Nimue Brown's Blog, page 431

Druid authority and ownership

On facebook a couple of days back, a chap remarked that a group we were in was not moderated and it was down to individuals using it. This made me realise that some awareness raising might be in order. Pretty much every space you encounter as a Pagan or Druid, online and in the real world, is owned by someone. Often there are layers of ownership with various different degrees of authority and responsibility associated with them.

Take this blog. I have the power to remove comments, and I can probably block people from making comments too. However, wordpress owns the site, not me, and they have the right to boot me if I do something that breaks their terms and conditions, or I do anything more generally illegal. Then wordpress are buying their website space from someone to whom they will be answerable, and that could impact on me in ways I have no power over.

Every facebook group has admins, and that’s true of any other space online. Someone has set it up, has control of it and can, at least in theory, moderate, ban, report and otherwise wield authority. Choosing not to use the power you have does not make it cease to exist. Every online space is managed by someone, and owned by a company who have authority over the space-manager, and probably owned again by the website host.

Offline you’ll find much the same thing. Every group, moot, grove, event, is run by someone. Not knowing who they are doesn’t mean they aren’t there. That person probably won’t own the space, so again there’s that second layer of authority – the pub landlord for the moot, the local council for the public land you do your rituals on and so forth.

There is nowhere Pagans get together that is not owned and in theory, managed. Some facilitators choose to be more active than others, some are better at it than others. In the best space, you don’t notice the manifestations of authority because they are good enough to be smoothly invisible.

Now, most of the time, the people who look after Pagan spaces – hold those facebook groups and blogs, run the moots and the rituals, are not paid. They put in their own time, money and energy, for the pleasure of making a thing go. I think this is worth bearing in mind. Any time you get into a public Pagan space, you are stepping into something that someone has made, put their energy into, and cares about. Think of it as walking into their garden, or their living room, if it helps. None of us would walk into someone’s house and deliberately crap on the floor, I assume, but we do it all the time in virtual spaces and I’ve seen a fair bit of it in actual ones (not literally, I hasten to add!).

We take the organisers for granted. We assume we have a right to demand things of them and that we are entitled to the service they provide, and so if we don’t think it’s up to scratch we hassle them. Remember these are unpaid volunteers, usually, and doing it for love. It is a different scenario when you are paying and someone is profiting, but it’s very easy to tell if you are paying and what you are paying for. Mostly you are paying for the venue hire. When we go into someone else’s space (and unless you are the one with the responsibility, it will be someone else’s space) and we are rude, inconsiderate, aggressive and so forth, we are not being fair to the person whose space it is. Now, maybe someone else was already being rude and aggressive, but, I go back to the pooing on the floor metaphor. The answer to someone taking a dump is not to take a retaliatory dump yourself. It just doesn’t work.

Every space, potentially, is sacred to someone. Every space, potentially, represents an act of love, service and devotion. That deserves respect, always. Not every space works. Not every space is free from problems. The question is, do we choose to trek in more muck, or do we offer to bring a bucket and mop and get our hands dirty actually putting things right again?

If you don’t support the people who run things, eventually they burn out, becoming so depressed and demoralised that they quit, and the space usually vanishes at that point. A little care of the people who are working on your behalf goes a long way, and makes more good things possible. What you do as a visiting individual really does matter.

A silly thing

This was not written for anyone in particular, just generally inspired by people (Druids and not-Druids alike) who become focused on Being Important and lose sight of actually being right, or useful, or anything else worth having. The lure of fame, celebrity and importance can blind us to what is of real value, and in our celebrity obsessed culture, a bit of taking the piss may be good for the soul.

And yes, I probably do spend too much time listening to the moe commercially driven end of contemporary music, but in my defence, I have a child, and a curious addiction to the radio 1 chart show (although I miss the top ten each week to switch over for Genevieve Tudor’s most excellent folk program…) I appear to have digressed…

Hardcore Archdruid Style

Got my archdruid on

Looking big and shiny

Got to polish it hard

Feelin’ pedantic and whiney.

Dust off my ego, shake out the robe

Declare myself Chief Druid of the globe.

Got my archdruid on.

No use complaining, my moon ain’t waining,

I’m jamming and slamming and

Nobody say hamming

Not a whiff of Shatner here.

No lingering smell of cheese.

I’m holier by far than thou

That’s enlightenment you’re smelling now.

Pimp my funky awen, yeah

(I’m exceedingly gangsta and down with the kids in my hood,

I mention this in case you are too middle aged

To automatically appreciate how badassed and street I am.)

And also I should like you to know

That you are wrong about everything.

(I’m increasingly attracted by the potential of really bad poetry. I think bad poetry slams could be pant-wettingly funny, highly creative, and well worth exploring. Anyone fancy a go?)

In Defence of Pretty Things

There are people in the Pagan community who feel that we need to get away from all the lightweight fluff and focus on that which is dark and serious. In fact, so great is our need for darkness, they believe, that they will supply it by wounding, attacking, attempting to humiliate and denigrate. Now, being someone who does not believe there is a one true way, I think everyone else’s beliefs are their own business. I’m delighted to share ideas, to listen to other views, I’m always open to taking onboard new ideas, but I can’t be converted because of that ultimate disbelief about ultimate truth. I’m also not going to try and convert you, because I don’t know that there isn’t one true way and maybe you have found it – if so, all power to you. However, that doesn’t mean I’m happy to accept psychological violence.

I could write you thousands of words about the dark things in this world. Pain and suffering, injustice, cruelty, those who died too young and those who died too slowly. The things that went heart breakingly wrong, the beautiful places now covered in tarmac. But you know this. You know it because you have your own stories too, of things you have survived and horrors you’ve seen second hand happening to people you care about. Odds are you’ve listened to the news, and there’s material enough there for weeping over, most days. The world is not short of dark things, or of suffering.

Most of us cannot hope to make much difference in face of that. Getting up every day with the intention of doing something good is not fluffy and lightweight. It is a heroic commitment to combatting outrageous odds. It is a daily battle with apathy and despair for many of us, and yet we show up and try anyway. To take your pain and try to transmute it into beauty – as so many creative people do, is an act of courage and defiance. I have read your poems, and seen your art works. I have listened to your songs, and I know something of the bravery of inspired effort that goes on, under-recognised, day to day. It takes guts to keep doing the right things when the systems themselves create pressure to cheat, lie, abuse, crush, denigrate and generally ruin. The short cuts and easy options abound, and most of them have a dash of dishonour in the mix. The right things often call for effort, a little sacrifice, a lot of caring. Day in, and day out. Thats not fluff, it’s often the most important work we do.

I love the cute, fluffy, warm-hearted memes that float around on facebook and other such places. I love the phrases of affirmation and the pictures of pretty landscapes people post. When I am low, I go to facebook for comfort, safe in the knowledge that there will be a beautiful bit of art to look at, or a gorgeous craft item to feel inspired by, or some warm bit of humanity that someone has shared from George Takai. Best of all, there are cute pictures of cats coupled with amusing captions. A reminder that there is more to life than the darkness. That humanity is capable of loveliness in many forms. That my friends are splendid human beings who care, and who, in small gestures, are trying to contribute to the good stuff, not pile on the shit.

To people who think we need to experience more darkness, I say this. You are making assumptions. You don’t know what the rest of my life looks like, or anyone else’s. You don’t know how ‘real’ the rest of it is – you measure realness by suffering, and yet you have no way to measure what portion of pain anyone else has been served. I can only assume that people who champion darkness actually have very cossetted, comfortable lives and have yet to be broken open by something awful. If you want darkness, get off facebook, step away from the social networks and go listen to the news. Step outside somewhere you can encounter other people for real. Try looking at a swan’s nest surrounded by plastic bottles, just as a small and easy start. Try looking for a creature that is extinct already. The real world is full of pain, it is out there waiting for you and all you have to do is care enough to let it in. Better work on that than trying to put the rest of us ‘right’.

When your heart has been broken enough times, perhaps you will come to realise that sometimes, the best thing to find is a pretty thing that some other human being has seen fit to make, in defiance of the shit.

The consequences of anger

Plenty of religions (and Yoda) discourage anger, but we don’t talk much beyond vague ‘bad karma’ and ‘god doesn’t like it’ ideas about the consequences of anger. There are times when rage is a good and needful thing, enabling us to change perceptions, change our lives and so forth. There are times when dramatic upheavals and huge responses are called for. The trouble is that the anger lingers on long after the moment has passed. The echoes of historical injustice, the memory of pain, can keep us trapped in a moment that has actually gone. I know because I’ve done it. Then there are the smaller things that people let themselves get angry about, and can still be bringing up years after they happened. I don’t think I do that much, but I’ve been on the receiving end of it, and yes, that makes me angry. It’s so easy to get angry with someone else’s anger, too, and escalate the thing up into something truly hideous.

I feel anger as a physical tension in my body, and there’s a definite relationship between it, and anxiety. A lot of my anxiety has to do with the things I am also angry about. I don’t want them to happen to me again. I don’t want to be a victim. I’m angry because I am afraid, and afraid because I am angry and round it goes. Live there and it will make you very, very ill. My experience of angry people suggests that a significant number (but not all) are angry defensively, trying to protect themselves from wrongs and threats, real and imagined. When the threats are real, the anger can be useful. When the threats are imagined, the anger is as dangerous to the person holding it as to anyone else. Someone who has got into the habit of feeling afraid may no longer be able to tell the difference. There are people who are determined to cast themselves in the victim role so as to justify lashing out in anger against others as well.

There are people who seem to enjoy being angry. It can, after all, feel powerful. And yes, the righteous anger that throws off the chains of slaves and brings down tyrannies is a good kind of power, but that can get addictive. Of course when we are angry we want to believe that we have the moral high ground and are entitled to hit out, with words or fists. We want to feel good about manifesting our rage. Movies are full of examples of ‘heroes’ who do just this, reinforcing our beliefs about how good it is to crush the opposition. Only it isn’t good. It leads to retaliation and feuds. It leads to broken relationships that cannot be fixed. As soon as you get into win/lose scenarios, everyone loses.

It’s not easy stepping away from what you firmly believe to be righteous indignation. That hunger for justice, that need to have your pain recognised, the desire that other people should do something about it… I’ve seen what it does. I’ve yet to see someone come out of the angry place actually happy with the outcome. It’s not about the winning, it’s about what the being angry does to you. It robs you of peace. It keeps you revisiting all the things that hurt. There comes a time to put it behind you, learn what you can and move on. Where that place is will vary depending on person and circumstance of course, it’s not for anyone else to dictate who should be ‘over it’ by now.

I’m alert to signs that people are angry because they are afraid. Sometimes those can be eased with a gentler, more careful approach. I’m not going to be angry with someone because they need me to be more careful with them – that would be pointless, and would entrench the fear. I’ve had people get angry with me on those terms, it achieves nothing good, and creates more misery. If I think someone just enjoys being angry, I’ve learned not to argue because there’s no point, it just makes them worse. Better to walk away and come back if they calm down. I’m not interested in being a whipping post.

My own anger, I am trying to turn into something else. I’m not prepared to let it keep me in an afraid place. Anger can also feed courage. It can be the motivation to stand up and say or do what is necessary – not to strike back, not to lash out or to hurt but to calmly face down and try to fix. The kind of anger that would enable me to calmly support other people who need help, and calmly not escalate things when other people are being bloody stupid. It’s not about supressing the feelings, or not experiencing anger, it’s not letting it run on and not wilfully feeding it to get to some dramatic shouty place, and not enabling the people around me to go their either. Not that I live with anyone shouty anymore, but there’s a whole world out there…

Becoming a non-person

It’s well known that if you want to destroy a person, or a minority group, it’s best to start by dehumanising them. This makes it easier for your people to feel comfortable about the destruction process, and it also makes the victim more passive and easier to destroy. In fact, do a good enough job of the dehumanising and the victim will sometimes destroy themselves and spare you the effort. What further complicates this already nasty issue, is that most of us assume (until it happens to us) that we could resist. We think we’re clever enough to see through the propaganda, smart enough to get out of the violent relationship, capable of resisting government led denigration. The people who don’t, are therefore stupid and probably deserve it, we imagine. This actually makes us easier to take down too, because we refuse to see what’s happening. We don’t want to believe we’re falling, we want to beleive we’re clever enough that it couldn’t be hppening to us. Once someone is starting to go under, it gets easier to push them all the way down.

There are a number of ways to turn someone into a non-person, and you can start small. Constant criticism of lifestyle choices, personal appearance, preferences and so forth undermines confidence. We judge by economic contribution (our elderly suffer as a consequence.) Ridiculing of opinion – which we see all the time online and in the media. “Only a stupid person could think the way you do.” Doing things and then lying and saying they never happened (as is so often the way with workplace bullying). Minimising damage. We only pushed him, it wasn’t really a thump. It was only a joke, we didn’t mean for her to kill herself… Blaming the victim – we aren’t doing this to them, it’s happening because they are weak, stupid, lazy and irresponsible. Labelling them – note the way in which the word ‘benefits’ is so regularly publically linked to the word ‘fraud’ so that when you hear the first the second is more likely to show up in your head. (Illegal) Immigrants, Muslim (terrorists) Unemployed (scroungers) … there are many more, but you get the idea. We build the associations.

Becoming a non-person isn’t an event. It isn’t about a single occasion of someone being a bit mean (really, you’re a man, you can take it). It isn’t weakness (thin skinned, melodramatic, making a fuss). Note how we can further denigrate people for becoming victims. No, this is a process, and it can happen so slowly and over such a long time that you don’t even notice your personhood being stripped away. Or your participation in doing it to someone else. You slowly become an object, an expense, a nuisance, a scrounger. You stop being Bob who can tell a good joke and likes the footy, and you become that useless man. You stop being beautiful Esme who is a great mum, and become that lump of meat he shoves round the kitchen of a Friday night before using for sex. And somewhere, maybe you stop looking at yourself in the mirror because you can’t bear the eyes of the person looking back at you. Somewhere in the process you start to believe, as you are being told, that this all makes perfect sense: it’s happening because you deserve it. If everything around you reinforces your status as a non-person, are you going to hold out against that?

Disbelieving everything you are told starts, after a while, to feel a bit crazy. So you try harder, do more, work longer hours, try to humour the boss, accept the benefit cut, accept the brutal sex, and the labels, and you let yourself believe it is all your fault this is happening, and you lose a bit more self.

I’m watching my government undertaking this process aided by the gutter press, and every day the news items, and the shit in the media makes me sick. The language of denigration, the deliberate, relentless dehumanising. Right now, the victims of preference are the poor. We’re hounding the poor into ghettos. We’re doing it by forcing people on housing benefit out of more affluent places, especially London. We’re well under way with forcing them to work unpaid for the state, with the welfare to work scheme. We haven’t moved them into camps for that yet, but maybe we don’t need to. Does this sound familiar to anyone yet?

Are we going to wake up one morning and find that the Tories have come up with a bold, final solution to poverty? And by then, will we have dehumanised the poor so thoroughly that, as the Germans did with their vulnerable people in the 1940s, we let the state kill them? That’s where you ultimately go with this kind of logic.

When they came for the disabled, I did not speak out, because I was not disabled. When they came for the single mums, I did not speak out, because I was not a single mum…

The bottom third of the UK population is now experiencing poverty, from what statistics I’ve seen. We have to start speaking out and we have to actively resist all attempts to dehumanise the vulnerable. No more labels, no more blame culture, no more robbing people of their basic dignity. You don’t need gas to kill people. You can freeze them to death with homelessness, or inflated energy prices. You can starve them to death. You can drive them to suicide. You don’t have to be as obvious as a death camp. You can make your whole country a death camp for the ones you don’t want along.

Steampunk Meditation

A few days ago, my Druid friend Shaun asked me if I could design a meditation based on Steampunk. My default reaction was ‘yes’, and then I sat down and thought about it. A meditation needs to do something. It needs to take you deeper in, or expand your mind in some way. There are meditations that are just about relaxing yourself, but that didn’t seem right for an application of Steampunk ideas. Steampunk is too dynamic for that.

Steampunk is also essentially a social and aesthetic movement. How to make that into a meaningful meditation without just playing with surfaces? I considered working round the four elements, but that seemed a bit of a cop-out, not least because I’ve put together a few element based meditations already (See Druidry and Meditation on the Books page http://www.druidlife.wordress.com/books). Really speaking, I’d just be wrapping relevant technology around existing ideas, and that felt like a cheat. I don’t just want to play with surfaces. The other thing is, steam technology burned a lot of coal, it wasn’t very green, which isn’t very Druidy, so the more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a good idea.

So where did that leave me? I confess that there was a brief crisis around just how much Steampunk Druidry you could actually do, and whether it was possible to have anything with more depth. I floated out the Secret Order of Steampunk Druids as much for fun as anything else. Can Steampunk Druidry be anything more than a bit of dressing up and having a giggle?

Here’s what I’ve come up with. It plays to one of the core Steampunk images, it deals in social connection, relationship and visualisation. I think it ticks all the necessary boxes.

Take some time to settle and slow your breath as you normally would when meditating. Then, picture yourself as a cog. Shiny or dull, large or small, well used or pristine… what kind of a cog are you? Every tooth around your cog is a point at which you connect with the world. Every time you turn, other things, other people turn their cogs in response. What causes you to turn? What are you turning? Picture yourself as a cog, be it a small one or a large one, and see how you fit in with all the other cogs, and try to visualise the sort of machine you belong to. Is it the sort of machine that goes round fixing broken things, or is yours a wrecking machine? Are you part of a really clever machine that makes amazing discoveries? Is your machine going somewhere, or just round in circles? Do you like how it looks? Is this a machine you are glad to be part of, or do you need to break out and roll off somewhere else? See where it takes you…

The Druid balancing act

Which may (as a title) conjure mental images of stacking up Druids in humorous ways… but sadly no, I am not poised to offer amusing photographs. The idea of balance as a virtue is nothing new. The Greeks had it (forgive me, I am rubbish with names, can’t tell you who). The middle way, the median, avoiding excess on both sides – it crops up in all manner of traditions and philosophies. Generally speaking, balance gives you something more viable and sustainable than the absence of balance will. Sometimes there are issues around the scale of the balance as you consider it – what may seem out of balance close up may be part of a bigger and wholly balanced picture, after all.

I’ve become increasingly conscious of the need for balance in my own life. Right amount of sleep balanced against right amount of food and right amount of activity is critical. Get it right and I can do a great deal. Get it wrong, and I plunge into bodily pain, exhaustion, depression and become more vulnerable to anxiety. I got it wrong a bit over the last few days, and am rebalancing now, in a very deliberate sort of way. I need some time with no drama, to get re-centred. I also know that too much time with nothing exciting happening also drags me down. I need a balance between stimulation and reflection. I need social time and quiet time, active time and time to be still, and I need that in ongoing cycles from one day to the next.

I can work off-balance for a while, and there are times when that is necessary, productive or interesting. Living there isn’t viable. It’s so easy though, to be sucked in to a mind-set that accepts excess. From surfeits of food and alcohol, to overwhelming noise, and excessive consumption, the opportunities for gluttony are many. The pressures towards sleep deprivation, starving yourself, not getting enough exercise, and other forms of damaging insufficiency are also many. With more people finding themselves pushed under the bread line on a daily basis, the scope for not enough is huge. People who are overweight from too much carb and cannot afford fresh fruit, veg and good proteins, who are both starving and swelling at the same time. Such is our modern culture.

Balance is so much more important than growth. Balancing the economy, balancing the personal chequebook – matters. Getting the money straight is good, but in that balancing act things like health and well-being need to be given a value and added to the scales. We are too quick to place no value on that which cannot be converted directly into cash. Mental health. Happiness. Quality of life. These are not cash issues and often cannot be sorted out by throwing money at them.

Balance is not about avoiding excess, it’s about not having too much of one kind of excess all the time. Some fasting for spiritual work is fine. Fasting all the time, isn’t viable. Some staying up all night dancing and drumming is fine. Doing it all the time takes you out of other aspects of life. Some pain, some rapture, some madness, some office banality… in balance with other things, a great many extremes are visitable. We can have wide and wild experience without burning out. It’s just a matter of knowing when to stop for a while, when to step away, when to do the other thing instead. Today, a little quietness and drawing breath, a little domestic work, a lot of resting. Tomorrow, some other thing…

All the creatures

It’s been a creature-laden weekend. A long train ride to do a book signing in Northampton (Waterstones!) led to several deer sightings and some wonderful fox moments. The fox on the way out was curled at the foot of a tree, catching the sun. The second, on the way back, was stood in a field staring at the train.

Then on Sunday, we went up to the Birmingham Sa Life centre. Lots of interesting creatures there, including rays. I’m very fond of them, I love the way they move, the grace and how curious they are. The centre also has a giant sea turtle, a beautiful, slow moving creature, totally inspiring to be near too. The sense of peace in watching such a being, is inspiring. The creatures at this centre are either bred in captivity, or, like the sea turtle had to be rescued after injury or similar problem, and then could not be returned to the wild again.

Today there were tame deer, peacocks and other birds. Including some comedy chickens with feathers in improbable places. Last week I was feeding rooks. We had moored under a rookery, and they were coming down for bread, and getting right outside the windows.

It’s not the exotica particularly that inspires me, but the closeness, and the sense of connection – however fleeting. Really fires my imagination. The point where a creature makes eye contact, or accepts your presence, or just stays for a few seconds. Those are amazing, even when the creature is semi-tame, and predisposed to put up with you. I had a moment at the Wild Fowl Trust where a robin came down and took grain from my hand. It was a wild bird, in a bird friendly place, but even so…

The people comparisons are interesting. I’ve seen a lot of people this weekend. Most of them did not make eye contact with me. Most were so focused on whatever they were doing, that they weren’t going to notice anyone else. Didn’t want to. There were a handful of really good human interactions with people we didn’t know. But overall, meaningful moments with creatures this weekend were more numerous than meaningful interactions with people we didn’t know. It seems to me that the creatures are less wary or me, less fearful than the majority of humans, and that’s pretty scary.

The illusions, fantasies and occasional uses of social networking

It’s a funny set of places, the social networking sites. People posting updates on the most mundane developments in their lives, photos of their food, commentary on TV programs. You can ‘support causes’ and sign petitions for just about everything, creating the illusion of something meaningful done. You can have hundreds of facebook friends but not really know anyone, creating an illusion of social contact. Then there’s the option of hiding behind a fake name and trolling the hell out of your victims. Oh, and there are games. We spend a lot of time on social network sites, time we will never get back and so much of what it gives is illusory.

I have, I case you were wondering, twitter, google+, linkedin and facebook accounts. I’m also on goodreads. Feel free to attempt to connect with me on any of those, although in practice facebook is the only place I reliably show up and interact with people. I have real friends there, people I actually know, or will know, or want to know, and that helps. I find that compared to the general assessments of social networking (as above) I have a pretty good experience of it. This is because my network doesn’t deliver many food photos and random trivia. I get pointers to really good articles I would not otherwise have found, and I get to find out about what some really interesting people are thinking and doing. In that way, I get a lot out of it.

Of course one of the things people use this stuff for is selling their work, big companies included. How much promo can one person take? Speaking as an author, occasional publisher and avid reader, nothing depresses me more than some author I’ve never heard of, banging on endlessly about their book. The egroups used to be full of similar stuff. I know there’s a theory that we can all go 50 Shades with our products, but maundering on about them isn’t the answer. Nobody cares. This can come as a bit of a shock, but one of the lessons the social networks have the power to deliver is that most of the time, most people do not give a shit about that thing you thought really mattered. When they do, it can be a humbling, overwhelming and powerful sort of moment, but that tends to pass. In the great noise of the internet, we might start to see our small place in the grand scheme of things, or we might equally end up with an inflated ego.

In practice the social networks are a lot like the rest of real life in that what you get out depends on what you put in and who you associate with. It can be really good. That a lot of it is tedious, pointless and time wasting, is simply down to the people who use it.

As a Druid who does not have many other Druids in close geographical proximity (when you walk or cycle, ten miles away isn’t close) I appreciate the contact of being online. It’s enabled me to stay at least a little bit in touch with friends and to learn more about the Steampunk community. For this, I am very grateful. I know I’d feel more isolated without it. Not all of us can get to where the likeminded people are. But if there are real people to interact with, better not to be on facebook, I think. My Druidry calls on me to go outside, but it’s easy to hold an illusion that time playing with online Druid communities is somehow proper Druid time. Mostly it isn’t. Or it’s a pale shadow of the real thing. It worries me how readily many people seem to have replaced real world contact with social networking though. Locked away in our little rooms with our little boxes, typing words to people we’ve never met… The scope for fantasy and illusion is vast. The unfortunate outcomes of this show up on a regular basis but the hurt caused is all too real.

I know that the internet has changed how I think. I’m watching myself for good ideas to blog about, and good thoughts to share over the ether. Twenty years ago, this didn’t feature in my mind. I lived and thought differently. I’m aware that social network sites can be addictive, particularly in times of boredom or loneliness. They tend to perpetuate the problems rather than solving them. I don’t think we’ve begun to understand the social implications of what we’re doing. Or the psychological implications, for that matter. It’s a mass retreat from the real world. And yes, the real world is not a great place just now, but we aren’t going to fix that by signing a petition on facebook.

Jo over at http://www.octopusdance.wordpress.com has committed to spending one day a week free from modern communications devices. Obviously I know about this because she facebooked it… but the idea is well worth a thought. Spending less time doing it can, if nothing else, improve the quality of what you bring to it.

I may not be blogging for a couple of days, I have a lot of real world stuff to do. Gods of trains and weather permitting, I shall be in Northampton Waterstones for a book signing on Saturday and then doing family stuff on Sunday.

Considering Power

Often, what having power means, is being able to do to other people things they are not able to do to you. If that isn’t actual violence, it will still be something that creates and environment for violence. Pagan communities abound with opportunities to get power over other people. The teacher-pupil dynamic can readily confer the wrong kind of power, as can being a ‘leader’ of events and activities. It all too readily it becomes a justification for making people do things your way. Once you start down that route, inflicting your will upon others, it’s a slippery slope. We stop listening to what other people say they want and need. Most dangerously, we decide we know better than them, and thus we get to the mindset that can announce it may be hurting you, but it’ll be for your own good in the long run. It may feel like rape, but that’s because you’re not able to properly express your sexual needs. Trust me, you don’t know how to manage that money, and you don’t know what you should be eating… scary stuff.

We can enter this kind of power dynamic in family life – the parent/child relationship is laden with opportunities to turn responsibility into despotism. When someone has far less power and knowledge than you, it is painfully easy to manipulate them, to ignore their feelings and preferences and force them to exist in-line with your designs. The damage this does is colossal. Again, while it may not manifest as physical violence, it is a violence against the spirit.

What happens to us when we adopt this approach? It isn’t good for the perpetrator either. This kind of power-over serves to entrench fear. After all, you want that power for protective reasons. You want to prevent them doing something to you (quite probably that which you are doing to them). You fear everyone is as unreasonable as you are and that only by having power over them can you stay safe. Do unto others or they will do unto you. Holding this kind of power means never giving yourself chance to find out that it might be different. Not everyone wants to control and manipulate. Letting other people hold different opinions is not going to take you to the hell you secretly fear. Let’s pause to consider gay marriage issues in light of this one. What are the bigots so afraid of?

When we force our will upon others, we don’t make things better for ourselves. We reduce our options, cut ourselves off from alternative perspectives that could have been really helpful. We also make it impossible to have real relationships, because nothing meaningful or truly loving can flourish in that kind of power-based scenario. To seek power over other people is to lose, and to keep losing, in more ways than you are likely to be able to see. It’s when we live and work co-operatively and with mutual respect that the good stuff happens.

The other kind of power, the power to get things done, is a whole other bag of squirrels. If you seek power in order to enable not just yourself, but others, you won’t get into this power trap. If you want power to fix something, to heal, to improve and you’re doing that co-operatively, then power is a good and useful thing. It’s when power becomes an end in its own right that the problems start. When holding power is more important than doing the right things. When appearing to be right becomes more important than actually being right.

Seeking power is a dangerous business. Power is seductive. If you care about yourself, it’s worth approaching any opportunities for power with a great deal of caution. I’ve also noticed that I haven’t met a single awful person who believed they were evil. Outside of fantasy fiction, no one believes they are evil and everyone will have a story about how what they do is perfectly reasonable. Even if they know the behaviour is wrong, they know that there is a special exemption clause that covers their unique situation. Most people who are very wrong, are entirely convinced they are right, and are unable to countenance different perspectives. This is probably the biggest trap of the lot.