Nimue Brown's Blog, page 43

The magical violin

(Nimue)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about finding I could play the violin again. I said that I’d need to manifest a violin, or the means to buy one. It wasn’t an idle thought, and I mentioned on Facebook that I was looking. Within half an hour a friend put up a hand to say he had an electric violin that had been sat in a box for ten years and did I want it? I’ve always fancied playing an electric, so I said yes, and then it took a couple of weeks to arrange to get it. My father very kindly funded it as my Christmas present.

I know a lot of musicians, the odds were always good that someone would have a violin they weren’t using. It’s an important point around magic and manifestation. Trying to nudge the universe for things it would be likely that you can have is more realistic than any kind of longshot. Making something manifest can also just mean asking for it in some really uncomplicated non-woo-woo ways and it’s always a good idea to start there. If there’s something real you can do to make something happen, do it, and do your magic alongside it.

Being able to play again feels miraculous to me. I had so many years when that wasn’t possible. There is magic tangled up in this – in the forms of the love and inspiration that got me to this point. I see both of these things as ways in which magic manifests in the world.

Once I get back up to speed with playing, the violin will also be a tool for magic. Music has a huge impact on mood, and you can shape a space with a tune. This is something the bards of old knew about, and there are stories of musical magic that could make people dance, or weep, laugh or sleep. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to make people dance, and in my busking days I was always delighted when my playing had that effect on a child.

I have no idea where this violin will take me or what new things it will bring into my life, but I’m excited to find out.

Local Druidry

(Nimue)

Prompted by a recent comment on the blog I thought it might be interesting to talk about Druidry and community and how that works for me. I was very active during my Midlands period in terms of going to moots, grove meetings and rituals, and then leading moots, meditation sessions and rituals. In the last ten years or so I’ve been involved with a few things locally, but nothing like on that scale.

There are moots I’ve been to a few times, but it’s not something I’ve reliably had the time, energy or transport for. I’ve been to mistletoe rites down by the Severn and had a few years of being involved with the local Druid Camp. There have been intermittent local rituals with various people over the years. The major issue there has been a lack of somewhere suitable – flat, accessible and not so windblown that you have to yell to be heard. Stroud has a lot of windy hills.

For some years I sat with a lovely group of contemplative Druids, meeting every month. That doesn’t happen anymore, and I miss it. Holding a space like that requires a bigger living room than I’ve had, so I wasn’t able to pick it up when the previous organiser needed to let it go. Otherwise, I probably would have done. Aside from that, my major local activity has been making temporary labyrinths for people to walk.

My nearest Druid Grove is in Bristol – which is a long enough journey that it has felt like too much to consider. I know I would be welcome there and I have friends in that Grove, but the distance is an issue.

I am tentatively exploring the possibility of starting something locally, because I’ve found myself in a conversation about it. The singing space I’m running in Gloucester isn’t overtly a Druid thing, but singing seasonally is part of what I do, and enabling people to come together and sing is certainly an expression of my Druidry. 

My local Pagan scene is rather lovely. We aren’t beset by personality clashes, big egos or witch wars. The local scene is supportive, with plenty of mutual respect. I know most of the people who are involved in making things go. I like them, but that doesn’t automatically mean that what they run is what I need. There’s a local Goddess Temple doing all sorts of things – as an example – but that’s not the right space for me. 

Sometimes being part of a community is a compromise, where you fit in as best you can because the need for like-minded people is an issue. Sometimes you get lucky and find that what’s on your doorstep is exactly what you need. Sometimes to get what you need you have to be prepared to run it yourself, which is a lot of work. Communities tend to be fluid as people come and go. Running Pagan spaces as a volunteer is labour intensive so it’s a lot to take on, and a lot to sustain and people can’t always do that for the long haul. 

Personal Challenges

(Nimue)

I intimated recently that there’s serious stuff afoot, but at the time I didn’t know how to talk about it. However, Keith has made the decision to chart his experiences on Facebook, and we’ve talked through how to handle the blog. I’m not going to be sharing anything too personal about him, but I will be talking broadly about how what’s happening impacts on me.

My beloved partner has cancer. At this stage he’s been through two operations, and now he’s dealing with radiotherapy and two doses of chemotherapy alongside it. We’re at the start of a six week treatment process and there’s a great deal of uncertainty ahead. How this impacts on people can vary a lot, most especially towards the end of treatment and around recovery time. It’s created a lot of uncertainty around events and gigs, but everyone we work with has been fabulous, flexible and supportive, which is deeply appreciated.

This is why we’ve dropped the idea of doing an online festival this year. Treatment is likely to affect Keith’s energy levels and his voice. Protecting his lovely singing voice through all of this is something we’re working on, but again, there’s no knowing how this is going to play out.

A week in and one of the impacts is just how much work all of this involves. The list of things that need doing every day is long, on top of appointments and daily treatments Monday to Friday. The amount of time and attention this treatment calls for is huge and I certainly hadn’t realised just how big the impact of all that would be until we got to this stage – not that we’ve had long to get to grips with the details. It’s also been a sudden and steep learning curve, with a lot of reading to do and a lot of information to get to grips with, especially around risks and side effects.

There’s every reason to think Keith will come through this without too much difficulty – he’s strong willed, physically tough, courageous and sensible in ways that will serve him well. He’s physically a very healthy person in all other ways and that helps a lot. But, there are no guarantees, and we’ll just have to see whether this works and take it all one day at a time.

One thing I’ve been feeling keenly is how very glad I am Keith chose to be with me, and that I’m the person who gets to take care of him through all of this. It’s not just about physically looking after him, but also about the emotional support he needs, and maintaining a decent quality of life. I know I can hold him through all of this. We’ve built an amazing life together, rich with joy, creativity and good things. We’re supported by good friends, and we’re good at taking care of each other. There’s a lot to learn about how to handle all of this, and handle it well. What I’m most likely to share here is what I’m learning around that.

My aim is to keep doing what I do.  That’s clearly the better mental health choice. The medical advice is to try and maintain your normal life as much as you can, so we’ll be doing that.

When a Pagan Prays

(Nimue)

It’s quite a moment in the life of a book when it crosses the 1000 sales line. This one has taken a while to get there, but it is a niche topic within a niche topic and I took a somewhat unconventional approach to the whole thing. It cheered me this week to find this book has reached this point.

I came to the subject of prayer as someone interested in it rather than someone doing it. I wanted to explore what role prayer plays in spiritual practice and I spent a lot of time reading about what people of other faiths do, as there wasn’t much Pagan material out there.

The wider social view of prayer is that it’s about asking God to give you stuff. This is not generally how things work for people who have a regular prayer practice. It’s much more interesting than that, and is an activity that can have a huge impact on a person.

Some way into the research I decided that I needed to experiment. It would not be enough to just study prayer as a topic, I was going to have to do some if I wanted to understand it. This had a huge impact on the amount of panic I was experiencing at the time and broke me out of starting each day by waking up into a full blown panic attack. Interestingly I wasn’t focusing my prayers on any particular deity or with a view to dealing with the panic. The practice itself gets a lot done regardless of how or where you direct it.

Currently Moon Books has an ebook sale on, so if you’re reading this post in January of 2024 you can get any of my ebooks from this publisher at 50% off using the code JANSALE24

When a Pagan Prays is over here – https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/our-books/when-pagan-prays

And all of my books with Collective Ink are here – https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/authors/nimue-brown

Changing your everyday practice

(Nimue)

When spiritual people talk about an everyday practice it can sound like you’re supposed to pick a thing and do it forever. This isn’t’t the case. It can be easier if you pick to do the same thing at the same time every day because then you know where it fits in. That doesn’t suit everyone.

If having an everyday practice doesn’t work for you, that’s fine. It’s totally acceptable to show up at the frequency that suits you. The most important question to ask is – what do you need from this? Once a week? Eight festivals a year? It’s all good.

An everyday practice doesn’t have to mean doing exactly the same thing every day. I tend to make a little space for meditation and contemplation and that’s usually on waking or when when settling at night, but not always. What I do varies a lot. I’ve talked about some of the specific things I’ve worked on – like having conversations with my gut inhabitants. Some meditations I visit regularly and these tend to be the ones that help my body relax. The rest of the time I explore and experiment and do things for as long as they make sense to me.

You have to try things to see if they work for you. Small everyday practices can include prayer, taking a moment with your altar, watching the sunrise, movement-based meditations, gratitude, journaling, making affirmations and more. Different times may call for different things. You will also need to try different things to figure out how they work for you.

When you’re new to something it is worth giving it a few weeks to see how you do with it. When starting out with anything it’s reasonable to feel awkward about it, especially if you’re new to having a spiritual practice. You might feel foolish or self-conscious, second guess the point of what you’re doing, worry about not being good enough and other potentially self-sabotaging things. So you have to give yourself long enough to get past that and see how you feel then.

It’s good to re-assess what you’re doing, and to do so regularly. If something has become more routine than ritual, it probably isn’t serving you anymore. If you’ve tried something and after a few weeks you aren’t getting into it then maybe try something else for a while. Think about what results you were expecting to get and whether those were realistic – especially if you were trying to do something more ambitious.

Simply checking in with yourself can be a really good fixed daily practice. Taking a moment to ask ‘how do I feel?’ and ‘what do I need?’ can help guide what you do the rest of the time. Do you need to get out and feel the air on your skin today? Do you need movement or rest? Do you need to soothe your mind or stimulate it? Give yourself permission to be a bit complicated and messy, and let your feelings and inspiration guide you.

Where the inspiration takes me

(Nimue)

One of the things I’ve learned in the last year or so is that I’m much happier when I have multiple projects on the go at the same time and when those projects are at different stages. This is an update about what I’ve got going on at the moment.

On the non-fiction side, I’m writing a book about Spirits of Place. I’m doing a chapter a month and this is available to read on Patreon as I go along. At this rate it will take me a year to get the first draft, and then I will decide how best to get it out into the world.

Also on Patreon, I’m sharing a hope-punk novel in progress. It also has some steampunk elements (well, it has a steam engine and a lot of humour.) Again I’m doing about a chapter a month, although I’m trying to get ahead of that with the writing part. Writing non-fic works fine undertaken in sporadic chunks, fiction not so much, but I’m getting away with it. 

I’ve been working on someone else’s project in recent weeks and I hope to be able to talk about that more, soon. It’s a book in translation where the English language aspect needs working on for clarity and coherence. This is very much a steampunk project, and more action oriented than my own stuff tends to be,

I have a novel I started some fifteen years ago and only managed to finish this autumn! I need to do a second draft of that, but I’m hoping to bring it out in February. I will be self publishing that, and free ebooks will be available in my ko-fi store. This is very much tied up with how I use Patreon. Support there makes it feasible for me to keep writing books and making some of them freely available. Ko-fi donations also help with this, as do people who are able to pay for ebooks. I’m a big fan of gift economy and trusting people to do what works for them.

I’m going to be looking at how to get existing Hopeless, Maine novellas out into the world, and I am in conversations with people about how to take that project forward.

I’m also brewing a folk horror novel. This is very early days, and I’m currently reading academic material about the genre – not least because I have a friend who has written a quantity of academic material about the genre! I’ve got a village to design and a vague sense of the key issues and some of the characters. I like to get my set-up figured out before I start and leave myself some room to explore the plot as I go along. I’ll be talking about this as I go because the genre itself has issues that I want to challenge in how I approach the story.

Being a modern English Druid

(Nimue)

I think it’s increasingly important to be clear about the ’English’ part of my Druidry. I’m not part of a living tradition in the way that some Druids are. I come to this path as a modern person inspired by the past. I am not a reconstructionist. I do not claim that what I do is historically accurate. I’m not personally much invested in the idea of my Englishness, but I still think it needs flagging up.

There are issues around what non-Welsh, non-Scottish and non-Irish modern Pagans do with those traditions. If this is something you want to know more about then your best bet is to find Druids who are deeply involved with those lands and cultures and take on board what they have to say about appropriation and people talking over them and misrepresenting their stuff. I’m not in a position to speak for them.

However, I live in a landscape where Druidry was practiced historically and where revival Druidry took root. I don’t think that being a Druid depends on either your ancestors of blood or your ancestors of place, and that the path should be open to anyone who wants to walk it. We can balance inclusion with respect. We can recognise that some of us come to this with ancestors who were oppressors. Most people, like myself, will have a bit of both. 

For me, my relationship with the landscape I live in is the bedrock of my Druidry. My local museum has figures of local Iron Age deities in it, and there are pre-Roman godds associated with this landscape. As I’ve talked about before, there is ‘Welsh’ mythology set in Gloucester, because the borders haven’t always been the same as they are right now. Boudicca was right out in the east of the UK – Celtic peoples were everywhere here, so in the UK we all have that as part of our landscape history.

My local Roman villa was most likely to have been Romano-British, Plenty of ‘Celtic’ people willingly adopted Roman ways of doing things. There are no hard lines between the two cultures, as further evidenced by how the Romans treated local deities, usually associating them with their own and continuing use of the same shrines. People have always been mobile, intermarriage between groups of people has always been a thing. None of us are ‘pure’ anything and notions of purity underpin a lot of fascist thinking so it’s important to take that into account.

You can be a Druid on your own terms. All you have to do is be respectful of people who may have closer and deeper ties with landscapes and deities than you do. If your personal experience of a deity makes you feel entitled to talk over or argue with people who belong to that deity’s landscape, history and traditions, take a good, hard look at yourself. Ask why you think you are so special and so important, because trust me, that’s a ‘you’ issue and has nothing to do with the godd in question.

Watery winter landscapes

(Nimue)

Landscapes can change dramatically through the year – something I talked about a bit last week. Here’s another example. In summer, these are regular fields and may have a few birds on them. Winter rain transforms this landscape into wetland, attracting huge numbers of waterbirds. There were some 3000 golden plovers out there, I was reliably informed.

It isn’t as easy to spend time in landscapes when the conditions are more challenging. What kit you can afford, how much extra laundry you can handle and how your body deals with cold, damp or slippery conditions will inform what you can do in the dark half of the year. 

However, there’s a lot to be said for knowing how landscapes change through the seasons, and what happens there. Some places are dramatically transformed. 

Wetlands are wonderful, liminal places that shift and change a lot. If you only saw this field in summer, you would not know that about it. The liminality itself becomes invisible. The field is most alive in winter when waterlogged and teaming with birdlife. Some places locally are prone to more invasive flooding. The relationship between land and water in the UK has a long history. We’ve drained a lot of wetland to use it for farming and building, but we need those wetlands to handle heavy rain. They also lock in carbon at least as much – and potentially more – than trees do.

Landscapes that seem very ordinary and seem devoid of life at some times of year can become very different places in the right conditions. It takes time to know a landscape and learn its ways. I think we can have much more meaningful relationships with places if we encounter them at different times and see how different conditions change them.

(Photo by Keith Errington)

Swan pilgrimages

(Nimue)

There are things I do as part of my relationship with the tuning year that are spiritually important to me, but don’t relate to anything traditional. These are journeys I make to connect to things that happen seasonally where I live. 

Locally one of the big winter events is the coming of the migrant swans. These are bewicks and whoopers, who breed in the arctic circle but spend their winters further south. They fly in guided by the stars and most of them come as family units returning to the same places year after year. Climate change means that they aren’t all heading as far south or west as they used to, but we do still get them.

Swans aren’t the only birds migrating south – the local wetland centre at Slimbridge attracts different kinds of ducks and geese as well. Seeing them all is wonderful.

There is a very particular kind of magic that happens, when the light is fading from the day. Swans who have been feeding on the fields fly in to spend the night on ponds in the reserve. The slanting winter light catches them, and they appear to be glowing against the backdrop of the fading day. It makes the swans seem otherworldly, and it’s an incredibly beautiful thing to see.

I try to visit the swans at least once in the winter – I’ve managed to see them twice this year. I might get to see them again before they leave. Their timings are variably each year – temperature and wind direction play large roles in when they arrive and depart. However, around December and January they are a reliable presence in the local wetlands and magical to encounter.

Intuition and the unconscious

(Nimue)

Our brains absorb far more information every day than we can consciously process. This means that the bits of our brains we aren’t conscious of do a lot of sifting, assessing and collating where we can’t see ourselves doing it. Unconscious brain functions are wonderful, strange things. It fascinates me that there are bits of us we have no conscious access too that are busily working away to keep us viable and operational. 

Our unconscious minds don’t work in the same way as the conscious stuff. They tend to be wilder and more likely to communicate in symbols and metaphors. This is the bit of us that makes lightening connections, it’s where ideas begin and flashes of inspiration come from. Unconscious processing is a very good, rational explanation for where intuition comes from.

If you’re happy with just accepting your intuition, this will be of no consequence. However, many people do struggle to trust themselves and to trust those gut feelings. We’re encouraged to think of our feelings as intrinsically irrational. This is of great service to anyone who wants to make us do things we don’t like (that would be capitalist society). Your unconscious mind is part of your animal self and it doesn’t want to be stressed sick all the time while doing dull, pointless or unsatisfying things. 

Open up to your gut feelings and intuition and your ability to function smoothly in a consumer society hell bent on destruction is likely to be compromised. 

If you do want this part of yourself, there’s a lot to be said for making some space and inviting it in. The unconscious likes to surface in unstructured ways so things like daydreaming, doodling, and improvised dance can help it bubble up into your awareness. Paying attention to dreams can help. Oracle cards and other forms of divination can be great for having a conversation with yourself. 

What we all need more than anything else isn’t the ability to predict the future, but the ability to understand ourselves in the present. What we might call intuition is part of the self trying to express significant things to other parts of the self. The more we’ve crushed our feelings and treated them as irrational, the weirder they seem when they show up. The more room we make for how we experience life, the more sense any given encounter with our deep selves will be.