Nimue Brown's Blog, page 416

Restoring Peace

This is what I’ve got at the moment. It’s a work in progress, if you can see things to add or fine tune, please do pile in to the comments section.

1) Recognise the problem. A peace that is based on pretending all is well, is an illusion and not worth having. Name it, admit it, call it what it is. If this makes you feel hurt and angry, then let that wash over you. If possible, try not to go and vent that at someone, even if you think it was their fault. (No, my track record is not great on that score.)

2) Work out how the problem came to be. Try not to take assumptions into this process. Look for clear, verifiable evidence. When things go wrong, there is usually a process, and it is seldom all one person’s fault. Look hard at your own behaviour and thinking, if you could have done better, own it. This will help a lot with stage three…

3) Sort out the things you have got wrong. There is no point going and getting angry with people who you feel have harmed you or caused trouble. If they did not mean it, they will be needlessly hurt, if they did, they won’t give a shit, or will use it as an opportunity to hurt you again.

4) If you say ‘I got this bit wrong’ it is easier for other people to admit their mistakes, too. If you are dealing with someone who cares about you at all, or is passably sane, starting by owning the bits you got wrong (even if it’s not having been clear enough why you were upset) opens a dialogue without being too aggressive. It is possible to move forward from here.

5) Accept that other people make mistakes. If they made those mistakes honestly, not out of malice, they will want to put things right and you can progress. If they meant to hurt you, there is nothing you can do but walk away. Genuine care and love can overcome human error. Genuinely psychotic inclinations cannot be fixed. You find out who people are when you go through this process.

Of course it would have been so much cleverer if I’d sat down at the start of last week and worked this out as a logical issue, rather than finding it through a messy process of getting things wrong, losing my temper more than once and testing several relationships to near breaking point. But this is the thing, where there is real care, even this can be worked through. People get upset, flail, lose their tempers, mess up, make poor choices, get angry for the right reasons, the wrong reasons, and all of that. We all do that to some degree. Most of the time, that can be got past, with a bit of care, a bit of willingness to drop guard, lower pride. To those of you who went through the fire with me last week, my thanks. You are much loved and valued. To those of you I need to work things through with still, please note I have a better strategy in place than I did and will probably be a lot easier to work with as a consequence. To those of you who can only do blame and anger, farewell, there is simply no time and place in my life for that.

Peace can only be restored where there is genuine good will and a true desire for peace. If you’re keeping score or want to come out winning, peace is impossible, and I’m not going to play.

Righting old wrongs

I’ve had a very odd few days, coming to realise there are some really problematic things in my history that I need to face up to. There are two people I have definitely not treated as well as I could have done, because I was acting based on totally inaccurate information. I’m having those conversations and trying to unpick what I can.

However, what this leaves me with is a great deal of doubt about a whole bunch of other experiences, relationships and interactions. I do not know what I might have handled really badly because I was working on the basis of things that were not true. I very much want to find out, so that I can put things straight where possible, sort out what I can, or at least get to explain and apologise. It is hard, and demoralising when someone treats you in a way that makes no sense, that can include people seeming defensive when you haven’t attacked them, people treating you as suspicious when you have done nothing wrong, or as with a recent blog post, people treating you like a drama queen when you just plain aren’t that thing.

This is a shout out to those of you who have known me in the context of a group setting anywhere in the last ten years. If, along the way, I did something that caused you a problem, or failed to pick up something you thought was important, please, please talk to me. If I failed to make sense to you, or did something odd that didn’t add up based on what you knew, now would be a really good time to drop me a line and have a conversation. If you aren’t directly in contact, just leave a comment saying you want to talk and I’ll pull your email address from that, and write to you.

If this is ringing bells for you in some wider context, or making you wonder about some mutual friend of ours, or anything like that, pile in. I’d rather wade through dozens of things that turn out to be of no great import than find something big and important got away, and someone who was hurt went unnoticed.

I have messed up, and I know this for a fact. What I do not know right now is exactly how badly and exactly where or when, or how much. And if this brings other messes to the fore that I wasn’t even aware of, bring those too, anything out there with my name on needs sorting. Thank you in advance, for any help or insight anyone is willing to offer as I try to wade through this, and forgive the slightly cryptic-ness, but there’s a lot here I don’t want to do in public right now, for everyone’s sake.

Death in high places

Yesterday when I was out on low ground, I realised I could see my local hilltop barrow. There were at least four round here, down the edge of the Cotswolds. Most are hidden a bit by trees, but I’ve been told that, when the barrows were first here, the hilltops were bare. I’m going to be exploring to see just how far away I can spot my local barrow from, but my guess is, a fair distance.

Back in the day, they would not have been grassed over, but exposed Cotswold stone. The light would have caught them, especially at dawn and dusk, and they would have stood out. My guess is that the ancestors who lived on the Severn plain would have been able to see these barrows every day. The dead, high on the hills in their shining tombs, would have been present.

Thinking about death affects how we think about life. There is some solid research out there around this one, it’s not just a philosophical statement. You can hunt it out if you are fussy. People who are aware of death tend to shift their priorities, usually away from materialism, money and status and towards that which actually makes them happy. There’s nothing like a keen sense of mortality to sharpen your perspective.

We went through this with the boy a couple of weeks ago. There was nothing particular to trigger it, just a sudden realisation that everything passes, he would die one day. What threw him most was facing up to accepting that his beloved cat would not live forever, either. Of course he’s known about the idea of death most of his life, but there’s a big difference between knowing the theory and grasping the implications. There was an immediate and very dramatic consequence: He has almost entirely stopped playing computer games.

While we were on the boat, with limited electricity, computer games could not feature much, but this summer has made all normal things more available, and there was a bit of a splurge. Then he stepped away. Realisation of his own death made him decide that computer games simply were not a good use of his time. We talked about this, and he said as much. He’s retuned to reading and being sociable, which is lovely, and I’ve not had to attempt to reason with him.

The dead speak to us, if we give ourselves chance to listen. They say ‘you too are coming our way, and so is everything else’. They promise absolute uncertainty. We might like to believe that our beliefs about what happens after death can be trusted, but I think we all also know that until we get there, all we really have is a best guess. Death brings every aspect of life into question. The dead remind us, any time we let them, that there is much to be said for getting on with living. Live well, passionately, drink deeply from the cup because you do not know how many days remain to you.

Looking at the prominent barrows, and how they would have been visible in the past, I think our ancestors were on to something. We, on the other hand, have grown far too used to death as a throwaway element in visual drama, the actor bound to be rapidly reincarnated to some new life before our very eyes. We might see a phenomenal amount of fictional death, but it serves mostly to take us away from real death. In our heads, we are never the bit part who bleeds to death in the background, we are the bullet dodging hero bound to survive to the closing credits. It is bullshit.

In living with our mortality, we are more likely to do a good job of the whole being alive side of the process. Those who are in denial about it, may not get round to living very much at all before the opportunity to stop living entirely catches up with them.

The irrational ones

Don’t worry about her; she’s irrational. A bit melodramatic. She tends to over-react, bless her, so you’ve got to take everything she says with a pinch of salt. Over blown. Over emotional. Unstable.

Then, when you find her crying, you won’t take her seriously. If she gets angry, you won’t really listen because hey, she’s a bit over the top, no point adding to it. If she says she is hurt, you’ll know it’s because she’s hypersensitive.

It works the other way too: She’s an ice queen. She’s totally unemotional, cold, hard, logical and manipulative. If she cries, its only because she wants something. If she expresses emotion at all, it is just a ploy to make you do what she wants. And so again, you don’t see and you don’t hear, because you’ve already written her off.

‘Her’ in both cases, would have been me, but undoubtedly not just me. These methods for diminishing a person tend to be entirely deliberate. They serve a purpose. By invalidating a person’s emotional responses, you make it easy to treat as irrelevant anything they are unhappy about. If you want to hurt someone, this makes life a lot easier. It is so important not to buy these stories, because any time you do, the odds are very good that you’ve just enabled an abuser to carry on mistreating their victim.

Along the way I’ve met people with hair trigger responses, to tears and temper alike. I’ve met people who are touchy, moody, easily affected, and while I accept that means their responses may be sudden, unexpected and intense, this does not invalidate them. We all feel things differently. There is nothing wrong with turning out to feel more, or less than the next person does. The odds are there will always be more difference than similarity on this one.

Many abusers are able to get away with what they do precisely because they persuade so many other people to buy into their story. The victim, hearing the same thing on every side ‘you’re just over reacting, it’s no big deal’ learns they cannot trust their own judgement. You stop thinking you can tell, you doubt your own decision-making capacity, and maybe start to feel like you are going mad. You lie there, bruised and sobbing, telling yourself to pull yourself together and stop making such a fuss. It wasn’t that big an insult… just a shove, not really a punch…it was just words… maybe they didn’t mean it that way. And all the time, the abuser sharpens their knives and keeps laughing.

Be careful with other people’s stories, especially stories that invalidate someone’s feelings. They are often not quite what they seem to be.

Pagan Elders

Paganism itself is old enough to have elders who have been doing their thing for decades, and ancestors of tradition who have passed beyond this life. Elders are a vital part of any community, providing much of the stability and continuity.

Keepers of knowledge, aware of how the wheel was reinvented last time, able to guide, and to inspire, elders serve many roles. Technically this doesn’t have to be an age-based job. In practice, the elder in any community is the person with most experience. Still, it’s nice when that person has some age and experience to bring to bear, but we make do with what we get.

Positions that suggest kudos, power or influence are always attractive to people who want to be important. In all communities, not just Paganism, you get the issue of people who crave attention and authority, but don’t have much to offer in return for that. It’s just an occupational hazard of being human, I think. Often we try to step up to roles because here is a gap to fill, woefully under-qualified for what we feel called upon to do. I’ve been there, and I have every sympathy for anyone who tries to shoulder a job they are not ready for. There’s a lot of difference between trying to do what needs to be done, and wanting a title.

The most important thing, for me, when I consider the elders I particularly look up to, is that they walk their talk. What they do when they aren’t up on the podium or writing a book, is consistent with what they preach. I think it’s the easiest way to spot who is for real, and who just wants your money. The elders who inspire me, walk their talk, live their work, embody their values and make a lot of sense. They too are capable of error and shortcoming, because they are people, but being wise elders they also know how to handle that kind of thing with grace and good sense. I’m very much of the opinion that you really get the measure of a person when you see what they do after they’ve botched something. That’s a true test of character.

I don’t have to agree with everything a person says in order to respect and admire them. I do not have to want to be exactly like them. What I need to see is the integrity in them. Obviously there are matters of personal taste around how I respond to their precise vision, but that’s a somewhat separate issue. I do care greatly about inspiration, and I will follow that, but I won’t follow it for long if a person has no substance, sincerity or integrity with which to back up their fine ideas. I simply don’t trust that which is not tested by being lived.

There are two people in particular I’ve had in mind as I’ve written this, whose years of experience, knowledge, work and personal integrity combine with powerful visions and insights to create something truly remarkable: Ronald Hutton, and Philip Carr Gomm. I have colossal respect for these two gentlemen, and in terms of Druid inspiration, these are the two I most look to. There are others whose work I admire, but where I’ve had less opportunity to explore that relationship between work and character as much. I have deep respect for the work of Graeme Talboys, and Glennie Kindred. There are many other Druids whose work I like and admire, and who seem to me to be embodying their ideas in compelling ways, but, a lot of these dear folk are under fifty, and therefore seem far too young to be considered in these terms just yet.

Author seeks dirt

The trouble with writing is that it is often a lonely and abstract sort of process. It takes a person out of the world. While I have known authors who apparently spend all their time at the computer or writing desk, hammering out words, how or why anyone does this is a mystery to me. I can’t sustain that kind of approach, I fall all too rapidly into block and depression. I also have no desire to try it, any more, and not just because of what it does to me.

What are we going to write about today? No matter how rich your imagination is, if you do not feed it, then eventually you will run out of raw material to weave new ideas from. This can result in either writing things that are a lot like things you wrote already, or stopping. Does the world need you to do another book that is pretty much a re-hash of what was in the last three? Not really, although if you can sell it, there’s a real temptation. Authors like to be able to afford to eat, too.

It’s not just authors who need to consider this issue though. Many modern jobs are abstract, sitting in offices moving information around rather than doing anything tangible. Not all jobs confer much social contract, and the more rushed you are at work, the more alienated you can start to feel.

What we all need, in those circumstances, is a bit of dirt. There are many ways to seek it, but something real, earthy and tangible to ground us, and reconnect us to the rest of life, and to each other, is a wonderful thing. Simply getting outside can be a good answer to this one. Any art or craft that needs your hands, is productive. Anything that engages the body, or puts you in touch with other people.

Most of my housework happens when I am between ideas, or trying to loosen my brain up a bit. I like to cook, because the practicality of making meals for my family, using raw ingredients, really answers those needs to make something solid, useful and immediate. Books can be solid, but they are never immediate, there’s such a big gap between doing the work and getting the finished item that it all feels a bit unreal.

One of my other joys, is preserving – jams and chutneys, and another is brewing. I love getting out and foraging in hedgerows for raw materials to work with. I love turning those raw things into something that can fill a jar or a bottle. Later, I get to enjoy the consequences. Today I have not written much, but I’ve made a lot of chutney from foraged apples and set up some wine. I feel earthed. I got scratched and grubby, I did real things. There are times when I turn to needlecrafts for much the same effect. There’s nothing like getting to the end of a process and having a thing that you made, sat there.

Some people advise that if you want to write, you should try and write something every day. There is something to be said for expecting to make an effort. If you want to write well, and deeply, and in a sustainable way, it is not enough to write every day. You need to also get out there and live.

Being challenged

On the whole, I like a good challenge. Those things that fall on me, requiring that I do something I had not previously imagined, stretching myself to find new shapes and capabilities. Those challenges are really exciting. Sometimes they also scare me, but that’s fine, I’ll take it.

The new job, by way of an example, has been full of challenges. I started working as a press officer in the midst of badger culling, fracking and the danger of war in Syria. Starting a week earlier than I was supposed to, because the work needed doing, not as prepared as I wanted to be, not having enough time… still, there were things that needed doing and I stepped up as best I could. I shuffled forward, and I tried.

More than a decade ago, I took on running a folk club because no one else would, and I learned on the job. I took the challenge of going to America to meet Tom in person – that one worked out very well for me. Before that, I took on his challenge and tried to learn how to write for comics. I’m willing to step out of my comfort zone, more often than not. Willing to strive, and to fall flat on my face while reaching for something.

Those are the easy challenges, because the emotional side of them is so simple. In the work, the good causes, the extra efforts required, I tend to have some idea what I am doing, and what I need to become in order to respond. What floors me, repeatedly, are the challenges where I cannot work out what I am being asked to do, where I am emotionally tangled and have no sense of what a right response would even look like.

The Green Knight enters Arthur’s court and calls out his challenge: “There is something you must do, something scary and taboo, which I’m not going to spell out because you have to guess, and then another thing is going to happen as a consequence, but we won’t be talking about that until later.”

This is not what the knights are expecting, so they sit there, looking puzzled, which is a reasonable sort of response. And because I am very precisely that sort of idiot, I stand up, and walk forward. Do I kiss him? Do I kill him? Do I howl like a wolf? What does he want from me, this Green Knight who declines to say? If I knew I had to behead him and go back next winter to receive a like blow, it would be easy. I know how to do that. I’ve read the story, I know how it goes. I do something, a little dance. It was not the right answer. The Green Knight cuts off my head, and suggests that, once I’ve figured out how to attach it, I can go back and try some other thing and we’ll see if he likes that any better.

I’ve been having this conversation for years, and all manner of people have shouldered the strange responsibility for performing the role of Green Knight. I wonder if the right answer is to sit down, keep still, and say nothing. (Other knights do this, what do they know that I do not?) I wonder if one of these days, in one of his incarnations he will get round to mentioning what it is that he wants. Or maybe the answer is to not let him into Arthur’s hall in the first place. I do not know. I’m getting pretty adept at putting my head back on, though.

(I blame Clive Barker, and those many books that taught me not to simply destroy that which is monstrous or frightening, nor to turn away from it, but to find some other response. This is why I stand up when the Green Knight comes a calling, because I believe, despite all evidence to the contrary that there is another way.)

Trust

There is a form of trusting that puts faith in the imagined perfection of another human, and then gets crushed by the inevitable reality. We are all flawed, we mess up, misjudge, and misunderstand even when we’re doing our best to get it right. For trust to be meaningful, it cannot be based on any anticipation of perfection.

I found myself thinking this morning about the handful of people I trust most. You’re an interesting set, let me tell you. All of you are damaged and troubled people, to some degree or another. All of you are a bit wild and unpredictable. I don’t trust you to turn up and do specific things, to remember, or even reliably to be gentle with me. Some of you are pretty challenging when the mood is upon you. You people who I love and trust the most, are a difficult bunch. So, what am I trusting? Nothing in there suggests what trust is normally considered to be about. It’s not about your reliability or predictability, that’s for sure.

Although in fairness, some of you are reliable about some things.

You are the people I can and do go to when I am in trouble. You are the tiny number of people I can cry in front of and feel safe, and feel no shame. I can let you see me when my body doesn’t work properly, when my mind is flaky, when my heart is breaking and all I can do is whimper.

What I trust, is that you have accepted me, flawed and messy as I am. You know what I’m like and you’re ok with that, and it doesn’t matter what facet of myself I put in front of you, you’ll know what to do with that. Probably because things in your chaos resonate with mine. I trust you because you are passably able, or in some cases remarkably able, to accept your own nature, whatever that is, and in accepting who you are, you have room to accept me.

Then there is the trust that comes from knowing that if there was a crappy way of interpreting what I said, and a well-meaning way, you’ll assume it was the second one. You won’t look at what I do when I’m ill, or tired, or in pain and assume I’m just trying to get out of something, or that I do not love you any more. Part of why I am able to trust you, is that you reflect that same kind of trust back to me. I don’t have to explain, and you’ll take me at my word. If I say I am ill, you will not worry that really I was bored and didn’t want to be honest with you. Or any of that crap.

I’m pretty good at liking and accepting people. I do it as much as I can. I try to see how the world looks from other people’s perspectives, try to take people on their own terms. I want to learn, and understand. Mostly I am not very good at trust, and that definitely isn’t because I seek impossible perfection in others. I’m coming round to thinking that a lot of it, is simply that I am tired of dealing with people who do not trust me, and this is a two sided thing.

Don’t trust me to be awake, or clever, to know or be able to do. But you can trust me to care and to try, to give it what I’ve got, and not to bullshit you.

Do not trust me with cake, though.

What is Honour?

My blog on honourable relationship brought up the issue of, what is honour anyway? The term honour, along with honourable behaviour and honourable relationship gets bandied around a fair bit, but with little definition.

Honour is personal. It cannot be pinned down into a specific set of values and behaviours. Unlike a system of laws, honour is a nuanced thing that responds to the moment, the situation, the complexities. There can be no ‘one size fits all’ approach here. We make it on our own terms. That said, there are some generalities I think we can pin down around this one.

Honour has to have integrity. What you say and what you do need to align. You need consistency. At the same time, all beliefs are evolving works in progress so there has to be permission to grow, develop and change. That calls for a balance between sticking to your beliefs, and letting them grow into something else, when necessary.

Honour is based on other things, it does not exist as a free floating, distinct and separate entity. Honour is rooted in your ethics and beliefs. It is how your ideas about what is good, right and necessary translate into actual speech, behaviour and thinking. So to be able to act honourably on your own terms, you have to have figured out what your value system is and how that works. You have to know what you believe. You can behave well in an improvised way but honour is a system, and it is deliberate, not accidental. Conscious engagement is a big part of what defines honour.

Everything we do is influenced by how we understand the world, what we think is happening, what we think it means and so forth. Our choices about what could be honourable are rooted in these understandings. Thus if our core beliefs are dysfunctional, we may have trouble acting honourably even to our own satisfaction. We also have priorities, and those shape our idea of honour. Is caring for our family more, or less important than protesting against war? There is no right answer to this, only the personal answer.

I think honour is always an attempt, an experiment and a work in progress. It’s an aspiration and an ideal as well. It isn’t a fixed and solid thing. What matters most, as I see it, is the conscious and deliberate attempt to create a set of values and then manifest them through the details of your daily life. The process of seeking to live honourably is far easier to talk about than the details because we can assume some common ground there. The process is perhaps the most important bit, too. In the questing after honourable ways of being, we learn about ourselves and the world. We make mistakes, experience confusion, find situations that lack tidy solutions, and we grow.

Pampering the Druid

What do you consider to be a luxury? What do you turn to for indulgence and a sense of abundance, to reward yourself, as a pick-me-up or a feel-good thing? Becoming a Druid is very much about re-imagining all aspects of your life, and is also an on-going process. If you want to be a Druid, there is no point at which you cease to do the work of becoming a Druid.

I’m not going to be all ‘hair shirt’ about this one. While I do believe in living lightly and trying not to consume excessively, life without anything that you consider to be a luxury can be bloody depressing. Feeling deprived of the good stuff is not conducive to good self-esteem or a sense of wellbeing. However, it is worth noting that a sense of abundance, luxury and wellbeing does not depend on specific external sources, but on how we think about them. If you’ve pegged your sense of self and your happiness to having very new, very fast and expensive cars, only that thing will do it for you. The marketing world encourages us, on a daily basis, to feel that only their product can deliver us the sense of inner peace and happiness we crave. This is of course, bullshit, but we are subject to rather a lot of it.

More often than not, the wonderproducts do not deliver for us, or have inbuilt obsolescence. Many of them are only luxuries, (in our minds) because of their newness. Once they are older and a bit tatty, those shoes, that gadget, no longer delivers and we ‘need’ another one. We fear being seen as poor, behind the times, out of date, and so we get locked into buying things we don’t really need simply because we are told on a daily basis that without them we cannot be happy or fulfilled.

One of the most reliable places to go for a sense of luxury, abundance and indulgence, is the body. There are balances to strike here because while one cream cake can seem like indulgent delight, a whole packet has implications. There are pleasures to be had in using the body (assuming yours works passably well) movement brings its own rewards. Walking, dancing, singing, working up a sweat, making love… if we have a mindset that recognises these as good things, rather than horrible and unwelcome impositions, they can be delightful. Making love, having the time and space to do that slowly, sensuously and with someone you really want to be with…. That can feel seriously luxurious.

Sleep is another. Early nights and long, languid rest periods, letting the body and mind unwind, relishing the smell of the clean sheets, the softness of the mattress… If you struggle to see how glorious a good bed is, spend some time camping, or sit on a hill all night to get a bit of useful perspective. A hot shower or long bath can feel deeply indulgent, relaxing the body and bringing sensory pleasures.

The company of friends, a few glasses of wine, a good view… feel indulged depends a lot on what you consider indulgent in the first place. That is a choice; one we are often influenced in by people who want to sell us stuff. What really makes you feel good? How can you get to that without it costing the world? The Druid path is not one of abstinence and denial; it is a path of finding your happiness in a way that does not take too much. What underpins this is a perspective. Learning to be genuinely happy, rather than reassured by participating in consumer society, is incredibly liberating.