Nimue Brown's Blog, page 411

Responsible Druid

Anyone who read the comments yesterday will see that I’ve been told off by a ‘Senior Druid’. My inclusive, find your own path approach risks leading the unwary into bad practice and improper Druidry, apparently. So, today I’d like to mention a thing that I consider really important.

The first thing that you do when you set out to become a Druid, is to take responsibility for your path.

There are many people who can teach you things about what Druidry might mean. There books aplenty. There are those who will say you have to read certain things, believe certain things, wear the right robes. You may be told to join the right Order, celebrate specific festivals or be encouraged to give yourself an unpronounceable name in a language you don’t speak. There are those who will offer you things that seem so mad, unfounded and impossible that you are left bemused and uncomfortable. There are others who will encourage you to explore widely and draw your own conclusions. I fall firmly into the final group, I think there are very few things you ‘must’ do in order to be a Druid, but one of them, without any doubt, is to take responsibility for your own path, and never abdicate that to someone else, no matter how senior they seem, how many books they’ve written or how many blog follower they have. Being responsible for your own path is your sacred duty as a Druid.

Ancient Druidry cast the participants as the thinking classes of the Celtic peoples. Graeme Talboys has written eloquently on this topic, and if you’d like to look into it, I recommend getting one of his books with ‘Druid’ in the title (he also writes excellent fiction). As I see it, any area of intellectual endeavour is therefore valid work as part of your Druidry. History and philosophy are always popular, but with crisis looming, I think we need more Druid economists, politicians, alternative technology experts and other forward looking academics, too.

Unless you are physically unable to get outside, or are in a place where that’s unsafe, then your Druidry should take you outside. By all means use the computer to do your intellectual learning, but also get out and do something. Explore your land. Druids need soil, and frequently need trees. Druids in landscapes that do not naturally feature trees have to figure out what, in the absence of trees, a Druid in their part of the world should be engaging with. Explore ancestry. Think. Learn. Pay attention to your emotional responses. Create, imagine, follow your inspiration.

I’ve talked about service recently, and the importance of that not being po-faced martyrdom. I’ll say that again. Serve by doing the good stuff.

On the surface that’s all very clear and ‘thou shalt’, but only in broad brush strokes. In practice, there’s such a vast amount to choose from as you find your own path. Your inspiration and your passion should guide those choices. Follow the call of your heart and the cry of your animal self. Listen to the land, and listen to your own wisdom. Of course listen to what other people do and think, because you can steal ideas, draw inspiration, find connections, and spare yourself from re-inventing the wheel all the time.

Every now and then you will run into someone who has given themselves a Senior Druid title and decided that they have the right to dictate how you should go about your Druidry. What you do with that, is your responsibility. All I can say is, the ‘Senior Druid’ title is often self chosen. If someone runs an Order, has a big Grove, teaches and you’ve gone to them seeking advice, then you might want to listen to what they say. No experienced Druid worth their salt throws themselves at other people uninvited to say what should and shouldn’t be happening, unless that person is actively dangerous to themselves or others. Anyone doing this is probably on an ego trip and doesn’t deserve your attention.

You are responsible for your path, and that means you are responsible for deciding whose advice to follow. I do not have all the answers. Most days the best I can manage is to formulate questions. Hang around with me and you are never going to get to call yourself a Senior Druid, and if that bothers you, then you’re in the wrong place! (Unless, as Graeme suggested yesterday, you become the sort of senior Druid who goes into the woods and then forgets what they were doing there… but that’s another story.)

The Goddess of Democracy

I’m currently reading John Keane’s “The Life and Death of Democracy”. He starts by pointing out that the original idea for democracy probably didn’t start in Greece, but came from somewhere in what is now Syria, Iran and Iraq. There’s irony. Furthermore, the Greeks had a goddess of democracy: Demokratia.

I suppose it should have been obvious that she would be out there somewhere. The Greeks were polytheistic, they had deities to cover most aspects of life and death, clearly this one should have been in the mix. I wonder why she is so unmentioned? It could be that the idea of democracy being founded so clearly in an unsecular society, is an uncomfortable one. It’s those wise, philosopher Greeks we want as the ancestors of political tradition. It may not be comfortable for many who uphold democracy as the greatest modern good, to find it tangled in with ancient religion. Pagan religion at that.

Greek democracy was seriously flawed in that it entirely disenfranchised women from practical participation in the overtly democratic bits. But, women could be priestesses, oracles and goddesses, and if you postulate that those presences intermingled with politics, women suddenly don’t seem quite so marginalised. Not a perfect scenario, but a less flawed one. Greek democracy also depended on slavery, and there are no excuses there.

To what extent does democracy still depend on slavery, though? We call it other things, but wage slavery locks many into long hours for little gain, the fruit of their labours largely enjoyed by others. We depend also on those hidden workers in distant lands who work for a pittance in dangerous conditions so that we can have the cheap merchandise our economy thrives on. That too is a form of slavery, and before we grumble too much about the Greeks, we need to tackle the monstrous inequalities our own systems generate. We still have a political elite, for the greater part moneyed, well connected, and coming from an increasingly narrow bandwidth of political, law and media training. We still have dynasties of ruling families, especially in America.

I do wonder though, about Demokratia and the implications of seeing democracy as a goddess. If that was your world view, you would see participation in democracy as a sacred act. Corruption and apathy would become crimes against deity. Every word spoken would have serious implications, and that sense of the Gods listening might keep a person focused on their sacred duty to serve.

I doubt the Greeks would recognise what we have now in terms of democracy. Such a small percentage of our population actually participates, for a start. The good of the majority hardly enters the equation, much less the good of all. And of course for those nature worshipping ancient Greeks, our political disregard for the natural world would have seemed like nothing short of madness. I’m entirely with them on that – it is insane and suicidal, and yet we continue to put short term economic gains before the viability of our home and planet.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a democracy where politicians took their words and work seriously as acts of service. Where a consciousness of higher purpose kept people on their toes. That doesn’t have to be about any specific religion, you could do it just as well from a place of humanistic atheism. The point is the quality of the service given, the much needed sense of humbleness now sorely lacking in public life, and people who step up to give, rather than to take. Imagine around that, too, a culture where having an excess at the expense of your neighbours would be unthinkable. A culture in which to hold ostentatious wealth while others go hungry would be the most shameful thing imaginable. So many modern politicians claim to be Christians, but it’s funny, I don’t remember Jesus saying ‘Screw the poor and remember the bottom line’ even once. Some genuine Christian values (compassion, love thy neighbour etc) would not go amiss, rather than this modern lip service to religion so often coupled with a total disregard for its most basic tenets.

The modern gods of Democracy have names, too. We call them Dollar and Pound, Free Market, GDP and Growth. These we worship, and these we sacrifice to. We sacrifice the lives of our poor, and the future of our children, to these deities. For a culture that claims not to be polytheistic and riddled with superstition, we are surprisingly devout followers of the gods of economy. We trust in Free Market to solve our every problem and handle our every need. Future generations may look back at our simplistic faith and roll their eyes. The Greeks may have been a good deal wiser than us when they chose Demokratia as their goddess, rather than money.

Fully Qualified Druid

Get on facebook, or into any online, public Druid space and you will find people who want to determine who is, and is not a ‘proper’ Druid, who is a ‘better’ Druid than whom, and who is therefore the most important. It doesn’t take many over-loud voices to create an impression that Druidry is a judgemental space, as hierarchical and dogmatic, full of rules as any other religion. You must do this, a proper Druid wears, says, owns, celebrates…

Bollocks.

(Actually, to clarify, a proper Druid does not necessarily own, wear, say or celebrate bollocks, but they remain an option).

Why are we pouring so much time into telling other people what they ought to be doing? What does it matter? I don’t think it matters at all. If you aren’t behaving antisocially, if you aren’t hurting or harming anyone else, why should I care in the slightest why it is that you call yourself a Druid? Why should I mind if your Druidry looks different to mine? If I trust the value and integrity of my own work, why would I need the affirmation of yours looking really similar?

Sharing what we do, for the purposes of mutual inspiration and to enable exploration, is a wonderful thing. Coming back with the results of experimental Druidry and taking about it, is brilliant. Let’s do that. I want to hear about the things you’ve tried and the inspiration you’ve been blessed with.

The fear of course is of dumbing down and falling standards. If we do not hold the boundaries and control who can be a Druid, then those other people will get in. The ones who do it wrong. The silly ones. The other sort. They are easily identified because they are not like us. We, on the other hand, are fine and reasonable, our Druidry underpinned by solid things, properly studied, thoroughly justified, and it is outrageous that anyone should suggest otherwise. And you know, maybe we need to do this a bit less. Maybe it is born of insecurity and a need to prove how good and special we are, and not a consequence of anything useful or spiritual at all.

You might want to consider not participating in those conversations. There is one thing that I am certain of, and it is this: The truly wise and for-reals modern Druids are not on facebook for hours at a time dispensing judgements on the quality of other people’s Druidry. They’re out in the woods, or working the soil, or practicing their craft. The really serious Druids (whoever they are… I may have been lucky enough to meet some) are not manifesting their religion on facebook. Anyone who shows up there touting their superiority has, as far as I can see, already invalidated their stance by wasting their time and energy bickering on social media. Anyone who seeks their Druidry on facebook probably deserves what they get. Pointers and inspiration are one thing, facebook Druidry quite another.

And yes, I say this very aware that I’m writing a blog that will share automatically to facebook, but I’ve never told anyone they can’t be a Druid, and I don’t mean to start now. I’m not an authority. I’m not so hard core and for reals that I have the right to trample other people. Do I have the right to grumble about the folk who get on facebook and pick holes in what other people do? To turn to those who say ‘this is not Druid enough’ and say ‘actually, this facebook nit-picking is not Druid enough’? No idea! But I’m doing it anyway.

I’m working on getting off the computer, spending more time on real things, and not getting sucked into endless, circular online debates that achieve nothing. As a consequence I find I am a good deal happier and I get a lot more done. I offer that by way of possibility. In the meantime, if someone online questions your right to be a Druid, don’t get stroppy with them directly, it just feeds the beast. Ask yourself if there is some other place you could be and some more rewarding thing you could be doing… because that’s where the real Druid action will be.

Ancestors and Laundry

Picture hand-washing, and you’ll probably either get the ancients scrubbing their clothes alongside streams, or the more Victorian image of copper boiler, mangle, and a whole Monday given over to the job. We’ve got washing machines because laundry is dreadfully hard, time consuming drudgery that working class women had to bear for centuries.

It’s not that simple, but I realise firstly that most people do not handwash, and therefore that most people will not have a realistic sense of how much easier modern handwashing is than the Victorian image of it. Washing machines use a lot of electricity and water. If you are struggling to make ends meet, handwashing may help you. If you want to be greener, this is also a consideration, water use being one of our many unhelpful ways of impacting on the environment. The carbon footprint of clothes has more to do with how you wash it than where you got it, I believe. Come the zombie apocalypse, you may be glad to know it’s easy to rinse out your knickers…

Ancestral laundry involved very different fabrics. Cotton, linen and wool predominated in the historical wash. These are not easy to clean, and are really hard to dry. Modern synthetics take a lot less effort (I have handwashed both). They dry far more rapidly, even if all you do is wring them out. Modern cleaning products, even the eco ones, are a good deal stronger and more effective than what the grandmothers had to work with, this again makes the job easier. Unlike our grandmothers, we have hot running water (for now, at least). Heating the water, and getting the fuel to heat the water was a big contributor to making the job hard and lengthy. We don’t have that problem. We can cheat a bit and get a spin dryer to shake the worst of the water out and still come in with a far lower water and electric use than the washing machine.

Our ancestors were, for the greater part, labourers. Even the wealthy were outside a lot, using horses to get around, and obliged to walk down muddy streets. History was a much dirtier place. Washing a miner’s clothes must have been really intensive work. Farm labourers, sweating in the fields all day must have required some serious scrubbing. We just don’t get as dirty; mostly washing means getting the dust and a modest amount of sweat out, maybe the odd food stain from children. Unless you go so far as to handwash nappies, you’re never going to meet anything on the scale our ancestors had to contend with unless you are washing for a manual labourer, and there’s not so much of that about and it’s not as dirty as it used to be.

Washing machines aren’t actually great for heavy soiling anyway. If I do an epic walk and get the hems of my trousers covered in mud, and throw them through a washing machine, the odds are a lot of the mud will still be there when they come out.  Scrubbing with a brush may take more effort, but I find I often get things cleaner by handwashing. Handwashing a couple of items is no less efficient, while throwing two shirts in a washing machine is a huge waste of power. There are all kinds of advantages to doing it the old way. It does take more effort, and more time, but not an unviable amount, for most of us. Obviously if you have three toddlers to wash for, this may not be for you.

Part of what locks us into our modern, unsustainable behaviours is the belief that there are no alternatives. We’re convinced that life without certain key gadgets, would be unbearable. I do not have many of the key gadgets. I’m fine. My energy bill is nothing like as crazy as most people’s, I do not spend my entire time scrubbing things, and nobody has died. It is worth questioning everything we take for granted, because there are so often viable other ways.

Dealing with depression

If you’re lucky enough not to suffer from depression at some point in your life, the odds are good you’ll need to deal with someone who does. How you handle that will have impact on the sufferer. To which end I’d like to put in some requests, based on things that have really knocked me about on a few occasions now.

Depressed people are hard work. They will not cheer up because you asked them to, they may not get over it any time soon any more than a person with flu will recover because you showed them cute cat pictures. Do not get cross with ill people for things beyond their control. Depressed people are not given the option, actually, to just pull ourselves together and get over it. We may be able to fake viability in short bursts, but that can be costly and is not available to everyone. Pointing out to a depressed person that it’s like pouring your energy into a black hole (I’m quoting, I had that one) is not going to help them. Rather the opposite.

You may find dealing with a depressed person is hard work. That’s actually fine. Ill people are hard work, and when the people we love are ill, we deal with that. It’s a working definition of what love means. If you are a full time carer, or a long term carer, then yes exhaustion is a real risk for you and yes taking care of yourself is important. No ill person who is free from psychotic tendencies actually wants you to martyr yourself for them. The reverse is more likely true: Ill people, be that the bodily ill or the mentally ill, usually fear being a burden. The keen sense of uselessness haunts many people who are unwell. Furthermore illness of all kinds impairs self-esteem, and depression sufferers are likely to have low self-esteem in the first place. If you tell an ill person how difficult you find them, how exhausting and draining they are, you will cause considerable harm. Depressed people may not need much persuading that the world would be better off without them. People die of depression (via suicide), so this is an appeal not to add to that.

If looking after someone is hard, take that to another friend. Go lean on someone who can bear it. We all struggle, and long term illness in someone you care about is frightening and demoralising, and actually they probably know that, but your gift of not making it explicit to them is priceless.

If really what you want from the situation is to have someone tell you how good and noble you are for putting up with this shit, move on. You are in it for your own ego, for pride and self-importance. The odds are you will do more harm than good. If you need the ill person to be terribly grateful, always impressed, always thanking you, what you actually want is them always to be vulnerable and inferior while you get to feel important. People who play that game will go to surprising lengths to keep their victim ill or down just so that they can keep rescuing them. It’s not helpful. Don’t be that person.

If you are suffering because someone you love is suffering, there is no shame or wrong in that, and that pain can be shared in mutually supportive ways. Watching someone suffer and being unable to do anything to help, is hellish. It hurts like nothing else. Owning that frustration can easily be an expression of love. Not owning it, but turning it into something to blame the other one for so that you do not have to feel guilty about being powerless… that doesn’t help anyone, ever.

It is one of the hardest things to hear that you are harming other people by being ill or in pain. When there are things you have no control over and you desperately need help and support, being told you are expensive, a nuisance, a drain and making other people ill is the sort of experience that can leave you wanting to die. I’ve had it happen more than once, and it’s left me wounded and flailing every time. When people are already down, already broken and barely able to function, these extra blows to sense of worth are nigh on impossible to take. If you love someone, you do not count the cost. If you are counting the cost, please consider that the kindest and most responsible thing you could do would be not to mention it.

Thank you.

A call to service

Many people talk about Paganism in terms of calling and service. There is a tension between the desire to be served by people who do that freely, and the need of those who work to also be able to afford to eat. To avoid getting bogged down in the money debate, I’ll just say that teachers, doctors, nurses, priests and politicians get paid, and that’s supposedly a calling and a service too.

What does it mean to serve? It suggests something a bit worthy and po-faced, if you aren’t careful. Paganism is not, and has never been about martyrdom. A situation where we are all supposed to nobly sacrifice ourselves for each other clearly isn’t sustainable. You can only have that kind of service where there are people whose job it is to be ‘fallen’ and in need of rescue and reform. A ‘goodness’ that depends on other people being in a mess is not something to aspire to, because to have that as the normal or desirable state of things is just… wrong.

What does that leave us? Sometimes for me, Druid service is painful and challenging. If people are suffering I tend to move towards rather than away, and there are days when that breaks my heart and makes me cry, and that’s fine. That’s life. I won’t do it if I think all I’m doing is wallowing in the misery; that does not serve. It’s easy to fall into that trap, too. Pain is not a measurement of service. Often, life throws up things that cannot be fixed, at least, not by me. Rescuing people is simply not an option most of the time, and therefore cannot be a measure of service either.

I’m reflecting a lot on a recent conversation with someone who said she felt she ought to serve, but she wanted to be paddling her feet in the water. What struck me then and stayed with me, is that this is no less important. There is a huge value in play, in laughter and lightness, in joy and unwinding a bit. The people who bring the happy things, sing the songs and lure you into the stream for a gentler few hours, also serve. Perhaps happiness is a better measure of service.

Not the happiness we have at other people’s expense, the pleasure taken in dominating and consuming but the happiness of that which is shared between people. The warmth and the giggles. Real things done. To put good things into the world, to add beauty and colour, to challenge the domination of the ordinary; that is good service. Healing is not just about stitching the wounds together, it is about getting to be more than scar tissue and stories about what went wrong. Service is about the good stuff, the things that enrich and enable. None of that walking on your knees, repenting stuff, just putting what you love into the world, so that other people have that too.

Serve with your songs and your dreams, with the brightest, craziest things you can be wilfully naïve about, with the deliberate triumph of hope over experience. Serve with laughter and in play, with warmth and a determination to focus on the bits that are worth having. You will break your heart sometimes, that’s inevitable, but it is your joy that makes service sustainable and meaningful, not your willingness to suffer for a cause.

Friend Wolf

On Friday night, Chris Wood (http://chriswoodmusic.co.uk/) talked about that look domestic dogs will give you sometimes that reminds you they aren’t so very far from wolves, and able to kill you. “I like that,” he said, and then paused. “I like that in my friends, too.”

It was a significant moment for me, because I’ve never got close to putting that feeling into words. I’ve carried that all my adult life and never known how to name it. Seeing the wild, the feral human, alive, dangerous, passionate and utterly real, is something precious beyond words. Knowing that person could kill you and knowing also that they probably won’t.

There is a hunger in my soul for that kind of connection with people. For those moments of being able to share something. A look, a word, an understanding. Often it isn’t dramatic. Truly passionate people can be very understated indeed, in my experience, while the more overtly emotional can turn out to be more theatrical. Not always of course, but sometimes. I trust those moments of fire, the times when I can see the wolf in the other person’s eyes. I trust the people who share that with me far more than I trust the ones who don’t.

I’m looking for it, in every interaction, in every connection. Is this someone who knows their wild self? Is this someone who can own the feral side of their nature and who is able to share that, even if only for a few seconds? It can be lonely indeed, holding that within you and having no one able to see, or honour it. To be the only bright eyed wolf in a room full of dull eyed automata. To be the only keen and alert rabbit in a room full of plastic dolls. It’s not about being a predator. Rabbits can deliver a serious kicking if affronted. Most of the cute fluffy things have teeth and the good sense to use them in defence. ‘Wolf’ is just an easy metaphor, a quick way of saying ‘dangerous’ because if I said deer, or hare, I’d have to do a lot more explaining. Nothing in nature is perfectly safe. Pretty flowers can be poisonous. Lovely trees can drop branches on your head, and their bark can be full of toxins.

We all have a wild self. Somewhere. Many of us have cadged it so thoroughly that even the suggestion it is there, is unbearable. The need to be ‘civilized’ and domesticated, the need to be appropriate, safe, harmless, and so forth, enables us to build prisons inside our heads. Wild is not acceptable. Untamed people may break rules, overthrow systems. It smacks of rebellion. It smells dangerous. Which of course it is. Wild people, free range people, wolf people and deer people… will not keep buying things because they are told to and will not keep working themselves to death so that those who would be dragons and sit on vast hoards of gold get to do that thing.

Authenticity and the Druid

The idea of authenticity has been rattling round in my head for a while now, prompted by reading Mark Townsend’s thoughtful book ‘Diary of a Heretic’. Mark lost his place in the Anglican Church because he would not compromise, holding his honour, his integrity and his authenticity as more important than his employment. That takes some courage and a lot of conviction. Reading his work, I found myself wondering how authentic I am, and how that word relates to Druidry. (Mark also walks the Druid path).

It’s not just a case of being true to your emotions. Acting out of emotions in the moment only represents a part of the self. I am certain that unconsidered explosions of emotion where what we do we later have to explain as unmeant somehow, is not authentic. It is possible to feel, intensely in the moment emotion that does not fit with what we think or believe.

It’s not a case of being ruled by your logic and intellect. I’ve tried that one a few times, and emulating Mr Spok isn’t it either. Logic untempered by compassion can be brutal. Intellect that refuses to acknowledge emotion isn’t able to handle human situations. This is why there’s a whole section of the blog devoted to thinking about feeling. The interplay between emotion and reason is tremendously important.

I think it’s really important to have a philosophy that holds together your relationship with self and world in a coherent way. A belief system could equally hold this space, and often the two share and mingle. An understanding of what life is about, no matter how provisional that understanding is, gives us the means to choose. Does this idea fit with my beliefs? Is this emotion consistent with what my philosophy tells me I need to be doing? Even so, it is not our philosophy or belief that makes us authentic. If we hang on to belief when it is at odds with reason, or we stick to a philosophy that crushes our emotional life, we aren’t authentic, we’re merely dogmatic.

After much pondering, I’ve come to think of authenticity as the interplay between these three aspects. Emotion, intellect and belief. If those aspects of us are at odds, we aren’t authentic. There is simply no room for it in that level of inner conflict. If we stick rigidly with one part of self at the expense of the others, we aren’t authentic. To seek authenticity is to work on those conflicts between how we feel, what reason tells us, and what we think we ought to be feeling and thinking, based on the beliefs we hold. It’s a constant dance, an on-going shifting process of refining, experimenting, rejecting, getting confused and trying again. In theory there could be an end point of perfect balance, but I suspect life throws us too many curved balls to let us stay in one of those for long.

To be authentic is not, I am thinking, to be rigid and absolutely fixed in some aspect of self. Authenticity actually calls for a willingness to change. It’s not good being authentic about your feelings, for example, if the effect is that you destroy that which you need. It’s no good holding a belief that disallows some aspect of how you feel, or that is at odds with what you actually think. To seek authenticity is to seek a coherence of self, where heart and mind accord. It means living in a way where what we uphold as values, ideals, and virtues is manifest in what we do. Many religions offer means of achieving that – perhaps Buddhism most especially. However, there is no need to seek methods elsewhere. We can think and feel and imagine out our own approaches. All it really requires is paying attention to what we do, why we do it, how we feel about it and how that fits with what we believe, or want to believe.

And it beats the hell out of trying to be ‘good’. I realised this week that ‘good’ is all about how other people judge and measure us. The only person who can say if you are at all authentic, is you.

What makes a bard?

How is a bard different from any other creative person? For me, it has always been about a spiritual dedication which is intrinsic to the work. A regular creative person may have all kinds of reasons for doing what they do. For a bard, creativity will, to a significant degree, be an act of spiritual dedication and expression. The creative work is not simply about making money, achieving fame or getting to ponce about in public whilst wearing a nice dress, either. Part of the point of the work is to serve the community, and part of the point is to serve the land.

So, how do we serve? By bringing magic into the world. Inspiring and uplifting people. Expressing the numinous. Offering insight into what it means to be human. Expressing our relationship with the land. Sharing history of place and tribe to ground people. Keeping traditional forms of creativity alive, holding threads that connect past to future. Giving voice to that which cannot speak and yet needs to be heard. Making sense of human experiences. Celebrating, remembering, imagining, exploring, honouring, satirising, offering alternatives, creating perspectives….

The most traditional methods revolve around the voiced word – poetry, story telling, and song. I think these three threads are vital, and it is important to acknowledge that traditionally, these were at the heart of what it meant to be a bard.  However, if you are able to do the work in other forms, if you tell stories in images or sound, if you share the voice of hill and forest with you dancing, if you make tunes that evoke the ancestors or pots that embody sensuality…. Or whatever it is that you do with your whole heart and soul, for your land and tribe… you’re a fellow traveller.

Not everyone will apply the term ‘bard’ in exactly the same way (and rightly so!) but for me it’s all about the giving, the sharing and expressing the work made of soul, passion and vision. There are a number of people who particularly inspire me with the work they do, and I think I will be doing other little showcases and shout-outs along the way, because I am a firm believer in sharing the good stuff.

Today I’d like to sing the praises of Lorna Smithers, a bard from the north of England, sharing poetry most days through her blog. The beauty of her word craft, the clarity of her insight, the power of her intent and her capacity to capture glimpses of otherworldly wonder make her a remarkable writer. http://lornasmithers.wordpress.com If you subscribe by email, her words will flow into your inbox, which I can heartily recommend as a thing to add to your day. There’s an explanation of what she does and why, here http://lornasmithers.wordpress.com/about-from-peneverdant/ . Lorna is also Bardic Co-ordinator for the Druid network, and is a resident poet on the Moon Books blog… http://moon-books.net/blogs/moonbooks/category/poetry/

Grammar and Grammarie

Imagine that everyone had been issued with a magic wand, but that the vast majority of people went round using them as chopsticks, cooking utensils, toys, and so forth. Every so often there’s a little, magical explosion, after which no one admits this might have been because of the magic wands being used in random ways.

From my perspective, this is what seems to happen with language, most of the time.

Spells and spelling, grammar and grammarie. Language is invocation and evocation. Sound is energy. Speech is inspiration brought forth. The written word is all about ideas made substantial enough to share. And yet we use it casually, with little regard for meaning. We speak without thinking, write without contemplating how others may understand our words. We also infer meanings, and then become deaf to other interpretations.

Then, when the mistakes have been made, we get angry with each other, building up layers of resentment and frustration. To go back to my metaphor, we wave our wands about, shooting dangerous sparks in all directions, and when we burn ourselves, we’re surprised. How did that happen? Why am I in pain? We can see the threatening outpourings from the other person, but are much less likely to spot the magic wand gripped in our own hand.

I’m not desirous of some sterile, blandly factual approach to language. I love metaphor, and it is hard to speak of emotional things without it. I love wordplay and creative approaches to language. These, by their very nature, tend to be well considered.

I’ve spent much of my life being told off for taking things too seriously. I make no apology for it. I am serious. I am quite literally sick, in the sense of being made nauseous, by people who are careless with words. I am sick of deliberate distortions of truth, the spin, the media games and the advertising hype. I am sick of the devaluing of language where hyperbole has become so common that it is difficult to speak of serious things without listeners assuming you are being melodramatic. I am sick of hate speech, sick of careless verbal cruelty, and above all, I am sick of the pathetic excuses and the oft-repeated belief that all of this is somehow ok.

It isn’t ok. Language is intrinsic to culture. How we speak to each other and how we write informs our cultural norms, gives us a basis for our behaviour and attitudes. How we utilise language is one of the primary ways in which we manifest our culture to each other.

Every word is an invocation.

Every word is an evocation.

Every word is a spell.

Every word is a prayer.

It doesn’t matter where we direct those words, these things are true, all the time. If we took our words seriously, if we valued them and deployed them with care as a culture, we would change. If we waved our magic wands thoughtfully, we would create magic, all of the time. We would stop burning each other, and stop being confused about how on earth this has happened again.

 

Words are inspiration and wonder, the flow of ideas from one mind to the next, the means by which we may each relieve the loneliness of being alone inside our own minds. Words are art form, are poetry and song. They are the enablers of civilization; culture and co-operation depend heavily upon them. These, the incantations of our daily lives.