Nimue Brown's Blog, page 427

The advantages of being talentless

There are plenty of people out there who assume that to be successful requires talent, which is innate. You either have it, or you don’t, and if you don’t, you may as well give up. This leads to a lot of people who don’t try because they don’t see any point. They aren’t gifted, they cannot succeed.

Observation of naturally gifted and talented people, and regular people, of people who have succeeded and people who have got nowhere leads me to think the opposite is true. I know far too many naturally gifted and talented people who have squandered that innate skill and never taken it forward, and plenty of people who are not innately talented, and have worked to achieve. The trouble with achievers is we tend to only notice them once they’ve got there, creating an illusion of natural talent.

The trouble with being naturally gifted, is that there’s no great pleasure in the things we get easily. Many of us humans respond better to challenges and actually put more effort into the things we don’t do well. Academically speaking I did better with sciences at school than with art and music. Straining to make any headway at all, it was the art and music I really wanted to do. I think the only thing I have an innate talent for, is learning. I know how to study, I absorb things fast and retain them, I can analyse, theorise, and so forth and that’s always been easy. Everything else has always been graft.

The trouble with talent is that you pick a thing up, and do it well and easily. Everyone praises you, especially if you’re a kid. You wing it, making little effort, and you progress, because you’re talented. One day, somewhere down the line, you hit the limits of that talent. You stop being able to progress effortlessly. You find a thing you cannot do. This can be a big issue for medical students, straight A achievers their whole lives, who in their twenties hit the first things they can’t do easily and really struggle emotionally with the experience. Finding it’s no longer easy can be soul destroying. It can wreck self-belief. And because it’s always been easy, the talented person has no idea how to work at improving, and at this point a lot of innately gifted people quit and walk away. The belief that it is inbuilt talent that matters means that when you run out of that, you think you have nowhere to go. Someone totally passionate about, and devoted to their subject will push through, work out how to learn and graft for progress, and get moving again.

The person who has more determination than talent has always worked for it, and just keeps doing that thing. They make progress. They may be tortoises to the talented hares who overtake them, but twenty years down the line, they’re still plodding away, long after a lot of the hares have given up.

In all things, I think determination is more important than raw ability. The person with determination keeps plugging away at it. The person who is naturally gifted all too often quits when the going gets tough. The magical combination of talent and drive does show up sometimes, or can be instilled in a gifted youngster so that they know not to rely on what’s easy. It’s so useful to find something you are naturally crap at, and do that thing, to learn how to progress by dint of sheer effort and nothing else. It is most certainly not the case that the person who starts out with no obvious talent is doomed always to be mediocre. Sheer determination will take you places nothing else can. If you have the passion, trust that, it does far more work than talent ever has.

Deconstructing fairy stories

I encountered Judith through her book God Speaking, which I was hugely taken with. Judith is a Canadian Pagan, writing from personal experience, and with a courage and honesty that I found captivating. God Speaking tackles head on the tensions between insanity and religion.

As Judith isn’t an internet person, and it’s really hard to sell books without an online presence, I offered her some guest blog space. These blogs have nothing at all to do with the book, but I think give a good sense of what an interesting mind she has…

Over to Judith…

As part of my self-training process I spent some years doing professional divination with a set of Ogham cards that I had developed. The design on the cards, that is, not the tree significator nor the traditional kennings although I did a little substitution for North American plants instead of a few British Isles ones that don’t grow here at all. So there I was at a show, doing readings with ‘Ancient Irish Tree Cards’ (in all the hundreds of readings I did only one person actually knew what ‘Ogham’ was) and the activities director of a local retirement home came by and asked me if I would come and do a little talk about Irishness at the home on Saint Patrick’s Day. I’m open to talking, but on the day of the presentation I drove up to the home and thought, ‘Whew!! This is a pretty upscale nursing home– I’m not sure I feel comfortable with this….’ Soldiering on (in solidarity) I was escorted into the library and given an easel (I start with a recitation of an adaption of ‘Saint Patrick’s Breastplate’:

Here in this fateful hour,

I place all Heaven with its power,

And the sun with its brightness,

And the snow with its whiteness,

And the fire with all the strength it hath,

And the lightning with its rapid wrath,

And the wind with its swiftness along its path,

And the sea with its deepness,

And the rocks with their steepness,

And the Earth with its starkness

All these I place

By the Gods’ almighty help and grace

Between myself and the powers of darkness.

(with large-sized copies of appropriate cards for each invocation.)

After that I was talking about the imagery in the various pictures and told the story of why the wren is the king of birds.

One old geezer who had clearly spent a long long lifetime of never being opposed in anything nor ever spending a moment of his time in doubt of his essential self-worth decided that now was the ideal instant for him to step up to his favourite pastime of pestering:

“This is just MAKE-BELIEVE!” he said querulously.

“These are legends, yes,” I responded, “But they explicate essential truths in a fantastical format.”

“Faugh!” he said, “Fairy tales!”

Then I lost my Socialist temper (as the sparks fly upward) and countered, “Look at the back-story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, for example: Goldilocks thinks of herself as a cut above the disadvantaged people living in a little cottage in the forest. ‘They are not like me’ she says, ‘They do not feel things the same way— they are just bears.’ So she feels quite comfortable eating their porridge, breaking their chairs, and using their beds. When the ‘bears’ come home and find her asleep, what is the essential truth, the moral of the story that is the teaching lesson here?”

The Querulous Geezer was thrown off balance by the indirection and not having me straightforwardly complain that he is causing trouble or being impolite and has no answer nor does any other of the audience…

“If you take all that they have from the poor they will rise up against you and eat you.”

And then one of the Nize Little Old Ladies changed the subject.

When I told the story at dinner that night, my son laughed and said, “So you’re not invited back for next year?”

God Speaking is out now, and you can get it here http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-God-Speaking-Judith-OGrady/dp/1780992815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368782561&sr=8-1&keywords=God+Speaking+Judith+O%27Grady and other such places.

Fire in the head

I used to improvise and wing things a lot, in rituals, and musically. There was a time when I’d happily go out with a violin and play music I didn’t know, with strangers, and mostly get away with it. It takes a certain amount of nerve. I think you could do that from a place of arrogance or self confidence, but for me what mostly enable the winging of things, was a deep belief in the awen. I’d open my heart, and the words would come, or the notes, or whatever I needed creatively in the moment. It never failed me. Mostly I just experienced the inspiration as happening to me, a force rushing through me, and I never felt much ownership of the things I did.

Life changes and a loss of nerve have meant I’ve not been out winging it as much in the last few years. Hardly at all, in fact. I draw on inspiration to write, but that’s usually a slow and private process. If it doesn’t work, no one else will ever know. Winging it in public is totally exposed and vulnerable, any shortcomings made visible. It’s one thing to go out and feel that you’re balancing on a tightrope the awen holds steady, and quite another to feel like you can’t. Depression and anxiety are not aids to the flow of inspiration. They are serious blocks, and anxiety makes it hard to just go out there and do it and trust that you can.

I had some unexpected jamming in a pub with some guys about a month ago. That helped me feel like I could just leap in and do those improvised things again. Yesterday I really took the plunge. If you read the blog – here – about Intelligent Designing, I proposed to write limericks for anyone who shared either the blog or the link. I had quite a few link shares on facebook yesterday (thank you everyone who joined in) and was rapidly churning out silly limericks that included people’s names. Exposed enough to feel a bit edgy, hidden behind the computer enough to feel a bit safe.

So much of creativity is actually about trust. Trusting yourself that the skills are there and you can do it. Trusting the inspiration to flow. Trusting people not to bring over ripe fruit and throw it at you… It’s always a bit of a leap into the dark. It always feels a bit risky, and I realise that I’d become risk averse in a way that was restricting what I could do. I need to learn how to trust myself again, and how to trust the inspiration. Yesterday went well.

If you fancy having a play, pop the book link http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1368694639&sr=8-1&keywords=intelligent+designing+for+amateurs on the site of your choice, and let me know – I’m on facebook, @brynneth_nimue, I’m on Google+ and linkedin and if you reblog to another wordpress one I can spot that. If in doubt poke me here or some other place…

Intelligent Designing

Dear everybody, I have a slightly mad fiction thing out at the end of the month. To which end I will be doing a slightly crazy thing tomorrow to help people notice it. If you would like to get involved with the crazy thing, the information is all at the bottom of this post. But, before you rush off there, please do pause for a moment, because what comes next is the opening of said book, Intelligent Designing for Amateurs.

Chapter One

Anthropological observations of the curious habits of personages native to Barker Street

Hopefully there would be dead people next door. That would liven things up tremendously. Ever since the new tenant was first mentioned, Temperance had been trying to imagine what an archaeologist would look like, and had become stuck somewhere between the beard and the muddy boots. Granny said an archaeologist dug things up, which had formed most of her impression. Temperance had never encountered an actual archaeologist before, and until recently, hadn’t even met the word in person. It was one of those large, pleasing, hard to spell words that she liked to roll around in her mouth. There were others. Obsequious. Crepuscular. Epigrammatic. Meanings did not always excite her young mind, but a word that came with a person had more appeal. Granny told her something about digging up iniquities, or possibly aunties. Antimacassars? Digging up definitely suggested mud, and led Temperance to think from there about the likelihood of dead people. Dead people went into the ground, so it stood to reason they could come out of it again. What else was there to unearth aside from coal and ore?

“Nothing at all like a body snatcher,” Granny had insisted, when the subject came up at breakfast, but Temperance wasn’t sure. What else would anyone want to dig up, really? Treasure might be nice, she supposed, but that seemed more like pirate business.

Still, having a new neighbor would cheer the whole street up. The bigger, separate house next to their little terrace had been empty all winter. Seeing the dark windows at night always inclined her to feel sad.

“How’s that sweeping going, then?” Granny demanded from inside the house.

The sweeping had not, in fact, started, the girl having entirely forgotten about the broom in her hand. Pushing curls of escaping brown hair out of her face, Temperance surveyed the twig strewn path to her grandmother’s door. Sweeping seemed so pointless. The wind would bring it all right back in no time. She sighed heavily, feeling very sorry for herself.

Before she could start on the job, the sound of hooves and wheels drew her attention to the street again. All of the delivery people had already done their rounds for the day. Horse-drawn vehicles were otherwise unusual here. The inhabitants of Barker Street were all very decent people, but not equal to carriages, excepting for weddings and funerals. Temperance loved funerals, but the approaching wagon lacked the plumes and splendid display of misery. Instead she saw a neat little trap, followed by a heavily loaded cart where a great many things were piled up behind the driver and passengers.

With a little squeak, she dropped the broom and ran to the garden gate. Then, because she did not want the archaeologist to think her childish, she slowed down. Walking in what she hoped was a dignified way, she soon reached the next property just as the tired horse came to a halt.

The person inside the trap was carefully helped down, and then approached the front door. There was no beard whatsoever, and no obvious signs of mud. Perhaps there had been a mistake? The trap itself took off at a jaunty speed. Temperance wondered if this was the archaeologist’s wife, come on ahead to make their new home nice. The man himself would probably be in a hole full of bones at this very moment, Temperance reasoned.

One of the men got off the cart. He had wild hair and a big coat. On the whole he seemed a better candidate for the adventurous life, and Temperance watched him expectantly.

“All to be unloaded here?” he asked the woman.

“If you please.” She nodded to the girl who was sitting on the cart. “I assume you can find the kitchen, Mary?”

The girl nodded and hurried inside. The two men set about unloading items of furniture from the cart and taking them into the house. Temperance felt rather puzzled by all of this. There weren’t any bones being unloaded just usual, household things. Unless the bones were in one of the tea chests. She supposed that would make sense, even if it was a disappointment.

“Hello girl,” said the tall woman, with an accent that clearly came from another place.

Temperance had spent hours planning how to make her introductions to the new neighbor. She had already established herself as being absolutely essential to Charlie Rowcroft, Barker Street’s resident inventor. Now, she meant to impress the archaeologist, or for that matter his wife, with her clever, useful nature. Thus, she would gain free access to their home as well. Staring up at the new arrival’s face, she couldn’t remember any of the planned speech and found herself instead saying, “Have you got any dead people?”

Now available for pre-order here -

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368608170&sr=1-1&keywords=Intelligent+Designing+for+amateurs and no doubt other places as well.

So, here’s the planned silliness. Reblog the post, or post the pre-order link and let me know. I can spot a reblog pretty easily, otherwise tag or message me on facebook, @brynneth_nimue on twitter, or drop an email to brynnethnimue at gmail dot com. I will then write a limerick or silly verse about you, and post it wherever the link went. That could be slow and messy with Twitter, but we’ll do what we can…

Steam Druid

For all of you who suffer from folk innuendo syndrome, I should start by saying no, this is not a Beltain related topic. It’s about steam engines and Druids.

Only when I went to the Cambridge (Gloucestershire) vintage car and steam show last weekend did I remember what I was doing there the previous year. It’s a small show – a field of old cars, a steam car (the only car I have ever loved!) a steamroller and a few baby traction engines puffing about. There was also a lot of rain. Last year I was working on Intelligent Designing for Amateurs. It’s a fiction thing and it’s coming soon… and as the title suggests, it is a bit about people playing God.

But I digress. I’d read Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe the previous winter, and that was a big influence on writing Druidry and the Ancestors. I needed to make some kind of meaningful response. A legacy remained. The sheer insanity of revival Druids, the mad energy, shameless disregard for facts, fraudulent invention… that had got under my skin. At the time I couldn’t see any way of bringing that to my ‘proper’ Druidry so I did what I usually do with impossible things, and put it in a story. How to do revival Druids? I didn’t want to work with the actual historical figures, so I needed to invent some equally crazy people to play with.

One of the consequences of this, was Henry Caractacus Morestrop Jones (Archdruid) complete with moustache, a robe that looks suspiciously like a nightdress, and a heightened sense of self importance. I wanted some slightly more sympathetic Druids as well though.

Then, at last year’s vintage car show with traction engine event, I watched the steam roller pootle back and forth, slowly. Inspiration popped into my head. Not the kind of spiritual, fire in the head awen inspiration we normally like to associate with Druids, but very silly inspiration. Druids on a traction engine. The scope for low speed chases struck me at once. I like a good slow chase for comedy value. Jack Barrow does them well, too.

In the process of writing a book, its’ not difficult to lose track of the source material, especially with fiction where I’m not making the same conscious effort to remember what I got from where. As a result I sometimes get the curious pleasure of re-encountering a thing and realising that it set me on an imaginative journey.

Druids on a traction engine.

I gather Dr Who has sinister cybermice in it, so I may have been a bit prescient with that one. Yes, it’s been a strange year, creatively speaking and the upshot is a strange book.

Sacred body part 5: Skin

by Theo Wildcroft

“I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence…” Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Sometimes I wonder if the great ancient monuments of this land are, in part, monuments to lost connection. Perhaps in settling down, in taming the wild, in tree felling and road building, we lost faith with the simple animal connections between breath and sky, blood and sea, body and land.

The truth is, Nature in all its beauty does not begin at the skin out, and neither should our reverence for it. You are in a very real sense a colony of atoms that chooses to be together in this moment. 98% of those atoms will be somewhere else and in someone else in less than a year (http://www.jupiterscientific.org/review/shnecal.html). You shed your skin, snake-like, once a month. Deep in the history of your evolution, you hijacked the whole idea of mitochondrial DNA from a passing mushroom (http://www.fungi.com/about-paul-stamets.html). Many of the beautifully balanced systems of your body only function because of the tireless work of symbiotic bacteria. In fact, there are so many non-human cells in your body that they actually outnumber the human ones (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603085914.htm).

As a body worker, this colony of interconnected species and organs that you call your body unfolds new miracles every day for me. Your shoulder blades are so thin they are translucent. If you could remove them from your body and hold them to the sky, they would look like wings of light. But slump forward and allow those wings to droop, and within minutes you will start to feel depressed and heart-sick.

Your breath, heart-rate and mental activity levels are interdependent. By giving you the right practices, I can help you to gently encourage your breathing to slow down, and your thoughts will slow down and soften to match it. But it’s a delicate process, and one where your conscious mind intimately meets with an autonomic body that it cannot dominate. If you were to force your breath to the same slow rate, without giving your whole self time to catch up, you would instead begin to experience stress, and even panic, adrenaline and cortisol would flood through your body in response and your breath rate would rise beyond your conscious control. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Breathing-Book-Vitality-Through-Essential/dp/0805042970)

What’s more, the electromagnetic field of your heart extends several feet from your body, and if the rhythm of your heart and breath are strong, steady and calm, they can encourage the heart and breath of people around you to be the same. If you look around you, do you know whose heart you are coming into harmony with right now? (http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2011/05/110504-fire-walking-hearts-beat-science-health-heartbeats/)

While you’re wondering about that, there’s this organ called the Greater Omentum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_omentum) in your abdomen, like a fleshy blanket. Its only job is to move around inside you, cuddling up to those internal organs that need a little extra support. It’s like a friendly alien. Meanwhile, your feet each contain 26 bones,

33 joints, and more than a hundred muscles, tendons, and ligaments (http://www.wefixfeet.ca/images/pdf/anatomyofthefoot.pdf). When you’re standing up, your body recalibrates each of them in every moment, to keep you upright. But it’s when you move that things get really complicated.

Your whole body – every muscle, bone and organ, is held together by this soft tissue generally known as fascia (http://www.anatomytrains.com/). It is a constantly renewed, 3D web of hollow fibres contained in fluid. It can respond instantly to change or threat, holding tight to protect a site of injury; gathering and releasing like a spring; or stretching and melting away when encouraged to. There is interesting new evidence that it might be the body’s fastest communication system – much faster even than the bio-electrical signals jumping the millions of synaptic gaps in your central nervous system (http://www.charlespoliquin.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/649/The_Secret_Life_of_Fascia.aspx).

Lines of force run through this fascia in spirals, zig-zags and waves. There is one that connects all the way from the inner edge of your feet up your inner legs, diving deep into the psoas muscle in your hips, which is sometimes called the muscle of the soul(http://bodydivineyoga.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/the-psoas-muscle-of-the-soul/). From there this web of fascia cradles the heart and passes up around the lungs, before ending at your temples (http://robertsontrainingsystems.com/blog/the-deep-front-line/). If you suffer from muscular tightness in your psoas you can get lower back pain, sciatica and a dozen other conditions, but the tightness in your psoas specifically will also signal to a body worker that you probably hold on to a lot of anxiety and fear.

We’ve been taught that our true Self resides in the brain; that the body is merely the agent of the mind’s desires. Please believe me: I know that your consciousness is distributed in every cell, even the ones that you are shedding in your skin and hair right now. The story of your life is written in every muscle tear and scar. There is neural tissue in your heart (http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/JCP99.html), and even more regulating the workings of your intestines. You really do have gut feelings (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gut-second-brain).

I know all this in part because I’ve had good teachers. Scientific exploration of the body advances all the time and enthusiastic experts are generous with what they share with the world. There are documents, images and videos of everything from MRI scans to microscopic investigations available for free or a nominal charge online. There are videos of Gil Hedley’s truly awesome integral anatomy dissections (http://www.youtube.com/somanaut) and extracts from the fantastic live footage of ‘Strolling Under the Skin’ by Dr. Guimberteau (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6FaULbOmnE). There’s even a great range of anatomy colouring books out there (http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_19?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=anatomy%20colouring%20book&sprefix=anatomy+colouring+b%2Cstripbooks%2C353&rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3Aanatomy%20colouring%20book).

All my reading and watching and discussion of the body’s wonders through the eyes of others is merely standing on the shoulders of giants and benefiting from their access and experience. But with each new theoretical discovery I seek to ground my knowledge in actual experience of the body both my own and my clients’. And when I’m deep at work, trying to work out how your lost mobility in one hip relates to pain in the opposite shoulder; when I remember all that I’ve learnt about the body so far and how much more I have to learn, I know that you are, each of you, a miracle in the making. That we all are.

Studying Druidry

There are a number of Druid Orders out there offering teaching material. The highest profile are OBOD, ADF and Henge of Keltria, but most Orders make some study material available to students. With the internet, it’s relatively easy to do. Do you need a study course to become a Druid? Maybe.

The advantage of joining a course is that someone else has figured out what to study and often a good order in which to do the work. Being self-taught can mean an awful lot of groping around in the dark trying to figure out what’s relevant, and whether the thing you are doing even counts as Druidry. With courses come mentors, tutors, advisors, people who can tell you how you are doing. For some people that affirmation is really helpful, for others, being in any way subject to authority doesn’t work.

Studying a course means there’s an identifiable set of other Druids who will recognise what you do and with whom you can easily work. You know roughly what they’re going to do. A formal OBOD ritual anywhere in the world will be recognisable to anyone who knows OBOD material, assuming they can handle the language. On the downside, it can tie you into more fixed ways of thinking, a belief that there’s a ‘right way’ to do ritual, when of course there are many ways.

Being entirely self-taught can be lonely, confusing and demoralising. It’s not just a matter of reading the right books, either, but of getting out there, engaging with the land, learning the seasons, finding your own ways of responding to that. For some, the solitary path is the only one that can ever make sense. It’s also worth bearing in mind that every last detail taught in any Druid course anywhere comes from people. Teaching materials are developed by experience, practice, and experimenting. On one hand they can save you a lot of time and spare you from both dead ends and wheel reinventions. On the other, their validity depends on having been used, and that does not mean other ways will turn out to be less valid. Other innovations from other people may better suit some times and places. That includes our innovations.

However you choose to learn, there is one critical thing that remains a constant across all possibilities: It’s down to the individual. What you do with the material you are given, or find, how you approach your learning and what of yourself you put in is critical. There is no course in existence that will turn you into a Druid. Only you can do that. A course may be helpful, but the work is all yours.

OBOD adventures, further

I announced some weeks ago now that I had decided to apply to see if I could be an OBOD tutor, and that I’d post along the way to talk about how that goes. So, I’m in process now. I’m not going into the details of the process, that doesn’t feel wholly appropriate nor do I think it’s likely to be of much interest. But there is a process, and I’m finding it a gentle and helpful one. This is not especially surprising as it goes with my experience of OBOD to date. Helpful, informative, gently testing to find out what I am and where I fit.

I like how supported this all feels. I like the strong sense I have that I’m entering a community in which I can both enable others and be supported in doing so. My wider experience of volunteering has had a very different sort of vibe to it – one of the most difficult things for volunteers is not having the back up to be sure of what you’re doing, that you’re on the right track and so forth. I’ve been places where volunteering was intimidating and felt exposed. I’ve plenty of experience of things I barely understood being dropped on me, and having to learn on the job to the detriment of those who got me during the teething period. I should add this isn’t exclusively a Paganism issue either. Often the problem is that volunteers are in such short supply that people don’t have time to properly train and support those coming in, there’s too much fire fighting going on already. It’s a long way short of ideal.

It’s lovely to find that with OBOD, I’m stepping out onto a path, already very clear about the existence of safety nets and knowing that I will not be expected to fly on my own until I’ve got the experience to realistically do so. And even then I’ll still be part of a wider, supportive community. I feel very, very positive about this. The time frames are not stressful looking. I don’t have to be up and running in a matter of weeks. I’ll be doing some practice work over the next month, and then some reading, and then we go from there. I’m looking forward to the challenges. I’m also looking forward to revisiting the study material from years ago, knowing that I’ll be working closely with that, for some time to come. Opportunities to go deeper, and to see thing through other people’s eyes abound.

My biggest fear around undertaking this, was that I simply wouldn’t be acceptable. It’s a deeply held, longstanding fear that pertains to pretty much everything in my life, nothing OBOD specific here. I worry about not being good enough, and testing that is always intimidating. I’m coming to learn that yes, there are places I do not fit, and yes, there are people who are not going to be ok with what I do and how I do it, but no, I am not innately an exile, I am not that which does not belong anywhere. It’s just a matter of finding the right places and people, and apparently I’m getting better at that.

Planning a handfasting

We had six months, from when Tom first got his paperwork, to physically get him to the UK, get married and submit the next round of paperwork. Apparently there are people who think you can just walk into a Registrar’s office with a couple of witnesses and that’s a marriage sorted. Not true. There’s a lead time of at least a month on the quickest of weddings, and if you wanted something a bit more involved and romantic, the 6 months of moving to marry visa will not allow it. Most people spend more than 6 months making wedding arrangements. One of the upshots was that we did not attempt to do a handfasting at the same time.

We had two years, before the next round of paperwork, which included a hefty form and Tom had to pass the rather silly Life in the UK Test. A heady mix of the painfully obvious, and things no actual resident ever needs to know around what the Queen can do but mostly leaves to the Prime Minister.

Getting married was a hasty process, and we didn’t have the luxury of time to enjoy it as much as we might have done. The knowledge that we only got two years, and then officialdom could, in theory, force us apart, has been really hard to live with. I’ve felt it as a physical weight on my body, most particularly my heart. But, paperwork dragons have been duly seen off, and this week we had confirmation that Tom has been processed and can stay forever. Last night I was crying with sheer relief. It’s taken us four years, from the point of declaring love to each other, to get to a place where we can live together for as long as we choose, without having to get permission from anyone. Having that which many straight couples can take for granted, for the first time in our relationship, is a really big deal. And yes, this process has made me even more sensitive to the plight of other people whose freedom to love and marry is restricted by law, but that’s a rant for another day.

It took me a while to realise that I hadn’t felt able to handfast because of the paperwork, and the permission to stay. We’ve talked about this one a bit. We are free to commit to each other totally now, because we are free to be in the same place. It also seems like a good reason for some celebrating. So I’m thinking about where, and when, and how. Somewhere public that anyone who wants to be with us can get to, would be the first consideration. We’ve got one volunteer for the celebrant team already, we’ll be looking for others, and there’s going to be cake, and ice cream, if I get this right. I’ve vows to ponder, and a dress to buy, because this seems like a fine excuse for buying a dress. And a thing to make for the tying of hands together. Perhaps a broom to make, too.

Alongside this, we’re house hunting, and talking to publishers, and all the things that constitute our lives and futures are starting to fall into place. Exciting times. It’s been a long, hard fight to get here, but we have a future and a lot of scope to chase dreams right now. It’s been a relationship built on dreams from the very start. For some people, dreams are flimsy, untrustworthy things, distractions from real life. For me, they have always been the essence of what I do. Dreams of better things, dreams that turn into books and images. We dared the dream that we could be together, that we could work together and do what we love. It’s not been an easy path on any count. And while ‘living the dream’ tends to imply ease and convenience, with a bucket load of cash, in our case it means living out our beliefs and values, making ideas into realities, and so forth. Often that’s not an easy path to walk, but we’ll keep doing it, hanging on to each other when times are tough, as no doubt they will sometimes be.

Happily ever after, for the first time in my life looks like a realistic option.

Who am I?

Picking myself apart, I look for things that were put on me from the outside. There are a lot of them. I look for things I’ve been taught to believe that don’t hold up to rational scrutiny. There are a fair few of those, too. I carry so many assumptions, absorbed with little thought. This is a process I started in earnest when I was writing Druidry and the Ancestors. Looking at the way in which ideas and behaviours can be passed down through families, unconsciously. Hurt and wounding transfers from one generation to the next. In my family one of the big issues was that we don’t do physical contact readily or easily. I’ve had issues with boundaries that stem from there.

Often when I’m working on a book, I’m experimenting with my own life and thinking, to see what I can find out first hand. That doesn’t stop just because the book is published. I found myself thinking about my paternal grandmother last night. I know so little about her. I may have inherited some physical problems from her, and I do not know what else. What came to me from those ancestors? What of their lives and stories is meshed into my being? I do not know. I also keep asking what it is I bring to the mix that is truly myself, my own spirit, not a repetition of ancestry, not a manifestation of DNA, or training, but purely and totally me.

I have been aware from the outset of this work that the answer could be ‘nothing at all’.

There’s an energy that is mine. It’s a wild, high octane, intense, manic sort of energy and if I’m not careful with it, it can leave me burned out. It’s not reliably safe to be around, either. A forest fire, hurricane energy that isn’t as careful as it could be with people who get too close, and that worries me. I also have a perception that spiritual means calm. Spiritual people are all mellow and at peace with the world. I’ve put in a lot of time trying to be mellow and at peace with the world, and I can do it a bit, but it gets ever clearer to me that it is not in my nature to live there. The hurricane self needs to be more active.

There has never really been space for me to be wild. I’ve always had to be domesticated. I was taught not to show off, or make a fuss, or draw attention to myself and I learned to be a passably inoffensive presence. Now I struggle with energy levels and depression. The more time I spend quietly looking at this one, the more certain I become that I need to give my wild self more room, more outlet. I need to accept that I am not a creature of still, silent contemplation all the time. There are hungers in me. I do crave attention, that sends me out onto stages and into ritual circles, it has me writing books and blogs. Why should that be shameful? Why should I feel any need to pretend that I do this for ‘good’ reasons and that ‘good’ precludes attention seeking? Celtic tales are full of attention seekers. The bards, heroes, the beautiful women, the magic users – they aren’t self effacing. They take pride in what they do and draw attention to it.

Is it really a virtue to stay silent in face of pain? To not ask for help. Being open about my shortcomings, and learning to ask for help gives other people chance to step up and be heroic. It’s not failure to need input from other people.

I’m aware of food hunger in my body, and sexual desire. Having spent a while now exploring what it means to want, I notice how much I want rest and sleep, physical affection, intellectual stimulation, laughter, beauty, experiences. I’m a demanding creature by nature and I want a lot out of life. I am not satisfied by banality, by that which is unimaginative and lacklustre, and I’ve spent a lot of years pretending to accept what bored me witless, just to avoid hurting other people’s feelings. What I learned along the way was that wanting made me a bad person. My wanting was an affront to others, who either couldn’t make sense of it, didn’t like it, feared it… and I let myself feel responsible for that, hiding those bits that I was learning were monstrous and unacceptable.

I am not passive by nature. I’m experimenting with not being ashamed of the hungers, drives, desires and impulses that come from my body. I’m looking for spaces in which I can express them and distancing myself from places where being biddable seems like a requirement. I’m learning to accept that I cannot conform to the image of Druid as chilled out speaker of calm wisdom. That manic, fierce, burning energy that has so much potential for trouble, is mine. Is me. It may well be the most ‘me’ thing I’ve got. It’s survived a lifetime of attempts to cage and tame it. It has survived my feelings of shame in it, my rejection of it, my self-hatred. There is an old skin on the outside of me, and I can feel it loosening, ready to slough off.