Nimue Brown's Blog, page 436

Not my Valentine

The wheel of the year brings us round to another festive period that drives me a bit nuts. Once again the great God of commerce is thoroughly worshipped in a festival that does a lot to inspire feelings of guilt, inadequacy and misery. It’s a time when anyone who is unwillingly single gets their unhappiness emphasised for them in every shop window. Today, it is your job to be happily in love with someone and demonstrating this by spending a lot of cash. Gah. He’s not my bloody saint.

Some years, the too-big bouquet of flowers is a reminder of how little romance there is the rest of the year. Sometimes the perfume smells of guilt. Sometimes the romantic meal for two, surrounded by other people desperately trying to do a romantic meal, just flags up that you don’t know what to say to each other anymore. Worse still of course is finding that no one has bothered. No cards from secret admirers, no flowers, no gestures at all. Bad enough when you’re alone, downright humiliating if you’re supposed to be in a relationship.

One day a year for romantic gestures does not a relationship make. When the relationship itself is thin, sad, and troubled, the failure to honour dates, birthdays, anniversaries and this one, just makes things worse. However, in a good relationship, the idea of this being a particularly special occasion seems a bit… mad. If the romantic gestures are there all the time, if you sit down and talk over a meal more nights than not, if you buy each other little gifts just because… what does St Valentine have to offer? Not much. An excuse, we decided, to go to Thorntons together and pick out some chocolates to share. No secrecy and no surprises, and to be honest that joint chocolate quest was one of the sweetest things I’ve shared around this irritating day. Almost made me feel positive about it.

Somewhere round here is the Roman festival of Lupercalia, involving the donning of skins, something to do with goats, and a bit of mayhem. I’m sketchy on the details because I’ve never celebrated it, but it sounds a lot less saccharine and a lot more fun. Also somewhere round here is some near-forgotten Italian festival where you give the object of your desire, a book! That’s for the win, we could do that, I’m not fussy about the date. Any day is an excellent day to bestow a book upon the one you love most. Then of course there’s Beltain, and that’s a whole other bag full of weasels…

Acoustic spirits of place

Being a singer and musician, I’ve always had a consciousness of acoustics, and it slowly dawned on me that this is not universal. Apparently not everyone automatically does this or grasps it as an idea, so I thought I should share… Every space has its own sound quality. As a Druid, in ritual or just connecting with a place, the sound of a place is easily tapped into and, I feel, really enables you to engage with its spirit. Using the sound resonance of a space really adds to ritual work and performance.

If you listen to a space, you can start to get a sense of how the sounds work. Are there echoes? Is sound bouncing about? Or travelling to you from afar? What makes sound here? If there’s anything vertical, be that a slope, a tree, a standing stone, you can bounce sound off it a bit. The big stones at Stonehenge are amazing for this. Messing about with your voice and listening to what comes back will tell you what’s going on.

In buildings, the height of walls, length of room, shape of ceiling will inform how the sound behaves. Often, some spots turn out to be better than others. If you can stand in the right place, throw your sound the right way, you get to tap into that resonance. The space takes your sound and embellishes it. Sometimes certain notes or pitches work better than others, and if you can hear that, you can play with it, pitching your voice accordingly. It works as well for speech as for song, and puts you into the most magical kind of interaction with your space.

If you can tap into the echoes, into the pitches that suit the space and find the right place to stand to get the best audio effect (that might simply be upwind of everyone else so the wind takes your words to them, and not away) you are in harmony with the space. The space is working for you, you do not need amplifying, your words fly out as if by magic.

I’ve been doing this for lot of years, and I know when I’ve understood the space and worked with it, because not only do I hear the soft echoes supporting my voice, but I notice how much quieter people are. Get this right and an audience that might otherwise have been restless will stand still, silent, spellbound.

Druid magic… bard magic… there’s some science in this, although you have to work intuitively and with your senses to use it. This is the simplest way of adding a magical quality to your words or music, and it works anywhere. Even the deadest room will have places that work better acoustically than others. So, if you see me ambling about a place, staring and the ceiling and humming quietly to myself, this is why. I’m listening to the spirit of the place.

Time off for good behaviour

I didn’t blog yesterday, or pick up my email. This is a rare thing for me. I did however, spend a lot of time wandering around Gloucester, and also a lot of time doing happy things with wool. That was all very pleasing. I’m starting to appreciate just how important rest is, in all manner of ways.

I have several friends who are really into fitness and activity, who talk about the importance of rest days. Now, my lifestyle often doesn’t allow that because I have no car, I am my mode of transport, and there are days when that’s a bitch. But, I’m making a point of trying not to cycle once or twice a week, and being gentler with me. Net result, less bodily pain. Time to heal makes a lot of odds. Time to recover from illness, and to let stressful things pass without being beaten up by them.

I’ve learned over the last few years that rest is essential to mental health. Time spent on quiet, gentle things that do not tax the mind and body allow me to find calm, and to keep things in perspective. If I rest, I don’t get as anxious, or as depressed (I piloted the boat all by myself for a little while yesterday and didn’t panic at all!). I sleep better if I take the time to wind down before bed. When I sleep better, I work more efficiently and don’t get as depressed – there are many cycles here.

When I try to run flat out all the time, I get ever slower and less inspired with the work. I’ve learned that the time when I’m not striving is vitally important. I consolidate stuff I’ve learned, for a start. I can then ponder and make connections. I can also daydream, play with ideas and let my mind wander. It’s often the times when I’m not trying really hard to get somewhere that result in the best ideas turning up. Creativity does not always flow to order, needs time to meander, and comes more readily when I’m not pushing like a mad thing. In undertaking to do less, I find myself able to do more and frequently better. That took a long time to get my head round. I feel like I *should* be working really hard all the time. That way lies rubbish output and burnout and misery. The time off matters.

I think part of my problem is that some people I’ve run into along the way basically assume that the creative life is a doss, an easy option, and involves never getting out of bed before lunchtime. I wanted to be taken seriously, I wanted to avoid ridicule. So the appearance of hard work became important to me. I started to believe that hours spent at the keyboard meant something. They don’t, necessarily. So I’m making a new space for myself, in which I can gaze out of the window for as long as I need to, or go for a walk, or appear to be doing very little. When I work, I work like a mad thing, because I can. I only get to do that if I pace it right, and I like the overall balance. There’s a self esteem, self respect thing here too, letting other people cause me to feel crap if I’m not working enough for their ideas about what I should be doing… and not rewarding myself with the time off and rest any person actually needs. These things make me feel less like a person and I have to get away from them or they will grind me down.

So, more ambling, and a ghost walk ahead of me, and I’m aiming to do something truly epic in the not too dim and distant. I’m not being lazy, I am brewing! And I no longer care whether others disapprove of me.

The journey back

Following on from Pathworking with Dunsany, I want to talk more broadly about the journey back. If you don’t die in the process, then the end of every adventure involves a return journey. This is just as true of rituals, pagan camps and deep meditations as it is for wandering Hobbits. At the end, you go home. This is an important part of the process.

Home is where you live. It’s where you come from, where you belong, be it ever so ordinary. Part of the coming back can be seeing the old place with new eyes. Like Dorothy in Wizard of Oz, you may find that the adventure allows you to see what was splendid about what you had all along. It may mean bringing back some of the mystery and wonder to share with those who did not go on the journey. It may simply mean finding a place to nurture the more down to earth part of yourself, because we need that too.

A wonder that you cannot speak of to someone who will appreciate it, turns out to be a lot less wonderful. The making of story and offering of experience to another human is part of the adventure. That sharing puts the adventure into perspective, places it in the wider story, perhaps helps us make sense of it too.

The contrast is important, between the wonderful and the ordinary. A life that was all ritual, or all pathworking would cease to make as much sense. That way, quite literally, lies madness. There’s only so much wonder a mind can take before it needs a rest, and perhaps a nice, mundane cup of tea and time to reflect upon things. We appreciate most stuff better for having a degree of contrast. The inherent peace of the ordinary probably seems a lot more valuable once you’ve trekked into Mordor, or whatever your personal equivalent may have been.

It can be tempting to want to disappear, taking the envisaged road into faerie, and never looking back. In the more profound moments of prayer, in the wilder dreams, in the deepest meditations, that call to just go and never return can be loud and powerful. This drab, damp life, this grey England, this lousy government… if only we could step through a magical portal and never come back. Only the coming back is necessary, and worth doing well. Come back smiling, with fresh inspiration, not reluctantly like a kid being dragged out of a playground to go and do homework. Bring a few shreds of glamour and wonder with you, for the rest of the world has need of them.

Only when we come back, can we reflect on where we’ve been and figure out what it means.

Pathworking with Dunsany

Yesterday I read several Lord Dunsany stories that involve transitions into the otherworlds. I decided to try them as a pathworking, dabbling along the edges of sleep as is my preference.

Here’s the pathworking, loosely…

First you must find Go-By Street, which is an obscure little side street in London. Along that narrow street you will find a shop where they sell all manner of things. You must ask for something they cannot provide. (I went for a pint of compassion recently milked from a Tory). Then, when the shopkeeper acknowledges that it cannot be done, you can ask the way to the cottages. The shopkeeper will show you the way, past a room full of sleeping gods, to a backdoor. You come out into a street where the pavements are normal, but all else is covered in grass, and there are no other buildings. You follow the path until you find the witch’s cottage. The windows on one side of this cottage look out over the fields we know and from the other windows you can see the purple mountains of faerie. From here, a person can go forwards.

I only got as far as the witch’s cottage, she told me to stay the night and progress at dawn. I slept, and I dreamed, and when I woke from those dreams I was back in the witch’s house. I went a whole night dreaming that I was dreaming and waking there. It was one of the most startling, and vivid experiences.

I pathwork along the edges of sleep sometimes with the aim of it feeding into my dreaming, but this is the first time in a long while that has worked, and worked surprisingly well. I feel very odd today, but in a good kind of way. I think the combination of reading several stories and then working deliberately with said gave me a real boost, but I rather felt I was going by some tried and tested route.

Dunsany did not claim to be a Druid. I’m not sure he claimed to be anything in particular. There are layers in his work under the whimsy and fantasy, layers of human meaning and also layers of something other, something resonant and wild that really calls to me. One way or another, he went somewhere. Call it imagination, or journeying, or the mad flights of a poet’s fancy, but he went, and as ways of crossing into other places, this is a fine one.

The stories were… A shop in Go-By Street and The Avenger of Perondaris and the odds are good that both are online somewhere.

Reading like an anarchist

As a consequence of feedback on this blog, and on book reviews, a thought has occurred to me. Namely, how to read to best effect? When I touch on something that is close to someone’s experience, that seems to be helpful, but mostly I’ll be off the mark for most people – I’m bound to be. But I’d like to think I could still be useful. I’ve noticed that I derive benefit from books that other people find wide of the mark (profound thanks to Lorna who triggered this whole line of thought.) And I just read a book on Zen (thank you Jo!) that, while not entirely chiming with me, was profoundly useful.

Reading is not just a case of stuffing words into your head to see what sticks. We are largely taught to accept the authority of the author (clue is in the name and all that). There is a tendency to offer as fact that which is really opinion, and that muddies the waters too. It occurs to me that there are things I do when I’m reading that it might be useful to share.

Firstly, I watch for fact statements that are really opinions and mentally re-label them, and reject or accept according to my own tastes. It is a bit of a faff, but gets easier with practice. It makes it possible, for example, to read texts from people of other religions without getting bogged down or grumpy. After all, it’s just someone’s opinions, I can take it or leave it.

Secondly, I look for the underlying ideas. I’ve been reading a lot about prayer in different faiths – the surface stuff is of no use to me at all, what I’m looking for is what underpins, what the core concepts are, what the logic is. This means some picking out, a lot of pondering, but it does mean I get useful things out of books that really were not meant for me at all.

Thirdly I have no qualms arguing with a book. If I read something that totally jars with my beliefs, experiences or expectations, I’ll sit with that and try to figure out why. It may be that I was in error in some way, in which case I learn. It may be an opinions issue. It may be that I decide the thing I just read would be wrong for me, in which case it’s then down to me to try and figure out what would suit me better.

Here’s a case in point: I loved Fiona Tinker’s Pathworking through Poetry book. I wasn’t drawn to most of the poems she used and wouldn’t work with them, and disagreed with many of her interpretations, but that was fine because the core ideas were so useful, I could see how to take them and run with them, there was so much good material that our differences of opinion seemed like no problem at all.

Books are a bit like people: Opinionated, working to an agenda that is not your own, unreliable, sometimes wrong. Like people, you have to get in there, make a relationship, find out where the good bits are, take with a pinch of salt where appropriate, run off in totally the opposite direction when needs be, and so forth. Books are written by people and people are flawed and messy things, and most of us will see things differently to at least someone else.

The trick to getting the best out of reading, is not to submit to the authority of a book. Question it. Check its facts. Test its assertions. Throw it in the recycling bin if it lets you down too badly whilst quietly nicking the couple of bits you thought were useful. Take it as a model of what not to do (cough, Death of a Druid Prince, cough).

You have to get a fair way into History and Literature as academic subjects before anyone starts teaching you how to read critically or suggests you can argue with books. This is a shame. Especially when you consider the authority imbued in religious books, and those are stories made by people too, and all the same things need to apply with them, as well.

The naked dancing Pagan thing

One of the most common questions non-Pagans ask Pagans is “Do you dance naked, then?” The other one is about sacrificing virgins. B-movie images of lurid sexual ritual are no doubt in their minds, or at least, that’s what they rather hope we do. That way, they can have fun thinking about it, or get righteously indignant about us, or both.

For the record, no. Never have, probably never will. For a start I like working outside and mostly the UK is cold, damp and not a good place to get your kit off. The bigger issue though is that I’m deeply uncomfortable with nudity. There’s a confession. Here we are, nature based spirituality, body as your own personal expression of nature and sacredness, and it makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t mind other people being as unclothed as they like, so long as I can stay securely wrapped up. Of course that’s mostly about an illusion of being less visible, less available, and I know that, but it’s still what I’ve got. I don’t much like being looked at. I really don’t like the idea of being judged, of being visually icky, or for that matter appealing. To be appealing is to be vulnerable, and I’ve had my nudity and the appeal of my body used to justify things happening to me in the past. Still got some baggage there.

I’m guessing that anyone who is so inclined can figure out what shape I am by looking, and that the clothes don’t really hide me. If I was a peacock person, it might be another issue, but I’m not that dressy either, I do clothes for practical reasons of warmth and comfort, and for camouflage, very seldom for any kind of display.

I’m wondering what it would be like to be in a social, ritual or spiritual context where people either casually didn’t have clothes on, or were very intentionally naked as part of the process. I wonder what it would be like to have that so much a normal and natural part of culture that’s it’s not excessively sexualised (at least in my head) or weird, or anything like that. Tricky to picture.

I think I was born with the sensibilities of an elderly Victorian spinster. If anyone had told me about covering up chair legs as a child and not flashing your ankles, I’d have been right there. As it was I just had to make do fashioning appropriate undergarments for bears. Toy bears that is. I used to have panics about guys who bared their chests, so all things considered I’ve made a lot of progress, but I’m a long way away from dancing naked round the fire in the woods in the middle of the night. Mind you, given how much rain we’ve had, I doubt anyone else danced naked round here this winter either.

Without a script

I want to talk today about the importance of not depending on a bit of paper in ritual. We don’t know much about the ancient Druids, one of the few things there is no doubt about is that theirs was an oral tradition. Bards and Druids alike expected to dedicate a lot of material to memory. This is a good thing, it means you have the words with you wherever you go, and no one can take them from you. I do understand that modern life tends not to encourage the hard work involved, but if you are serious about Druidry, this is a great place to start with really, seriously, doing it.

Paper is a problem in many ways. In low light, rain and wind, it can be unreadable, so if you were depending on it, you may be stuffed. It is a literal barrier between you and everyone else, it may seem small, but you will try to hide behind it. When you’re reading, you’re thinking about reading, not the meaning, not the people around you or the below or the sky above. With the words in your head, you have space to connect mentally with the space as you bring the words forth. If you’ve learned the words you’ve given time to pondering their depth and meaning, and you will speak them with feeling, insight, understanding, you will bring them to life. Even if you stumble and muff up a bit, it will be more alive. Lastly, if you really work and still don’t feel able to go without the paper, you’ll do a far better job for having tried to learn than if you’d gone the easy road in the first place.

I’m a big advocate of speaking in the moment. This takes confidence and practice, you need to know broadly what sort of thing to be saying, and so spending time with scripts can be a good preparation. Speaking in the moment, you can invoke awen and inspiration, you can respond to what’s around you, with feeling, making sense of your ritual space, your people, your experience. A script will not give you that, ever, it’s an imposition on the moment devised in advance based on assumptions about what you will get.

Part of this is about permission to mess up. You may forget the words. You may not spontaneously spout poetry. You may pause. But, you’ll have your head up, and you’ll be present. Whether working from memory or inspiration you will inherently be honouring the Druid tradition. You’ll be more real. We all muff up, that’s fine, it’s part of the learning process. You can’t open to the awen when you’re clinging to a bit of paper for protection, it doesn’t work that way. Learn the words, or don’t, but either way, dare to trust yourself. Dare to speak your Druidry in the moment, like you mean it. The difference is huge.

A case of mistaken identity

“What the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer’s story, one responds “aha! This is my story. This is something I had always wanted to say but wasn’t able to say.” There has to be a dialogue, an interaction between the seer and the community.” Joseph Campbell.

That was my “aha!” moment, and with it came a stunning realisation about what it was I’d got wrong. I thought I wanted to be an author. I thought that from the age of about five, with flirtations with wanting to be other things along the way (Batman, rock star, teacher, traveller, the usual really). I’d always imagined that I’d find a way of being an author that was useful but never really put in the legwork there.

I don’t want to be an author after all. I want to be a seer. I want to put into words things that need expressing but that people don’t have words for yet. I want to be like a Troubadour of Mediaeval France, introducing the idea of personal love to a society that didn’t have that idea, and doing it mostly via songs. Only obviously I’m going to have to find some other concepts.

All the recent trauma and loss of direction makes sense to me now. I understand why I wasn’t happy. I was trying to do the wrong thing. I had misunderstood what it was that I wanted to be in the first place, and having that clarity now, I can better see where I need to be and what I need to be doing. I shall be chipping away at the non-fiction work (several in the pipeline now) and stepping back from the fiction a little. I need to spend more time trying to be the seer, not the author, and then come back when I have tales to tell. It’s going to be an adventure and I feel good about that prospect.

I’m also going to keep reading Joseph Campbell. I’ve got The Power of Myth on the go at the moment – a transcript of the interviews he did with Bill Moyers including bits that did not make it onto the TV. I’d not read any Campbell before, I confess, but am blown away. Some of it is dated, inevitably, but I have such a sense of finding a kindred spirit there, I’ve been coming to so many of the same conclusions on my own. It feels a bit like coming home. I’ve got a lot of reading to do, and that’s an excellent prospect.

Emerging from the cave

Yesterday I attended the Cotswold Pagan Society Imbolc ritual held in Clearwell caves – Druid led but not just for Druids. It was a really interesting experience. The caves themselves are a mix of natural formation and iron ore mining that dates back into pre-history. Clearwell, in the Forest of Dean is part of an area where coal and iron have been mined for a long time, much of it by surface digging. The landscape is hillocky with leavings from mining efforts such that much of the place has been shaped by ancestral activity.

It is a place of my ancestors. My father’s mother came from the Forest, so I assume given so many people there were miners that I probably have an ancestor or two who worked those caves. In youth, before it was all organised and a centre, my father and his friends wandered about down there, he was clearly a braver and more adventurous soul than I am! I’d be nervous doing that in the dark, it would be so easy to get lost.

I’ve never done a ritual in a cave before. I’d also not previously done anything so formal, planned and scripted, so that was an interesting experience. Despite the OBOD training, I’m too much the bard to want paper in hand. If words need to be fixed I feel a need to learn them – for me that’s part of the bard tradition. Really I prefer to wing it, finding inspiration in the place and the moment. I’m aware that comes from a long history of improvising – with music, mumming, writing, I’m in the habit of doing things in the moment. Many people aren’t, and a lot of life doesn’t encourage us to open up to sudden flows of creativity. One of the things yesterday left me with was a sense of being fortunate in the skills and experiences life has brought me. There must be many people who need the support of the written word, the permission inherent in a ritual script, to make Druidry available to them. Taught as we are to follow and regurgitate, it seems like an act of ego, insanity or self importance to be burbling away off the top of your head. At least, it does at first… Druidry has to start places people can cope with, and sometimes the reassuring bit of paper is needful.

During the ritual I found myself thinking about Stone Age cave painters, mysteries explored in art in the deep darkness of the earth. I thought about the hibernating bear, and also the mystic cave dwellers, the dragons and goblins, and wondered who, traditionally, inhabited those forest caves. I thought about the association between caves and hermits seeking inspiration and closeness to spirit. Inevitably I also thought about the womb of the earth, especially as we walked the steep and narrow path up towards… not rebirth in daylight, but the gift shop. Ah, modern humanity…

I spent so long running rituals, or being at the running end. It’s really good to stand in circle without any particular job or responsibility, to just be there and see what happens. It’s a relearning process for me, in all kinds of good ways. I have no doubt that at some point I’ll be setting up some circle of my own, quietly, but yesterday reminded me of how much work goes into making those big, public circles happen. All kudos to the people who pour their energy and creativity into such events around the world. It’s such a valuable service, connecting communities and letting inspiration flow, but I remember all too well how it used to wash me out.