Nimue Brown's Blog, page 426

Creative partnerships

In many ways, working with someone creatively has a lot of parallels with romantic liaisons… first there’s that initial attraction, after which you find out if the other person feels the same way about you. Then, if they like you too, maybe you get it together, and maybe it’s amazing, or a disappointment. If there is a first flush of mutual enjoyment, can you make it last? In creative partnerships there are flings and one night stands, fleeting, wild affairs that have whirlwind effects and then run out of energy, and long term marriages. Perhaps the biggest difference is that no one seems to take issue with plurality. There’s less jealousy in creative connections and fewer people will judge you for having more than one creative partner. No one finds bands alarming, so far as I know. There are also fewer formal laws about who can work with whom and in what circumstances. Creativity is not regulated in the same way as love. Creative people get contracts they can walk away from by mutual agreement.

I’m in a long term and deeply involved marriage with Tom, both in the romantic sense and the creative sense. The two are wholly intertwined for us anyway. We do have creative relationships with other people, though. Tom’s been exploring projects with Jonathan Green, Cavan Scott, Tom Sneigoski, John O’Marra, Professor Elemental, and has all kinds of short term things going with people he does book covers for. I’ve not had quite so much going on lately. In some ways, authoring lends itself to the more solitary life. I used to do a lot of music, and for me that was all about the glorious dynamics of creative collaboration. Music is always better shared, I think, writing is not quite so innately sociable.

There’s a lot of intimacy in joint writing. Not least, something novel length represents a lot of time invested in the other person. There’s a lot of willingness to flex required, to explore and get out of the comfort zone a bit. I’ve not had that many writing partners along the way. I’ve started a few things with people, but the process has tended to follow the whirlwind romance shape, in that it is all very lively at the outset, but it lacks something and is not sustainable.

I got online this morning to the deeply affecting discover that, not only is Professor Elemental out there encouraging people to check out Intelligent Designing for Amateurs, but he is describing me as his writing partner. It’s not something I’ve talked about a great deal, but, we’ve been working together on some things for nearly eighteen months now, and as plans for future projects develop, it seems fair to say that yes, this is a dedicated, long term writing partnership. It’s a very good feeling. Tom pointed out to me that this is more of a threesome thing, as he is very much involved on the art making side of said projects. Heh.

So, we’re out, it’s official. At some point I’ll be in a position to talk more about what we’ve done, and are doing, and that’s going to be very exciting too. I’m also exploring some other things, tentatively, with several other people. Creativity can be a promiscuous sort of process, but that’s definitely part of the fun.

And if you aren’t familiar with the dear Professor, he’s here – http://www.professorelemental.com/

Making a home

We’re in the process of transitioning off the boat. It’s an opportunity to reflect on what is needed, what it is that we want from a home, what’s viable, and how best to walk our talk. We’ve lived without a lot of the ‘normal’ things for several years now. Do we need to go back to conventional living arrangements? It doesn’t feel like good Druidry.

The boat has a solar panel and wind turbine, so most of our electricity is fairly green. I can’t see any way of replicating that in the foreseeable future. However, there are all kinds of dinky bits of technology out there… more efficient, smaller, lower impact. Realising that with this move we have the luxury of time, has opened a few doors.

Other things are going to be odd though. I’ve lived with fires almost all my life, and it looks like there will be no hearth in the next home. For me, a home without a hearth is going to be weird. I can’t say I enjoyed that last time I did it, but that’s part of the trade-off.

In preparation for moving, we’re once again getting rid of stuff, taking the opportunity to offload things that aren’t needed, aren’t used, things we grew out of, or were hanging on to just for nostalgia. That’s a good process. It’s one of the things I find I like about moving home – the chance to reassess every owned object and make some decisions. Last time we did that we gave up furniture and kept books and musical instruments. This time, the absolute priority was finding somewhere we could all live together. ‘All’ in our case includes Mr Cat. Finding a place where he would be happy and welcome informed a lot of our choices.

We’ve enjoyed some aspects of being really rural with the boat, but work would be a lot easier with more ready access to infrastructure. We will no doubt be out and about more, and I suspect I’ll be doing more in-person teaching, as well.

The right space can be really enabling. It underpins a lifestyle, permits certain choices, removes others…. The process of looking at what we need and want in that regard, too, has been really good. Soon we jump, and the next big adventure awaits us.

So, short post today because I’ve been running round in the rain a lot, finding needful things, and sorting stuff out, and ring to work out how best to mix the alternative and the normal to make something good. Much to figure out yet though.

Learning to think (again)

Becoming a Druid is in part a process of learning to think like a Druid. I’m still a work in progress on this one, I expect I always will be. There are so many assumptions drilled into us by the mainstream, other religions we may have been exposed to, our friends, families… unlearning and relearning can take a long time.

We are taught to want consumer goods and we are told that we need them. A Druid, becoming increasingly aware of the environmental destruction wrought by humans, soon has to question this. What do we really need? How much energy should we be consuming? How sustainable are we? Faced by a society that assumes you must have a car, a refrigerator and freezer, a flat screen television, mobile phone, games consul etc… simply saying ‘no’ is difficult. People fail to understand how you might not want those things. Of course you HAVE to want it, because not to want all the stuff is to challenge their reality. People who have not chosen alternative ways of being tend not to like having their comfortable certainties shaken by those who have. It can lead to conflict.

We are taught to blame and criticise. Television is full of it. Bullying is widespread. People seem to think they have a right to be offensive, hurtful, derogatory and so forth under the guise of ‘free speech’. As we learn to be more compassionate, hate language becomes more uncomfortable, as does the desire the challenge it by being hateful back. We start to see the fear that underlies bigotry, the moral cowardice implicit in all bullying behaviour. There’s no tidy answer to dealing with this.

We are taught ‘one true way’ be it science or religion. Druidry offers us a multiplicity of ways. There are many paths through the forest, many routes up the mountain, many names for deity and truth is always going to be bigger than us. Learning Druidry, we learn to give up on the self-important delusions that tell us we know it all, and start down the amazing path of beginning to appreciate the enormity of all that we do not know. Life is full of mystery. There are wonders, as soon as we can open our eyes and admit our ignorance so that we can start to see properly. This is a liberating process that will confuse the hell out of any ‘normal’ people who happen to be going past.

We are taught to be afraid. Fear of difference, of each other, of strangers, authority, anarchy, oil prices, job security… your life is loaded with messages about scarcity and how afraid you should be. Oh, and you can buy this insurance product and that object to help you feel better about these things… Resisting fear, is something I find tricky. I am also aware that fear is deliberately encouraged and fed to serve the needs of politics and big business. Resistance is essential. While we are locked down in fear of each other, we are not cooperating to make things better. We need to cooperate to overcome the genuine challenges and shatter the illusions of the manufactured ones.

We are taught that we are irrelevant, small, and powerless. We are taught to be cogs in other people’s machines, to be nice and inoffensive, passive acceptors of what is handed down to us. To become a Druid is to become your own authority, to embrace you strengths, whatever they are, and to empower others. We each have our own lives to lead. We all matter. None of us have to be cogs. Druidry is a subversive sort of business. It’s as well our processes are quiet and understated, or we might find a lot more resistance to us in the wider world.

Learning to think differently takes time. It’s so easy to fall back into the old habits. Much of your life will do its best to hang on to you and force you to stay where you were: tame, frightened, easily controlled, biddable, nice… Once you start to replace ‘nice’ with ‘compassionate’ and ‘tame’ with ‘responsible’ everything starts to change.

Bleeding Nuisance

Of course I’m breaking a bit of a taboo by even mentioning this, but yes. I’m bleeding. Last time I put up a blog post someone who claimed to be Pagan piled in to say that bleeding is private and to suggest I shouldn’t be talking about it. I’ve been told off for being honest with my son from an early age about menstruation. (The net result is a well adjusted young man with a non-squeamish and compassionate attitude to the process, so sue me!) I’ve seen graffiti scrawled onto Mooncup adverts about how gross a moon cup must be. There, on our screens ‘sanitary products’ demonstrate their ability to soak up a blue chemical. No, we must not talk about blood. Unless it’s spurting in some violent arc in a movie scene.

I shall persist in being a bleeding nuisance on this topic, and I have no qualms about offending people. Not only is bleeding natural for a lot of us, it’s essential to the on-going existence of humanity. No blood, no babies. Rejecting the blood is one of the many ways in which our culture tries to deny what is animal about us. The human animal bleeds, shits, farts and pisses. Every time we try to pretend that isn’t so, we deny that we are a part of nature. We are messy, visceral beings. Our natural bodies produce smells which we teach each other to hide with chemicals. As though smelling of fakeness, of laboratory product is more attractive than smelling of skin and sweat.

Menstruation effects women in all kinds of ways, but we are wary of talking about it. PMT, the sometimes (but not always) debilitating effects of cramps have been used against us for far too long. We are told these things make us unstable, unreliable, unsuitable for that working world of men and power and importance. We lie. We hide it. We deny one of the most basic aspects of our femininity in our (theoretically) breeding years so that no one will treat us as inferior. Frankly, that sucks. I bleed. Frequently I hurt, often it makes me cry. It does another thing, too. It makes me honest. Most of the month I might be able to tolerate the bullshit, the stupid, the useless and put a brave face on. Bleeding makes me intolerant of all that stuff. It’s not a crazy time, and in my past it was often the one fleeting bit of sanity when I could be honest with myself about what was wrong. Somehow, the hormones give me permission to cry and generally I find that hard.

How much easier would life be if the blood wasn’t embarrassing or shameful? How much difference would it make if acknowledging the cycle did not run the risk of inviting neo-Victorian attitudes? What would it be like to live in a culture where being female was not something you had to hide and apologise for on a monthly basis? But no, we have to put on a brave face and keep going as normal. I honestly think that if men had something comparable going on as well, the collective attitude would be totally different. Instead, bleeding is ‘unclean’, it needs sanitising with sanitary products. We aren’t supposed to talk about it, because it’s ‘gross’ we’re just supposed to pretend it isn’t happening and carry on as normal.

I’ve encountered men, (plural) for whom vaginal sex during menstruation is distasteful, and others who find partners aren’t interested when bleeding, but who expect to get laid anyway, and think rear entry should be on offer to tide them over. That this whole attitude casts the female body as so much orifice for gratification, doesn’t seem to matter to them. And here’s a thing, think about it. Blood is distasteful, but bottoms…. Hmm. What interesting double standards we have as a species! I’m very glad to say I don’t have that kind of stupid in my life any more, beyond the occasional, infuriating anecdote.

Bleeding. Proud to bleed. Grateful to be able to bleed, to be fertile, and female and alive. Unashamedly a bleeding nuisance.

Deconstructing fairy tales

This is Judith O’Grady’s second blog post, pondering what lies beneath the surface of certain well known fairy stories… (the first one is here)

Goldilocks construed as Cruel Lady of the Manor versus the Irish Peasant Bears got me thinking. How does this work with other classic children’s stories?

In Ancient Ireland the legal system was Brehon Law, different from the Norman Law that replaced it. Simply put Brehon Law is a top-down system– rulers are responsible for the well-being of the people under them and can be deposed by those people if they are dissatisfied. In Norman Law rulers inherit by birth and birth order and the people under them owe them fealty– responsibilities and goods.

A mark of wealth was having a horse (requiring a special diet and housing) and the indication of status was cows (land was measured as ‘grass for __ cows’). Poor people had donkeys (satisfied with whatever grew on the road verge) and pigs (living on leftovers and what they could root up in the woods). So the common man could be typified as a pig, living in a round wattle-and-daub house made of basket-weave sticks plastered with a mud-and-straw mixture and topped with thatch.

Back then wolves were not endangered and were not anthropomorphized as caring parents, skilled team players, and brave warriors but as dangerous predators of precious domestic animals and killers of flocks. Sort of a Bogey-Wolf; the epitomization of hard times.

The Bogey-Wolf might come to the door of your house of straw as sickness, loss of crop or animals, or trouble in your extended family. You would try to defy him, but if he huffed and puffed your house (none too strong to start) would disintegrate. You would go to your neighbour and he would let your family into his house of sticks. But if the Bogey- Wolf was plague, famine, or reavers he would be in the same case as yourself and his house would be huffed apart as well. In the classic story the pig with foresight has taken the trouble to build a house of stone and (chastising you both for shortsightedness) he grudgingly allows you into his sturdy house as poor relations.

Using the Irish Brehon Law template, however, the chief (who lives in the stone house) has a responsibility towards the rest of the tribe. He brings all his people in, puts your flocks in the courtyard, and shares the stored crops around. In the terms of the story, his roof (made of slate) cannot be jumped through like thatch, his walls are secure, and he lights a big fire to make up a pot of surplus-food soup and burns up the Bogey-Wolf when he tries to creep down the chimney. Suddenly the story is about sharing rather than planning for the future.

Judith Grady is the author of God Speaking, which you can find here… http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-God-Speaking-Judith-OGrady/dp/1780992815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369479738&sr=8-1&keywords=God+Speaking+Judith+O%27Grady

Reincarnation stories

I’m currently reading David Lacey’s ‘The Karma of Everyday Life’ and I suspect I’ll be back to ponder karma another day. Usually karma turns up in belief systems that also include reincarnation, although it could be applied as a one lifetime process. I don’t have any strong opinions about what happens after we die, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m entirely at ease with my own uncertainty. There are things that make me wonder though.

I have some very early memories from this lifetime. One of the things that strikes me about those recollections from the time when I was really small, is just how big my vocabulary was. I have a better memory for words than images at the best of times so am reasonably confident I’ve not added this later on. Being small enough to play under the coffee table and hearing the word ‘obsessed’ is one such example. I was talking early.

My family were not, I think, any weirder, more funny about nudity or more keen on covering up than any other typically repressed English household in the second half of the twentieth century. Me, on the other hand… I couldn’t bear nudity. I remember having a rash that might have been measles, and arguing with my parents that I did not want to have to show the Doctor my bottom. Ok the rash was worse there, but I had rash other places. I was made to do it though, and the burning shame and humiliation made for a powerful memory. My experience of other small children is that you tend to have more trouble getting them to not show you their bums, their underwear, etc.

I couldn’t stand it if adult males were topless around me. That filled me with feelings of fear and loathing (now, thankfully overcome!) It went further though. I loved cuddly toys, but they had to have pants too. Really. So obsessed was I with this issue, that I figured out a knitting pattern all by myself and I knitted pants for bears. Many bears. If someone had told me that you could cover up the scandalous, exposed legs of tables, I’d have been right there.

I arrived in this world with middle class Victorian sensibilities about nudity and clothing. I have no rational explanation for this. I didn’t like wearing trousers at all as a little girl, that felt almost immoral. I’ve since got over that one, too.

On the plus side, it gives me something to tap into for the period literature. I don’t have to imagine what it would feel like for it to be shocking if a man saw your ankles. I know that feeling. That sense of other people’s bodies as somehow alarming and wrong… I recall my father pointing out to me that, underneath the clothes, everyone is naked, and how sick that made me feel. A Victorian gentlewoman does not like to have such things pointed out to her, and there was one such creature living inside my childhood head. I remember the horror that came with understanding how reproduction works in the natural world, and realising that we humans might not be wholly different. That wasn’t a happy discovery for me. (Again, I got over it). I don’t struggle to imagine what an uninformed Victorian virgin might have gone through in face of the realities of marriage…

Paganism has been a great antidote to this, learning to be ok in my skin and with nature as it manifests in the human form. I started life in a very odd place, a hundred years out of date and desperately confused by everything around me. Reincarnation? I don’t know. And that’s without getting started on the fear of fire, and the meltdown I went into watching The Name of the Rose for the first time. I’m not squeamish, but show me a stake and I cease to function.

Pagan Titles

As regular readers will know, I’m not that keen on authority or power structures. Titles that are all about seeming important make me edgy. However, not all titles are simply self-given manifestations of self-importance. They also function, at least in theory, as meaningful labels that allow people to better understand what we do. “Celebrant” announces a willingness to take bookings for rites of passage. If you’re calling yourself a wise elder, you’d better have a grey hair or two to back that up with, and so forth.

A label can be a statement of intent. There’s a fab blog post on this very subject here –

Quite often what happens though is not that we wake up one morning and glue a shiny title to ourselves, but that it comes in from outside. You get labelled as a teacher the moment someone asks that you teach them and you don’t run away. You become a ritual leader the first time you step into a circle to run it, and a grove mother, or father, at the point of there being a grove. Sometimes that’s chosen, sometimes it happens.

There’s an interesting thing about naming. On the landscape history side, the names given by outsiders are considered more useful than those given by locals, in the past. If you live round here (wherever here is) there’s The pub, The church, The fields. If you live somewhere else, and look at it from the outside, there’s that really good pub, the particularly badly built church, the very muddy field. Old names, given by outsiders, often say more about a place than what the inhabitants called it. Let’s not ask what happened to Chipping Sodbury. (Although Chipping means market and bury implies Saxon fortification, so I’ve just foiled my own gag. Never mind, we move on…)

The names people give us may be better indicators of us, than the titles we would choose for ourselves. I find it hugely reassuring that other people are willing to call me ‘Druid’ and ‘author’. Mind you, I’ve also recently been called a filthy urchin, which is not wholly lacking in appropriateness. The titles we give people can be reflections of respect, or derision. One only has to look at politics to see the difference between the titles they give themselves, and the titles others bestow upon them. Can I mention swivel eyed loons now?

The legacy of fear

I’ve got to the stage with the anxiety that I don’t live there all the time. In terms of quality of life, that’s huge. It’s mostly due to knowing that my bloke can stay in the country, and knowing that I can keep my child – having both of those in doubt for a number of years was making me very ill. It means that on a calm, unstressy day I am now a passably function human being. I forget, all too easily, how many panic buttons there are and how easily they are pressed, so if I do ok for a couple of weeks I’m badly thrown by the panic when it comes. Of course life is not stress free.

There are some kinds of stress that I can handle, and I’m building a picture of what it is that tears my body up and makes me not just emotionally messy, but physically ill. That which I have no control over is a significant issue. If I have scope to act in a way that can fix, offset or avoid, then even really stress things are bearable. Things where it’s out of my hands – as it felt like with Tom’s application to stay, are really hard.

But why? In part because I assume the world is hostile towards me. I assume that the more I want something, the higher the risk that I am going to be punished simply for daring to want. I get very anxious around things I need that are awkward and inconvenient. I am afraid of answers roughly shaped ’you cannot get there from here.’ My logical mind knows that mostly, there are ways, and that ‘you can’t get there from here’ does not exist in many sane and functional systems. It probably doesn’t help that not all systems are as sane and functional as I would like them to be. What underpins it is too long in contact with people who were not reasonable, or fair, or I sometimes think, terribly sane. It’s been an odd sort of life…

And there it is, the thing I want, and the challenge to overcome before getting it (yet another evil and terrifying form, of course, and bureaucracy always makes me a tad queasy.) I want this enough to be terrified. Then the racing pulse, the stomach cramps, the sleeplessness. The speed at which I move from emotional response to bodily distress still surprises me. It shouldn’t, I’ve lived with it for years.

I’ve found it helps to pick apart the fear, and name it. Nameless dreads are always worse than the ones you can pin down. Where possible I give mine names like Bob and Geoff, Nigel, and Justin, because that makes them a tad more manageable. I’ve learned not to try and shut down my mind in escapist ways, but to walk into whatever the heart of the fear is, trying to face it and name it. I can’t say this helps with the getting to sleep, but it gives me tools. In the short term, emotion and body fail are far more potent and immediate than logic. However, every time I throw my rational mind at the fear, I make some small bit of headway.

“You are not a nameless dread, you’re a snorting application form.”

“Snort,” said the application form.

A lot of people live with fear. Being open about it has brought me a lot of heart breaking stories from fellow travellers (feel free to keep them coming, because it helps to acknowledge this stuff). Fear is easy to hide. It doesn’t show up in bright purple blotches across your face. No one else can hear that your heart is racing, or feel your gut tying itself into dysfunctional knots. It’s hard to explain. People who are not afraid look at the apparently small thing that is crushing you to death and see how small it looks to them and think you are being melodramatic. It’s just because they do not realise that to you this thing has manifested as an elephant, or a landslide of mud and that it really is squashing the life out of you.

To those of you who do not understand, be grateful. It is a precious gift in life to live without terror.

The Auroch Grove

I wasn’t particularly contemplating names, when this one popped out at me. It seems to fit. I admit to having a thing about that which is absent – my previous group was Bards of the Lost Forest, a reference to the departed Forest of Arden mentioned in Shakespeare. Aurochs have long appealed to me – giant hairy cows that became extinct in the 1600s when the last one died in Poland. I feel their absence keenly. Aurochs would have made groves, their feeding and trampling clearing areas inside forests. This is important work, it’s the margins of woodland that support the most diversity of life, so the physical groves made by aurochs would have been ecologically important. When you lose a creature, you lose what it does as well. There’s a species of tree that depended on the dodo for germination. Eventually the last of those trees will disappear too.

Thus far I’ve not done much towards starting the Grove. However, with the name in place I’ve set up a google group which hopefully you can find here https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/auroch-grove this is just for ease of communication. The only requirement for joining the Grove is that you join the egroup so that I don’t have to run round doing different things to contact different people and getting confused. Not in anyone’s interests, that. I’m very happy to have people along who have kids, and anyone else who is comfortable with there being children about – I have one too, and he’s very good at this sort of thing. People studying courses are entirely welcome, so are people not studying courses. If you’re an old hand at this and just want a group to belong to, do come along, and equally if you know very little but are interested, that’s fine.

I am not asking for commitment to turn up. I’m going to aim for monthly gatherings, maybe more if I feel like it, or someone else does… come as often or as infrequently as you are able/inclined. If you ask me to come out and don’t show up, then I’ll be grumpy.

I know it’s going to be a creative and experimental sort of group. I know that where possible, we’ll be outside, but I’m lining up places to retreat to in cases of weather. I’m interested in connecting with the land, environmental action, bardic arts, and picnics. Also cake in pretty much any and all circumstances. I also won’t be running rituals around the 8 usual points in the wheel of the year – other groups are doing that already, so I’d rather not tread on toes, and prefer to explore different narrative ideas about the seasons. The rest we can probably make up as we go along.

I don’t know when exactly we’ll be starting in terms of real world meet ups – hopefully this summer, but that kind of information will be on the egroup.

Sacred Body Part 6: Choice and Connection

by Theo Wildcroft

“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world…” Mary Oliver

The making of a life consists of being broken open, of being stretched beyond your capacities again, and again, and again. Every time you stretch a muscle, you are tearing the muscle filaments apart. We break, and breathe, and adapt and heal. My students and clients come to me saying that there’s something wrong, because they have lower back pain that won’t be soothed, or they can’t go a week without their nervous system experiencing a panic attack, or just that they can’t put their socks on as easily as they used to.

They connect with me one on one in dedicated therapy sessions, or snatched conversations after class. They’re often confused about what they’ve done ‘wrong’ to their body sometimes they’re angry or ashamed at being ‘broken’. Especially when what’s broken can’t be fixed by a pill or a treatment or an operation. I had a client once tell me: “You know, it’s just I wake up every morning and say – ‘I’ve still got Parkinson’s then.’”

My students know that I can’t fix them and I don’t pretend that I can. I just help them manage their human condition, and reassure them that they’re not alone. This is my service, my druidry if I can call it that. Their bodies are communicating, and I do what I can to find a space, physical and psychological, in which these unheard fragments of the body, heart and mind can start to hear each other again – in which they can start to feel whole, and strong and rested.

But the pain of the process isn’t wrong, it’s inevitable. Only by choosing to deal with it can suffering can be negotiated with. It takes a lot of courage to face that and not to run from the world. And yet human beings are quietly doing the same all around you.

I know their journey because I’m only two steps ahead of them. Two decades ago now, I decided that I would live, rather than just survive until a better option came along. It seemed to me a hypocrisy to profess a reverence for nature whilst rejecting my own. In each day since, I have found a new way to break the shell of my thinking, feeling self open to the world. Every day I have to make that choice again;

every day a different ‘yes’ to life, to nature and to my body.

It’s not for everyone. Every so often I get a friend or relation asking me for a quick fix. They want me to give them something simple and easy to repair back pain resulting from 15 years or more of misaligned shoulders and atrophied hip flexors. I’ve learnt to read the signs as their eyes glaze over. And whilst I’m trying to explain the evolutionary fallout from walking on two legs they’re wondering if the consultant they’ve just seen has a new, clever operation in mind.

They just know that 30 minutes of practice a day whilst really listening to their body isn’t going to make as much difference as a scalpel. In a way they’re right – I can’t and won’t compete on those terms. But they can’t understand why I won’t just give them a few quick poses to do for a couple of weeks whilst they watch the TV at the same time. They don’t want all the yoga stuff. They just want to get fixed. That’s their choice too.

But there are always surprises. Last year at the Rainbow Futures Druid Camp, where I have led morning yoga sessions for the past 7 summers, after a few years of mutual teasing, and against all his better judgements I’m sure, an old friend came to a yoga session with me, and then another, and then another. I managed not to break him too badly, which was encouraging to us both. He’s a trustee for the Druid Network, and so when he asked for submissions for a talk at their conference, I chose to return that courage, that small act of faith.

CONNECTION

“Here are my hands

that are also my heart, my mind,

my life -

all that remains…” Thich Nhat Hanh

For some of you, I know I have been preaching to the converted. For others, I come to a confession: my aim is to seduce you: back into your bodies, and back into the natural world we all hope to honour as pagans. I do so with words and pictures and video links, over this narrow bandwidth that is our online world, but I’m appealing not just to your reading mind but to your whole being. What I really want is for you to feel, not understand.

To reach you I spent hours and days in typing, editing and refining. Knowing that what I really want with you is time, and practice and a wide open sky. With each word written I became more and more aware of the sunlight or rain on the windows the ache in my right shoulder and the twitch in my calves to put the laptop down and go for a run instead. I did it once, for the conference talk, and again, for these blog posts.

But I was told that to teach you must go to where the student is at. Then, if they take one step towards you you take another two towards them. So here I am, if you can imagine me, in heart, hands and voice – one physical being to another, to call you home. As they say – come on in the water’s lovely.

I hope your shoes are still off because right now I want you to feel both the earth moving beneath you and the movement of your own body against it, in a way that recognises that simple, sacred connection, not just from the skin out, but all the way through.

I want you to take this step every day if you can. I want you to do it in a thousand different ways: stretching and holding and balancing and twisting and folding and opening. I don’t care if you call it yoga or Stav or Five Rhythms or just a really long walk.

So I’m not going to ask you to stand again, but I am going to invite you to root your feet as well as you are able to upon the earth here today. Consider your hands, and remember the intimate connection that they have to your heart, to your ancestry and your history. Take a few moments to do this, if you would. Close your eyes, or just turn your gaze inwards for a few seconds.

And as soon as it’s next possible, I invite you to gently reach out and find another hand to connect with. If you’re feeling a little shy and reserved, just do this once. If you’re feeling more expansive, feel free to hold hands with as many people as you can today.

At the heart of so many of our rituals, is this simple act. We stand together, heart to heart and hand to hand. It’s so simple, so powerful. And if you can really feel it, from the skin in as well as the skin out, it can be enough for us to begin to heal that connection between our soul and the soul of the world.

For me, the body, our bodies, are sacred. Faith, community, druidry, and life itself is about relationship and experience. We are at our most sacred where our edges meet the world, and all the human and other than human people in it. We are in the end, what we are able and willing to experience. So I thank you for your willingness to reach out and touch this experience with me.

FInd out more about Theo and her work here: http://www.wildyoga.co.uk