Nimue Brown's Blog, page 415

Standing in circle

Outside of Paganism it tends to be the case that you go along to religious gatherings as an observer. The audience/performer dynamic between priest and assembly reinforces the idea that you’re mostly there passively, to have something happen to you. When people first come along to Pagan circles, it can be easy to assume the same thing is happening. Often one person appears to be leading, others may have roles, and you as newbie are just an audience. Wrong!

To get the best out of a ritual, you need to start by taking yourself seriously as a participant.

It’s not a block of audience, most usually it’s a circle, and each person in that circle is at just as key a point as any other person. The focus, presence and intent each person brings to the ritual, matters. This is as true in loose, open circles as it is in more intense and closed magical groups. Everybody counts.

Often the idea of dressing right and knowing what to bring seems more of an issue to people in advance of their first ritual. Most Druid circles don’t require people to dress up, especially not the first time, so the right answer is usually to be dressed for the location and likely weather conditions. Most Druids prefer to work outside, so a decent pair of boots and a waterproof coat may be the best ritual gear available!

If the person or persons leading the ritual are any good at all, it will not be a problem that you as a new person do not know how things work. I would say that a group accepting the inexperienced but unable to look after them is probably not somewhere to go twice.

If you are serious about Paganism and not just going along to observe (which is fine to do in many situations) then you need to participate to get the best out of a ritual. Most of this happens in your head and heart. It is about being open to what’s going on. Think about what is said, let your emotions be stirred a little and your imagination stimulated. Treat this as a magical experience, a chance to connect with the awen and experience a flash of the numinous, and there’s much more chance of that happening.

What probably isn’t obvious when you’ve less ritual experience, is how much odds your attitude makes. Atmospheres in circles are delicate things, made up of everyone present. One person who isn’t taking it seriously, one person who isn’t really present, or concentrating or engaging can be enough to have a discernible, negative impact. At the same time, one really engaged person can shift a lacklustre ritual up a notch. It doesn’t matter that you’re new, if you are present, you have a share in how the ritual goes.

Rituals are far less about the words and actions than they are about thoughts, feelings and intentions. You don’t need to know the words to engage with the intentions, and if your heart is open to experience and you are willing to be moved, then even as a total novice you can play a meaningful part in a ritual just by standing there and giving yourself to it.

The bardic audience

Prompted by a very good point made on Facebook by Robin Herne, I want to explore a set of skills that have huge value, but are seldom talked about. I’m warming up to teach a Pagan leadership course over at http://www.patheos.com . Robin pointed out that there may well be as great a need for information on how to be a good follower, and I think he has a very good point. These are not skills we teach, either. It does not help that normal culture muddles this kind of thing into being subservient, which it isn’t.

It is really hard to do well as a performer if your audience are crap. It doesn’t matter how skilled or talented you are, a really shit audience can wreck an evening. Bad audiences aren’t listening, don’t care, talk to each other, have their mobile phones go off, get up and walk around in the middle of things, break atmospheres, show no respect and generally make the job hell for the poor sod at the front. Gigs where this kind of reception can be expected, are called ‘wallpaper gigs’ because that’s all you are – a musical backdrop. Performers take them because they need the money, but being wallpaper is soul destroying.

Being a good audience is about more than just sitting there quietly with the phone turned off. It is a skill, and you can hone it. A good audience is not merely listening, but engaged. It cares, it responds, it sings along, and participates, taking an active role in making the event work. One determined bardic audience member can shift the whole tone of an event.

As a young human, I always used to get up and dance if there was live music. I loved dancing and was not self-conscious about being the only person on the floor. I have observed repeatedly that most people are not willing to be the first one up, but when someone goes, others will follow. All of a sudden that which would have been a wallpaper gig turns into a meaningful interaction between performers and audience. The performers are boosted by this, so they play better, give more. The audience responds, and so a powerful feedback loop is created.

I’ve done it in the street, actually stopping to listen to buskers and applauding them at the end of a tune. Other people will feel able to join in. I know perfectly well that I’m capable of being an influential presence, and if I give someone my focused attention, it’s discernible. Other people get on-board.

Anyone can do this. Just give of yourself bit. Give your care and enthusiasm, your applause, your willingness to dance. Give your stillness and quiet, your respect. These are all good bard skills, and well worth honing. They also turn what might have been lacklustre evenings into engaging events. A performer cannot do it on their own. Singing, playing, storytelling into the void, or the noise, is unworkable. Just one person who is listening, who you can address things to, changes the entire nature of the arrangement.

We are too used to amplified entertainment over which you need to shout to be heard. We’re used to the darkened anonymity of big performance spaces, and we are accustomed to entertainment as wallpaper. It takes a bit of a wriggle to leave those ideas behind, and get back to a real engagement between performer and audience. That’s what bardic work is all about, but the performer cannot do the whole thing themselves.

Little rites of passage

When thinking about what to celebrate, we tend to focus on the big, defining moments in life – birth, death, coming of age, marriage, and elder rites. In practice life is dotted with smaller moments of deep significance, too, and there’s much to be said for honouring them along the way.

We had one yesterday. The boy has come to the age of travelling independently to and from school. It tends to be an option here in the UK at 11, with the shift from Primary to Secondary school. Friends of his are bussing in and out of town, also on their own for the first time. For children using school buses, or living very close to their school the moment of independence can be earlier. There are of course many young people and parents who won’t get this little rite of passage, because the school run is by car. For us, the school run has meant walking or cycling, and I’ve done it with him at least once, and often twice a day since he started school 7 years ago. It’s been a significant part of our lives, and a little bit of time we’ve used for talking and sharing. There are other spaces aplenty for that, but it won’t be quite the same.

Go back not so very far in time and the idea of parents on the school run would have seemed preposterous to the vast majority. It used to be that you walked to your local school, if you were any kind of normal person. A few miles in all weathers. Cars, shortages of safe places to cross roads, increased anxiety around stranger danger and an increased addiction to total ease and comfort have all helped shaped the change. It’s easy to drive by, drop the kid off and drive away. Adding to the traffic problems and the road dangers. I’m a dogmatic fundamentalist when it comes to this one: Walking and cycling to school is good for young people. It allows time to warm up the brain in the morning and wind down on the way home. There are social opportunities, and the fresh air and exercise is good. A healthy child can go out in all weathers, assuming the right clothes, and not suffer in the slightest.

There used to be far fewer such moments in the process of loosening ties between parent and child, I suspect. Children used to be freer sooner, and there wasn’t the same social pressure to insulate the young to the current degree. We used to expect that a child could be responsible for themselves walking half a mile or so. These days you have to be much more careful. Grant too much freedom too soon and social services may be called in. With gloomy talk of feral youth, and resentment of young people roaming about in the streets, the young are increasingly battery raised. Free range children are alarmingly rare.

Part of me knows that this moment of shift and changing responsibilities, is a really important moment in the life of my family. We honoured it with something sugary. Part of me knows how modern and weird this is. He could have been sent off as an apprentice by now, squire to a knight, or in full time employment in some other era. Part of me knows that for much of history, statistically speaking he’d have done really well to have lived this long in the first place.

In other times and places, first knife ,first hunt, first kill, first wound would have marked the journey from family bosom to independence, in whatever order they came. Now it’s first mobile phone, first part time job, first independent journey, first car. The moments of significant change are in so any ways defined by the culture in which we live, as soon as you get beyond the more biologically informed set. It makes me wonder what we might pick as some kind of ideal series of transitions and key points.

Political Druid

This is a tricky area for me. On one hand I believe that every choice we make inevitably has a political aspect to it – whether we notice it or not. I also believe that if we’re doing the Druid thing right, then everything we do has a spiritual aspect to it as well. Often, they intertwine. The choice to honour your relationship with the land by living carefully and responsibly, also has political implications. At the same time I am deeply uneasy about any approach that hardwires religion into politics, has religious leaders spouting political messages or otherwise tangles up power structures from either side – as has all too often been the case between church and state all over the place. You don’t need a formal relationship for it to be an issue. The chances of anyone getting into the Whitehouse without professing Christianity, are troublingly slim. I have nothing against Christians, but it shouldn’t be a needed qualification for anything outside of the Church.

I would never say there is one right way to manifest your Druidry, and this is especially true when it comes to thinking about ourselves as political creatures. I do think we have an obligation to inform ourselves as best we can so that our decisions are as well based as we can get them. How that works out in practice has got to vary. Where you are, what matters most to you and who there is on the ground to work with are critical considerations. For a person in the UK but outside of England, with a deep investment in culture, the parties of independence might make a lot of sense as something to support. If your local MP is a politician of conviction who works hard for their constituents, there’s every reason to put that ahead of party politics. You may find it makes more sense to pour your energy in at the most local level, or into awareness raising work unaffiliated to any party. Groups like 38 degrees, charities, and the like can be deeply political in their work without getting into the murky waters of party politics.

As I see it, it matters far more that you engage, than where you decide it makes sense to do so. Follow your heart, your awen, follow the need of your land, and tribe. Do the things you are called to do. That may take you into petitions and protests, experiments with currency, local markets, co-operatives, land charities and innumerable other things that really could use your energy.

For me, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, it means writing for the Green Party. Most of the time, I’m working at a really local level, talking about issues that affect an area of land I could cycle across. I’m not a great cyclist, I might add. It’s a job deeply involved with the place I live and the people around me, which feels like where I should be. If you follow me on facebook and twitter you’ll see I’m putting more time into Stroud issues, and one of the places I’m doing that, is here – http://ruscombegreen.blogspot.co.uk I’m not the only contributor.

However, with European elections looming, I know I’m going to be working on a whole other scale, and a really unfamiliar one at that. The lead Green candidate for the south west, is local to me – Molly Scott Cato. All of a sudden that ‘think local’ job turns out to be something much bigger, with implications for a world stage. I’m a little daunted, but aware I’m just one of a team on this job and that plenty of far more experienced people than me will be leading the way.

It is however, a measure of how easy it is to become involved. In the space of less than a year I’ll make a journey from being barely involved in politics at all, to having a tiny part in something that has the power to affect the world stage. I’ve seen it happen other places, too. People follow their inspiration and the work that calls to them, and they go from small work to high profile, high impact activities. Take Jack Monroe, who blogged about her horrendous experiences as a single mum in a poverty trap, and is now talking at political conferences, and garnering media interest http://agirlcalledjack.com/2013/09/15/for-fairness-sustainability-and-for-the-future-gpconf-speech-in-brighton-14th-september/

So often, we don’t act because we don’t think we can make any kind of meaningful difference. We can. However you do it, for whatever cause cries out to you, step up. The world of politics, formal and informal has been dominated by markets, corporations and profit margins for too long. Politics needs people who give a damn about something other than the bottom line. It doesn’t matter where or how you manifest that, just that you do.

For better or worse

Every day brings uncountable numbers of choices and opportunities, many of which we don’t even notice. It’s so easy to do things out of habit without considering the implications. I tend to wander round urban spaces in a slightly oblivious trance, especially days when I’m in a lot of pain. I don’t pay as much attention to other people as I might. That might come over as me being rude, proud, aloof or uncaring. Even without particularly doing something, I may have done something that has significant impact on another person. While its offputtingly easy to get bogged down in all of this, making a mire of inactivity out of fearing the consequences, I still think it’s worth stepping back and having a ponder now and then.

I’m actually a big believer in habits, when properly arranged. It is easier to maintain that which has become normal to us. The trick is to pick and craft the habits rather than absorbing them from external influences and pressures, or cobbling them together by accident. I try to make a habit of smiling at strangers, to break the ‘far away’ habit described above. Recently I’ve also been trying to get the boy into the habit of noticing what’s around him – with massive success, I might add. It’s nigh on impossible to take care of your things and space if you don’t first notice when it needs some attention. A habit of paying attention feeds a habit of taking care. Equally, a habit of ignoring anything that is wrong feeds a habit of inaction.

For me, paying attention is part of what it means to be a Druid. Sloughing off the conventions of apathy, disinterest and oblivion in favour of knowing and noticing; even when it isn’t comfortable to do so. Those throwaway remarks, those unconsidered actions can roll on to have unforeseen impact. I’d rather know what I’m doing, although I find I never can truly live up to that.

There are daily opportunities to put other people down, pick holes, criticise and complain. Sometimes that’s really important. Right now you might want to complain on twitter about proposed gagging laws and tweet #gagginglaw and #ldconf to encourage the Liberal Democrats to properly debate the issue at their conference. You might want to complain about the sheer insanity of the badger cull, which isn’t going to help farmers in the slightest. You could complain about fracking, about war, or any social justice or environmental issue that grabs you today. Those things are so worth challenging over. Complain to the people in power. Do it directly. Make a difference.

So often though, where we pour our energy isn’t into the big issues of the day. It’s not world peace, or saving species… its small, nitpicky grumbles with the people around this. You did this… I did not say that… you’re so unreasonable, I’m so put upon… we let the small problems seem like really big ones. Perhaps in part because we don’t want to think about the big problems. Let’s face it, most of them are terrifying. I’d rather not think about that. Or, more precisely, I’d rather not *need* to think about them. Fracking and gagging laws won’t go away just because I’d really rather they weren’t out there waiting to happen.

Every day there are chances for small acts of warmth, kindness and encouragement. Every day brings opportunities to praise and encourage, to share inspiration, to reach out in good ways to those around us. Equally, every day is full of reasons to get cross, feel put upon and lash out. I’ve been tired of the lashing out business for a long time. Let’s do less of that thing, especially on the internet where trolling and bashing are rife. Let’s not pour energy into hurting each other. Let’s try and support each other so that we can turn our energy to the big issues, the big fights.

Between us, we have an amazing amount of power. I don’t care who left the toilet seat up. I don’t care that it is up. Let’s be splendid. Let’s be proud of each other, supportive of each other, and from that, able to really challenge what’s going on out there. And to those of you who are innately splendid and weave your lives out of compassion and careful attention, please know that you are hugely appreciated and a source of much inspiration to people who encounter you. I’ve been blessed with a few such folk in my life, and you represent a standard I would very much like to live up to.

The tides of history

Back when I was working on Druidry and the Ancestors, I kept running into a sense of history as something with tides and currents. Some of the books I read suggested that event had a momentum, and that people at the forefront were just riding the tide. There can be a tendency in history writing to ascribe what happens to the influence of a few movers and shakers. However, that sense of current and momentum distributes the ownership a bit. Great (and lousy) leaders do not exist in a vacuum. Ideas of the day, popular opinion, arts, sciences, religion and so forth all shape the mood of the moment, all help to create the current. It may be that we just avoided world war 3, not because leaders around the world did anything spectacular, but because it was so clear that people were not going to support it.

Every moment of history is made out of more actions, ideas, influences and efforts than we can hope to see. The tide of history isn’t a simple current, either. There are whirlpools, eddies and undertows. There are the lingering influences of things we nearly did, just escaped and wish had happened. It is a complex mix, and out this mess we create the future, one thought, one word at a time.

One of the things that generally underpins any status quo (with the possible exception of the band) is that the status quo is normal, natural and inevitable. That makes it hard to imagine any real change, despite the fact that we live with almost constant change, often beyond our control. We also tend to believe that the status quo (still not the band) is so big that we, as individuals, cannot make much impact on it. So what if I cut my carbon footprint? Unless world leaders step up, we’re all doomed anyway…

Except that we are the status quo (ok, I give up…. Rocking all over the world…). If we change, everything changes. If each of us, as an individual, decided to go vegetarian tomorrow, the impact would be massive. We can have other debates about whether that would be a good idea. If we all chose to use fewer animal products, drive a bit less, reuse a bit more – the consequences would be vast. Small changes made by lots of people are tantamount to a revolution. We make the tide, we are the current, and all the politicians can do is try to ride it while telling us they are in charge. Control is an illusion, and it does not hurt the politicians and corporations to remind them of that, once in a while. It only works while we all choose to co-operate. So, what’s the plan for tomorrow?

The relativity of pain

Pain is subjective. How you understand it, be it bodily or emotional, depends on what else you have experienced first-hand, and what you have seen others endure. If you aren’t very empathic or haven’t encountered much suffering, that second option will barely exist for you. The biggest pain you have ever known is the measure of how bad you think it can get (ie, that plus whatever you are capable of imagining is worse). For young children, every bump and frustration is a source of overwhelming misery.

Gradually, some of us learn new perspectives, a few of us don’t.

It can be all too easy to get into the idea that “my pain is bigger than yours, and that mine should be taken seriously, while yours should not”. I spent my childhood being told I had a low pain threshold, yet I’ve had 2 tattoos without so much as a whimper, and went most of the way through labour with no pain relief. I consequently find I have no idea how my pain relates to anyone else’s. If it hurts more than I can bear, I need help, or something to change. If I can bear it, I bear it. What else is there? What help is it to be told at that point that you’re making a fuss, over reacting, that your pain is not as big as you think it is?

It’s difficult encountering those people for whom a torn nail, the wrong actor getting the Batman role, a head cold or a bad day at the office seems like something of earth shattering proportions. I do find it hard watching the amount of energy people expend griping about what seems trivial to me. Whose perspective is wrong? Actually, it could well be mine. Perhaps I should be taking my own pain a bit more seriously, rather than assuming that I’m just being lazy or feeling sorry for myself.

Then there’s the knowledge that if any of us had been through a Nazi death camp, a Rwandan massacre, an epic natural disaster… we’d have a whole other perspective again. There are people who will get to watch their loved ones suffer and die, powerless to help them. There are people whose apparently whingey griping about pain turns out to be the undiagnosed cancer that kills them. Perspective works best when you’re looking backwards, possessed of all the facts. When you’re in pain, you probably don’t have that. You don’t know what was meant, or how much less an issue it will be than what tomorrow is going to bring for you. All you know at that point is how it fits with where you have been.

We all start out howling because the teddy falls out of the pram. We learn at the speed life sees fit to teach us. That might be a gentle curve. It might be in sudden shocks and bounds. We might coast along for forty years and then be crushed by something we were in no way prepared for. Life doesn’t always help us grow into a useful perspective before it really shits on us. Today, the worst problem is how to peel a pomegranate. Tomorrow, you are hit by a truck, but not killed.

The only answer is compassion, with ourselves, and with the people around us. No one knows what someone else is feeling, or how that fits in the context of the rest of their life. If someone is hurting, try not to judge them. Maybe you could sail through that problem untroubled, but maybe that’s because you aren’t as bruised already as they are. We don’t know. It helps to remember that.

Boundaries and sacred personal space

I recently had the privilege of being an advance reader for Joanna van der Hoeven’s new book: Dancing with Nemetona. It’s a lovely and inspiring piece of work, and prompted me to think about my own edges. Nemetona is a goddess of sacred space, and the book is all about edges, boundaries and how to work with them.

I lost my boundaries. It was a soul destroying experience, over a number of years, underpinned by people who felt entitled to use me any way they liked and expected me to be grateful. Looking back I see parallel things happening in a number of relationships, not all of it domestic and some of it deliberately caused by professionals. I learned not to have an opinion, nothing was private, nothing was mine. I had no right to refuse, and therefore no way of holding boundaries.

As I became conscious of this, I locked down in every way I could. We had very few visitors to the boat, and in part that was because I did not like sharing it. That was my safe space, I guarded the threshold fiercely. I created emotional distance from everyone except my husband and child, and I reinforced that with physical distance. I was profoundly uncomfortable with even the idea of most people touching me, and made sure opportunities did not arise.

I held my boundaries very close, very tight. It felt safer that way. I felt stronger and less afraid, I’d built my castle and I could sit in it and resist efforts to besiege me if necessary. I was not going out to be bloodied in combat again.

And then we moved.

All of a sudden we had an address people could find, and it was reasonable to expect me to show up. I’d planned a gentle, cautious return to normal life in which I would lower my defences in gradual, carefully considered ways, and never so far as to feel exposed. Life apparently had other plans for me, with a startling rush of human contact, places to be, jobs to do, and most of all, people who put hands on me. People I did not know well. It’s been a bit of a system shock.

I can’t live where I was, it was a straightjacket as much as a defence strategy. I don’t actually know how to handle normal situations with normal, friendly, tactile people, and that’s not a comfortable realisation. I’m never entirely sure what’s ok, what’s too much, where I could reasonably draw lines. I can’t have no edges, I can’t be more wall than person, there’s got to be something in between and I need to figure out where that is.

I suspect what I have to do, is figure out what I want. For me. For whatever reasons strike me as being important. I know, logically, that I have a right to hold whatever boundaries I wish, and for whatever reason. It is evident that I’m not clear of my past because I still don’t feel that entitlement to do what I need without having to justify it. I still expect people to take issue and demand I do differently. I still find it hard to say ‘please don’t put hands on me’ when perhaps it would be ok to do so. I don’ trust people to hear that and not get angry with me, and again that’s history speaking and nothing to do with the character of any given individual.

The road back to some kind of viable, non-anxious, not-depressed life is a long and complex one. Every time I think I’m there, I find a new thing I have to deal with and unravel. One day, this will stop. In the meantime, I’m going to hold that thought of personal space as sacred space as best I can, and try to bring something a bit more spiritual to this need to sort out where my edges need to be. Thanks Jo, timely inspiration there.

Beauty in Tears

I’m not a full-time professional Druid. This is partly because I don’t think of Druidry as being something you do, more as something you take with you to the things you do. Partly because the discovery of Druidry did not cause me to want to give up everything else I love. Rather the opposite. One of the other things I do, is writing fiction. I’ve dabbled in most forms and genres along the way, and no doubt will continue to do so, but the one abiding passion I keep returning to, is the Gothic.

Unlike many genres, Gothic isn’t that firmly regimented. It’s less about a story shape, more about an atmosphere. Gothic is creepy, without falling into graphic horror. It’s a spooky and supernatural, and it can have romantic elements, but it’s not paranormal romance. Gothic is full of uncertainties, blurry edges, uncanny possibilities and the beauty of mournful decay.

My latest wander into the realms of the gothic, is novella, Beauty in Tears, which I’ve just self-published on kindle. Victorian set, there’s a dash of Steampunk in the mix, a little action and some romance. It’s a haunted sort of a story, full of the things people think they have to do when they refuse to imagine they have any choices, and it is not, as a consequence, a child friendly sort of tale.

The title for this one comes from an O’Carolan tune. For those of you not familiar with him, O’Carolan was a blind, Irish harper, often heralded as the last great Irish bard. He wrote a wealth of exquisite melodies that these days are claimed by the folk tradition. Really speaking he should be in the classical cannon, and at the time he was working, composers came from Europe to hear him and be influenced by his ideas. He was an incredible composer of melodies and deserves far wider recognition than he gets.

I’ve been playing Beauty in Tears for years. (I’m a fiddler, with another of those many hats on). It is a lovely, sorrowful sort of tune, much as the title suggests. Here’s a rather nice arrangement of it – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGf-Ra9EujQ It does bear more than a passing resemblance to another tune called The Ash Grove, but, I digress. You can easily pick up other O’Carolan tunes, should you get the urge. Youtube will provide.

Usually I get a story idea and then struggle to find a title. This was a rare occurrence of me wanting to use a title, and then trying to find a story that would fit it. I’m interested in the capacity of pain to open us up, breaking the protective prisons we build, cracking us open as we feel things we really didn’t want to. Pain can be a great teacher, and sometimes, the right pain at the right moment, can be a great healer. So while in no obvious way is this a Druid book, there is the issue that I wrote it, and therefore pottering along beneath the surface are all manner of things that I really care about.

All of my books, regularly published and self-published, can be found here – http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=Nimue+Brown&search-alias=books&text=Nimue+Brown&sort=relevancerank

Leading communities

When a person gets into a position of leadership in a community, they don’t just make calls about what happens; they define a culture. Mostly, Pagans come to leadership by accidental means. Very few people consciously seek it, and therefore I think it’s justified to say that no matter how firmly you believe that leadership issues are not your problem… they are. You could wake up tomorrow and find a moot has fallen on your head. They do that.

Many pagans do not like to think in terms of hierarchy and power because it smacks of all the things that you probably don’t want to do. We don’t want dogma, or to be controlled, we don’t want to be told how to feel or what to think. This means that effects created by subtle, and accidental means get under the radar, we don’t spot them and they cause problems.

Let me give you some examples. If you run open rituals, and you always wait around for the latecomers, because you’re a lovely, inclusive sort of person, you can in fact make a massive problem. You are rewarding the late people and punishing the punctual ones. You are reinforcing the idea that it’s fine to be late. I’ve seen this lead to serious levels of unhappiness and disharmony. You get a culture of lateness, or a culture of resentment, or a lot of people stop showing up.

If you let whingers and complainers dominate discussions at the expense of people who are doing the work, you get problems. Of course you do this because you think everyone deserves a fair hearing and you take complaints seriously, but if you get someone for whom whinging is a hobby, you destroy the morale of volunteers and the whole thing falls apart.

You might want everything to be done only by consensus. That’s a classic of the well-meaning, inclusive pagan mind-set and all too often, it results in nothing happening at all.

Small things you do as a leader can shape how the community around you behaves. What you do defines what is normal and acceptable. That includes what you do when you’re tired, sore, pissed off and hungry. It is a lot to have to think about and a lot to carry, and one of the many reasons why people who do put themselves forward often choose to step back again after a while. It is bloody hard work to do it well. It is also well worth trying to be alert to all of this.

However, there’s scope for all manner of things here. If we engage with our wider community at all, we are all in a position to either support, or not co-operate with accidental culture failures of this shape. If we get a dysfunctional leader and we cooperate with the culture they make, we are contributing to that culture. It is all too easy to do, and I say that knowing perfectly well that I’ve done it.

The only answer I can see is to make sure, in everything you do, that you uphold your values, walk your talk, and hold firm against any culture that tries to encourage you to do otherwise. It isn’t always easy, but if we all do it, it will probably become more so. Never give a leader guru status, never give your power away to a teacher, or a public figure. Own what you do. It is when we mistakenly imagine that someone else is a ‘better’ pagan than we are, that we get into these things. Only you can walk your path. Only I can walk mine.