Nimue Brown's Blog, page 428

Novice Again

I’m very much a lifelong learning person. Learning new things, new ideas and new skills is a source of joy to me and I can’t imagine ever wanting to stop. Unshockingly, given the whole Druid thing, I find it a cyclical process. I discover something, I study, explore, practice, I get better at it. I start to feel that I can do the thing passably well. Then I see something else that makes me realise how little I know, and I find myself feeling that I am starting at the beginning again. Occasionally this is frustrating and depression, but most often it’s an exciting experience.

I’ve gone back and relearned how to breathe, repeatedly. Learning to breathe underpins all kinds of voice work, meditation, physical activities. Each time I learn, I go somewhere new, I make a kind of progress around my spirals. I go through it with music too, pausing to break down my techniques as I try to tighten up on some aspect of how I play. Working with voice and bouzouki, I had to go back and learn how to breathe again. Circles within circles. I never did get the hang of breathing, singing and drumming all at the same time, though.

When I started out learning Druidry, I studied correspondences, ideas about circles and elements and pretty much anything anyone pointed me at. I worked very hard to learn. Then somewhere along the way I grasped that Druidry is not wholly an intellectual thing you can get out of books, and that I needed to change my doing. I was outside a lot, but I had to do a relearn to bring Druid ideas to my time amongst trees, and then further relearning as I started to question and challenge the book learning. Particularly, having studied the wheel of the year, I then totally questioned the whole thing and wanted to move away from year narratives. Now I’m feeling a desire to look at that again, to go back to the fundamental cycling of moons and seasons, and think about my own year shapes.

I’m currently reading Dorothy Abrams’ Identity and the Quartered Circle. This is a book about fundamentals, and its making me go over my own practice and beliefs again, thinking about what I do, and how, and why. It’s a witchcraft book, and I’ve never seen myself as that kind of magical practitioner, but there are things that could stand a rethink. It may be time to go back to the beginning again and re-walk the spiral paths of Druidry.

I also find myself a novice in being a person. I don’t know who I am. That’s actually exciting, because it allows so much room for change and growth. I’m recognising things that have been put on me from outside, and shaking them off, but I don’t know who I am without them. Who would I be if I did not start from the assumption that I’m undeserving and useless? How would I behave? What would I be able to do that is currently unavailable? How would I feel? A fledgling in old skin, trying to work out if these are wings, or flippers or what, and flapping, and wondering if I belong in air, or water, of where… metaphorically speaking.

With anything, at any time, it is possible to rededicate, go back to the beginning and try to relearn. Obviously the things we have already learned go with us, either helping us to learn more deeply, or in the form of things we must first unlearn. We can always make the conscious decision to be a novice again, to reject what we thought we knew, or to reinvent it. There’s a letting go of self importance around choosing to be a novice. Sometimes I find it hard to admit that I do not know, or that what I have learned is wrong. Attitudes to myself and my body, I am having to relearn. Attitudes to how to interact peaceably, what to tolerate, what to resist – a work in progress. Admitting you don’t know is a tremendously liberating experience. It opens the door to learning.

Every morning is an opportunity to go out there and become something new. Again.

Healing Work

As a culture we’re passive about healing. We expect to show up at the doctors and get some pills, or some surgery that will make the problem go away. Or we want a magic herb, wand or laying on of hands to the same effect. We say ‘healing work’ when we mean the work that healers do, when perhaps we should be more willing to apply it to ourselves. We all get sick. Many of us will experience mental health problems too. Healing work is something we could all do with paying some attention to.

There are a lot of ailments that can be tackled, and if not sorted then alleviated by lifestyle changes. Diet, exercise and sleep patterns have a lot of influence. A good diet isn’t merely about weight, it’s about giving your immune system some decent raw material to work with.

Exercise isn’t just about weight either, keeping the heart healthy, working off stress, building physical confidence, keeping mobile. We do a lot of healing work when we sleep. If we don’t give time to sleep, how do we expect to heal in a timely fashion? Diet, exercise and sleep all impact on mental health, which in turn impacts our ability to deal with other health challenges.

It is work. It takes effort and discipline to try and change your lifestyle, change harmful thinking habits, and maintain wellness. This needs recognising. People who expect the magical fix (from the doctors or the reiki) will get disheartened by the lack of a magical cure all, and won’t stick at doing the needful work. There are no ‘cures’ there are things that supress symptoms, ways of cutting out problem parts of the body, things that boost the immune system and things that prevent you getting the disease in the first place. Whatever route you go, your body has work to do, healing from the experience and sometimes from the knock on effects of the treatment – as with cancer, or having an operation.

I’ve been trying to fix my head for years now. I’ve had brief stints on medication, had cognitive behavioural therapy interventions (all on paper) had one to one counselling, time with a support group, self help books… and I’m still not there. Depression and anxiety continue to flare, affecting my body as well as my mind, and limiting what I can do. There are days, I confess, when it feels pointless to keep fighting this stuff. Then I stop and look back and think about how much more ill I was a year ago, two years, three… I’ve come a very long way. The effort that went in was worth it, and I remind myself that it’s going to take more effort to go the rest of the distance, and that it can be done.

It doesn’t help that we aren’t really taught to feel responsible for our bodies. We could take huge strain off the health care systems just by learning how to look after ourselves, learning how to work at being well. Maybe not all the time, but enough of the time that we aren’t flirting constantly with disease. That would mean taking stress seriously too. Stress is not good for your immune system, heart, nerves. Stress begets mental illness, makes us sleepless so we don’t heal, makes us feel we can’t stop to take care of ourselves. If we took stress seriously we might have to face the uncomfortable truth that a lot of workplaces are contributing to the ill health of employees in big ways, and then it might be possible to sue, and big business isn’t going to like that. So keep taking the magic pills, and don’t ask any awkward questions…

Sacred body part 4: Loss

by Theo Wildcroft

“Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong…” David Whyte

I have learnt, over the years, that I come to my physical practice not when I have it all worked out – not when I know what ritual, what offering to make. I rarely know that.

I come to practice not when I am whole and complete, but to find wholeness and completeness – to become the being I already know myself to be: a child of the world; and for generation upon generation,

a child of this land and of my tribe, such as it remains.

When I move and practice in this way, it is rarely in a nice, neat yoga studio. It is, instead, in forests, on hillsides, under rain and storms or sunrises. In my heart I see myself crawling back, running back, laying all of my confusion, all of my doubts and my deepest confessions, at the feet of gods I cannot even name. Gods I know intimately, and who know everything I am and can be. Spirits of the air and land and sea that I move through and which move in me. Spirits that I meet in my skin and in my bone. I start out with poses and movements that I know that have worked before, and I move from there into the unknown, to the wordless, and into wholeness.

It’s less graceful than it sounds when I’m falling out of a hand balance, or scraping my feet on rocks, or just cursing the tightness of my hamstrings. But that’s important too. It’s too easy for me to float about waving my hands in the air, thinking pretty thoughts. I need a practice that grounds me in the reality of my body and my world. I need a practice that I have to work at; that I’m a bit crap at; one that leaves me with bruises and wanting more.

Because this is the only kind of practice that has begun to heal the loss of connection between my deepest self and the world I chose to be born into. It is in physical practice that I leave behind the invented, conceptual prison of material separation. I shy away from the cold, grandness of a Created world and my smallness at its indifference. Instead, I don’t just remember, I feel. From my marrow to my breath I experience the world evolving from the actions, the practices, the living and dying, of everything in it.

The animate divine is present with me then: immanent and intimate. It is built from waves moving on water, hares running from combines, with handshakes and tar sand extractions, in crows mobbing red kites, and gulls squabbling over landfill. All of it meeting with my breath in the wind, and the stretch in my muscles.

It’s a small offering I make, but healing that connection is a sacred and lifelong task for me. This is what works. And so for my current dedication for the Order of the Yew (http://druidnetwork.org/yew), I wrote these words:

“In this eternal moment of renewal between breathing out and breathing in,

Surrounded and overcome by the embrace of the World Tree, the ever living Yew,

I renew my dedication.

I pledge my self to the quest:

For the dark womb of potential beyond the reach of light,

For the furthest known truth beyond the reach of proof,

For the riches of expression beyond the reach of self consciousness;

To simplicity beyond the simplistic,

To creation beyond creativity,

To language beyond words,

To a single step taken in absolute awareness

Of the pulsing star in the heart of all things,

Dancing. Laughing. Dying and being born.”

And after nearly a decade of practice, I still have so much to learn about how to take that single step of absolute awareness. So I keep coming back to the mat, and the forest, and the storms and sunrises.

A very intuitive friend of mine, Suzanne Askham (http://www.suzanneaskham.com/),

had a vision last year of the Roman invasion of Britain. She said she saw the British, the English as they would become, in the face of the sheer might of that invasion, giving up our souls for safekeeping. It was as if we sent them away, so that our bodies may do what needed to be done; and suffer what needed to be suffered. It was how we survived. Maybe, she says, we got really good at it, until we learned to live without that connection, and until we couldn’t even name that which was lost.

And her vision touches me most deeply, because I have lived that story in my own life. Whilst heavily pregnant with me my mother was in a car accident. She was driving, but she blames my father. Their friend’s legs were broken but no one was killed and my mother was lucky, coming out mostly unhurt.

But I wonder if that shock delivered in the heart of the womb left me viscerally ambivalent about being born into a dangerous world. I’ve lived most of my life as if I was visiting here never quite landing with both feet, if that makes sense?

And I was 10 when I first gave in to that call to separate from the physicality of existence. I left my body to its pain and violation; floating around the ceiling somewhere. All because I couldn’t fight my way out of a situation in which my sanity, and possibly my life, was at risk. Like my friend’s vision of the invasions, it’s how I survived, at least until I could leave home. But the habit of separation has been hard to break.

I spent my adolescence hiding and dreaming in books and my early adulthood in intellectual debate. My university tutors even thought I would join them in an academic life. The truth is, I was wasting away, almost literally, increasingly lost inside my head and even out of it. I’m not saying a life of the mind is incompatible with a life experienced through the body, But for me at least, it has taken me years to relearn the simple signals coming from my body of hunger, thirst and even the need for breath.

Find Theo here – http://www.wildyoga.co.uk

The happy Druid

I’ve met a lot of people along the way so far, from people who were penniless and living in single rooms in Bed and Breakfasts, to people who have big country houses and go skiing every year. People who have been invalided out of the workforce, the self-made and the downright lucky. I’ve known plenty of wealthy people who were a long way from being happy, whilst misery and poverty go together very easily. Without a doubt, the happiest people I know are either retired, or self employed, doing something they care about and feel has value, and have strong friendship networks.

Often self employed people like me work longer hours than regular employees and do so for less money, but, you get to say no when you need to. You can fit your work around your life, and I see a lot of that amongst the self employed, especially around child raising. People who work for themselves always have more scope to be creative, and get more direct financial reward for the things they get right. There are more risks, but these days most regular employment is so insecure that the risks seem a lot smaller than they used to. At least when it’s your company you can really fight to keep it going and don’t have to depend on whether anyone else is determined to make sure your job continues to exist. What I hear from regularly employed friends suggest that increasing numbers of workplaces are becoming unreasonable, disrespectful pressure fests. The self employed may not have as much cash, but we don’t endure any workplace bullying unless we do it to ourselves.

There are basic essentials that we all need. Recent discussions on facebook around food budgets demonstrate that a person who knows their stuff and has enough wriggle room for some bulk buying, can live well on fairly little. Less desire to be fashionably dressed keeps the clothes budget down. Feet as transport save money, and the cost of gym membership. There’s an art to being less affluent, and one of the key requirements is knowing that cash does not equate to happiness. Yes, life without the basics is miserable, but that’s not always a money issue. Rest and sleep are basics, plenty of highly paid, high flying jobs will deprive you of those. Human relationships are also a basic human need, and if you’ve got to work all your waking hours, or deeply antisocial hours, money costs you in terms of relationship.

The first secret to finding happiness rests on knowing what actually makes you happy. That’s going to vary for all of us, but whatever you think you’ve got, it’s worth poking it. The joy of shopping, for example, can often be about getting a temporary sense of power out of spending money, but if you run up debts, that disempowers you, it can become like an addiction. Getting drunk can feel like happiness, but there’s thinking out there that our young people do this just to blot out the reality of the rest of their lives. So just how happy a state is that? Merry is great, slightly pissed can be wonderful, but so off your face that you don’t know which way is up? Its popular, hugely expensive in terms of police costs and antisocial knock-ons.

I am able to get by on very little because I know what I need. I have books, online articles and radio 4 to supply me with intellectual stimulus on a daily basis. I have good company in the form of my bloke, my child, fellow boaters, excellent friends and a wide selection of casual acquaintances in the wider world. I need time outside and most especially, panoramic landscape views. Enough food, exercise and rest are possible to achieve, although I don’t always get that balance right. Lying in bed, snuggled with my man, cat purring in my ear, child giggling at the other end of the boat as he reads Pratchett in bed… of these things are contentment made. Happiness is not a big, dramatic sort of emotion. If I need thrills and adventures, moving the boat on a windy day, cycling a hill, undertaking an epic walk – I can challenge myself. I don’t get bored. I have the freedom to think and feel as I please, to choose a lot of what happens, or negotiate it in ways that work all round. I am free from bullying, and unkindness doesn’t feature much in my life. I feel very lucky in all of this.

I’m happy when small things go well, and when what I do works for other people, when publishers say yes, and the child says ‘today was an awesome adventure’ or things to that effect. I’m happy when I feel that I’m acting ethically, and walking my talk in some way or another, and when what I do manifestly benefits someone else. Money can be nice, especially when it represents people who bought my books. But money does not buy me the call of the cuckoo, a child’s laughter, or the man who looks at me with adoration in his eyes.

Working with energy

Nope, not a New agey post from me today, more a pondering of how the biology works, or in my case, doesn’t, partly prompted by reading some excellent material from Dorothy Abrams. I don’t have a deep understanding of bodily energy systems, but I can observe, and am starting to notice, and question a few things.

For the last ten years or so, I’ve run flat out whenever I could, punctuated by times of illness and burnout when I could barely move at all. To do this I have learned to ignore pain and exhaustion, which is something I’ve been trying to unpick for a while. Yesterday I noticed that my muscles can be tired, while the rest of my body jangles with restless energy. It’s like being on a caffeine high, without drinking the coffee, and it contributes to not being able to sleep. My guess is that it’s the adrenal system.

Adrenaline is there for short term bursts of life saving fight and flight activity. It’s there for emergency dashes to the water hole, and for when you’re going to need to walk a long way to find any food. It has its place and its uses, but we aren’t supposed to use it all the time. I find I’m easily tipped into anxiety and often feeling threadbare in a way that leaves me wide open to depression, and I think this is because I’m pumping more ‘energy’ into my body than my body is realistically able to use. What I’ve been calling ‘running on willpower’ might better be labelled ‘running on adrenaline’.

In the last few months I’ve started to feel like I need to take proper care of me. I’m tired of living with pain, and the depression and anxiety are no kind of fun. I’m looking for root causes. Most of the circumstantial causes have gone, leaving a legacy of thought and behaviour habits to tackle. If I kick into fear/adrenaline mode at the start of each day, I start pushing and forcing myself from the moment I get out of bed, and then later fall into bed so wound up I don’t sleep, thus perpetuating the whole cycle. I can afford to stop doing that now, so am trying to get my adrenal system to step down.

This is another form of being vulnerable. Risking saying ‘no’ to things, and people. Not trying to do everything right now. It’s a process of learning not to think of myself as a commodity that should be available on tap, but as a person. I still struggle with that one, it’s another legacy issue. When people don’t treat you like you’re a person, you can end up believing it – it’s such a tidy explanation, you don’t have the same rights as real people because you’re too flawed to count. Intellectually I’ve been resisting that for a while, but the emotions often move more slowly.

I think that to move forward, I’ve got to explore making the constant adrenaline drive stop. I’ve got to let myself be tired and sluggish and a bit useless for a while. Then perhaps I can get some better rhythms going around being able to rest and recharge. There’s every reason to think that if I can sort this, I can reduce pain, exhaustion, depression and anxiety such that I end up with more energy and more scope for doing things. That helps me feel less self-indulgent about the process, because I still struggle with ‘because it would be better for me’ as a justification for anything.

Being with someone who supports me, and who will manifest that support in practical ways, is a huge difference. Being with someone who soothes my anxiety with gentle physical comfort, and who encourages me to take care of myself, not because I’m a massive inconvenience if I get ill, but because I am worth taking care of. Having the space in which to do this is so important. Head space as well as right physical environment. Having the inspiration from other Pagan writers to challenge my ideas about physical and emotional pain. I’m going to try and do something radical to change my life, and to be well.

Being vulnerable

There are limits on what you can do by playing safely. The person who does not want to expose themselves to risks doesn’t get much done. Any undertaking to do a thing, courts disaster. It gives us opportunities to fail, to be knocked back, humiliated, and made miserable.

I’ve been submitting works to publishers on and off for about fifteen years now. It doesn’t get easier. Granted, I now have more ‘yes’ letters than I did, but I still get a lot of rejections (mostly around short stories). Every time I send a piece in, even if it’s to a publisher I’ve worked with before, I’m acutely aware that ‘no’ is an option. It doesn’t stop there. Books get published, only for readers to hate them, and with the internet it’s really easy to take that hate to the author.

Putting things out in public invites criticism, and I’ve had some harsh ones over the years. One reviewer called an early piece of mine ‘repellent’ and that stayed with me. I don’t have a thick skin.

Bardic work means standing up in public and exposing your work, your inspiration, your soul, to scrutiny. Sometimes it goes wrong. The voice breaks. Words are forgotten. A string snaps. Someone in the audience undertakes to be rude. And again, it only gets slightly easier with practice, and performing always brings you into situations where people can really, seriously hate what you do.

Creativity is a very personal thing. A lot of self and soul goes into it, and not having that recognised and honoured can be agony. The cake that nobody liked and the epic cleaning job nobody noticed. The flowers that barely got a word of recognition, the ritual no one thanked you for… creativity is not just about obvious arty stuff, it’s about the making and the inspiration in all aspects of our lives. Sharing it makes you vulnerable. Not sharing isn’t an answer, because you remain untested, never confident you’re good enough, afraid of being knocked back, or of holding too high an opinion of yourself. We fantasies about the praise and applause, but it’s never enough. Imagining we could be good if only we dared becomes soul destroying itself after a while, just another delusion to cart about. No one respects the book you know you could write or the career you would have had if only…

So this week I answered some questions for OBOD about why I’d like to be a tutor for their course. I’ve exposed myself to being looked at, tested, considered by whatever means seems necessary or appropriate. Last time I did that (an editing job) I didn’t even hear back, not so much as a rejection letter. Well, I know the OBOD folk can and will do better than that.

The day I stop asking if I’m doing a good enough job, if I could do better, is probably going to be the day I stop breathing. The idea of resting on your laurels never made any sense to me. I always have to be pushing to do more, and better, on whatever terms I can. I don’t enjoy being tested, but it’s inevitable. The alternative is to create a little reality bubble in which I am the only person who judges what I do. Sure, that way I would never have to believe that anything I did needed work, but I wouldn’t improve much. I care more about doing things well than about being able to pretend to myself that I’m there already.

In the meantime, never under estimate the power of saying encouraging things and praising the stuff you love – the cake and the craft item, the story and the song.

Why poverty is so expensive

We hear a lot from politicians at the moment about how much the poor cost society. So, I thought that could stand a closer consideration. Money is paid from the public purse to support people who are in desperate circumstances, but this is not the only way in which poverty costs money, and the other ways need thinking about too.

1) Poverty often leads to poor diets, in turn causing obesity, malnutrition, and weakened immune systems. These contribute to ill health. Sickness costs the economy in terms of lost work days, and people needing health care.

2) Poor people are known to be at higher risk of depression as stress and anxiety are causes of mental illness. An inadequate diet increases the risk of poor mental health. (Prisoners given vitamin supplements are less likely to reoffend.) Again, loss of days from work due to ill heath, cost to health services in terms of anti-depressants, and counselling. Huge knock on costs of suicide and attempted suicide.

3) Poverty is a motivation to commit crime. The more desperate people are, the more justifiable crime seems, including robbery, violent crime and rioting. Police, courts and prisons are all very expensive.

4) People with no disposable incomes cannot invest in their children’s education. No extra curricular activities or lerning resourecs at home. Under fed children are less able to concentrate in school, leading to a knock on problem of lost talent and economic potential.

5) Poor people have no disposable income with which to support the high street. Money for leisure tourism, entertainment, and luxuries are non existent, reducing available cash flow for large sectors of the economy. The more people are poor, the more these sectors are starved of cash. See HMV, for a recent example.

6) Heating costs money. Damp, unheated and cold homes can be very unhealthy. Being cold all the time is exhausting. This contributes to ill health and hypothermia can kill the sick and elderly. More costs in terms of lost working days and stresses on the health service.

7) Poor people don’t necessarily have spare cash for running shoes, gyms, swimming pools etc and if undernourished won’t have the energy for exercise. Absence of exercise in the lifestyle contributes to poor physical health and poor mental health, costs as described above.

8) Desperate, depressed and disadvantaged people are known to console themselves with drink and drugs, which can lead to violence. The cost to wider family, knock on effects on crime, with its attendant costs, impact on children, cost of social services interventions etc.

9) Bored teens with no prospects and no means of entertaining themselves are the most likely source of vandalism and antisocial behaviour. Repair costs, police costs, damage to communities as fear keeps people indoors.

10) People who have no hope eventually give up. If you don’t believe there’s any chance things can get better, what on earth is the point of trying? The harder things get for people in poverty, the more incentive they have, not to find work (as the government mistakenly imagines), but to fall into despair and apathy, with suicide an ever more tempting option.

Forgive the lack of detailed referencing to sources, please, but I’ve not drawn on anything wild or obscure here, and a lot of it I would like to think is common sense. My point is that none of the costs of poverty outlined above can be reduced by making poor people even worse off. I think there is every probability that short term cuts to the welfare budget will result in elevated long term costs on the health bill, social services, police, courts and prisons. We are storing up problems for the future.

There are economic arguments for not punishing the poor as a solution to recession. Point 5 should be the most evident. Take money out of the bottom of the system and business suffers. If you want economic growth, money in the hands of poor people moves. So what if they spend it on booze, or fags? If what you care about is GDP, someone made a profit there, some business benefitted, and will pay tax and maybe get to hire more staff. Economies depend on the flow of money. What we’re doing at the moment is reducing the flow.

Greens and Blues for Beltain

All over facebook, people are posting bits of folk songs and generally hailing the first of May. Beltain is here! Summer is a coming in. And here’s me, feeling awkward. Again. Part of it is not having a group at the moment. These festivals in the calendar are all about group coming togethers, and without the focus of a circle, the first of May is not so very different from the 30th of April, or the second of May. Just another part of the slow transition through the seasons. I can’t find it in me to celebrate any of these days on my own. I bow to my ancestors, to the ones who celebrated, and the ones who protested, because this is also Labour Day. (we’ll have a May Day my oh my…). I bow to the Queens of the May, and the morris dancers who danced up the sun. Memories of previous Beltains, good and less so, also come to mind.

It’s not just the issue of not having a celebration lined up. It’s also about what’s happening around me. The willow trees on the canal are just coming into leaf. Not all of the hedges have greened yet, and hawthorn normally gets going in March. The big beech tree on the school run hasn’t even started to open its buds, most of the visible woodland is still in the twiggy stage, and brown, not green. How can it be Beltain when the trees are not yet fully in leaf?

I’ve seen one clutch of ducklings, and plenty of evidence of nests, some of the usual spring activity is well under way. I’ve heard a cuckoo a few times, that folk icon of May, calling out the coming summer. There are swallows hunting over the canal and along the lanes, bugs now abound and the fish have started jumping in the evenings. It’s coming. But it isn’t here yet. Not all of the cows are back in their fields. There’s a big change in the character of a landscape when the animals go back out. We’ve had lambs, and the sheep are always out earlier than the cows. My nearest neighbours were let out a few days ago, but some of their cousins up the road are still in their sheds. The boggy ground won’t have helped, although we’re drying out finally. Traditionally Beltain is the time of taking the livestock off the low pasture and up into the hills, and the fires purify and protect them. It’s not the time for getting the cows out of the barn. That should have happened already.

I can remember one bad winter in my early twenties where we didn’t have trees in leaf until Beltain. Even that year wasn’t as late as this. I have missed the leaves. There’s no sign of the new reeds coming up yet either. No reed smells and rustlings. I miss the dappling of light through leaves and the greening of the landscape, I miss the way the air is different under a leafy canopy. It’s been a long winter.

If you are celebrating today, or over the weekend, I wish you much joy. May the sun smile down upon you, and the leaves unfurl around you. May there be life and all the delights of summer’s promises. I hope we get a proper summer this year, a good balance of sun and rain so that crops ripen rather than rotting in the fields, unharvestable. Again.

Once upon a time, apparently people related the health of the land to the virtue of their ruler. If we did that now, the UK government would be in a lot of trouble, and we’d have had a very big wicker man last Samhain. There are things a modern person cannot blame the government for, but at the same time, we are seeing climate change, and those in power do not care that Beltain has come without the greening.

The White Goddess

My Father read The White Goddess when I was a child, and bits of it entered my awareness early on. Especially the idea of the Maid-Mother-Crone triple goddess. I attempted to read the book myself in my twenties. By that time I’d read a fair bit of Robert Graves poetry, and I, Claudius. I’d also picked up a degree in English Literature, and I was expecting to be able to handle it.

I was so wrong.

What happened instead was a slow, maddening trudge through page after page of mystery. I didn’t have a classical education, nor did I know my mediaeval texts well enough to get the references that sometimes came thick and fast. I found I didn’t have the history, or the anthropology or etymological skills to really grasp it either. I had at least tried to read Frazer (and, I confess, given up) I knew the gist and could at least see that bit of the puzzle, and I knew about Margaret Murray, and that helped. Mostly, The White Goddess confused the hell out of me.

There were times when I had a keen sense of this enormous, powerful mystery just beyond my grasp. A feeling that words themselves could be acts of magic, and that the entirety of reality could be reshaped if only you knew the right language. A sense of something important that was quite determined to stay hidden in its thicket and well out of my reach.

And then, there was this sneaking suspicion that some of the arguments were a bit circular and didn’t add up right, and that many of the learned references were effectively confusing me and not helping me and that this made it harder to follow the argument and that perhaps that wasn’t an accident. The book had been written to exclude those not elite and poetical enough to keep up with it. In the end I had no choice but to acknowledge that I was never going to be elite and poetical and well read enough to understand Graves.

The things I had understood weren’t terribly cheering, either. Graves writes a lot about true poetry, and what it means to be A Real Poet. Having a willy turns out to be an essential qualifier, for him. Women exist to be muses, beautiful, alluring, demanding, inspiring… but not poets. Only Sappho is apparently allowed to be a Real Poet and that’s mostly to do with being a lesbian, and her permission was grudgingly granted. So, not only am I not clever enough, I’m also not male enough. Thank you Robert Graves. Thank you very much. I never saw myself as potential muse material either. I’m never going to be ethereal enough for what Graves had in mind. I could get side-tracked on a rant about women as artists and historical attitudes, and contemporary ones for that matter… perhaps another day.

In the last week, I’ve slogged my way through Mark Carter’s Stalking the Goddess. It’s a big, difficult book, (akin to Ronald Hutton on that score) in which ideas and information come thick and fast. Not being an academic, and not automatically knowing all the references, I found it hard going. Interestingly, I did find it readable, in stark contrast to Graves. What Mark Carter does is takes the reader through the tangled maze of Grave’s influences, sources, and possible thinking. I learned a lot about Graves as a consequence, and the book I had struggled with, and came to understand more about how all that fits into modern

Paganism. The effort made in reading Mark’s work more than paid off. I came out feeling like I’d learned a lot, and not like I was stupid. I never once felt myself feeling inadequate over the whole not-having-a-willy thing either.

Mark has done the thing I couldn’t hope to do. He’s picked through The White Goddess, found the sources, cross referenced against possibly relevant things, and picked out the threads until you can see them and possibly make sense of them. I hate to think how long it took, but, as I’m going to be interviewing him for the Moon Book blog, I shall be asking.

And there are no spoilers in saying that yes, Grave’s arguments are actually quite wonky, his evidence wobbles a lot, and those things that looked like distraction tactics, probably were. It comes as a relief to me to think that there is no failing in my not having got to grips with Graves, and that the sense of inadequacy he gave me is not something I need to keep buying into. Good scholarship doesn’t set out to make you feel like an idiot. It gives you a fighting chance of broadening your mind. Mark Carter certainly did that for me, for which he has my profound thanks.

If you were in any way affected by the issues in this blog post, you can get Stalking the Goddess from all the usual places. Here’s one such… http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stalking-Goddess-Mark-Carter/dp/1780991738/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367316849&sr=8-1&keywords=Stalking+the+goddess

Sacred Body part 3 : Offering

by Theo Wildcroft

As pagans and druids, we worry and debate about the authenticity of our practices, our stories and songs, and our gods. We define ourselves by drawing boundaries around Northern Europe, or Celtic versus Saxon influence, or marker points in time. Forgive my bluntness, but I think we’re missing the point. We become overly influenced by concepts such as intellectual purity and social corruption, trying to fix our uniqueness, our difference, and our place in a world of indigenous faiths whilst another part of us reaches out instinctively to reclaim what we really need.

I think this pattern repeats itself all over, as physical practices bubble up out of the ground, taking on the names of other traditions as a way back into our lives. Mark Graham (http://www.druidcamp.org.uk/a-potted-history-of-druid-camp/) talks convincingly of how sweat lodges are just not the same in Britain as they are in the US – and I know he believes that this is a reclaiming, a bubbling up of an older British tradition.

When the much mourned Gabrielle Roth (http://www.gabrielleroth.com/) wrote passionately about her practice of ecstatic dance, she urged all of us to ‘sweat your prayers’. All across the world, the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic diaspora is expressing its love of life through theoretically foreign or brand new physical practices – practices of the body. I know that some of you use dances, songs and drum chants from other cultures; whilst others practice Nordic or East Asian martial arts. And I know why, because I’ve tried most of them too.

Some things that the body has to show and teach us may be universal, but I think that others are more specific to our environment or ancestry. In our own lifetimes, we are endlessly evolving and adapting. Due to the evolutionary accident that combines a narrow female pelvis and an oversized brain, we are each born months, if not years, immature. The human frame, brain and body is formed in response to experience. From the ages of both 0-3 and 10-13, your central nervous system blossoms, creating millions more synapses than you need, and then ruthlessly culling the ones you don’t use. But this process doesn’t end in mid adolescence. Instead, it continues at a slower rate throughout your life. What you repeatedly do, think and feel – what you practice – is who you become. You remake yourself every day.

And after all what we have inherited most clearly from our ancestors is our hearts, our hands and our voices. The legs we stand on were shaped by generation after generation walking this land. My hands just had to remember how to spin and knit and sew; how to wield a hammer or a saw; or how to pick up a child, because they were shaped by these acts a thousand times over, and that shape was written in my genetic code.

For many pagans, thousands of years of a natural, temperate, northern environment has done the most to shape your body – your nervous system, your digestion, your skin, and every other aspect of your physical existence, is still responding as if it lived in a shelter in the woods, feeling safe among the fires of your tribe. All this has changed in a historical heartbeat – in just a few generations. Are you aware that even the presence of artificial light in your evening environment can disrupt your sleep patterns so badly, it correlates to a statistically significant increase in rates of cancer?

Look at your hands right now, really look. Go ahead. Can you see just the tiniest fraction of all that they are asking to do; all that they are capable of – and all that has been handed down to you?

“Three drops of inspiration touch the tongue…

if the soul does not sing its song, the third is slow poison…” Emma Restall Orr

I want you to do something more for me. I want you to take off your shoes, if you’re wearing them. And your socks too, and place your feet in contact with the floor.

Some of you will be resisting the invitation. Just try, and stay with why it’s uncomfortable for you. Some of us will be worrying about whether the floor is safe, or warm enough, and whether the world is going to hurt us. Some of us will be worrying about whether our feet are ugly or smelly, or in other ways shameful and beastly; and unfit to be shared with others.

I spend a lot of time in alternative communities. Last summer I helped build the most beautiful hexagonal compost loo out of green larch wood at Monkton Wyld near Bridport (http://www.monktonwyldcourt.co.uk/). I’m finding that a good indicator of a person’s character is their attitude to waste – especially human waste.

And isn’t that interesting? How often do we cling on to a barrier between our physical self and the world; with all the other human and other than human people in it? There is a shame there that I share:

in my head, I criticise myself endlessly for my few extra pounds, my grey hairs and wrinkles, my scars and marks: for all the times my mind feels that my body has not been the perfect machine I somehow expect it to be. Part of me can’t stop doing it, even as I feel guilty about being so ungrateful. And yet…

I was taught, and I believe that the best offerings I can make to my gods, and to my world, are of my physical self. That this is a true sacrifice – not a grand offering crafted by another and bought with my money; no matter how finely wrought. This is an offering made out of my own hair and sweat and spit in the wind. First, foremost, this is who I am; this is Awen in its rawest form, incomplete, flawed, and therefore perfectly real.

In so many traditions, including our own is a linguistic link between breath and spirit. Each breath, tirelessly received and offered back is a tangible experience of exchange with the world. In each breath, we exchange gases, and warmth, and scent and moisture, and a thousand other subconscious intimacies. Your life depends upon each inhalation. Many other lives depend in return on the gift that you exhale.

How were we ever seduced as a culture into believing that humanity stands apart from a world Created for our dominion? In each breath we whisper the truth: that in this jewel of a world, there may be pain and violence and cruelty, but nothing is lost or wasted or irredeemably corrupted unless our thinking makes it so. And because this intimate relationship with the world our mother can never be truly broken, renewed as it is with each breath, and meal, and piss, with each life and death, this bond calls to us still to be healed.

Find Theo here… http://www.wildyoga.co.uk