Nimue Brown's Blog, page 413

Book Review: Spirituality Without Structure by Nimue Brown

Reblogged from From Peneverdant:

Nimue Brown is a druid author and fiction writer living in Gloucestershire. Whilst Spirituality Without Structure is rooted in her experience of pagan Druidry it is written from an existentialist perspective. Directed at anybody who has given up on formal religions it holds relevance for theists and atheists alike. As an anarchic bard and polytheist who has avoided formal courses in Druidry I was deeply curious about what Nimue had to say.

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Baby steps to saving the world

With the latest reports on climate change making it clear that we are in trouble and it is the fault of our species, there’s a lot of misery and powerlessness floating about online. Other People aren’t going to listen. Other People won’t act. Governments won’t do anything and too many Other People don’t care, or disbelieve or refuse to live differently. You know who the Other People are – they’re the ones with the real power, whose actions make a genuine difference.

What this does, between the gloom and doom and the idea that only someone else can fix it, is keep us in that most dangerous of mind sets: Keeping calm and carrying on. That is suicide.

So let’s take a case in point. Disposable plastic shopping bags are not necessary, we know this because for most of history, people managed perfectly well without them. That’s a huge resource outlay to make something we use for perhaps an hour or two and then throw away. Plastic tortures and slaughters wildlife in hideous ways, and if you’ve been online for more than a week the odds are you’ve seen photos of a creature hideously bound by plastic and suffering dreadfully.

We could entirely eliminate the use of plastic bags. We don’t need government action. We don’t need the supermarkets to do anything different. All we have to do is stop using them. It really is that simple. Get a bag you can re-use, take it shopping with you, re-use it. A huge environmental problem will simply go away. (Then we just have the tidy up to contend with).

And the thing is, all the bags you don’t use and throw away are part of the solution. This is true across the board. If we all used a bit less electric, wasted a bit less food, drove a bit less, recycled a bit more, reused a few things, kept something out of landfill by some responsible means, the effect would be vast. How much power could we save, how much could we keep out of landfill and how much better would our collective relationship with the planet be if we all did a few small things? We could turn this whole thing around just with individual action.

I do not think governments have the will or the courage to tackle climate change. I do not believe big business gives a shit. However, that’s a tiny minority of human life. If the rest of us start making small changes and trust that those changes are worth something, we can turn the tide. If we all stop with the plastic bags, the supermarkets will give up handing them out, and will stop buying them, demand dries up, supply ceases. We could do that with pretty much anything if enough of us gave it a go.

I’m not a big fan of market economy, but on the plus side it is really vulnerable. Take away demand, refuse to demand, and supply has to quit. We can force suicidal and unsustainable business out of the market, just by not engaging with it. That means being really suspicious about anything claiming to be free and easy. We will be paying for it; in truth, we just don’t get to find out what the price tag is. We pay for it in damage to our habitat and risk to our lives, and that’s a bloody expensive outlay for something you only wanted to use once and throw away.

Pagan Fiction

It might surprise you to know that there is enough Pagan fiction for it to seem sensible to talk in terms of genre. Over the years I’ve done a lot of work as an editor and book reviewer, and as I’m openly Pagan, these tales tend to find me. I think the genre is an interesting reflection of us as a community.

There are a lot of authors who are not Pagans, but who use Paganism as a way of getting the paranormal side of ‘paranormal romance’ sorted. I can’t say I have any great enthusiasm for this, it tends to be fluffy and not like anything that might happen in your actual life. There are a lot of Pagan authors too. Most are writing ebooks, because traditional print is insanely hard to get into. Romance and erotica are reliable sellers, so authors with a desire to get paid once in a while often gravitate there. The majority of Pagan fiction I’ve encountered, falls into the romance genre, with varying degrees of eroticism.

What makes a romance Pagan? Obviously one or more of the participants has to be an active and practicing Pagan for a start. It’s not unusual to make the Paganism central to the romance – lovers meet through social Pagan situations, their relationships are changed and challenged by rituals, spells, contact with the divine and so forth. Look around the Pagan community and you’ll see a lot of Pagan couples. It isn’t easy being in a relationship with someone who isn’t Pagan and doesn’t get your world view. Possible, mind, and plenty of people manage perfectly well.

From an author perspective, the tendency of Pagans to be a little bit outside the mainstream, a bit edgy, unconventional, sometimes marginalised – it’s good material, getting an interesting tale is that bit easier. People who have it too easy are no fun to write about. With the gothic hat on, the tension between magical insight and possible madness is an absolute gift.

Then there’s the reincarnation issue. The most popular theme in Pagan romance fiction, whether the author is Pagan or not, seems to be reincarnation. The couple were together in a former life. They are soul mates. Maybe they struggle to realise that at first. There will be some kind of barrier, it’s not a proper romance if you don’t have to suffer a bit along the way! There may be adversaries from past lives lurking about, eager to harm, or destroy them. The love affair may have some cosmological implications. It makes for a charming sort of story, even more romantic than regular romance, because this stuff is forever.

I got to thinking about this. Why is it that we don’t tell reincarnation stories about other kinds of relationship? If we do reincarnate and there are lessons carried on or people we keep having to engage with, there must be other stories. The person you killed last time around. The lover you feel all maternal about who was perhaps your child in a former life… there are so many ways to create messy, complex and interesting stories out of reincarnation, that I wonder why we’re so hooked on the tale of the eternal soul mates. Possibly because it’s more comfortable and easier to resolve.

From an authoring perspective, and as a reader, I much prefer stories that are complicated, messy, difficult to unravel, and where it’s not always clear what the right outcome would be. That doesn’t rule out romance, of course, it just rules out tidy romances. It led me to writing this – http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FJ58GRA (short story, including love, death, paganism and enmity)

What kind of stories do we want to tell about ourselves? Do we want realistic Pagan fiction, or romanticised, fantasised versions? Do we want Paganism in all genres? How do we want people to see us? Would we welcome more realistic depictions from non-Pagans, or are the fantasies that we can shrug off as ‘not us’ actually more comfortable?

If you’d like to try Pagan murder mysteries, historically set, can I recommend you pick up ‘A Dangerous Place’, by Robin Herne, http://www.amazon.com/A-Dangerous-Place-ebook/dp/B00EPQ7Y40/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1381128425&sr=1-1&keywords=dangerous+places+robin+herne which contains a full and rich depiction of human behaviour, and is splendid. It demonstrates that there is much more scope within Pagan fiction than the fantasy and romance end, which currently tends to dominate.

Walking with the ancestors

I’m late blogging today because I’ve been out for hours, walking with others from the Auroch Grove. We’ve been walking along a local hill line, which the map shows as having seven or so long barrows and tumuli on it, plus rumours of others, the site of a Celtic or perhaps Romano British Temple, and an earth worked hill fort. One of the tumuli has its top off and can be wandered into, one is intact, and can be crawled into, and the earthwork can be walked. Not all of the burial sites are easy to visit, although I’m going to see if I can get permission to go to them in the future.

It was a very long walk, but a feasible one. That tells me that yes, the odds are that our ancestors of land were walking between these barrows and the hill fort. I can only imagine who, when, or why, but the idea of some kind of pilgrimage between the places of the dead and the living really speaks to me.

The views from those hills are incredible, we can see into Wales, miles in every direction in fact. It is mind expanding, to see so much landscape, to experience the enormity of place and sky.

I have a sense of this land that I did not have before. My body is sore, my mind is tired, tomorrow I will hurt. I do not have any kind of intellectual insight into what I just did, no sense of cerebral comprehension, but at the same time… my body knows this landscape in a different way, feels it, has become part of it. It’s been a profound experience. Perhaps with time to reflect, a more head-centric understanding will come, but I don’t mind if it doesn’t. Today has been a good day.

Part of the flow

I’ve met one hell of a lot of people along the way in all manner of different capacities. Authors, pagans, comics artists, musicians, publishers, organisers of events… It’s given me considerable opportunity to see what works, and what doesn’t. There is a classic mistake that people make, and it is simply that they show up making some noise about whatever they’ve got and expecting people to take an interest. Many of the communities I’ve been involved with have been welcoming places, encouraging of new ideas and energy, but even in those contexts, just showing up with your thing tends to be unfruitful. Fruitless, even.

One of the reasons is that if you aren’t engaged, you don’t know what’s out there or where you fit. If, for example, you’re writing Steampunk books, but have never read any Steampunk books, listened to any of the music or been to the events, the odds of doing more than skimming the surface of the genre, are slim. This is often why first time authors are samey and derivative, in all genres – not because they’re emulating the greats, but because they haven’t read enough to know what’s been done to death already.

Most communities respond better to people who come up from a grass roots level on the inside. It’s true in politics, where candidates with the right face, air dropped in from some other place tend not to be popular on the ground. People tend to respond to you better as a leader of Pagan things if they’ve seen you learning your craft by showing up to stuff. Obviously tricky if you were the only pagan in your village. If you want to get respect as a folk musician, you don’t show up half an hour before your set, play it, and leave. You go to a session as well, or a singaround, or listen to someone else’s set.

All the most successful teachers and organisers I have known along the way have spent time sat quietly in other people’s events and lessons. Partly to learn (borrowing other people’s ideas!). Partly to support the wider community. Partly to network and get insights. Partly to be seen as someone who also shows up. This is something that works in a whole number of different ways all at the same time.

The person who turns up, is part of the flow. They put money in the hat, engage with the wider community, learn, give and participate. In online spaces, this can translate into things like reading other people’s blogs and responding to them, giving other people a shout out, reviewing, and the such. Giving something back. It’s not wise to expect things to flow towards you if you are not also creating flows of energy that go from you towards other people and spaces. Mostly, they don’t come towards you if nothing is moving out from you.

It’s also worth being watchful for spaces online that just consist of people who turn up to try and sell things. Back in the day of yahoo groups, this used to be a huge problem with ebook authors. You’d get hundreds of people on a list, all trying to sell their latest book. No one was listening, and no one was buying. Easily half of the writers hadn’t read enough of anything to know what made a good story, either.

It is so important to engage, it doesn’t matter what you do, or want to do, amateur, professional or somewhere in between. Get involved. Connect with people who are doing it already. Show up, participate. It will help you. It will help everyone else. Everyone wins.

Imperial Russia & the Goddess

Today’s guest blogger, Steven Ingman-Greer comes to us from Top Hat Books (who published by Intelligent Designing for Amateurs) Top Hat are doing some interesting things around unorthodox, speculative and innovative historical fiction…

Lost Eagle, the story of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II’s daughter Grand Duchess Tatiana (1897-1926)

By Steven Ingman-Greer

I’ve loved the world of Imperial Russia and the family of the last Tsar Nicholas II for as long as I can remember. From a child I’ve had pictures of them in my head, often moving pictures. Sometimes I would even hear the family saying words, to each other and also to me. These feelings, intuitions and imaginings went hand in hand with my study of them from a purely historical, objective point of view. But as I studied the histories, over the years I came to realise that what we are taught in schools and often academic institutions as well is only the history of often one point of view, that of history’s “winners”. This realisation ignited my strongest characteristic. My curiosity. I just had to know what I wasn’t being told. The other side of the story that I felt existing just beyond my reach…the side that would bring in the complete picture in perfect balance, like a ballerina en pointe…

I am very lucky. In life I have studied the world from two apparently opposite perspectives. First, I regard myself as a musician. I studied classical music theory and practice from the age of seven and have played viola and clarinet, the viola to professional standard. For this there is rigorous study of technique required. But in the end the technique is put to the service of intuition and if you are on track, no two performances of the same piece will be identical and each will have the stamp of your unique individuality. As a composer, I know intimately, that after all the study of fugue and Sonata Form, in the end, you simply hear music with your inner senses, feel it, and then write down what you hear and feel using your technical skill at the service of your intuition. As the Imperial Family’s friend Sergei Rachmaninov said, “music goes from my heart to your heart, bypassing your brains…”

My apparently opposite training is that of a scientist. I am a qualified Analytical Chemist to Masters level and have done a doctorate in Chemical Engineering. From this, you learn strict observational technique and to look at all sides of a problem before reaching any lasting conclusions, conclusions which must be rigorously tested before being accepted.

My love for Nicholas and his family has driven me to study them in depth for many years. My scientific side has studied all the available English texts and I knew intimately what the histories said of them, what they did, studies of character etc…

But all the time I was studying them, I was aware of my other side, the intuitive one, blinking away at me, like a beacon in the night. And this went hand in hand with the deepest side of me. As an adopted child, who lost my mother at an early age, I intuitively learned to turn to the universal mother instead. I had a devotion to the Virgin Mary when I was young, but was also driven to study religion from many perspectives, eventually coming to realise that all religious paths are simply reflections of one initial universal source which expresses itself alternately in masculine and feminine form. The Russians I discovered had an initial devotion in ancient times to the Universal Mother, the Goddess for want of a more accurate term. When they embraced Orthodoxy in the year 988, it was largely the beauty of the Icons of the Holy Mother and the music of the chant that they responded to, rather than any particular religious doctrine. For them, worship of the Goddess simply continued in another form. For many, especially in Siberia, the practices of Orthodoxy were simply added to the intuitive Shamanism that already existed there and the seers and healers went on with their work as before. This seemless transition has meant that the “Old Ways” have survived in Russia, largely intact to this day. And it is from this tradition that the man known as Rasputin came.

This man has had a very bad press over the years, some of it, it has to be said, his own fault. But basically he went to help the Imperial Family as a result of a vision of the Holy Mother, who told him to go to St. Petersburg to help them. Once there, he was able to help heal the Tsarevitch Grand Duke Alexei of his haemophiliac attacks. But even more importantly than that, he taught all the Imperial children the native wisdom of the Russian people. In this tradition, everything, down to the rocks, is seething with life. There is no such thing as “dead” matter and everything is imbued with the spirit of the mother, from whom comes all life in the universe. He knew intuitively the gifts of each child in the family and taught them accordingly. In my first novel about the family, “Lost Eagle”, told from the perspective of Nicholas’ second daughter Tatiana, her gift is that of communion with the animal kingdom, with which she has a special, healing bond. Her sisters and brother all have different gifts. These, and Rasputin’s relationship with the Goddess I will explore in future books.

In this first book I also begin an exploration of the concept of the “willing sacrifice”. My research over many years has lead me to conclude that the form of religion we know today was once very different, indeed opposite to what it is now. Today, we venerate the willing sacrifice of a male figure on a Roman executioner’s cross. But in the past, the willing sacrifice venerated was that of a Holy Maiden, a Royal Priestess, whose ritual death and resurrection affirmed the continuity of life on Earth to be sure, but who also demonstrated in ways that are now lost to us the continuity of life, the Afterlife and rebirth as well. The stories of Jesus after his resurrection – being seen and spoken to by disciples – are mirrored in the stories of the Maiden’s resurrection. But she was part of an intuitive mystical tradition in which life beyond this mortal one was not simply intuited, it was known – through the Maidens – by everyone. Let me be clear. Life after death in these earlier times was no matter of faith. It was a matter of truth and actual knowledge, gained from and through the feminine. In Rasputin’s actual words, noted down by Tatiana in a book you can still see today – “…all is in Love and not even a bullet can strike love down.”

Over the last two millennia the loss of this knowledge has come through the persecution of the Feminine in Mankind as a whole – both in actual persecution of Woman, but also in the persecution of what the Feminine actually means. Qualities such as intuition have become devalued and since the Enlightenment, the very thought that everything in the Universe has life has come to be treated with contempt bordering on derision in lower scientific circles. It is this attitude to life that causes animals to be treated as no more than machines for our experimentation and the earth to be mined and fracked ruthlessly for resources without thought for the consequences. Ironically, the great scientists, those who have made ground breaking discoveries, like Albert Einstein, valued intuition highly, indeed he himself said – “intuition is more important than knowledge”.

Rasputin taught the Imperial Family the wisdom that he and his ancestors already knew. That the Earth and everything on it and in it both visible and invisible was alive and was part of the Sacred Circle. From this comes the basic concept of Freedom based on an acceptance of free will and free choice in all beings in all things. The Tsar began to take these teachings on board himself, instituting an Act of Freedom of Religion in the early years of the 20th century. This officially freed the believers in the old faiths from persecution by church or state. Had he survived beyond 1917, it was his intention to institute the reforms of his Grandfather Tsar Alexander II and introduce universal suffrage, making the Tsar a constitutional monarch and giving the choice of government freely to everyone.

The world as we know it today is a sorry place. Freedom of the kind I am talking about is still unknown, even in our, apparently, democratic society. Wars are still being fought over religion, when they could all stop now if people simply realised that all religious paths lead inevitably to One universal Source and respected the right of all to follow a path dictated by individual freedom of conscience. Sexuality, that intensely feminine quality of inner and outer communion, and one celebrated as a liberating force by Rasputin, to the fury of the male Russian aristocracy, remains suppressed and not properly understood in many areas to this day. Above all, there is a deep need now to reaffirm the Earth as a living being and all creatures as possessing soul and heart, all to be treated with the love and compassionate understanding that we would wish to be treated with ourselves.

These then are the issues that are at the heart of my work. They are issues which I explore intimately in my novels on the Russian Imperial Family, beginning with “Lost Eagle, the untold story of HIH Grand Duchess Tatiana of Russia”. I wanted to tell their stories from the perspective of the daughters of the Imperial House, those beautiful figures in white who have never had a voice until now, but whose suppressed voices, when allowed to finally sing, tell us a story that takes us within, back full circle to where we all began. The Russian Orthodox Faith knows this secret. For their most secret and sacred Icon of all, seen recently on a visit to Mount Athos by Prince Philip, cousin to Tsar Nicholas II, is the Icon showing the Mother of God giving birth to the Universe.

“Lost Eagle”, the story of Nicholas II’s daughter Tatiana, her life and escape to England after the massacre of her family, is the first of five novels exploring these themes. It is published by Top Hat and is out on October 25th, 96th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

For more information please visit my website, http://www.losteagle.co.uk

All content © Steven Ingman-Greer 2013

Exile

For the ancient Celts, exile was worse than death. It makes sense – for a culture that believed in reincarnation, death was not such a big deal. The honoured dead remained part of the community, their memory kept alive by story and song. To be exiled was to have no place to belong, no one to remember your deeds, it was to lose your land, your identity, your whole place in the world.

These days, exile might not seem like such a fearful thing. That, however, rather depends on how you relate to the process. Should you be willing to shrug your shoulders and move on to next town, where you aren’t known and you can start over then no, exile from a place doesn’t mean much. If you have a deep relationship with land that could be sorely compromised by broken relationships with people, it’s a whole other thing. If your sense of self is embedded in being part of a particular group – often true of religious people – then exile or excommunication can be deeply damaging. If you are the sort of person who feels keenly a need to belong, to be accepted and know where you fit, exile is disaster. The loss of a job can easily be exile from community on just these terms.

I’ve been through experiences that felt a lot like exile to me. The social group from my teens disintegrated, inevitably, and I left the area too. Something was lost that could not be returned to, because it no longer existed. That was my first taste of what it meant to have nowhere to belong, and it took me a long time to get over it. The community in my geographical area during my twenties was lost to me when I had to leave. I kept what lines of communication open that I could, but it’s not the same as being with people. Those were just circumstantial. Nothing personal, just life. Not my fault.

Three years ago, I felt like an exile from the Druid community. That was all about me – not about anything I’d done wrong, or badly, I might add, but a knock on from being in crisis and seeming like a liability to others as a consequence. For a while I had no idea if I could even call myself a Druid any more. Interventions from other people in the Druid community made me realise that it wasn’t a case of exile. It’s taken me three years to piece together what happened, but most of it came from just one person. It doesn’t take much. I’ve seen that with other people, too. When you really care about something, when you’re really invested in it, heart and soul, then the smallest push out of the communal circle has far greater impact. For anyone holding positions of authority and leadership this is a vital point to bear in mind. Anyone who is serious may be far too easily persuaded that you don’t think they are good enough. Most people are not ego-maniacs, riddled with delusions of grandeur and feelings of self-importance that allow them to shrug off suggestions that they can’t cut it as a Druid, don’t belong, aren’t good enough or aren’t welcome.

Experience of wider culture has brought me into contact with a fair few people who habitually use sledgehammers to crack walnuts. People who hammer home the point because they expect not to be listened to or taken seriously if they are gentle. People who shout and demand when they should go softly and ask nicely. I assume that’s underpinned by a lot of insecurity, but when you get that in people who are visible and dominant, the result can be a lot of people disempowered and slinking away into exile. It’s not good.

I, for one, am a walnut; sledgehammers really aren’t required. I watch what I do, all the time, wanting to make sure I am fair, properly understanding things, not hurting anyone needlessly and so forth. A word if I get it wrong will have me running around trying to put things right. Get out the sledgehammer, and I will shatter, and there will be nothing much I can do after that point.

It’s been a very odd ten days or so. I’ve lost something that mattered to me, but in the same time frame, someone else who I very much admire, value, respect and feel inspired by has moved deliberately towards me, asking for more of my time and creativity. (Thank you, Talis).

When the Druid I had been following turned me away 3 years ago, Philip Carr Gomm swept by and offered me a place at OBOD, where I had studied years before. Not a huge fanfare, but a listing for my book on the OBOD site, and a celebrant listing, and a feeling of having a place to be, of being wanted and valued and not out beyond the edges of community after all. Community is never about the opinion of one person, no matter how important or in charge they seem to be.

I think the moral of this story is that if one person demoralises you and pushes you away, even if they seem to have power, don’t believe that they speak for the community as a whole. They probably don’t. In my experience, not at all, in fact. And if you do lead, bear in mind that exile was supposed to be a punishment for the most serious crimes, for the things that could not be rectified, where no restorative justice was possible. Not for minor offences, real or imagined, and not as a way of propping up your own sense of importance.

Facing the Darkness

Facing the Darkness by Cat Treadwell is a new release from Moon Books.

If you saunter over and look, you’ll see that my other half, Tom Brown, did the cover, and Cat is a friend, so I’m not claiming neutral objectivity here…

Depression is not a tidy ailment, but a spectrum of difficulty, from fairly mild levels of distress and disconnection through to the desire to die, sometimes acted on. For non-sufferers, depression is often equated with melancholy, angst, feeling a bit sorry for yourself and other ideas that are way off the mark, often culminating in an impression that you ought to be able to pull yourself together. Depression is a complex illness, and furthermore it is an illness that kills people.

New Age books tends to go in for a lot of warm, fuzzy affirmation. Like attracts like, we are told. Think positive thoughts. For the depressed person, this has already ceased to be a realistic option. Often as a consequence, ostensibly spiritually uplifting material can, for a depressed person, just add to that sense of failure and alienation which is already dismantling you.

Cat Treadwell knows about depression, and this really shows in her writing. This is someone who has walked dark paths repeatedly and come back with some significant insights.

The first time I read Facing the Darkness, I was, by my standards in a pretty good place (only mildly depressed, by medical standards). I found the book helpful and it was good to read. Coming back to it in states of more serious depression, I appreciated being able to just pick it up and dip in at random. Depression is not conducive to good concentration, often. I would suggest that for a person whose depression is mild to moderate, this is a really helpful book and well worth having on the shelves.

If you are seriously depressed, wanting to self-destruct, to stop breathing, to crawl into a small, hidden space and never come out again, you won’t reach for any kind of help. You’re probably not reaching for anything just to make sure you can’t pick up something sharp and dangerous. If you’re in that place and fighting to keep going from one breath to the next, then the best place for this book is in the hands of anyone who is trying to be with you through that. It offers insight. If you’ve taken Cat’s ideas on-board really thoroughly when in a more viable state, you might be able to draw on them in times of absolute crisis, but that’s going to come down to your nature more than anything else.

It is so important to talk honestly and openly about what depression is and what it does to people. It is so very important to have realistic literature that actually deals with what depression means. In writing from the heart and with a deep honesty about personal experience, Cat has made a powerful contribution to what needs to be a large and on-going public discourse.

If you, or someone you love walks the dark roads sometimes, or lives along them, this is book worth investing in. It isn’t a comfortable or easy read, but that’s rather the nature of the beast.

Collaboration and inspiration

Yesterday brought some work on a current collaborative project, and the rush of energy that always follows. I think my collaborative works have been my best so far, and likely always will be. For one, I’ve been so blessed in the quality of people I get to work with. I draw a great deal of inspiration from contact with creative souls, which means collaborations are a drip feed supply of input for me, in a way that helps keep the ideas flowing.

Then there’s the issue that when I have a creative partner for something, I also automatically have an audience. I’ve talked about the audience issue before. I’ll work and study for love of craft, but to me, work that isn’t shared is only half alive. The other half of a book happens when a person reads it, fleshes out the characters in their mind, brings their own stories to the story and turns it into something new. Just occasionally I get to hear about those, and some of them go really exciting places. There was, for example, one lovely reviewer who understood book 1 of Hopeless Maine, Personal Demons, as a schizophrenic sort of story, in which heroine and nemesis are in fact the same person. I’ll admit that wasn’t how I saw it, but I realised there was every space in the tale to read it that way. A story that works is full of different possible interpretations. It why I like old myths, because there is always room to bring some new way of seeing into them, and that’s really exciting.

For me, every creation is a collaborative process, because of the audience. When I definitely have an audience, that really helps. Here on the blog, I get enough feedback to know firstly that I am writing for people, and secondly some idea of what it might make sense to write for you. If I’m writing with someone, I’m also writing for that person, safe in the knowledge that at the very least I have an audience of one. Hopeless Maine was written for Tom. Sometimes I write things for my child, too. At one point in my career I was writing custom fiction, which was exciting. Usually for an audience of one, they were intense collaborations as I strived to bring someone else’s vision to life for them. It was always a challenge, and I loved doing it. Sadly, custom fiction is too big a luxury in these austere times, and the market went away.

I’ve never been able to write just for my own amusement. There’s nothing odd about that, I struggle to think in ways that allow me to do anything just for me. It makes me uncomfortable. I was trained too thoroughly, and too early that I needed to be useful, everything I did had to be for something, to achieve a goal, to be helpful, to serve someone else. It’s one of the reasons I don’t find it easy to arrange as much down time as my body could do with – it feels like doing something just for me, and that invariably feels wrong. It’s a thought form I am trying to challenge but am a long way from being able to break.

What I have done, is go back to writing poetry. It is the least commercially viable form of writing a person can undertake, so far as I know. I have given away poetry before, there are a couple of collections to download here if you go over to the Books page. So it’s still not entirely audience free, still not definitely something I am doing just for myself. I’ve pushed it further to try and have that personal creative space, though. The result is that I write really awful, emotionally self-indulgent, bleed on the paper angst ridden poetry like I did in my teens. A private vice, it is neither use nor ornament, which feels rather decadent. I want to get to the point of writing fiction for me, because I think that would make the whole business a lot more sustainable, and that I’d be happier. Thus far I am finding that if I do not first envisage a reader, no story shows up, but perhaps that will change over time.

The 70% challenge

I’m currently reading Molly Scott Cato’s book, The Bioregional Economy. You’re going to be hearing a lot about this, because it’s having a huge impact on my thinking. How I perceive the place of Druidry in the world is shifting. The choices I mean to make in my own life are all being reconsidered, too. In addition to that, I am so inspired by Molly and her vision that I will be investing time and energy in trying to get her work in front of more people. I’m not prone to being so inspired by people that I have to leap into action and do something, but Molly is an exception in so many ways.

We cannot have infinite population growth and infinite economic growth and infinite growth in consumption, given that we start out with finite resources. I’ve known this for years. What I’ve not had before is any sense of how energy use would need to change so that we can viably live within our means. According to The Bioregional Economy, current thinking puts the figure somewhere between a 70 and 90% reduction. That’s a staggering prospect with huge implications, and has really brought home to me the scale of the problem.

Could I cut my energy consumption by 70%? I may not be a good case study here because there’s already a lot of things I don’t have that a great many people take for granted as necessary. I’m living in a small space, with no car, no television, no fridge or freezer, a caravan sized washing machine. We have computers for work, we have a phone and the internet but are otherwise pretty low tech. I can’t cut back much further without being unable to work, and as this is a rented flat, there are things I’m not able to do in terms of getting a more efficient boiler, a water meter, or solar panels.

Most of my scope for cutting energy use depends on better sourcing of that which I consume. This makes me realise that I do not have any idea how the various things I buy contribute to energy use. There is nothing to tell me what the real cost of my food and clothes actually is. Where they were made, how they were produced, how they travelled, how people in that process were treated, and so forth, remain unknown to me. If I could get everything locally and direct from producers, I might be in with a chance of both knowing, and doing better. The costs of that would still be prohibitive for me, although I’m doing what I can.

There is a cost to all the things we are able to source cheaply in supermarkets. Most of that cost is invisible, but it is actually part of the reason why I would struggle to afford the things made by local craftspeople and the produce on the farmers’ markets. We push prices down all the time, and there’s a miss-match between what it is possible to earn, and what it is necessary to be able to spend. To sell my work in the modern market place, I have to charge so little as to push myself out to the margins. We’ll spend more on takeaway food than we are happy paying for printed books. British farmers in the UK struggle to make ends meet, unable to compete with cheap foreign imports. In other countries, people are growing flowers to sell commercially but cannot afford to reliably feed or educate their children. The whole system, is mad.

We keep hanging onto this myth, perpetuated by popular culture, that science will find a magic solution. Star Trek style technology will give us the lifestyle we’ve been sold, at knockdown prices with clean air. That isn’t happening. We keep taking more than the natural systems that support us are able to keep providing, and that plainly isn’t going to work.

A 70% reduction in energy use. That’s a stark and alarming figure. 90% is really rather frightening. What would that leave us? What will life look like when we finally bite the bullet and stop pretending there isn’t a problem? Assuming we get round to that in time. It casts the whole concept of what we might need in such a different way as to challenge every assumption our culture holds right now. That’s probably a good thing. Right now I don’t know how to do it, but I am determined to face that challenge.