Nimue Brown's Blog, page 414

Your hidden mind

On Art Share this week (www.art-share.org) we were talking about how we work, and the importance of switching off the more conscious part of the mind in order to better get on with things. Tom definitely draws more comfortably if there’s music on, or I’m playing, or reading to him. It frees up his hands.

Rather a long time ago, I minored in psychology at university, and one of the things I ran into was the idea of the pre-conscious mind, which does quite a lot of the work. It’s this bit that will pop up the answer to a missing name three hours after the relevant conversation. Somewhere beneath the surface, you were working on that all along. This is just labels, as far as I know there are no actual brain structures to go with them.

Rather a lot of our thinking happens at a level we aren’t aware of. All the technical stuff around running the body. Anything we know well. These days I tend to say I play the violin by sense of smell, because I have no conscious idea of what I’m doing any more. It just happens. Hours and hours of work have resulted in the violin being so much a part of my body that I do it the same way I breathe. And as with breathing, if I have to think about it, things get complicated. This, I gather, is true of people who are good at pretty much anything, and if you make a person deconstruct what they’re doing to explain it, their ability to do it actually reduces for a while.

Last night my brain woke me in the early hours of the morning because it had processed a large quantity of raw data and it wanted me to look over the findings and make some decisions about how to act. Why that seemed so important that I had to do it at 3am, I have no idea, but I did the thinking, went back to sleep and woke up feeling like I’d made some good choices.

So what is going on at the back end of my mind, in the bits I can’t see? I think the answer is habit and training. My mind can run unconsciously round any loop I have built and maintained. That’s true of the violin playing, and it is also true of anxiety. I have a capacity to learn and analyse unconsciously, but only because I’ve put so much time into learning and analysis. Tom draws amazing art when he’s not thinking about it too much, but only because he’s spent decades thinking about it a great deal.

It can look a bit like magic. We might be tempted to see the hand of deity in the mix, or some other supernatural agent, and to miss out the important detail that we built the space in which this happens. We made the tools, fine-tuned the hardware, wrote the software, if you like.

I only have myself to blame for what my mind gets up to in the middle of the night.

The flip side of that is knowing that I can deliberately reconstruct my thinking, with time, establishing better habits of thought, and putting my energy into the right things. I don’t believe that we make our own realities, but we absolutely do make the brains that perceive and engage with whatever else is out there, and we have a startling amount of power to change that, albeit slowly.

Hermit and tribe

There are lots of good reasons for picking solitude and a more solitary life. Not everyone is gregarious by nature. There are lots of introverts in the world, an abundance of folk for whom human contact is not that engaging or delightful, for all kinds of reasons. There are also a lot of things that can push a person into being a hermit, not because they want to be, but because they can see no other way. While I am someone who likes a lot of quiet time, I’ve also had some experience of feeling obliged to be a hermit and I’ve seen a lot of what it does to other people.

1) Poverty. If you can’t afford transport, or suitable clothes, social contact can be difficult. Most normal social activity has a price tag, a person in poverty may not be able to afford a beer at the pub, and can’t step up to buy a round. All of these things are humiliating, and rather than expose the feelings of shame poverty causes, people stop showing up.

2) Geographical isolation. Only pagan in the village can be a real problem. Loss of public transport, rising fuel costs, loss of rural venues, loss of urban venues even – there may not be anywhere you can realistically get to from where you live, and so you become unable to engage socially.

3) Illness. Both mental and physical ill health make it difficult to engage. If you have to constantly explain why you can’t do things, because the limits of your body and mind are not where people expect them to be, that can be depressing, humiliating. Fear of having something go wrong in public can leave many unwell people just afraid to go out, and afraid of being rejected for having something wrong in the first place.

4) Low self-esteem. If you don’t feel you have anything to offer, how can you ask to be part of a tribe? How can you expect people to accept you socially? Assumptions of not being welcome and not being good enough keep people isolated, which reinforces those beliefs.

5) Expecting rejection or other bad outcomes. People with bad histories (and there are a lot of us, perhaps a third of all women) find it hard to trust that social situations will be safe, that they will be welcome and well treated. Fear of anger and aggression, fear of abuse, of rejection, mockery, humiliation etc.

6) Fear of crime. I have met plenty of people who, even though they have not been victims of crime, are so fearful of this as a probability, that they don’t go out much. Instead they stay in watching news and crime laden TV programs that reinforce their beliefs about how dangerous it is out there. Which is ironic because statistically you are more likely to be raped, assaulted, or murdered by someone you knew and trusted, not by a random stranger.

7) Disbelief. If you think there’s nothing out there worth connecting with, nowhere you would fit in and nothing you would enjoy, you won’t even look. Lack of information about other people leads to a belief that you wouldn’t find anyone to engage with reinforced by not going out and finding anyone to engage with.

Most of these become self-perpetuating, and can take a person to a place of feeling anxious about having to deal with other people. Once we start to see human contact as threatening, unrewarding or impossible, we tie ourselves in to cycles of behaviour and disengagement guaranteed to reinforce the perception. I think there are many facets of our culture that help to perpetuate this. These fears are not crazy or irrational, it is important to note that every last one of them is well founded.

1) We denigrate poor people and uphold concepts of expensive chic, reinforcing the idea that to be and look poor, is to be unacceptable.

2) We don’t have a good public transport network, and the cars much of our planning decisions were based on are getting too expensive to run.

3) We have rising rates of mental illness, and a culture that is not tolerant of, nor reliably kind to people in difficulty.

4) We don’t have all-inclusive tribes. Membership of anything social depends on activity, and at least on actively showing up.

5) Our culture, TV led, says its ok to rubbish and ridicule people, to shout them down, humiliate, harass and otherwise behave in shitty ways. A few episodes of the soap opera of your choice, or any reality tv show where judges rubbish people as entertainment, will teach you this.

6) While violent crime between strangers is on the decrease, domestic abuse exists at a monumental scale. The irony is we’d probably be safer going to the pub than staying at home, statistically speaking.

7) And what is there, to go out for? Where are those tribes and communities we might belong to if only we made it out the door? Mostly they don’t exist, for all of the above reasons.

This is not about individual failing, this is a crisis of culture. No, I don’t have any answers.

The death of dreams

One of the hardest things to deal with in times of loss and grief, is the attendant loss of that which never was. It’s an issue when someone in our lives dies, in the breakdown of relationship, the loss of a home, a job, or any aspect of your way of life. All the things you imagined would be, all the dreams you wove around that thing have to now be dismantled, or rebuilt somewhere else. It’s a hard process, made more so by being invisible and difficult to explain. The more disproportionately you have invested in relation to what was actually there, the more it hurts, and the more silly you get to feel along the way.

I’m getting fond of blog posts with soundtracks, and for me this song encapsulates something about the secret grief that is a dead dream.

Life is not kind to dreams, and often we are not culturally kind to dreamers, either. To be a daydreamer is to be out of touch with reality, to be a fool, unrealistic and doomed to be disappointed. And yet, without dreams, without wild hopes and aspirations, without the triumph of optimism over experience, life would be thin and pale. It’s the willingness to dream that sets us on the path of new romances, takes us to new jobs, founds new organisations and groups, gets up and tries. You have to dream before you’ll make anything new. Some of those dreams are stillborn, or die young. It is part of the nature of dreams.

When pets and people die, it is obvious, and we have some idea how to grieve that. Dreams die slowly and quietly, slipping away without telling you. No one else sees their passing, there are no funerals for dreams, although plenty of poets will write them elegies. But poets are dreamers themselves, and wider culture doesn’t have much truck with that either.

There is deep, hidden personal tragedy in the death of a dream. It does not matter how large the dream was. Small dreams of days off, a little good, a small joy, are painful in their demise as well. It does not matter how crazy the dream was, all those abandoned ideas of fame, fortune, creativity and a life less ordinary. It does not matter whether you fed it with action, or cherished it as an idle thought, its death will still diminish you and take a little colour out of the world.

When enough dreams have died, it becomes easy to give up on them entirely. Dreams are foolish and ephemeral things, as the song says, ‘they just let you down’. So perhaps you stop dreaming them. Perhaps you stop hoping, daring and imagining. You don’t hold them anymore and you stop feeding the ones you were trying to make real. It is a bitter road to walk, wherever it takes you.

Afterwards, when you have buried the dream and grieved its death, the trick is to start over, to dream something new, to make hope out of whatever threads are left. So I’ll leave you with a second song, one that reliably makes me cry.

Don’t be misled by the first verse, this is not *just* a song about a ship. This is a song about not quitting, about love and determination, and refusing to give up on dreams and passions… though your heart it be broken and life about to end… no matter what you’ve lost, be it a home a love a friend, like the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.

Druid in a landscape

Where do you belong? Forest, vale or high blue hill? Do you need heavy clay beneath your feet, or limestone? Is your natural habitat the coast, the desert, or moorland perhaps? This may not be about where you live, but where you have a deep sense of belonging. I’ve met many Druids along the way who have moved from the place they were born into a place that held more resonance for them. Sometimes that can be about an attraction to specific ancient sites – there are a few Druids who have gravitated towards Glastonbury, for example. It may be the history of a place we connect with, it’s current culture or something in the physical landscape.

Relationship with the land is something I consider to be a really important part of Druidry. ‘The Land’ can be an urban space just as readily as somewhere green. A Druid who feels more of a calling towards cultural, academic or political work may be much more drawn to urban environments. Wherever we are, we have a relationship with that space. If it isn’t where we wanted or needed to be, that can add complexities.

I’ve met a few people now for whom soil type is an issue. I don’t do well on heavy clay, I have discovered and find granite a big odd. I am certainly most comfortable on my native limestone. It is worth considering that a soil is not a thing apart. How water behaves is very much informed by what is in the ground, whether you get marshes or streams, whether water sits on the surface or vanishes underground, and what happens in heavy rain or drought are all land issues. Different plants thrive on different soils, so you get wholly different communities of those depending on what is going on beneath the surface. Plant life informs the kinds of insects you get, and the landscape as a whole dictates what kind of creatures you get in it. While many of our mammals are adapting to urban life, you still need water for otters and eels, trees for woodpeckers.

I haven’t done much formal ritual in the last few years, but the relationship between ritual and land is important for me, too. I need to know where I am standing. Increasingly I need to feel a sense of connection with that place, such that I can speak from it. It’s making me ever more wary about taking on distance celebrant work; I’d rather help people find someone closer to them. I don’t want to do ritual places I do not have a relationship with the soil. That’s a personal thing. Other Druids whose service is more angled towards the celebrant work in the first place probably find that the call to help people is stronger than the need to know the soil. It may well also be that for some, hundreds of miles of land can feel familiar, known and related to in a way that would be impossible for me.

Apparently there’s something very localised about my Druidry, and it pertains to the Severn vale – which to come back to the opening lines, does indeed give me forest, vale, high blue hill, and also river. It connects me to my personal ancestry, and to the Stone Age. There are Celtic and Roman archaeological remains around here, and everything since then. The limestone hills with their ancient grassland, flora and fauna, the hanging beech woods, dramatic views, the flowing water, and the many secret places tucked into what at first glance appears to be a tame and knowable sort of landscape. This is home, and very much where my Druidry lives. It took me a decade of not being here to properly understand that.

Value and connection

Nothing gives me a sense of belonging like being in a place where I feel valued. I’ve done all manner of things along the way, as a volunteer, as an employee, as a leader and as a participant. I’ve been part of a number of communities – Pagan, folk, geographical, school-centred, organisations, companies… and there are some trends. It all comes down to a collective culture, and whether the community defaults to valuing members and appreciating their contributions.

I’ve been places where the culture was more of not praising or valuing. This tended to go alongside not trusting people to make good judgements or do good work. This turns very quickly into a low morale scenario where the people involved do what they must, but have no motivation to do their best. I’ve seen other cultures where a small number – one or two usually – wanting dominance, disempower everyone else by rubbishing their contributions, undervaluing their time and effort and creating a sense of unworthiness. At its extreme, I’ve been places where I’ve been treated as a nuisance and an inconvenience even when I was doing everything I could to make a meaningful contribution.

We all need to get and to be able to hear negative feedback. We all muff up and need to know when that’s happened. However, if you’re in a situation where nothing you do is good enough, it starts to feel like maybe you are the problem. Whatever the proffered reasons are – too slow, too stupid, not careful enough, not talented enough, if you’re devalued continually it can get inside you and inform your sense of self. That’s very bad news, in terms of personal wellbeing.

I’ve run a lot of things over the last ten years. There have been one or two people who have waltzed in, made demands, offered little, got stroppy when I didn’t make enough fuss over their ‘contribution’ and waltzed away again. With the organiser hat on, I find people who are a genuine nuisance are few, and they select themselves out as soon as they find they can’t be the centre of attention, have all the influence and do none of the work. I’ve also found that anyone who turns up because they care and want to help, will be useful. I’ve yet to meet anyone who was actually stupid or talentless or who could not be found a niche. I’ve been treated as such a thing more than once. I’ve long since worked out this has everything to do with group culture, and nothing to do with me.

We’re all good at something. It might just be that we bring our enthusiasm and make a good audience – something any organiser or performer knows how to value. People who want to be part of the solution stick around to stack chairs, show up early to make tea, take the litter away, help with the publicity, or just say ‘ really enjoyed that’ so that the person running things also gets to feel valued. A culture of not valuing ends up as demoralising for people in charge as it does for everyone else.

When you’re in a culture that does not praise or value, it is easy not to notice that it is widespread. If you think this is just about you, and you get bogged down in your own feelings of unworthiness (I have been so prone to this along the way) you don’t spot the bigger picture. We should be praising the good bits. It makes the needful criticism so much easier to take. It keeps us thinking about what we can be grateful for, and remembering that everyone who turned up has a value just because they did that. Cultures, be they in workplaces or social groups, are made up of people, so as individuals we can challenge cultures that undervalue. We can do differently. A word of thanks, a round of applause, can make worlds of difference.

I have felt worthless, useless, unwanted and a nuisance in some spaces. I have felt valued, respected, trusted and welcome in others. I have been the same person all the way through, it is an issue of culture. This is one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to consider what underpins emotion. Only when I think about how I feel can I spot these patterns, and hold a sense of what is mine to deal with and what comes to me from outside. When we decline to let outside influence get in, then we work from places of ignorance that are bound to distort our perceptions. When we let everything from outside us get in we are equally vulnerable to getting a distorted sense of who we are and how things work. The quality of feedback from outside depends on the culture we are in and the calibre of individuals. One thing I do know, is that if someone can never find a word of praise or kindness for you, the problem is more likely with them than with you. Nobody is entirely useless.

Inspiration and a pre-emptive grumble

For the past month or so, Tom and I have been involved in a weekly podcast called artshare – http://art-share.org/ for more details and to pick up old instalments. It’s dominated by visual artists at the moment, I’ve been the only published fiction author in the mix, (quick amemnd, because it turns out Brigid is a published non-fic author and I didn’t know!) but I anticipate that changing. People can ask questions via the website, and we try to answer them. Thus far the focus has mostly been on practical, businessy things, but this week we’re going to be talking about inspiration. I’m prepared to bet someone will ask my least favourite question. Hence the pre-emptive grumble.

“Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s not hard to answer – “by being alive and paying attention”. What troubles me is the question itself. It pre-supposes a number of wrong things and I’d like to take a moment to pick that over.

1)It prioritises inspiration over graft. This will usually go with words like ‘gifted’ and ‘talented’. Most of all creativity is work, not a magical event that only happens to a special few. Anyone who puts in enough effort can do good and creative stuff. Without developing skills and understanding, and learning your craft, no amount of inspiration can help you.

2) It postulates inspiration as something that comes from outside. Every time we talk about where we get our inspiration ‘from’ we place the source of creativity outside of ourselves. Again, that’s about making it magically inaccessible. Only people who can go to that special other place get to bring back ideas, we are encouraged to think. Bullshit. There are more ideas out there and in your head than will ever be realised. Everything has the potential to be an idea. Inspiration is a process that happens inside you, grasping a potential idea and seeing what to do with it. There are more questions to ask and possibilities to chase than there is time even to consider, much less act on them. Inspiration is not a scarce resource, it is the water we swim in, we just need to realise that.

3) Asking where ideas come from suggests that getting ideas is difficult or unusual enough to merit thinking about. It’s easy. What is difficult, is getting good ideas, ideas that will work, that other people engage with, that can be made real and so forth. The difference between daydream inspiration and the vision to make something, is knowledge, experience and occasionally sheer luck. The more of this you do, the better able you become to spot a workable idea in amongst all the alluring rubbish. It’s also often the case that having just one idea is worthless – certainly from the perspective of writing a novel. You don’t need one idea, you need a whole load of ideas that can be woven together into something new.

Be alive, pay attention, do things, think about stuff. Experience, experiment, live. Then you will notice that there is more inspiration than you know what to do with, and after a while, you’ll start knowing which bits of that you might meaningfully run with. What matters is nurturing the inspiration you get, honouring your own vision, and putting in the work needed to turn ideas into realities. It troubles me enormously that we perpetrate myths about creativity and inspiration that are untrue, create unreasonable expectations of creative people, dismiss the actual work involved and discourage the majority from thinking inspiration is available to them.

There is no magical difference between successful creative people and everyone who wants to be an artist/musician/actor/author/dancer/poet. Ability is about effort and time. Success is ability, marketing, networking, people skills and taking good risks. Without the work, any idea of luck is irrelevant, and probably has more to do with getting those other ingredients all lined up anyway.

Bardic tradition and relationship

When we talk about bard stuff, the emphasis tends to be on original creation, be that in song, poetry, story making or wider expressions of creativity. We lose sight sometimes of bard craft in the moment, and that old tradition of sharing words and music. There are two sides to having a tradition, of which original creativity is only one. Obviously you need people to make things, or there are no stories to tell or songs to sing. In order for there to be a tradition, other people need to pick up those songs and stories and share them on, keeping them alive far beyond the death of the originator.

I grew up steeped in the folk tradition, and I know a lot of material that has been through countless unnamed other hands. To be truly part of the folk tradition is to disappear. The songs and stories live on, the people gracefully melt away. Those songs change and evolve over time, something visible in the many variants of many older ones. Change is part of the living quality of tradition.

As a performer, I dedicate far more of my time to other people’s material than to creating my own. I’m very much on the maintenance side of these traditions, not an innovator. I sing and play traditional material, and also things written by people I know. It raises some interesting issues for me. I quite often change bits. I’ll replace archaic words with things more likely to make sense to my audience. I’ll change gender to make songs fit me, or I’ll change the meaning of a song simply by singing it as a woman. Richard Marx’s Hazard becomes a story of prejudice against lesbians if I sing it the way he wrote it! Damh the Bard’s Obsession is a very different song if I sing it, just because it is me, and not him. There are songs I’ve felt comfortable tweaking and adapting, and songs where I would not change a detail of arrangement. There are songs I do not sing, much as I love them because I do not feel I can honour them. Raglan Road, would be a case in point.

This is incredibly personal stuff, and is about my relationship with a song, it’s creator, it’s history, where I got it from, what I was doing when I learned it, and who I’m singing it for. Each relationship is different, for me. I’m entirely conscious that every other person who engages with this same folk tradition has a totally different relationship with the material. This is great. Other people can mess about with songs that I hold sacrosanct and could not touch. I am not in any way distressed by this. I run into arrangements that reimagine songs in ways that inspire me, and others that make me sad, and that’s fine too. Diversity is good.

What I’ve realised over the last few days, is that my relationship with the tradition, and with each individual song or tune I work with, is important to me. I take those relationships as seriously as I do relationships with people. For me, a song is a living, breathing, spirited thing that deserves respect. I’ll only change it if it makes sense for the song. I’ve been working on a rework of Lyke Wake Dirge, which is beautiful, but needs a lot of explaining in the original, being both archaic of language and about something that we don’t have in the collective consciousness any more – the journey through purgatory. I might try it out at Samhain. In the context of my relationship with that song, I can do that. Other people may not like it. I in turn feel bloody uncomfortable when people re-write Christmas carols to make them Pagan. But, I deal with that by not singing them. End of problem.

Relationship is not one big blanket thing with a single answer for all circumstances. It is the precise way in which we engage with specifics – people, places, songs, trees… and I have only just realised in a conscious way how important that relationship with songs is to me.

Peace one day after

Yesterday I started out in a place of pain and confusion. I don’t usually blog so directly from what’s going on in my life, but there are times when it seems productive to share. We spent time for Peace One Day, sitting on a hill with likeminded folk. I had about 4 hours there of walking, talking, sitting, sharing bread and ideas about both peace and conflict. Then afterwards, more talking and sharing insight. There is no peace until the pain has been addressed, but there is also, as was pointed out to me, a violence in the healing, and that’s hard to face.

Today I am actively seeking the things that leave me feeling better: Time in my lover’s arms, time on small jobs around the flat. I’ve set up some wine. There will be a walk and jam making along the way as well. Just being with my family in our little home and letting myself feel held and protected by that. It’s often the smallest and most practical things that help me feel peaceful and secure. It’s not big speeches and grand gestures, but a friend’s hand on my shoulder, a warm word online, extra time in the duvet.

I am an intensely emotional sort of person, and it is easy to let that turn into a focus on the large and dramatic stuff. Passion, inspiration, rage and rapture are attention demanding. They take over. I’m starting to see though, that while these intense things bring colour and a sense of direction into my life, they aren’t what holds me together from one day to the next. These are not sustaining forces. Far too readily overlooked, and perhaps far more critical, are the influences of kindness and liking. No one can sustain passion or lust full time. It’s exhausting. Having that in modest and manageable bursts is glorious, but what happens in between?

I started asking myself why this relationship I am in works so much better than anything else ever has for me, and I think the answer is, because we also like each other and care about each other. On the tired, scruffy, lacklustre days, care will keep a relationship warm, tender and close. A default position of kindness means that even when we disagree or misunderstand each other, we don’t end up hurting each other. It makes worlds of difference.

Liking and kindness go together well. These are sustainable things, feasible for the long term, creating threads of emotional engagement you can hang the whole rest of your life from. Equally, for me it is the spaces where that warmth and gentleness are lacking that I really suffer. I know there are people who believe in vigorous debate, in challenge, who take a combative and macho approach to all aspects of relationship, interaction and creativity. It makes me very sad. So I have come to the conclusion that if other people want to be strenuous in their debates, ruthless in their creative approaches, tough and hard-nosed in their beliefs – they’re entirely welcome to that thing but I won’t be showing up for it.

I like deep exploration of subjects. I enjoy the interplay between barely compatible ideas and exploring outlooks different to mine. I am open to being challenged, disagreed with, told I am mistaken, but I need that to be done by people who also care about me enough as a fellow human being to treat me with kindness at the same time. Or at least not actively be unkind to me. This, it turns out, is the price of peace in my life, and where I find what I need is unavailable, I’m going to move on. There is no need for anyone else to do differently, I don’t believe in asking people to change for me, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I have a right not to be in spaces that make me miserable and ill, and that the only answer is to quietly leave them.

My thanks to everyone who shared yesterday with me, who offered wisdom and insight, kindness and friendship. Let’s keep doing those things.

Peace One Day

Today is Peace One Day. It’s an international project and you can find out more about it at http://www.peaceoneday.org

Peace is not merely an absence of war. Many of us do not live in peace even though we’re not implicated in any kind of armed conflict. I know so many people who are caught up in fighting right now – fighting their governments and corrupt systems, fighting to save badgers, landscapes, homes, to protect rights. There are too many people whose work life is a constant battle, or whose home life is fraught with danger. We kill each other on the domestic front all the time. We die on the roads. We end our own lives in pain and despair.

Peace is about all of these things. It’s an issue of not being at war with the planet, and not practicing genocide on other species. We don’t even have a word for that, so far as I know, but we should.

We don’t get real peace by ignoring the problems, or by ceasing to fight over matters of life and death. The only kind of peace of any value, is a peace that works for everyone. While we buy into the idea of competition being preferable to co-operation, while we put the gain of the few ahead of the needs of the many and refuse to even think about the long term survival of our species, we can’t have peace.

I’m very tired today. These last ten days or so have left me bruised of heart and mind, and ill of body. I am painfully aware of a need for some personal peace right now. I’m going to take some time out today and sit in a hill with friends, and think about what we could be doing to make things better. Where to stand and fight and where to let go. When to step forward, and when to walk away. Small and finite resource that I am, how can I deploy myself to best effect? Where will my voice make most difference? I don’t know.

The last few days have brought me face to face, repeatedly, with everything I like least about myself, everything I fear may be true of me in terms of my insufficiencies. It’s funny that I get people, both online and offline, who see me as someone who needs taking down a peg or two. I’ve never figured out what it is that I do to come across as arrogant and self- important, aside from simply having this willingness to speak. I only keep doing it because there’s an ongoing stream of feedback from people who find me useful. I figure, if one person finds my words helpful, it was worth sharing them. And yes, there are indeed plenty of days when I share my latest critic’s concern that this makes me some kind of audience-hungry imposter, somehow lacking in some needful inner quality. There is no peace at all in that kind of despair and self-hatred. The only door it opens for me is the one that leads to death. There are days when that seems like the most productive contribution I could make. There are days when I write about peace because I need to believe there is some point, some reason for hope.

For those of you who find me acceptable and useful as I am, thank you. What you give, in doing that, is beyond measure for me. Peace in your hearts, peace in your homes, and may Peace One Day as an idea bring you something good.

Scaring small children

It used to be the case that fairy stories were dark and alarming things in which small children who did bloody stupid things could expect to be eaten by wolves, bears, witches and so forth. Yes, said the fairy stories, the world is a dangerous place full of things whose motives are different to yours, things that are hungry, grouchy things with pointy teeth. Go carefully, children. And it was a fair point, because death in childhood used to be really normal.

In the last hundred years or so, child mortality in the west has plummeted, and I suspect in response to this, fairy stories have become gentler. It’s ok kids, happily ever after awaits, with a handsome treasure and the frog of your choice. Interested in writing for small children, I’ve looked at what many of them are fed – brightly coloured, stylised creations with no bearing on reality. Stories in which nothing much happens, and nobody dies. Cute fluffy animals doing cute fluffy things.

Back when I was the parent of a young child, I cheated. We didn’t do unbearable fluff for bedtime. I took a leaf out of my father’s book. When I was about three, my Dad read me The Hobbit, and on we went from there. So I read my small son the entire Dark Materials trilogy, and anything else I thought would be interesting. He fell asleep during reads on a regular basis, cannot have had more than a passing grasp of the plot, but he loved Lyra and armoured bears, and all that came after. Now at 11, I have an emotionally well-adjusted child with a realistic understanding of how the world is, and a penchant for books. Right now, he’s reading Jekyll and Hyde.

The world is a scary place for small children, and always will be. There’s so much that makes no sense, and that cannot be explained to you. I remember being four and wanting to know what death meant and what happened afterwards, and no one could help me there. Many parents just won’t discuss sex, death, why strangers are a danger, what actually happens if you put your hand on the iron, and all those other things that regularly feature in your life as ‘stop’ ‘don’t’ and a grownup screaming at you. “You don’t need to worry about that,” is such a common solution to the alarm of small children. But the thing is, some of them do keep worrying.

I firmly believe that scary stories are good for small children. I’m not talking about traumatising them, but a bit of manageable alarm, a bit of feasible unnerving. It creates a safe space in which you can get fear out into the open. Name it, own it, understand it a bit. And don’t tidy it up with just stories that resolve into nothing to be afraid of after all. The world is a scary place, death and suffering are real. Small children are not stupid, and lying to them really doesn’t help. A child who is exposed to a few darker faerie stories is much better equipped than one who only gets princesses in frothy dresses.

We forget, as adults, that children don’t have as much empathy. They often enjoy violence and gruesome details, in part because it’s all a little bit unreal to them. Think about Tom and Jerry cartoons. I remember howling with mirth at those as a kid, while revisits as an adult have left me wondering what on earth amused me… just as my own child howls in laughter. Talking to teachers, I’ve very much had this impression confirmed – many kids like gory stuff. Horrible history sells.

It’s all about scares that you can live with. Learning to cope with being scared makes the world a more manageable place. It’s the same impulse that sends teenagers off in search of horror films where teenagers are eaten by monsters. I don’t have any of that for you today. What I do have is http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/baronmind/lil-eddie-edgar-allan-poe-for-kids A board book version of The Fall of the House of Usher, in which mildly alarming things happen and small children get a viable introduction to Poe. It may also be a sanity saver for parents who can’t take any more cute fluffy animals, or singing furniture and whose eyes are weary from an excess of bright colours. If you need a giggle, watch the video.