Nimue Brown's Blog, page 432

Theories of reincarnation

Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism all emerged from the same roots, bringing into the world a hierarchical concept of reincarnation that has been absorbed somewhat into New Age thinking. We know the ancient Celts believed something along the lines of reincarnation but we don’t have much detail. It’s easy, and therefore tempting, to import the ideas of other cultures to fill in the gaps.

While I like the idea of reincarnation (matter, after all, gets reused, why not spirit?) I don’t like all of the baggage. Far too many New Age folk are willing to accept superficial wealth and material success as proof of good karma and blame misfortune on bad karma, even going as far as to suggest disability is a consequence of bad karma. That’s hideous, illogical and a way of abdicating responsibility. Why would material wealth be a reflection of your spiritual condition anyway? If we think about the majority of spiritual teachings, there are plenty of reasons to argue that poverty is a spiritual advantage (easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, and all that). Material wealth, in every seriously spiritual context, is a trap and a distraction from real life. The only people who seem to advocate it as a spiritual good, also seem more interested in material wealth than anything else and I’m prepared to bet that’s not a coincidence.

Another problem I have with this system of reincarnation is that it suggests something or someone is keeping score for all of us, to decide who to punish and who to reward, and that starts to sound like all the things I dislike in monotheism. I’ve been reading about Jainism this week, and they understand karma as a substance that attaches itself to your soul and by its presence, dictates what you are capable of doing. Good karma gives you auspicious opportunities to grow and develop, bad karma can ultimately reduce you to being a hell-bound type creature, but what you suffer is precisely the hell you have created. There’s something very pleasing about that idea, I think.

Then there’s this whole business of what constitutes a ‘better’ incarnation. The widespread understanding is that being a human represents a pinnacle in earthly achievement and from human state you can ascend to something even better. I can’t help but feel this opinion has everything to do with us, as a species, thinking rather too well of ourselves. As a Druid, it doesn’t chime with me at all. Everything has spirit. Why should our manifestation be considered ‘superior’?

Consider the number of other creatures who clearly devote a lot of time to quiet contemplation. By the looks of it, my cat meditates far more than I do. Dolphins strike a lot of people as being very spiritual creatures. How about elephants? Wouldn’t it be progress to reincarnate as an elephant? Although this rather assumes the existence of progress or that one form is better than another, and really we have no idea.

With the Druid hat pulled down firmly over my ears last night, I came to a conclusion. A longer lived entity has more lifetime over which to develop spiritually. All Eastern reincarnation traditions seem to have aspects of renouncing the world, becoming still, quiet, sometimes inactive as the last step before transcending. This does not sound like people to me. This sounds like trees. Then I went on to think about the spirits of mountains, and other very old things that have had time to become, and are no doubt still becoming. You’d need a lot of human incarnations to keep up with that.

I’m not that convinced by the idea of reincarnating into some higher, unearthly state of being any time soon. I’m not so troubled by the woes and wonders of this world that I feel a need to transcend them. I’m interested in learning how to do as good a job as I can at being alive. That may mean I am simply a very long way from being able to transcend, but that doesn’t trouble me much either. Give me a few thousand more runs round the wheel and maybe I will know differently. In the meantime, I rather like the idea of coming back as a tree.

Poverty and spirituality

There are many spiritual traditions that advocate poverty. I’ve never been comfortable with this because it so readily turns into a justification for keeping people in unreasonable conditions. However, poverty is not a single state and can operate in a number of ways.

The most obvious is financial poverty. Now, if a person chooses to renounce the world and live in poverty, that may be conducive to a spiritual life. If you’ve chosen to go cold and hungry in order to renounce the flesh – that’s your own business and evidently it works for some. Most of the financially poor people in the world have not chosen this state, and do not have a context that makes it productive for them. Hunger, disease, child mortality, long, soul destroying and back breaking hours of work for subsistence level wages – for most people the pressure and suffering this creates is not an aid to spirituality but an obstacle.

Many people are time poor. This can easily go alongside financial poverty with the long working hours that give no intrinsic value to the worker. However, many affluent people also experience time poverty. Time is life, and to be poor in disposable time is not good for the soul either. Being too rushed to have real relationships with anything makes a spiritual life difficult, if not impossible. We may have to choose between time poverty and financial poverty, but more likely in western cultures, our inflated beliefs about what we need will steal our time to fund things we really don’t need at all.

We can be socially poor – easily underpinned by both financial and time poverty. You need time and a little disposable resource or at least some energy, to engage socially. Worked to exhaustion, that won’t be an option. Humans are social creatures, we need to connect with others, and to be impoverished socially is a real loss. It is in contact with other humans that we get opportunities to walk our talk, find solace, and get the best out of life. The elderly suffer this one especially.

Emotional poverty is easily achieved if you have no meaningful interactions in your life. That doesn’t have to mean human contact. A hermit deeply engaged with the natural world has a rich emotional life. Emotional poverty can mean we don’t have much scope for creativity or inspiration in our lives. Even the most logical and intellectual forms of expression still require a bit of inspiration. Often rather a lot.

Looking around me I see a lot of stressed, worried, unhappy people who have more financial wealth than they know what to do with, and no means to really enjoy it. So many people trying to buy a solution to ennui, to apathy, to a lack of joy in their lives. Are these people much better off than the people who struggle to make ends meet? Materially, yes, but that’s not the whole story. Meanwhile the whole planet suffers from the over consumption of resources.

We are collectively, so afraid of financial poverty that it makes us oblivious to everything else. We forget that all financial wealth does is provide resources, and if you can’t use those to enrich your life, you might as well not have bothered. Time poor, socially impoverished, emotionally bankrupt… it’s a high price to pay for that gizmo laden modern life in the fast lane.

Mother Nature

She feed us and gives us a place to live, free of charge. Like inconsiderate teenagers, we leave our crap lying about wherever we drop it, we wreck her most precious things, seldom bother to apologise and show no gratitude. We expect her to give everything, and assume we need offer nothing in return. We collectively envisage Mother Earth as the kind of mother who will say ‘never mind dear, have another sweety’ no matter what we do to her, to each other, to ourselves.

Even the most tolerant and indulgent mother has her breaking point. The moment of saying, “No more of your shit. I am not paying your way and clearing up your rubbish and putting up with your lousy attitude any more. Get useful, start contributing, or get out of my house.”

Of course the teenage git has alternatives. A friend’s couch to crash on, social housing. Hell, they could theoretically even get a job. We have nowhere else to go. If Mother Nature decides she can’t put up with any more of our uselessness, there is no couch to crash on.

The spring equinox is past, and there is snow on the hills of the Forest of Dean. The wind is so cold my hands hurt from being outside. This is climate change, and we’re told this morning we can expect twenty years or so of drought and flood just from the excess carbon in the air RIGHT NOW. Are we working to reign in that carbon addiction? No. Do we have any chance of holding at current levels? No. Are we in serious trouble already? Yes. Are the politicians busy trying to save the species? No. Far more important to keep shuffling the imaginary money around so that they can claim an every bigger piece of the pie.

Well, Mother Earth may not be making much more pie. Standing outside today it was pretty obvious to me that Mamma is pissed. Mamma doesn’t want any more bullshit excuses about GDP and how we can’t harm business. We are running out of time to put our shit in order, while Mother Earth taps her foot impatiently and reminds us that there is a door, and she can boot our sorry arses through it any time she likes. Actually boys and girls, extinction is an option. For us.

Maybe one day the leaders of the world will wake up and realise they need to get cleaning and fixing as a matter of some urgency. Maybe it will occur to all of us that, like any other mother, Mother Earth has finite patience, finite resources, and we have been taking the piss for far too long.

Contemplating relationship

Some of the most important emotional relationships in my life, looking back, were with people who were not lovers. Some of the lovers, in retrospect, had little impact on me at all, and several were quite damaging. I was pondering this late last night, because I have a fondness for looking for patterns. I’m also on a quest for self-knowledge. So much of who I am and have been has been shaped by the people I was in most intimate emotional contact with.

Those soul deep resonances with others had the effect of tapping in to things that are intrinsic to who and how I am. Through music, literature, creative thinking, sharing ideas and beliefs… looking back those connections were as much about meetings of minds as anything else. I’m very much a thinky person, although also deeply emotional, but intellectual connections are really important to me.

The relationships that went awry involved pressure to be things that did not resonate with me. That included dressing in ways I felt uncomfortable with, acting in ways that were unnatural to me, and basically supressing my own nature for the benefit of others. It’s really that legacy which has created the need to do this whole ‘quest for self’. Picking apart what is me, and what was put on me from the outside, I’ve come to a fairly simple conclusion. There’s a thought form in comics art that goes ‘if it looks right, it is right.’ I think that may have wider life applications. If it feels right, it probably is right – at least in terms of being a reflection of your own nature. If your nature is sick, twisted, depraved and cruel, that’s going to raise a whole other heap of issues, but I don’t find that in myself.

I responded to playfulness and creativity, to deep thinking, inspiration, and people who were passionate about the things they were into. Part of me wanted simply to be on the receiving of that kind of intensity, I was attracted by emotional capacity, in part. To be what fires someone’s imagination, to be the focus of intense desire and to inspire fierce passion, has considerable attractions. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be muse and playmate, and all that. Being in that place now, I can look back and see more clearly what it was that I hankered after in those previous connections. The people who loved fiercely, even if they didn’t bestow that on me, were wonderful and inspiring. The people who just wanted to make me small enough to be unthreatening and easily managed, I could have done without.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course. It’s easy to look back and see patterns and relevance that was wholly invisible to me at the time. I’m also aware of how much that went wrong for me had to do with my not understanding my own nature or paying enough attention to my own needs. I let people tell me who and how to be, because I thought being loveable was the most important thing, and it looked for a time like being loved was conditional on modifying myself. Turns out it isn’t. To be accepted as I am, found good enough, adored not in spite of my nature but because of it, has been a revelation. It makes me realise, looking back, who the really important people in my life have been, and they were not in all cases the most obvious suspects.

Gratitude and fortune

I am lucky. When my life fell apart I had enough inherited cash that I did not have to seek social housing. I can earn some money, even though I’ve been ill, and thanks to self-employment have been able to stay out of sickness related benefits. I do get some help from the government – you can get support alongside quite decent incomes, if you have children. But on the whole, I’m not as dependent on the system as many people are, and that’s pure, blind luck.

It was sheer luck that the bad choices in my history did not leave me in a mental health hospital, or out on the streets. It was pure chance that set me up in life with a decent genetic intelligence and some good teachers. Not everyone gets that. I’ve been able to roll with changes and challenges, survive setbacks and find ways round problems because I am fortunate enough to be passably bright and pretty well educated. Not everyone gets those breaks.

It’s all too easy to look at the successes in our lives, and put those down to how good we are. We deserve our winnings, our paychecks, our comfy homes, good health. Of course we want to believe that because it gives us an illusion of control. If we made it and earned it, then we ought to be able to keep it. This is just an illusion. Bad luck, an accident, a folding company, ill health, a run on your bank, a tree root undermining your house. The lucky amongst us are seldom more than a couple of missing payments away from total disaster. Should that happen, much depends on how lucky we are in our friends and family, and how much support we get.

Blaming those who get into trouble is a way of reassuring ourselves that it won’t happen to us. We’re too smart. We work too hard. We’re too together to have a mental health problem. We jog, so we aren’t going to get sick. No matter how hard you try, one mistake with a car can take all of that way from you in a space of minutes. We want the people at the bottom to be lazy scroungers, so that we don’t have to be afraid of that happening to us. Well, we should be afraid, and we should see our illusions of security for what they really are. Bad luck strikes randomly, and does not pay much attention to how clever, hard working or health conscious you are. There’s only so much you can ward off by doing the right things, and only so far a clever mind will carry you. I’ve seen it happen to plenty of people. There are lots of folk on narrowboats who got here because they were too smart to entirely go under. Businesses ruined by supermarkets. Lives ruined by violence and abuse. People plagued by ill health, or who lost everything in a messy divorce. But people who had enough left and enough imagination to take up boating, and survive. Not everyone has the inner strength to keep getting up when they’ve been knocked down more times than they can count.

Some of what pushes people to the bottom of the pile is not pure bad luck. It’s deliberate abuse by others. Unlucky to get a dose of that, but not wholly accidental. Robbed, raped, beaten, bullied, intimidated, forced out, mistreated, conned… there but for the grace of… go any of us. These things destroy mental health, destroy financial success, demolish lives. If we’ve avoided one of those disasters, it may not be because we’re too smart, it may just be we were lucky. Sometimes people fall because they are ignorant, or naïve, or gullible, or too willing to forgive, or not mean enough to take advantage of others. Are these things we really think others should be punished for?

If we recognise that luck, it’s a lot easier to stop assuming the poor are at the bottom of the heap because they can’t be bothered to arrange anything better. It’s easier to find some compassion, and not to judge everyone without knowing any of their details. As the job market dwindles, more and more people are pushed, wholly against their will, into poverty and dependence. People who want to work if they could, who would gladly take on anything. Why burden them further by stigmatising them for things beyond their control? So that we can hang on to the belief that we deserve what we have and it won’t be taken away. And because it suits the government as they take yet more money out of the welfare system.

When it is taken away, when you find life spiralling out of control, and you desperately need help and someone to pick up the pieces, there’s much to be said for finding yourself in a kind and compassionate system. Because the alternative is to believe that you deserved the fall as well, that it represents a failure to work hard enough or be good enough. You are a failure, then. Or the alternative is no safety net, and destitution, and no second chances.

Picture yourself (if you’ve not been here) suddenly out of a job, and unable to pay the bills, with the mortgage company threatening to take the house, and your relationship falling apart under the strain, and the anxiety making you feel so sick you can’t get out of bed in the morning, and crying for no reason sometimes and wanting to die. Picture yourself there, and then ask how helpful you’d find it to have the government treating you like a lazy scrounger who is destroying the economy.

We’re long overdue a culture shift on this one.

Sex, politics and religion

Sexual activity is about as private and personal as it gets. Yet, when you think about it, this is also the area of our lives religions are most keen to interfere with. The rhetoric of no sex outside marriage, no gay sex, no contraception, no sex for fun only for procreation, lust as sin, and so forth has a huge impact on countless lives around the world. The same monotheistically derived ideas underpin a lot of ostensibly secular laws as well. Who you can marry, whether you can access contraception and abortions, what happens if you have a child out of wedlock, whether rape can be legally deemed to occur inside marriage. If you live in a country where rape victims are punished as adulterous… you don’t have much ownership of your own body.

Underpinning this is a fear. You can hear its echoes in every right wing rant about ‘family values’ and the pretty irrational belief that somehow it is family units that make a state viable. The fear is that if we could all have sex with whoever we pleased, we’d run amok. Women especially. We’d be doing it in the streets, for Heaven’s sake. Anything short of a clampdown, is an invitation to licentiousness, orgy and depravity, according to some people. And they say it as though they think depravity is a bad thing. Which is ironic when you consider how often such vocal figures are caught out by their own hypocrisy, practicing what they preach against.

Sex is natural. It underpins nature, in fact. Very little would happen without reproduction. Yet as a species we’ve evolved in some interesting ways. We have far higher sexual drives than we have reproductive capacity, which suggests we’ve evolved a sexuality that is all about pair bonding, not reproduction. It could be argued our sexuality exist for social bonding. It takes a long time to raise a human child, and the pair bonding aspect of sex is an important contributor to that process.

Out there in the rest of nature, many models for sexual behaviour exist, and most of them find human parallels. The harem is much like the herd. Swans are monogamous, robins are adulterous, some creatures mate with whoever happens to be convenient at the time. Some males impregnate and depart, some stick around and help. Nature has no one right answer to sex and relationship. Human nature is the same.

Why are we so afraid that sexual freedom would equate to the breakdown of civilised society? Well, it undermines patriarchy, for a start. The ownership of women, control of fertility and thus traceability of male lines of descent is all very key here. Back before DNA testing, controlling your women was the only way to be sure whose offspring you were rearing. Listen to the right wing folk and you’ll think they imagine that, if our young people were allowed to find out about gay sex, they’d be so delighted by the wonders of it that they’d give up on being heterosexuals and the species would come to an end. I have to wonder what goes on inside some people’s heads.

Does all moral behaviour depend on carefully restricted and socially controlled sexual behaviour? I don’t think that for a moment. How many people you have sex with is far less a measure of your moral character than is how you have treated those people. How enthusiastic you are about sex is not a measure of depravity, just an aspect of your nature. Some of us are innately more enthusiastic than others, and none of the differences deserve to be stigmatised.

As a Druid it makes me really sad, listening to the new archbishop of Canterbury saying its ok to be gay so long as you don’t act on it. We need to get the politics out of sex, for a start. Anything that happens between consenting adults, is no one else’s business. Only when consent is compromised or harm done does the rest of society have a duty to intercede. We need to let go of these ideas about harming your soul, and sin. Fine if you want to apply it to yourself, that’s your own, private business. It is not an unassailable truth you have a right to force upon others.

Religions are as obsessed with controlling and regulating sexual behaviour as governments seem to be. And yet, none of these manifestations of power has managed to stamp out rape, or child abuse, or prostitution, or sexually transmitted diseases, or any of the other genuine ills that go alongside irresponsible and criminal sexual behaviour. Oh no. Internationally, religion seems more interested in stopping willing gay people from shagging each other than it is in stopping adults from abusing children, or women from being forced into sexual subservience. That’s so wrong.

There’s a power aspect to sex. Who has the right to do what, to whom, is a political issue and a power issue. Of course there’s religion muddled up in it. The whole thing needs a radical rethink, with the crimes that cause harm being taken a lot more seriously, and the ‘sins’ that arguably harm no one getting a lot less time and attention.

The Unreal Estate

I’ve been talking on and off lately about changes in how we work and what we do and why. During my meltdown at the beginning of the year I admitted to myself that a number of things were really bugging me. First is the nature of the publishing industry, which is very slow. By the time a book comes out I no longer feel involved in it, I have usually moved on to something else and I struggle with this. Putting content into the world more often is a sanity saver – this blog being a significant part of that. There are also issues around the fact that I can write enough words in a day to keep Tom busy for months, and that makes for a disconnection. I have to wait a long time for things to make progress, and the frustration I feel around that is really unhelpful. It was getting to me.

A lot of this cannot be changed, but we sat down and talked about what we both want and need out of our creative work, and we hatched an idea. We want to work together, really together, so we’ll start of a morning with the same piece of paper, get the words and images planned, and then over the day Tom can make a page. The rest of our work commitments mean that we might have one or two days in a month when we can work this way. It is enough.

A week or so ago we took a day, and made a comics page from scratch, for a new title – The Unreal Estate. We’re both very fond of Under Milk Wood, this is nothing like that, except that there is a debt owed… it’s modern, urban, and very strange. It allows both of us to push the edges of our ideas and creativity, which is great, and whether it turns into anything doesn’t matter, because the method of working is nourishing and gives us something we need. I realise that just a small amount of the really soulful work is enough, I can spend most of my time on dull necessities if needs be, so long as I have a little bit of time to follow my heart. It’s liberating.

I’m still exploring how I want to work and what I need to do, working out what is both desirable to others and meaningful to me. I think there are balances that can be struck. I think there are things I am driven to create that other people enjoy. Hopeless Maine has been a success on that score. It was made with love and a lot of people are responding to it. Tea Dragons (see some of them at http://www.copperage.deviantart.com) seem to be getting people excited too, so, more things like that (you’d like some insane Steampunk cats, wouldn’t you?). I’m hopeful that I can find ways to follow my own awen and make things other people benefit from. I don’t see much use in creating just for my own indulgence, nor do I see any point in making things that are saleable but soulless. Whatever I do has to tick both boxes, or I’d rather not do it at all. Having that clarity has been a great help to me.

So, here’s the thing we’re playing with, just one page so far, floating it out across the interweb to see if anyone enjoys it…

http://www.hopelessmaine.com/?p=994

(Do leave a comment on the comic if you stop by)

What dreams may come

Dream interpretation has always fascinated me. As a very young person, I got my hands on a dream interpretation book, but I rapidly found that the ‘answers’ were a bit too tidy, and most of my dreams did not include things that could be readily picked out as symbols and interpreted that way. I’ve always tended more towards narrative threads, and my symbolism is pretty personal. My impression is this is generally the case. We all have symbolic languages in which our unconscious minds try and talk to our waking ones. Life experience, belief, preference and so forth contribute to make this personal symbolism work. Unravelling it is a journey into the self. The first question to ask is not ‘what does the book say?’ but, ‘what does that mean to me?’

I studied Freud a bit at uni, which confirmed my feeling that trying to impose meaning from the outside, is reductive and pointless.

That said, there are trends that stand some consideration. Firstly, if you are learning something, your brain will consolidate that during periods of rest and sleep. We aren’t conscious of much of the process inside our own minds. This is distinct from your Freudian unconscious, which has its own drives and agendas. It’s more like the way in which you can’t see what your computer is doing to make these words visible to you. That much self awareness would drive us crazy. So, we have a functional, not-conscious element to the mind that handles the sorting, storing, and comprehension without our conscious thought processes getting involved. One of the signs that you truly know a thing is being able to do it without consciously thinking about it. Dreaming can be part of the consolidation process, so what you dream may reflect what you’re learning.

Now, that Freudian style unconscious, that place of repressed emotions does seem to exist. If we are deep in denial about something, it bubbles up eventually. Dreams can express to us the things we are consciously trying not to be aware of – fear, desire, need, insecurity, all that kind of thing. There’s scope for self knowledge here, because if we can acknowledge the dreams that manifest what we’re refusing to deal with, we get closer to dealing with it.

The person who does not get enough sleep, also doesn’t get enough dream sleep, so having and remembering dreams is a good sign of sufficient good quality sleep. It’s worth considering your dreaming in this very pragmatic way, because it can give you some useful information about the state of your sleeping.

I also think that dreaming is a good indicator of your state of mind generally. Drab, dull, repetitive dreams – such as dreaming in extra days at work, do not speak of a happy and fulfilled mind. Anxiety dreams can be very telling. Having the same set of dreams can be suggestive that something in your waking life needs tackling, and that you are trying very hard to flag this up to yourself. The person who dreams strangely and widely, drawing on all kinds of experience, is probably in better shape than not, between the ears.

Rich dreaming can be emotionally rewarding, as well as going alongside good sleep. It is worth paying attention to dreams. You don’t have to believe in much, or see any magical component, to be able to notice that they are a function of the mind, and that something is going on there. Stay away from Freud though, unless you’re reading him for giggles. Don’t assume there is one right answer to your dreaming and that someone else can tell you what it is. The only right answers are the ones that make sense to you, and sometimes dreaming has no discernible meaning at all. Some of it is white noise. Some of it is prompted by external things. (The boat rocks and I dream of an earthquake, for example). We can get so bogged down in the question of what things mean that we forget that sometimes things just are, and that no extra layers need to be added.

The turning of the year

Somewhere in the last few days there was a shift from tail end of winter to definite spring – the sort of spring that could eventually turn into summer, if we’re lucky. The birds are gathering nesting materials, the blackbirds are singing down the sun with enthusiasm, and there’s a greening in the hedgerows. Buds fatten and the hawthorn is in leaf.

In previous years I’ve been wary of that whole ‘tie your psychological processes to the cycle of the seasons’ malarkey. There are many ways in which it doesn’t work. Winter is a hard and busy time for me, the realities of life are demanding, I do not do the peaceful sleep of the dark time of the year. Mostly it depresses me. However, the practical shift into spring, with longer days, more light, more warmth makes a difference. All the jobs become easier, laundry dries outside, the stove doesn’t need keeping in through the day, and I have more energy to use elsewhere.

My ancestors would have been ploughing and sowing – I can see the work in the fields. They would have had new livestock to care for, so being released from the work of winter would simply have made the work of spring easier for them. Not a time of birthing new plans, but a time of reacting to what the season demands, historically speaking.

I don’t do the rush towards midsummer, but I do have a shift at this time of year. More light means more available working time. Sat in the duvet at 6.30 am I wrote some verses. I wake earlier thanks to the light, too. If the weather is fair, such that regular jobs become easier, then there will be more energy to give to other work. If the evenings are good I can also go back to strolling around sunset, which opens me up to different experiences. This is the time of year when I become less devoted to the radio. There will be more people about walking in the evenings too, so it becomes more sociable. Winter nights on the towpath are quiet.

Nature is not something we have to make a considered, intellectual response to. It’s not a case of noticing spring and recognising it’s time to get those winter-dreamed plans under way. We are nature. We are natural. All we have to do is give ourselves enough space to do what we do and find out what it is. We’ll all have our own cycles and rhythms. The hibernating hedgehog is not more or less right than the migrating swan or the labouring duck. We do what we do. If life requires us to live in ways that are at odds with our natures, we suffer. Most of modern life is arranged so that the majority of us do not have scope to live naturally. I can’t imagine this does us any good. However much time and space you have to be your natural self, embrace it, for this is precious. Don’t do any more than you must to reinforce the unnatural systems we’ve locked ourselves into. A little quiet rebellion goes a long way!

When not to be angry

Every day brings things to get angry about, from human apathy destroying the planet, to global injustices and political stupidity. We need to get angry enough about these things to get up and challenge them. All too often what happens instead is that our energy and rage is focused on much smaller and more personal issues. There have been some great comments here on the blog recently about the importance of assuming people online mean well, and being willing to listen so as to develop our own compassion (Andrew and Sean, and thank you!).

Every kind of opinion and belief is out there waiting on the internet to offend and frustrate you, and any number of trolls lurk in wait for victims. There is simply no point getting angry about this one, it just feeds them. I think we mostly know that, even if we do still get drawn in.

Then there are those situations when the other person goes that bit further, making accusations, getting personal, dishonouring you. Whether those are public situations with strangers, or private situations with people we know, those are hellish, and the desire to wrathfully defend honour is enormous. This is the point at which we may look to our wider community for justice (by which we invariably mean support for ourselves). From observation and personal experience, this is not reliably forthcoming, for all the reasons I was talking about in the Druid in conflict post. Then what? A tattered reputation, recriminations, anger, sometimes bad enough to tear whole communities apart. It’s rare that anyone wins one of these, whether they deserved to, or not.

What happens when we get angry? We assert our case, make accusations, take the dirty laundry out into a public place… The thing is that when you arrange it so that shit hits the fan, pretty much everyone ends up wearing it. Often these things start small, a word out of place, an angry exchange, then digging up some history, and an escalation, often enabled by the wider community, until you reach a point of no return. By the time you’re venting angry words online in defence of your knowledge, skills, status, beliefs… it probably is too late. Part of the trick, I think, is nipping this sort of stuff in the bud before it gets out of hand.

Here’s an example. Last week, in a public forum, someone said something that most definitely implied I was stupid and irresponsible. As it happened said critic had made some wholly wrong assumptions about what I’d just posted. I could have got angry and defensive. What I chose to do was apologise politely for any confusion caused, and then explained. There was no come back, no escalation. I also had the pleasure of making said critic look like an idiot without actually being rude. Win!

I thank people who tell me things I did not know and offer counter-arguments because I am genuinely grateful for those. I learn a lot from the folk who see things differently, and am pro difference, not threatened by it. I don’t get any heated arguments there. I also like offering people free use of the blog to expound on different perspectives. I find that sees off the trolls. It’s very easy to write ‘here’s a total over simplification of the issue’ on someone else’s work, a lot harder to come up with the goods when invited to do so. And of course if they did, that would be win all round, and we’d all learn something.

If someone imputes your honour, and you respond by yelling abuse at them, threatening them or calling them stupid… the odds of coming out of that looking good are slim. If you can draw a deep breath and try to respond with compassion, politeness, and patience so much the better. It’s not easy to avoid being patronising, but worth a shot. If you persistently uphold your politeness, people are much less likely to take against you, less ammo is handed to those who would use it, and sometimes, the whole problem goes away. You have upheld your honour, by acting honourably. I’m amazed how many people seem to miss that one online. Everything we do is part of our Druidry, including what happenes when we’re really pissed off.

Leaving us time to go back to the much more important business of challenging governments and big business and trying to save the world.