Nimue Brown's Blog, page 430

No Excuses

Whenever there are acts of terrorism or public violence, we wait for the explanations. Sooner or later, the media will tell us which outfit is claiming responsibility. So often, there’s a professed cause to be highlighted or announced, some political agenda supposedly being served, and we’ll get that out and air it. The net result tends to be that the majority become more hostile to the perceived implicated minority. That can in turn lead to ‘reprisals’ as though bashing some innocent bystander from ‘the other side’ somehow evens things up. All this gets you is more anger, more hatred, more violence and more suffering.

Effectively what we do is give terrorists a media platform to sell us their useless excuses and justifications. This is a big part of the incentive. A few minutes publicity for your hate, alongside whatever sick jollies you get out of hurting random victims. I can feel a bit more understanding for people who kill specific people for specific reasons – that at least makes sense. To kill an unsuspecting stranger in the name of some kind of political idea? Some person who might have agreed with you, potentially. Some person who might have cared, might have been sympathetic (you’ll never know). To kill children. What does that prove? That other horrors happen other places and should not happen, is never going to be sorted out by blowing up random victims. It just makes people angry, and rightly so.

I think it’s really important that we stop caring what the bullshit excuse is. Don’t give the cause airing – not if people have died. Any kind of fair and legal protest should get media time and recognition, but if you set out to kill people, I think we should respond by not naming your cause, and not giving you airtime. We should name the killers, and label them as psychopaths and not give any space to talk about the excuses. Every time we air the excuses, and debate them, we validate them. It’s counter-productive.

So, I want to know the names of the people behind the Boston bombing and I want to see them sent to prison for a very long time. I don’t want to hear one word about what they claim to have been doing it for. It’s irrelevant. No one who really cares about a cause goes anonymously to blow up strangers. If you have a cause, then speaking, publicising, legitimate protest are the ways to go. Non-violent non-cooperation is fine. Actually, I’m in favour of pretty much any kind of protesting that does not lead to bloodshed. As soon as someone dies, what you’ve shown me is that really, you don’t give a shit about your cause, you’re just some sick creature that wants to kill, and latched onto this as an excuse. You’re probably insane. You have also undermined my sympathy for your cause, whatever it was.

If you want to resist this kind of violence, the place to start is by not putting information out there about the alleged reasons. There are no reasons, there are only lame excuses. Don’t talk about the excuses, don’t acknowledge them, don’t share the articles on, don’t buy the papers that give a space to the justifications of the mentally ill when they act out their deranged fantasies. None violent non-cooperation, is something we can all participate it. Let’s not co-operate with hate.

Burying Thatcherism

Today we bury a dead former politician. I can see why, for those who were directly harmed by her activities, this would be something to celebrate. If, for example, you lost family members in her Falkland Islands war, you may feel she’s responsible for that and be glad to see the back of her. If you suffered, and you feel relief in her demise, fair enough. Beyond the personal response though, I don’t think we have much to celebrate. We may be burying Thatcher, but we are not burying Thatcherism.

She changed the political landscape across the world, apparently. She changed it so much that allegedly-Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair considered her an influence. Thatcher did not believe in community, only in the selfishness and greed of the private individual. Her policies reflected that, and in turn served to make it more true. That’s going to take a lot of unpicking. The vibe is still with us – mistrust and envy your neighbour, begrudge them what they have, consider what they cost you in taxes, see the needy as an unwanted burden and expense. It’s all about the money. Under Thatcher, we sold our humanity to the highest, private bidder, or the person who could do the work we wanted for least outlay. Thatcherism means an absence of compassion. It means looking at the bottom line, not at value, or quality, or long term impact. You can see all of these ideas underpinning our short term, money orientated, environment pillaging twenty first century.

Now take a step back and look at our ailing economy. We don’t invest in innovation anything like as much as we could. We have an economics of bland mediocrity where ‘quality’ means ‘identical’ and no one wants to gamble on anything original. Our fashions, fictions, movies, TV, is mostly rehashing what is old and safe. Retro is in. Retro is that which we have done before, mostly, the sellable, the known market. Our economies dwindle. Could it be that we don’t want to spend our money on recycled ideas and old creations in barely new skins? Could it be that the drive of the bean counter is away from the desires of the consumer, not towards? This is definitely the case in the arts industries, and I suspect is true more widely, as well.

Thatcher was one of the founders of our almost religious devotion to free market economics and our wholly irrational beliefs that markets can drive everything to best effect. The worship of those Gods, Supply and Demand are hers. The prayer ‘let there be greater customer choice’ comes from the same place. Yet, we privatised the trains, and we don’t have a better service than before, ticket prices are high, and the government is still paying a subsidy. We do not speak of these things because they are tantamount to heresy. Thatcher championed privatisation. Well, we took energy out of the public domain, and the net result is that energy companies make huge profits while consumers struggle to pay bills. Of course that in turn takes money out of the rest of the economy. What Thatcher’s legacy gives us is not a thriving flow of energy and resources, but a tendency to draw too much money to too few people. It just doesn’t work, but in politics, that’s an unspeakable truth. We don’t go there.

There were problems in Britain in the late seventies. Yes, our traditional industries were ailing and failing. Yes some of the publically held resources, like British Telecom, were not working well. Thatcher told us there was one solution, and only one solution – free market, private enterprise. The magic wand to solve all ills. It wasn’t.

That we tried a thing and it hasn’t worked would not be a problem, had we not taken the concept on as indisputable truth. We sing the praises of free trade, and consumerism, even as they fail to deliver. In the last week or so, politicians have still praised her saying that what she did was the only way. I’m sensitive to the language of religious fundamentalism, and it is here, in Thatcherism, The One True Way.

Politicians like to tell us there are no alternatives to the solutions they offer, but this is ALWAYS bullshit. There are invariably other ways of tackling things. We didn’t have to ditch industry in favour of the banking sector, as Thatcher did. We could have made a bid for being a knowledge based economy. We have some of the best universities in the world. There are a lot more real jobs, real progress to make, real value to generate in a knowledge based economy. Banking is a make believe world of pretend money in which nothing of any real value is made.

I hope we manage to bury Mrs Thatcher quietly and with some dignity, and some good solid, responsible protesting alongside it. We should not be spending this much money on her funeral in the current economic conditions. The day I celebrate, however, will be the noisy burial of Thatcherism, when we collectively wake up and realise that, as in religion, so in politics: There is no one true way, there are always alternatives, we do not have to follow her lead.

(I wrote mine before I saw this – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/bury-not-just-thatcher-but-thatcherism)

Emotional Pain and Sanity

My recent blog about psychological violence elicited a very good point from Robin Herne – namely the way in which more New Agey approaches to life suggest that it’s up to us not to feel hurt or upset. We shouldn’t in this system, need or want to experience pain, and we can let it pass over us, and not be affected. This is an approach that facilitates bullying, and is often deeply unhelpful. Part of the problem is the tendency towards a glib simplicity that isn’t equal to real life situations.

Firstly there’s the issue that being able to cheerfully ignore that which might hurt, is insane, and not something to aspire to. We need negative feedback, it tells us when we are short of the mark, actually wrong, or causing pain to others. There are few things more difficult to deal with than the person who will not hear that they are causing pain and distress. No matter how uncomfortable it may be, to be a sane and functional human being we all need to be able to hear that we’ve messed up. That can hurt. We need to take that pain on the chin, and respond to it. We also need a culture in which is it allowable to make mistakes (and therefore to learn), but that’s a whole other issue. It’s very easy to tune out the negative feedback, maintaining your inner calm through total disinterest in the feelings and needs of the rest of the world. That’s not Druidry.

Then there’s the kind of hurtful stuff that comes as a result of other people’s pain, fear, insecurity and so forth. Fragile egos and wounded souls can inflict hurt, not out of malice, but sometimes because they have no idea how to do better. The ‘do unto others before they can do unto you’ mentality. Responding in kind will further entrench hostility and increase pain all round, which helps no one. Ignoring it certainly isn’t guaranteed to make them go away, and may also reinforce erroneous beliefs. If the flailing person is your partner, parent, colleague… they need dealing with, compassionately. It requires seeing past the spikey surface and finding a way to engage with what is underneath. Think about how you might try and work with an injured wild animal, and take that as a model. Move slowly, make no sudden movements or alarming noises, be patient, expect to get bitten. People who cause hurt out of their own pain can be helped out of that place and it can be well worth the effort and the odd bite. They need to learn that not everyone is going to hurt, attack or humiliate them.

There are hurts that come because someone enjoys causing pain. I think these are often more subtle, so you won’t even notice at the time that you have been reduced. Instead, you’ll be apologising for having got it wrong again, for misunderstanding, for not being good enough, clever enough, patient enough. These are the hurts that don’t (unlike the first set) offer ways to improve. They give you a sense of failure, unworthiness, insufficiency. There’s often no sense that you could do something to fix it, either. You *are* a bad person, a waste of space, a nuisance. You can’t fix that, and they treat you accordingly no matter what you do. The hurt doesn’t necessarily come in the moment of abuse, either. It’s a slow desolation of self. If you are a never good enough child, self-esteem trampled by parents or teachers, you may never even realise there are alternatives, you just internalise how rubbish you are, and that puts spikes on the inside, that will shred you perhaps for the rest of your life. It can happen in workplaces and in relationships too, although there we stand a better chance of spotting it, but not everyone does. You can break a person and them not realise what you have done, which is truly awful.

The only way to respond to the third kind of pain, is to recognise it and get the hell out. The person who will wound you and declare you never good enough, will never be impressed or won round. They may well encourage you to think it’s possible, the eternally dangled and unreachable carrot that allows them to beat you conceptually (and sometimes literally) when they please.

Emotional pain can be dealt with productively. There’s the sort we learn from to grow and develop. If you can grow and develop by taking onboard something that hurt, then it was useful pain and you benefit from it. There is the pain caused by the suffering of others, and if you spot that and deal with it compassionately, things can improve for both you and the other one, and for people around you, too. The third kind of pain serves no purpose beyond entertaining the sadist who practices it. The only thing to do is recognise them for what they are. If you can never get it right and never be good enough, you are experiencing the kind of pain that needs not only to be ignored, but to be escaped from. The greatest agony in this can be the requirement to recognise that someone whose opinion you have respected, and you have trusted, is actually rather awful. That one hurts, and fear of that pain can keep us prisoners when we should be running away. It can be easier to internalise the blame, than face the hideousness of a corrupt soul. We can fool ourselves into thinking we can save such a person, or that they only do it out of pain, but stay there long enough and you’ll see that nothing changes – you do not become ‘good enough’ to please them and they do not become secure enough to let go of their justifications for abuse. There comes a time when sanity demands saying ‘enough’ and walking away.

SACRED BODY, PART 1: CONTEXT AND EXPERIENCE

by Theo Wildcroft

This is an adapted transcript of a talk given at The Druid Network Conference in November ’12. It’s shared here in multiple instalments. I’m so blessed and honoured that it has found a more permanent home on Druid Life.

“Had I paid closer attention to those chickens I would have known I had to let go of my head and follow my feet if I wanted to dance…” Gabrielle Roth

My name is Theo Wildcroft and I’m a reluctant druid. I’ve known I was an animist since someone told me what it meant. And if I hadn’t spoilt my census form, I would have put ‘pagan dash’ as my religion, of course. But the label of ‘druid’ has always felt like a lot to live up to.

I do know that I’m a yoga teacher, because that’s what I put on my tax return. So as I’m often a bit nervous talking to large groups, I start with something I know, and you can join in at home. If you are able to, please stand up. Humour me. It’ll be worth it, and if not it’ll all be over in a minute, I promise. Lift one leg off the floor, and place that foot against the other leg. This is known as tree pose. You can place the foot really low down on your other leg and be a sapling, or high up if you’re feeling steady as an oak. Now, can you close your eyes, even, maybe? Just for a moment? You can sit down again now – carefully. And now I know you’re awake, let’s get back to the druidry.

The truth is I have always considered my spiritual beliefs about how the universe is made to be a work in progress, honed in discussion and contemplation, rather than sanctioned by a faith. And I struggle with things like labels, with belonging, with tradition and longevity. I appreciate archaeology and ancient texts, but it isn’t the ground out of which I construct my life.

I am, nonetheless, deeply in love with nature in all its forms. I am irreverent in temperament and anarchic in my politics. I know, it shows. Anyway, over the last few years, the druid community has become the place I most feel at home spiritually. Well, parts of it, at least.

EXPERIENCE

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time…” T.S. Eliot

So if my beliefs are changeable and my allegiance to labels is fickle, what is left is practice. What is left is what I do. And I agree with Graham Harvey (http://www.grahamharvey.org/) that the evolving practice of our religion is its centre and anchor. The offerings, rituals and prayers; whether we practice our faith in silent contemplation or noisy celebration; when we choose to do this alone, or in a group, or in public – this is what defines what kind of druids we are.

Experience, in the end, is what brings us together and divides us. Nowhere is this more evident than at Stonehenge, where thousands of people can agree on a date and a time and a cause for celebration, but then argue endlessly about whether it is more sacred to drum and dance, to drink and toast, or to sit silently.

Over the years, I’ve watched druid communities interact, at public and private ritual. I’ve been to quiet meet ups with the Order of the Yew (http://druidnetwork.org/yew), done my duty to represent The Druid Network at the Stonehenge Round Table and returned each year to the Rainbow Futures Druid Camp (www.druidcamp.org.uk). I’ve debated and laughed and fallen out spectacularly in the Druid Network’s online forums (http://druidnetwork.org), and recently fallen into some slightly bewildering druid Facebook groups. Now here I am, blogging for the first time. Be gentle with me!

Along the way, I’ve had interactions that felt open, respectful and generous and others riven with prejudice, suspicion, even contempt on both sides, sometimes with exactly the same people. I’ve long contemplated what determines the qualities of these experiences. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it is only when we are physically present with each other that we can build the bonds of trust that forge relationships of real community. Online, we are all to some extent talking to the shadows inside our heads, to previous hurts and battles of wits. And if we haven’t spent real time together, it’s easy to forget that there are real people out there, especially when we cannot see the blushes start or tears fall.

More, it is in shared experience that our bonds are deepened into the tribal strength that establishes us as a collective force in the world. In moving together, smiling together, or just sitting together, we are able to experience each other; to meet heart to heart, with no place to hide inside our worst fears of each other. I know that the more time I spend with you in sweat lodges and circles and the less time on Facebook, the closer to our shared humanity I feel.

How often do we allow our druidry to be diminished, like here, to the width of a broadband cable? I know we are scattered across the geography of the British Isles and far beyond, and wherever we live, we are still scared of being the only pagans in the village. But sometimes it feels as if, having declared the divinity of Nature we worship her from a distance, using the icons pictured inside our houses, and inside our skulls when all the time she is immanent and all encompassing, just waiting outside the door. I’ll wait here while you go let her in, shall I?

Psychological violence

The brain is a physical structure which is shaped by what we do with it – learning, practice, habit, life experience, memory – this is all part of the mix. Our minds are not amorphous things separate from our bodies but real, tangible structures that respond to what happens to them. Hit someone in the leg with a hammer and you will get nasty bruises, and possibly a broken bone. As a culture we take that kind of thing seriously. However, we seem to assume the mind is a whole other thing. Violent assaults on the psyche are not assumed to cause breakages in the same way. Now, when it comes to considering criminal damage, it will always be hard to produce evidence of psychological trauma, but I see no reason why that should make it culturally acceptable. I find myself wondering if depression and anxiety are to psychological damage what bruises are to the hammer.

For many the idea of psychological violence will involve really overt forms of torture. In practice we aren’t talking about watching puppies being drowned, or being threatened with death for not complying. Most psychological violence is far more every day. As a child I was taught the rhyme ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never harm me.’ It’s a commonly held idea. Bullying words aren’t causing you real pain, is the theory. We’re taught to accept this kind of bullying and to feel ashamed if we are hurt by it. This only serves the abusers. Humiliation, denigration, ridicule, dismissal, all undermine the sense of self. These things take away self-esteem and your feeling of being a person. The lower key, more mundane stuff is insidious, and can be inflicted daily. I remember a woman whose husband shouted at her all the time. She was a mess, but did not feel she could go to the police because she expected they would tell her she was being silly. He hadn’t laid a finger on her, but her nerves were tattered. I do not know how that one ended.

It’s so easy to make clear to a person that they are worthless, useless, a nuisance, unwanted, unloveable, unacceptable. The martyred air of one who is having to go to some lengths to tolerate you, is soul destroying to encounter. Having holes picked in the smallest things that you say and do, as though your small tastes and preferences are stupid. Being blamed is another one. Having your emotions ridiculed. Try being bullied to the point of tears by a person and then have that same person call you melodramatic and irrational for crying. A bit of you dies on the inside.

Being shouted at, being mocked, being the butt of cruel jokes. Your body treated as a sexual object, not a living expression of yourself. Or, your body treated as disgusting, or as something to laugh at, or as something you should feel ashamed of. Try telling someone they’d look so much better if they wore what you told them to, day after day, and see if their self-esteem holds up… or don’t if you’re any kind of decent human being. Lecture, demand, punish, tell off other adults as though they were especially stupid children. So often the one dishing it out is painfully insecure and only doing it to big themselves up. That flailing, fragile ego can be a source of so much pain and destruction.

Evil is often small. The worst things we do to each other are often mundane. Most of us will not be literally stabbed in the back. It’s that other stuff, the bruising of soul, the cutting up of identity, that causes the damage. The wounding to feelings is not fantasy, it’s not something we *should* be able to shrug off. Emotional experience is no less real than the hammer, and the brain is no less a physical structure than the leg.

What worries me most at the moment is the campaign of psychological violence being deliberately waged. The perpetrators are in the media and in parliament, and the people they are working to destroy, are the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Slackers. Scroungers. Worthless, useless, sponges, waste of space… and who, being presented with that on a daily basis, does not feel themselves dying on the inside? Who can hold out against that and not start to feel that the world might be a better place if they were dead?

Depression kills people. If you bully a person to death with sustained psychological violence, they are no less dead, and you are no less guilty of killing them then if you had done it with the hammer instead. The law might not be able to judge it, but a culture can. We do not have to lie down and take it. We won’t fix it by taking up the same arms and using psychological violence back. That’s just another way of losing. Of course it’s tempting, of course we feel justified, and want to lash out and even the score, but all that gets in the end is more pain, more damage. We can say ‘not good enough’ and we can disagree, non-violently. Not just with the politicians, but anywhere people start taking word-hammers to other people’s minds.

Supporting Judith O’Grady

The odds are that you’ve not previously heard of Judith O’Grady. She’s a pagan author, of the book God Speaking, published by Moon Books. (pre order info here – http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-God-Speaking-Judith-OGrady/dp/1780992815) I think it’s a very important book, which is why I’m going to be putting in some effort trying to make sure it gets into people’s hands. The trouble is, Judith isn’t famous already. She doesn’t have a TV program, or a movie deal. Most people have never heard of her. This means that most physical book stores will not automatically put her books on the shelves, and most people will never even encounter her book, and this sucks. So let’s not have it be like that.

God Speaking tackles head on that problem about mental health versus religious experience. We live in a society where to hear voices, is to be crazy. Most Pagans sidle carefully around the subject, wanting to claim personal experience but at the same time not wanting to sound deranged. This book explores the issues in a witty and compelling way. Judith O’Grady is a person with a lot of valuable insight to share, and a really accessible writing style. She deserves and audience.

I think a lot of people outside the book industry imagine that what happens when you are published, is that the world magically beats a path to your door, you become wealthy and it’s all good. What really happens is this. Something like 250,000 books are published every year. Many barely sell at all. Something like half the books printed end up in landfill. Most authors, you have never heard of. Most books, you have never heard of. Most will never get into bookshops, or libraries. JK Rowling, Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey represent wild anomalies, not the normal authoring life. Which is a pity really, because there’s a lot of good stuff out there deserving of far better sales than it gets.

Most publishers simply don’t have the huge international marketing budgets needed to compete with film, TV, computer games, internet, phone aps and all the other things you may spend your disposable income on. Moon Book certainly cannot buy Judith the visibility she deserves. These days even the big houses fail to manage that. Books depend on word of mouth. That means you.

I want there to be good books. I am very bored of lightweight, predictable, derivative writing, and that’s what dominates the mainstream. I am desperate for substantial, engaging, well written and original material, fiction and non fiction alike. Therefore, if I find something good I am going to shout about it. The thing is, if no one buys an author’s books, they get depressed and demoralised. They maybe can’t justify the time and energy it takes to make another one. They maybe don’t see any point. I’ve been dangerously close to that myself, and this is part of my solution to that problem. If we could establish that there is a market for good, ground-breaking, original, surprising stuff maybe the mainstream publishers and bookstores would not focus so much on the celebrity crap, the obvious rip-offs and all the rest. I want nothing short of a revolution in the industry.

So here’s what we need to do, in this case and in others. We need reviews of Judith O’Grady’s work in as many places as possible. If you have a review site, can review for a publication or have a blog with a LOT of followers, see if you can get a review copy from the publisher. I think people who read this book will be convinced of its merits. I’m doing this purely because I read the book and was really inspired by it. Or, if you can take a blog post or an article, or something of that ilk and put it online and tell people about it, step up. If you leave a comment here I can get your email address from it and pass it to Judith. She’s not really an internet person, but she has a lot of ideas and opinions and will happily write you some content. Also, if you blog her stuff, tell me and I will tout the hell out of that post as well.

If you’re reading this and thinking ‘I know a book that deserves this support’ then get the word out. If you think I can help, tell me. Review on goodreads and amazon. Mention it on facebook. For one, authors do notice this stuff and it really seriously can mean the difference between feeling there is a point to what you do and keeping going, or feeling all is hopeless futility and quitting. One good word. One person who understood and was inspired. That’s honestly how marginal the creative life can be. So if you value something, talk about it.

Beloved and not so beloved dead.

Reblogged from The Animist's Craft:

I write this on a day when I have had to turn the radio off. Thankfully we do not have a television, so we have been spared from a good deal of the media frenzy surrounding the death of Margaret Thatcher this week. Having got through BBC Radio 4's morning news program, just about, the prospect of a day full of obituaries, analysis of her life and work, frankly fills me with rage.

Read more… 1,160 more words

Red has covered this topic so well, that I wanted to reblog it. I'd been pondering for a couple of days now how to respond to the death of Margaret Thatcher, and Red has captured so much that resonates, tht I think it makes far more sense to point you at her reflections rather than cobbling together something of my own. Enjoy...

Zen Druidry and other meanderings

My friend Jo van der Hoeven’s lovely little book ‘Zen Druidry’ is out in paperback now. I’ve already read it, and can vouch for it being very nicely written and full of interesting and engaging ideas. I’m not a Zen person, but I enjoy reading about different paths. I believe we can learn a great deal by exploring the commonality between faiths, and also looking at the differences. There are enough overlaps between Buddhism and Druidry that plenty of people pair the two. Druidry, after all, suffers from a lack of ancient texts. Buddhism has plenty of source material, but is very much part of a different land and culture. Taking the bits that make sense and placing them where you are can work with many different paths.

I read widely and am fascinated by other faiths. Shinto, Jainism and Hinduism have recently featured a lot, and I’ve been reading about Zen (aside from Jo’s book) and want to get some Zen Koan teachings. I want to be very clear that this is not about a pick and mix approach to religions, nor about any kind spiritual tourism. I want to learn about what it is to be human, and I think belief is a window to the human condition as much as anything else. Cultures and alternative perspectives fascinate me, I read what philosophy I can manage, I read atheist writers… I’m a bit of an omnivore.

Zen Druidry made a lot of sense to me. I might not choose to go that way, but I can understand it, I see the attraction and it has influenced me a bit in terms of my meditation practice. Recently I’ve also had a look at some reconstructionist Druid writing. Now, given that this is just Druidry, it would be fair to assume this would be even more appealing and meaningful to me than all the ‘foreign’ faiths. I’m hugely interested in history, in the Celts, archaeology, the mediaeval fiction… and yet I fall down entirely with Celtic reconstruction. Why is it that, when I can comfortably read so widely, I struggle with what *should* be closest and most accessible? I can read, and know mostly what’s being referred to, recognise the source material, it’s not like I don’t know my stuff. I’m not an expert on Celtic history, but I’ve got some awareness.

I think it’s this. Religions evolve, and they do so slowly over long periods, punctuated by the occasional upheavals that, for example, bring Christianity out of Judaism, or creates splits into new subsets. Through the evolution process, religions stay with us. If I read about Shinto, I’m reading about something written for a modern audience. Even history is filtered through so that my mind can take it in. The one thing I struggle with is the idea that anyone, of any faith here and now could hope to fully understand the thoughts and beliefs of anyone from two thousand and more years ago. This is the premise on which reconstruction depends – that we can go to the source material, such as it is, and from that we can even viably attempt an understanding at the people who lived it at the time. That from our centrally heated houses with a supermarket down the road we could have some hope of comprehending what it would mean to be utterly dependant on the land you live on, just for starters.

I don’t think most of us have the slightest chance of making the jump.

I remember being told once that Vikings couldn’t have brightly coloured clothes, because as soon as you wash them, those old dyes run, and wash out. Of course he’d chucked his trousers in a washing machine. Soap. Hot water. If you don’t wash often and you don’t wash hot, you can have those colours just fine. A tiny example of how easily we fail to grasp the implications of difference.

Zen Druidry looks a little bit like modern, western Zen, which probably looks a bit like Japanese contemporary Zen which in turn bears some resemblance to other forms of Buddhism, and that no doubt has some stuff in common with forms of Buddhism through its history and through those roots back to the Vedic culture it began in and from there back into something I don’t know much about yet. But apparently that was an oral tradition, teaching in groves. It could be that Buddhism and Jainism, as post-Vedic attempts at reviving pre-Vedic culture have more relationship with something Indo-European that looks like Druidry than picking over Roman remains ever will. A living, evolving tradition may have more to say to us about how Druidry would have evolved, than the remnants of Druidry do. We’ll never know.

In the meantime, you can find Jo’s blog here –www.octopusdance.wordpress.com and here book here – http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portal-Zen-Druidry-Natural-Awareness/dp/1780993900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365680961&sr=8-1&keywords=zen+druidry

The tales we tell

Humans are storytelling creatures, and our favourite subject is ourselves. We tell stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we aspire to be going. For many, the process of growing up is the process of changing those aspirational stories from wanting world peace, to wanting a nice kitchen. Thus far I have singularly failed to grow up, and am doing my best to keep it that way.

We know each other to a large degree through our stories. It’s one thing when you live amongst the people you grew up with, all holding the same myths in common, identities interlocking, but quite another meeting strangers. We go off to university and other places to reinvent ourselves. When I changed town, I changed name. As a child, I had a name I hated, when I moved to a place no one knew me, I was free to offer any name I liked, and I did. Having come back to the place I grew up, that old, unwanted me hangs around like a ghost. Sometimes it is simpler to answer to the old name and not tell the tales of change.

Much reinvention is harmless, some of it is actually productive. A clean slate to experiment with ideas of self can be a good place to find out who you are, free from all the assumptions that chained you as you grew. Live your life out in the same place, and those stories of youthful error can become your defining features, whether you want them or not. Then there’s that other kind of reinvention. The sort that doesn’t mention time spent in prison, much less the reason for it. The sort that invents prestige and experience in order to impress. Offering the fantasy of who we wanted to be, and not the reality.

I’ve been through a few of these, and the mind bending process of having to unpick the threads of my own life from the vast tangles of other people’s fantasy webs. The trouble is that one little lie is seldom enough, they need extra details to make the story plausible. Characters are added in. Friends, lovers, events, and once those stories tangle into other people’s lives, it gets complicated.

I think about the man who told his family he had an agricultural accident, leaving him scarred for life, but who told his friends he was injured whilst fighting as a mercenary. Maybe neither version is true. That one didn’t turn out to be terribly important, because no one was counting on his soldiering expertise. It could have been a very different story if we were.

Now here we all are living our lives in public, where the guff that a teenage girl says can come back and cost her a lucrative job. These days you can’t just move town, you’ll have to start a whole new online identity if you want to step away from the past. The past, I have noticed, has a knack of coming back, and if it doesn’t fit with the story you tell, that can get messy. The ex girlfriend who isn’t ex at all, the child you didn’t admit to having, the friends and enemies historical who it turns out have no desire to be written out of the story.

We invent ourselves all the time, in every expression of self from conversations with friends and colleagues to the snippets of life we put up in public places. I think the internet may have made some of us more self-conscious in our story making. It also makes it easier to spin incredible webs of lies and deceit. Invent whole identities. I’ve seen friends burned by attractions to works of fiction in online dating. I’ve met people who were so convinced by their own stories that they had no awareness of how they might be perceived from the outside.

It’s no good flashing the words around if there’s nothing to back them up. Of course we can invent and reinvent ourselves, that can be a good part of the learning and growing process. Everyone should have the scope to change, but if we don’t live out that ‘once upon a time’ narrative, there are always going to be consequences. The bigger the story, the harder it is to tell what it might be going to do to us.

That’s my story, anyway.

What nature does

In the comments recently, Alex observed that nature is sex, violence and death and went on to make some suggestions about how we might relate to it, ourselves and the fluffy safety of facebook, off the back of that. I’ve pondered this at length. I took that ponder down the towpath last night, and saw a fox in a field of lambs. I stopped to watch. The lambs were really curious about the fox, two of them started trotting about after it. The fox moved away from them. Nobody died. Of course ultimately everything dies, and things are dying all the time, and eating each other, and breeding. But this is a fragment of the story.

I’ve watched swans mating. The seconds of that were far shorter than the strange, almost courtly dance that came afterwards, and are nothing compared to the long weeks of sitting on eggs that will follow, and the months of teaching cygnets how to be swans. Trees spend quite a lot of time having sex – and usually attempt to get it on with my nasal passages for good measure. They have their cycles of dying back and growing, but what trees seem to spend most of their time doing, is sunbathing.

I spend a lot of time outdoors and have direct contact with wild and natural things on pretty much a daily basis. Nature sleeps when it can, and a lot of it sunbathes. I see social interactions, and yes, I see fish die in the beaks of cormorants, and small birds hunting for insects. I saw the pigeon the otters got, or at least, what was left of it and I saw a gull take a baby coot. Comparing the moments of drama, violence, sex and death to the hours of very little happening leads me to believe that while sex, death and violence are part of nature, there’s a lot of other stuff going on too.

One of those things, is play. I’ve watched the buzzards riding the thermals, drifting up into the sky until they are almost invisible flecks. They can’t hunt from up there. It serves no practical purpose. I listen to the dawn chorus most mornings, to the blackbirds singing at sunset and the settling sounds from the rookery at night. Communication, expression – there may be things about group bonding and territory there, but it’s a big part of their lives. Maybe it ultimately serves the sex and death agenda. Or maybe what the sex and death get us, is opportunities to sunbathe, sing, and ride the winds. I’ve watched the gulls ride on the wave behind the Severn bore, and get airbourn in high winds apparently for the express purpose of being blown about. I’ve watched the huge flocks of starlings wheel across the sky at twilight, and the water voles diving exuberantly into the canal because they could, not because it was practical.

Reducing the world down to the basic mechanics of the selfish gene busily reproducing itself and ousting competitors misses a lot of what nature does. Some of nature is co-operative. Some of it is playful. Most of it likes to lounge about doing very little, when it can. Spending a lot of time with the wild things, sex, death and violence look like a tiny part of the whole, and aren’t always the most important bits. I say this because I believe that whatever you are doing right now has to count as one of the most important bits. However, nature programs, with their emphasis on drama and desire for narrative are terribly prone to giving misleading shows of sex, death and violence. I can see how watching a lot of nature on the TV might leave a person with a distorted sense of what ‘nature’ actually means. We need to get away from the human storytelling with its tabloid obsessions, and get out amongst the trees, where the birds are singing, things are growing, and there is life being lived, not just the bits that go at either end of life.