)

Not for Profit

I’m currently reading Mark Steel’s ‘What’s Going On’ – fast becoming my revolutionary handbook of preference. He makes the point that the idea of profit seems to have taken over everything else. We’ve become obsessed, as a culture, with the money that can be made from things. We devalue the things that have no price tag on them, and if it isn’t making a profit, it goes. When the only value available is profit, how can you protect the habitat of a newt, or suggest that clean drinking water ought to be a human right? What price love, or companionship? What’s the economic worth of not having a shitty day? Who cares? We’re selling our quality of life, and all too often we sell it to the lowest bidder for the least possible return.

Being Green is not just about the politics. For me, the politics are the least of it. Lifestyle, culture, personal change and community are a more important manifestation of the Green agenda than getting bums onto political seats. Not least because a bottoms up approach to things is always better than a top down solution. Imposing things on people is not part of a Green agenda. We have to BE the change.

So I’d like to issue you all with a small challenge, and it goes like this: Every day, very deliberately do something that has no economic value whatsoever. Do it for love. It can’t be online, because of the electricity you use and the advertising revenue your presence generates. That’s all about the money. You can’t pay to do it, and it cannot lead to something you will be paid for doing. If that seems difficult to figure out, it will be a measure of how economically informed your life has become, and this is something you need to know about.

Small gestures are fine. Gaze out of the window for half an hour. Go and sit under a tree. Have a little dance. Sing a song – you do not have to be good, you just have to like singing songs. Rescue something you might have thrown away and turn it into some other things. Even better if those things are sock puppets or of no real utility. Play. Mess about. Turn the phone off and climb into a big chair with something warm and soft to cuddle. Have an extra hour in the duvet. Re-read a book you already own.

We have to stop being good little consumers, and we have to stop letting every part of our lives be turned into someone else’s profit. Or our own, for that matter. We have to stop letting profit be the most important thing, or we are going to trash the planet in the name of GDP. The way to do this is not through top-down politics, but through each of us quietly undertaking to rebel in small ways. Do something irrelevant that you enjoy. Rest more. Play. Practice religion or philosophy. Make love.

If you can get that into the mix once a day, you can expand on it. You can add value to your life- value in a warm, human sense, not in the sense that goes on a balance sheet. You can also do this and be useful – that’s actually easy because many of the things that most need doing, no one will pay you for anyway. Read a book to a child, pick up litter, give away things you no longer need. Contemplate what strikes you as being economic activity, and what doesn’t, and have a look at the interesting grey areas in between. How monetised are your life and perceptions?

And, next time someone tells you it’s all about the bottom line, laugh at them. Please. Laughter is powerful, and this obsession with profit is ridiculous, and destructive. We need to start mocking it as the lunacy it so clearly is.

 

(For the other side of the argument, about the need for paying fairly for things, there is Creativity for love and money)

Happily Ever After

I haven’t had a vast number of relationships, although there were some flings along the way that have not been terribly visible to those of you who know me personally. Most of my relationships have not lasted more than three years. Some just gradually disintegrated. We ran out of things to say to each other and things we wanted to do. We stopped being interested in each other. We moved on. Mostly that was fine, and seemed normal. One limped on in an undead state for far longer than it should have done, but the rot had set in by the three year mark.

Tom and I have been a couple for four and a half years now, and married for nearly three of those. I’ve been conscious in recent weeks that we’re into the time frame when usually things have fallen apart for me (assuming they hadn’t fallen apart way before then). Life has tested us, repeatedly and extensively. The initial challenge of being a long distance couple. Narrowboat life, poverty, a protracted period of horrendous stress with going to court, professional setbacks, work challenges, bouts of illness… it has not been an easy few years. Yet we’ve made the best of things through all of that, and in face of hardship have pulled together rather than pulling away.

I look at us, and I feel more confident than I’ve ever felt about any relationship ever. It’s not the big, dramatic stuff that seems most critical here. It’s the smaller, every day stuff. We like each other. We get on. We enjoy doing stuff together. We can laugh at things, and together, and we find joy in sharing the small things. It’s the little stuff, the hugs and warm words, the daily exchanges and the small tokens of affection that are the glue. Drama and passion we’ve had aplenty, but you can’t live there full time, and if there isn’t the gentler, day to day stuff, passion burns out.

I had thought myself to be a loner. I used to spend hours alone every day, working mostly. I can do bursts of intense social contact and extroversion, but on the whole need a lot of quiet time. I would have said there was no way I could spend most of my waking hours in the company of another person and not end up strangling them. But here we are, and hours I spend away from Tom are rare. I haven’t strangled him at all. This still surprises me; both that I could be so comfortable with another person, and that anyone could find me tolerable in large doses.

As a younger human I did not believe anyone would want me, and was ridiculously grateful for any attention at all. It did not lead to me making reliably good choices. I spent my twenties and early thirties thinking I was an awful, difficult person to deal with and that only some kind of saint would be able to put up with me. I thought this because I was being told how hard I was to live with on a very regular basis. I’d come to understand that I am unreasonable, demanding, difficult, moody, irrational, impossible to please, and a whole heap of other things that made it very hard to look at my reflection in the mirror of a morning.

Then in these last four years or so, I’ve had a totally different experience. Having it reflected back to me that I’m fun to be around, good to share things with, interesting, reasonable, not so demanding, co-operative, kind even. A whole other person. Someone I don’t have to hate and feel ashamed of. It’s a very different sort of life experience, feeling valued and loved for who I am, rather than grudgingly tolerated. Maybe I wasn’t so awful in the first place. I’ve not noticed any dramatic changes in my behaviour, except that I laugh more and cry less, because I am happier.

I spent most of my life believing that the onus was on me, to bend and shape myself into something other people would find pleasing, so that they would put up with me. All the time I was doing that, I wasn’t terribly happy, nor did I seem ever to be good enough in the people pleasing role. These few years of not feeling like I have to do that have been revolutionary for me. To be good enough as I am. Not needing to apologise for the shortcomings of my existence. To feel liked. The smallest, most basic and essential things, so easily taken for granted if you are used to them, but an absolute miracle and wonder for me, having mostly not known what that would feel like.

He’s not perfect, and he knows that. He doesn’t expect me to be perfect either. When things go wrong, we deal with it and move on. No big deal. There is trust between us, and respect, and mutual need and a deep, deep love that has been tested in all manner of ways and that does not crumble in face of adversity. I can easily imagine doing this for the rest of my life. I just wish someone had sat me down when I was fourteen and told me I was worth this, and that I should not accept anything less than someone who would love me as an equal, value me as I am, like me as a friend and respect me as a person. But I got there in the end.

Being Broken

Life gives us many opportunities to break. In pain and fear, in loss, grief and failure we are torn open. Or we learn to close ourselves off from that. We learn not to care. Why choose to suffer when you can protect yourself by the simple method of not giving a shit? Why let the opinions and feelings of others affect you? Why love anything enough to risk being wounded by losing it?

I’ve spent a fair bit of time now watching the people who protect themselves from pain. I’ve had some pretty close contact with that approach. The people who cannot hear that they are wrong because they will not subject themselves to the pain of shame. The people who protect themselves by not caring, and who fear love. None of them were actually all that happy.

There is always a balance, always a trade-off. The person who protects themselves from humiliation struggles to learn anything. You can’t progress if you have to believe that you are already perfect. The person who does not care lives a life that is short of warmth. If you do not love then you miss out on a lot. Perhaps you feel less pain, but you feel less joy as well. The people who avoid risk in the hopes of minimising suffering also avoid opportunities to live.

Out there in the normal world, people will ridicule you for feeling too much, for caring, for weeping over that which is awful, for grieving over loss. We’re supposed to get over it and move on. Bereavement should be tidied up in a matter of weeks. The loss of friends, homes, jobs, security, health and prospects… we’re supposed to shrug it off and not inconvenience other people with our pain. What this means in practice is that we are taught to hide what we feel, and to lie about it. I’ve been there and I have the t-shirts. For a huge, personal catastrophe, you might get a couple of weeks of grace, if you are lucky.

People who do not grieve their losses (and not just the dead) do not get to heal. People who are not allowed to break, take far more damage on the inside and far longer to recover. Rates of depression and anxiety are soaring, but we don’t ask why, and we certainly don’t look hard enough at the bat-shit crazy culture and assumptions that might be underpinning that. It is a terrible thing to lose your health, or your job. It is awful when relationships break down. It is gutting when the goalposts are moved unfairly, when the system itself turns on you, when there is cruelty without justice, when there is sheer bad luck. And then you’re supposed to pretend all is fine.

If you are allowed to break, you are also allowed to heal. If you are allowed to own your distress, you are also allowed to ask for help. If you are able to feel all the shitty, humiliating things, you are able to learn how to rise above them. If you are able to feel the pain, you are also able to feel the joy and love. Yet it remains socially unacceptable to break, even when your life is in ruins.

Creativity, for love and money

Collectively we don’t seem that upset by the idea of paying more money to the kinds of celebrities who we know will blow it on the rock and roll lifestyle. Alcohol, drugs, fast cars, palatial homes and designer goods are all part of the celebrity fairy tale, so we buy the music, the films, the football tickets and we keep them in business. In the Pagan community, the reverse attitude seems prevalent – that it is an affront to seek money, and anyone who appears to behave in ways that even suggest they might want to earn a living from what they do, are called parasites. I’m not terribly fond of either extreme, I confess, and I sometimes suspect there are people who resent the professional Pagans but are still blithely supporting the other lot.

No one owes anyone a living and no one is especially entitled to anything. On the flip side of that, I like arrangements that value the work a person does, whatever that work is. I am as concerned by the chronic overvaluing of footballers and bankers, as I am by the chronic undervaluing  of nurses and teachers. The trouble with a market led economy is this race for the bottom, and if you don’t have the bargaining power to force people to pay you more, what you’ll end up doing is having to undercut the next fellow, to try and get ahead. Most of us do not win at that game.

I don’t have a rock and roll lifestyle. With authors, it tends to be less the drugs and cars, more the pipe and the whiskey, but I don’t have those either. But then the truth about authoring is that the vast majority of us are not able to make enough to live on. We need other income streams to survive, or supportive partners, or a small inheritance. Very few authors end up super rich, but the media likes to focus on the JK Rowlings of this world, and skim over the many near invisible others who barely make enough to keep themselves in jumpers so that they can sit in unheated homes and keep typing.

Buy my books, and I may blow some of the money on clothes. Not designer stuff, nothing glamorous. Most of what I own is either very old and tatty, or too big for me. The downside of inadvertent weight loss is that old things no longer fit. Some of my clothes are twenty years old and more, and while there’s use in them I’ll keep wearing them, because it would seem irresponsible not to.

I will probably spend royalties on cheese. As food prices go up, cheese has become more of a luxury than a regular thing, and being a vegetarian, that’s a bit of an issue. The vegan alternatives are more expensive than cheese (tofu, seitan etc). I gather theft of meat and cheese has gone up considerably as people in far greater difficulty than me simply cannot afford to eat properly any more.

The other thing I tend to fritter the money away on, is books. I’m a big reader, and I do use the library, but it’s nice to be able to support other authors by buying their work too. Books mean research and deepening my understanding and broadening my awareness, which seems to me an essential part of the job.

I’m very tired of the myth that hard word equates to earning, and that those who have wealth deserve it, while those who do not have only themselves to blame. I’ve worked hard on all manner of things, and I know the jobs that work you hardest are often those closest to the minimum wage. Those jobs will have you flat out and run ragged, with little to stimulate your mind or engage your interest. If hard work equated to income, teachers would be paid as much as doctors, while bankers would not be able to earn million pound bonuses. If hard work equated to income, an artist might be expected to make a living without working seven day weeks most of the year. Anyone who thinks art isn’t hard work hasn’t tried painting for ten hours a day, every day.

That said, if you’d like to read the first chapter of the latest book for free, no obligations, its on the publisher’s website – http://moon-books.net/blogs/moonbooks/pagan-portals-spirituality-without-structure-nimue-brown/

I find marketing my own work really difficult. I find it hard to suggest to anyone that they might consider buying something I’ve done, because I’ve seen the ‘parasite’ accusation a few too many times, although not directed at me, so far as I know. We none of us reliably earn in relation to our worth, it’s a big flaw in how our current economic systems are set up. Music, art and words are increasingly available for free on line, pirated, and given away because no one will pay. It’s a sorry state of affairs. Buy someone’s book. Give something back in exchange for the things freely given. Buy an album. It makes worlds of difference to people who create. And if you can’t stretch to that, please consider not hating us for flagging up now and then that we need to eat, too, because many creative people actually live close to the edge. Being taken for granted and expected to do it all for nothing and told that we should be happy being able to do it just for love, really doesn’t make that any great joy.

Being Judgemental

One of the things I’ve learned in the last few weeks is that I’m a seriously judgemental person. When it comes to entertainment in all forms, I’m really fussy and get cross about time given to things that weren’t very good (by my subjective standards). I can be fairly judgemental about people, too. I know there’s a significant social movement towards holding up being non-judgemental as an ideal, because it isn’t nice to judge people, or what they do.

I think it’s really important to be able to judge. If you cannot say when something is rubbish, you also cannot meaningfully say when it is good. I think that’s too great a loss to countenance. I want to know where my work could be better (it could always be better). If I let myself think everything I do is good enough, helped by nobody judging me, I am not going to improve much, nor have any sense of improvements if I do achieve something. If I cannot say a person is cruel, unkind, violent and unreasonable, I cannot protect myself from violence or other forms of abuse, or warn others.

Being non-judgemental can in fact be incredibly lazy. One thing is not as good as another, more often than not. Where there are real needs, like nutrition, a bowl of sweets is not the same as a bowl of fruit. Ultimate value-judging can also be lazy – the kind of attitude that says ‘all comics are worthless’ has not bothered to find out whether all comics are the same (they aren’t) or what impact comics actually have on people. We need to be very careful when making sweeping judgements about things we have no direct knowledge of – there’s another judgement.

Often it is easiest to be judgemental of broad trends, ideas, swathes of people. I hate television, which is unfair because there probably is some good stuff in there somewhere. We will be most unpopular where we judge specifically – this book and that comment. The broad trends are easier to dismiss. If I hate fantasy as a genre (which I don’t) and you love it, you can just dismiss me as the sort of idiot who does not value fantasy. If I hate your favourite novel, that’s starting to feel a lot more personal. If I hate the novel you wrote, that’s about as personal as it gets. There is a school of thought that says I should not offend you by making it known that I do not like your stuff.

What is the alternative? Lying by omission, and a strange language inflation in which ‘like’ can start to suggest ‘actually do not much like’ and anything short of rabid praise starts to sound like damnation. That’s no kind of win.

Judgement is impossible to bear if we need to be loved universally. It is horrendous to find someone disagrees with us, if it is our belief that everyone should feel the same way we do. If our loves and labours are so fragile that any dislike of them will crush us, and them, we’ve got some work to do. This isn’t about the person who judges us, this is about us.

It is possible to be judgemental without being rude or destructive. Not liking a thing does not make it ok to pile on the abuse. I do not like television, but that doesn’t mean I am entitled to belittle the people who do, or to rubbish the people who work in the medium. My tastes and preferences are not the ultimate measure of quality. There is a difference between saying ‘I do not like it’ and ‘it has no worth’. Unfortunately, many people will hear the former as the latter, which is unhelpful. Not everyone has to like what we do. It is ok not to have universal love and approval, and if we’re looking for that, we’re going to get badly bruised, because there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy to hate you for what you do, no matter what that is.

If you are surrounded by people who only say how great you are and never mention when you mess up, your views become sorely distorted. If, through tantrums and vitriolic responses, or even violence, you make it impossible to criticise you, then you cannot learn and instead give yourself a free hand to do as you please. Totalitarian regimes make cultures where no one is able to judge them. Abusive lovers do the same thing, for the same reasons. The people who know they are shoddy but do not want to face that truth will build webs of lies and further abuses to protect themselves from judgement.

Judgement is a good thing. Used well, it undermines abuse and stupidity. Used well, it gives people chance to do better and go further. Applied specifically and with sense, it helps us improve the qualities of our lives by focusing on that which we most benefit from. Knowing what to judge, and what to let go of, what to challenge and what to shrug over is a good Druid skill. Knowing what is dangerous and what is less so, what needs taking down and what needs a quiet word to point it in a better direction. These are skills of diplomacy and insight, and it would serve us all to hone them.

Everyone is lovely

For a long time I’ve struggled with the idea that I ought to be able to feel that everyone is lovely, as good as they can be right now, doing the best they can and worthy of respect. I want to believe it, but people have this unfortunate habit of making that really difficult for me. I’ve started to realise there is a curious and uncomfortable political dimension to all of this, which I’m still grappling with, but want to offer up in the tentative form I’ve got.

Everyone is lovely. Actually this seems to be a very partial sort of statement and people who apply it have often drawn a circle around ‘the people’ that does not include everyone. The Working Classes, the Christians, the Pagans, the Welsh… it doesn’t really matter where you draw the circle, but it matters a lot that you draw it. You believe in the people inside the circle, in their innate worth and beauty, in their future. You support their rights. History is full of stories of this shape.

The trouble, as I have said with people, is this nasty habit of not living up to expectation. No body of people is universally and dependably anything much. Humans are frail, fallible, not always alert to their best interests and not reliably onboard with ‘visionary’ ideas about what they should be wanting. Most of the time, this is not much of a problem, and those few zealots for their chosen people just sit around wondering why no one wants to put them in charge.

The problems start when you do get the would-be glorious leaders in charge. The working class still isn’t radical enough. The Christians still aren’t fundamentalist enough. The Welsh just aren’t aggressively Welsh enough… most people are not in fact hungry for Cultural Revolution. They just want a quiet life. The next apparently logical step is that you have to make them do it. For their own good. Because it’s best for them. You have to make them only speak the pure language, and only learn the right history. You have to make them march, and fight and abandon their children for the good of the cause. You have to frighten them into betraying their neighbours as not being proper fanatics, and on it goes, and the bodies start mounting up.

Some of the world’s worst atrocities have been born out of Utopian thinking. The leaders who have created Hell on Earth have, without exception, been promising Paradise. An imaginary paradise for the chosen few in which all wrongs will be driven off by getting rid of those who are not chosen, and making the chosen manifest their destiny. The destiny a small minority have seen fit to envisage. There’s a destructive anger that comes from the massive difference between the fantasy of ‘the chosen people’ (whoever they are this time) and the reality of a bunch of actual people who are no better or worse than anyone else.

Trying to believe that everyone is lovely, actually seems like a first step in a very wrong direction, to me. All people should be entitled to the same basic human rights, but that’s the extent of the commonality. Some people are cruel, and some do not care. Some revel in their wilful ignorance and some are smug in their superiority. People can be really quite shitty. I do not love everyone. I am not going to try and love everyone because I would be unavoidable partial if I did try. When we start making assessments of collective qualities and worth, we are on a very slippery slope. Better, I think, to be able to recognise the difference and diversity. ‘The People’ do not exist, no matter how you try to draw a circle around a few of them/us. We are all individuals and the more able we are to carry on quietly being individuals, the less likely I think we are to end up killing each other.

Emotional Honesty

One of the things that matters to me is space in which I can be present to and authentic around my own emotional responses. Interestingly, I gather I can come across as a bit ‘heart on sleeve’ with this blog. That troubles me slightly, because this is so such a construct. What goes here is not the raw experience of the moment, but something I’ve had time to process, reflect on and squeeze into some kind of shape. My actual emotionality is a lot more immediate, but I’m a big fan of thinking about feeling and seeking to understand the currents of my own emotions.

There are many situations in which emotional honesty may not seem appropriate. Work situations would be an obvious example. Nonetheless, I’ve watched over the last few months how my emotional state impacts on my ability to work well. When I feel happy, am engaged with the work, feel emotionally secure and emotionally rewarded, I get a lot more done and the quality of my output is better. On the other hand, if workspaces are triggery and I feel that people are trying to control me, I can kick off into anxiety and my productivity decreases. I took the choice last week to be honest about this with someone I work with, and I think it’s going to help, but it was nonetheless an unnerving decision to contemplate. At work, we are not supposed to feel.

There are many human interactions that do not prompt strong emotional responses in me at all. I quite enjoy the fleeting contact I get with people who I feel neutral about. It can be easy and pleasant. I know it’s not providing what I most need, but the emotional connections are often difficult, and as risky as they are rewarding.

It is the human contact rooted in things that matter to me that tends to be the most emotionally affecting. I’ve always formed deep bonds with people I share music with. There’s a level of engagement in shared music that can transcend normal interaction and become very much an emotional dialogue. There used to be a few people in my life with whom I had that level of intensity and openness when we were playing together, and I’ve missed it. People with the technical skill and the open heart are not many, but there are some on my radar and I wait to see what happens.

My creative collaborations have always engendered a high degree of exposure of self and soul. Tom was my artist long before he was my lover, and it was the intensity of the shared working that drew us together. Other collaborations have brought deep friendship and potent connections. Where there is flow and trust, where no one needs to be in control and there is respect between participants, creative collaborations are wonderful things.

The trouble is, it doesn’t always go like that, and until you get in and try, it’s not obvious which way things might go. Creative partners can also turn out to be possessive, resentful of other people’s successes, jealous of the skills of their creative significant other. Co-creators can be paranoid, or control freaks, or both. It can turn out that one of them is aiming to ride on the coat tails of the other. That stuff hurts. It makes it harder to trust anyone, and harder to trust your judgement about who might be equal to those deeper, more involved connections.

I started last summer with my soul just beneath the surface of my skin, with my heart open, ready to trust and to try. I did not place that trust very well, and I’ve had to step back. It may well be that the people I should have chosen to work with have suffered as a consequence. I messed up. I put my faith in the wrong people, and it left me needing to retreat and regroup, to lick wounds, consider the bruising and try to work out what I actually want.

I do want those creative connections. I want people in my life I can trust and share with, where there is flow and connection, trust, respect and good things happen. I want those magical moments of finding myself on exactly the same wavelength as the person I’m with, where the ideas are streaming along. My two regular creative partners, Tom and Paul, have simply weathered my falling apart these last few months and supported me. I do not need to be cautious with them, and I will go back to those spaces, open hearted and ready to make stuff. I’ve had time to reflect, and have decided I’ll take the bruises and setbacks rather than protecting myself by not risking it. I’ll try to pick more carefully. What I want are people who see the heart on the sleeve and dare to show me theirs, rather than reaching for something to cut mine with.

Where books come from

Fiction remains a bit of a mystery to me. Each imaginary tale has its own unique process of conception and gestation, and I still have no idea whatsoever how, or why it works. Non-fiction, on the other hand, has much clearer origins and everything I’ve thus far written on that side has come about via a fairly similar process.

I’m an avid reader and will try just about anything in terms of subject matter and genre. I read a lot of non-fiction, and will have a go at any topic if it’s written intelligently. History, natural history, philosophy, religion and politics tend to dominate. My natural response to finding a topic I’m not up to speed on, is to get a book or three. Currently that means I’m reading a lot of politics, because I need a better handle on that aspect of society and I do not know enough about where we are right now, much less how we got here. I’m finding plenty of books to answer that.

On the Pagan side however, there are a lot of introductions and far fewer in-depth books. When I started getting into meditation with a view to running groups, there were only a couple of books with any obvious relevance to what I wanted to do. I had exactly the same experience after reading Blood and Mistletoe – there was nowhere obvious to go to read more about Pagan relationships with ancestry. Then I started exploring prayer, and hit exactly the same problem. In each of those three cases I started reading around, looking at other traditions, experimenting and asking questions.

Druidry and Meditation, Druidry and the Ancestors, and Druidry and Prayer (not available yet) all came out of the process of not being able to easily find what I needed. It makes me very conscious that all spiritual books are basically human inventions, and that none should be granted too much authority. Religion is entirely a consequence of people making stuff up and writing it down, usually in response to a perceived gap in the already available information. Nothing else is available. It’s all guess work, experimentation, jamming on other people’s ideas, and trying to make sense of the world.

In each case I’ve become more aware that there is no way I could nail any issue or put together some kind of definitive text. Sure, there’s an ego drive that way, I expect most authors want to write something ground breaking and definitive, but mostly we won’t. These will be steps along the way, and others will carry on from them (hopefully) to write something better, deeper, more insightful and more relevant.

I mostly end up writing my best shot at the book I really wanted but could not find at some key point in my life. The most recent, Spirituality without Structure, is the book I could have done with when I was about nineteen and starting out along my own path in earnest. Currently I’m working on something about dreams, which I the book I was looking for in my early twenties, that neither psychological writing nor new age stuff was able to deliver for me. I have no idea what comes next. It depends entirely on my becoming aware of an absence that matters to me.