Nimue Brown's Blog, page 44

Asking what’s most important

(Nimue)

One of the small daily practices I’ve been exploring in the last month or so, is to ask what’s most important. I do this at the start of each day. Making the time for the question rather than just getting up and getting on with things is part of a larger shift. I used to be very much an up-and-at-it sort of person whenever my health allowed. These days I often stay in bed for a little while after I’ve woken up, and approach the day at a gentler pace.

What will be most important today? The odds are I already have some plans or intentions in place. I may revisit those, but my priority is to just be open to what seems most important intuitively. I watch out for the more unexpected responses. Whatever comes, I try to sit with it for a few minutes and just get a sense of how it works or how to follow through on it.

What’s most important right now? That can vary a lot. I give myself permission to think about what I might need from the day as well as what others might need from me. I check any plans I’ve already made and see how these look in light of any new thoughts.

It’s not something I invest a huge amount of time in, but I’m finding it beneficial. Sometimes unexpected priorities emerge, and I like where that’s taking me. I’m finding more room for what I need for myself rather than what’s needed from me. It’s informing how I pace things.

This is also a practice that allows inspiration to enter in. Sometimes what comes in response to that question is an idea, or an answer to something that needed dealing with. That might be inspiration for practical problems, for projects I’m working on or for things I’d not previously considered even needed attention. It opens up space for possibility.

It also creates space to explore any tensions between what’s supposed to be happening and what I actually want. Some days I just have to get up and do the things – whatever they are. I might not like them, or want to do them but some things just have to be tackled. Acknowledging how I feel tends to help me deal with the things I’m not keen on and to handle that more effectively. Recognising when I’m uncomfortable means I’ll do a better job of offsetting such challenges and keeping myself in a more functional state overall.

There are all kinds of things a person can make deliberate time for in a day, and I can certainly recommend this as something to explore if you’re looking at small, everyday activities either to enhance your everyday life or to open up space for intuition and/or inspiration.

Temperate rainforest

(Nimue)

There are temperate rainforests in the UK, in Scotland, Wales, Cumbria and the south west. These are places where the rainfall is high and the temperature is more even than normal. As a consequence you get a lot of moss and lichen. One of the signs that you’ve got a temperate rainforest is the presence of stuff growing on trees. The photos in this post show moss and ferns growing on trees.

These photos were taken in The Golden Valley – one of Stroud’s valleys. The canal runs through this one. The bottom is sheltered by the hills and it’s clearly a damp place with good conditions for moss. There were a lot of trees that had a lot growing on them.

This was a saunter that underlined the importance of getting to know places at different times in the year. It’s something I’ve talked about repeatedly around working with landscapes and seeking spirits of place. Most of the locations I visit I’ve encountered at different points in the year. For various reasons I’ve only previously been on this stretch of canal in the summer. Seeing it in winter made things obvious that I hadn’t recognised before. 

In summer this whole area is green and leafy, so the moss isn’t so self announcing. With the leaves down the area looks very different, and while the bare branches weren’t a surprise, the intensity of the moss was unexpected. It’s more visible for having more direct light on it and stands out more for not being surrounded by other greenery. Seeing this place at a time of year I hadn’t previously encountered it has changed my sense of it.

(Photos courtesy of Keith Errington).

Sitting with emotions

(Nimue)

This isn’t about mindfulness practice, because that isn’t something I do. My approach to emotions is not about observing them and letting them pass through, but one of engaging with them. I’m not interested in being unattached to my emotions. I see authentic living as coming from a place of feeling your feelings and being self aware and I embrace my feelings as part of who I am. I haven’t always had space to express or act on how I feel and I’ve sometimes had to crush my own feelings to a damaging degree, but they are who I am.

When life is busy we can just end up bouncing from one experience to the next with no time to process things. When life brings intense experiences, it takes a lot longer than normal to make sense of them. Taking time to sit with your feelings is really effective either way. It doesn’t need a lot of time normally. A few minutes at the start or the end of the day can do a lot to help you process what you’re feeling and to know what’s going on in your life.

It’s a simple enough thing – just taking some quiet time and noticing what you’re feeling and making space for other things to come up. The thing about emotions is that to understand them you do have to let yourself feel them. I don’t think it works to try and observe them as though you are somehow on the outside of them. It makes no sense in terms of what emotions are – these are physical events in your body occurring at a chemical level. You are your body, and you are your body chemistry, you aren’t separate from it or outside of it. The brain you might observe with is also part of the same physical and chemical systems.

When emotions are bigger and more complex it can take them a while to fully show up and longer to make sense. If you sit with them and allow them, then you can make sense of them more readily. There’s a lot to be said for letting your feelings happen in a considered way, making space for them where you can give them priority. It’s better by far than having them explode suddenly while you’re trying to do other things. 

It’s ok to feel the difficult emotions. There are a lot of faux-spiritual messages out there about not feeling some of our feelings, and a lot of cultural stuff around which emotions are unacceptable. If you’re set quietly by yourself, there is no reason to avoid any feeling. Let it come. Know it, name it, understand it. Allow the shame and the guilt, the anger, bitterness, resentment and anything else you’ve been told isn’t ok. Let it happen. In making room for it, it becomes easier not to be ruled by it. The things we try to suppress and ignore or pretend aren’t there can control us in ways we are not conscious of. It’s better to be conscious.

When you make room for everything, you also make more room for joy and delight, hope and enthusiasm. Undealt-with feelings can rob you of all of that. When you let yourself have your authentic feelings you will find out what doesn’t work for you and that leads the way to changing your life for the better. When you’re dealing with your feelings regularly – ideally daily – you also invite peace. An emotion you’ve come to terms with can be carried peacefully – even a large and difficult emotion. You can have it with you without it feeling heavy to carry – and that’s true of even grief and anger. 

Winter and the wheel of the year

(Nimue)

The change of calendar date can feel like a big, dramatic moment in the turning of the seasons, but in many ways it isn’t. The light is returning, slowly, day by day. The days will get longer now, but you probably won’t feel the change in the next week or two. The wheel of the year is not a series of big events, but a day by day process.

This has a lot to offer in terms of everyday Druidry. The big eight festivals often dominate how we think about the seasons, but they don’t need to. The wheel of festivals is a twentieth century thing and while each festival has a long history, celebrating them all doesn’t.

Of course our Pagan ancestors all experienced the cycle of the seasons and were impacted by it. Taking a day to day approach is bound to connect us to them and whatever they did in some small but meaningful ways. Looking at the wheel day by day brings us closer to the wild world and the seasons as they occur around us.

How we experience the year depends on where we live, and taking that very personally is effective. Noticing how the changes of light impacts on you personally is good. I live in the shadow of a hill, so we have to get considerably further into the year for me to get more direct sunlight.The further from the equator you are, the more dramatic the shifts between solstices are. 

Paying attention to both the sunrise and the sunset is easier in winter, your odds of being awake for both are good. If you only get one, that’s also fine. Just making a point of noticing them day by day is a good way to connect with the journey of the sun. Take a moment when you notice the light fading, and take a moment in the morning when you realise it’s getting light. FInd out how your body reacts to these things and how you feel about them. Do you wake before the dawn? Are your sleep patterns affected by the changing length of days? Do you welcome the long winter nights, or are you glad to see them shortening?

Anyone in the southern hemisphere is of course going the other way right now, and will be experiencing the shift to shortening days. The principle of just paying attention works no matter where you are, although the longer your days the less realistic it is to witness both the sunrise and the sunset. There’s a lot to be said for doing what you can most easily do day by day.

Music and magic

(Nimue)

As per the plan, I headed out on Saturday in pursuit of a new bow for the viola. This was a successful mission and I have something where the weighting is perfect for my awkward, hypermobile fingers. I can’t do a proper bow hold because all my joints go the wrong way under pressure, so finding a bow that sits well in my hand will greatly improve my playing.

I was loaned a violin to test the bows with as I tried to pick one out. I haven’t played violin in a long time after a shoulder injury cost me mobility on the left side and I could no longer get my hand on the neck. 

Somewhat nervously, I picked up the violin to try the first bow. My fingers made it to the neck. After a few fumbling, out of tune misstarts, my hands remembered. Notes flowed out from under my fingers just like they used to. I didn’t cry, but it was a close thing.

No doubt this is a consequence of getting to grips with the viola. A year of playing has made me stronger and more flexible. Much as I love the viola, I don’t have the same depth of relationship with it, and it doesn’t feel as magical to me as the violin did. But, up until recently I thought I’d lost all hope of ever playing the violin again. It’s a wondrous thing to have that back.

What I don’t have, is a violin I can play. I owned a violin for many years – a somewhat eccentric handmade instrument, probably about one hundred years old. The back came off it, repeatedly. A number of different violin makers tried to repair it over the years and the repairs never held. The last chap who fixed it gently suggested that if the fix didn’t work, there wasn’t really anything left anyone could do. It was like losing a friend. I still have the violin – unplayable though it is. I am nursing the hope someone might be able to use the viable bits and turn it into an electric instrument for me one day.

I’m not honestly big on manifesting as a way of getting things done. However, I need a violin, I need one to turn up by magic, or I need enough money to turn up by magic for me to be able to afford a good one. News when I have any!

A Curse of Magick

(Nimue, review)

I’ve thought for a long time that a lot of myths make considerably more sense if you assume the main protagonists were mostly teenagers. It’s not an unreasonable thought – people in prehistory had shorter life expectancies, with 25-30 being a lot more normal. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that active adults are in fact young adults. It makes sense of the emotional aspects of the stories, the cockiness, impetuousness, the rash choices and the choosing of preposterous hills to die on.

This is a YA novel take on the tale of Grainne and Diarmuid and the tale works very well indeed with overtly teenage characters. It isn’t a story I’ve spent a long time with, but this felt like a faithful take on the original. For anyone unfamiliar with the story I should point out that like a lot of ‘Celtic’ myths, it doesn’t go well and the ending is sad. It’s not a conventional sort of romance, and there were a few sequences that were tragic, so it pays to be prepared for that.

If you’re the sort of adult reader who, like me, appreciates a good YA tale, this is for you. If you’re looking for an accessible way into the mythology, this is a good read. It has a nice pace to it, plenty of magic, and detail and I found it a delight. If you’ve got young readers, this is a bit sexy and there are some slightly gory bits, so it depends a bit on your young human. I’d have no qualms about buying a copy for fourteen and up – Grainne is seventeen, which is something of an indicator.

I have read some of the older stories in the forms we have them. I’ve read The Tain. I found most of it to be a slog – it’s not a form of fiction I do well with. Ancient mythic stuff doesn’t tell stories in the same way we do, and there should be no shame in not getting along with it. If you want to engage with ancient stories but don’t get on with how they are told, looking for books like this is a really good option. 

Here is the link on Amazon: 

Setting intentions

(Nimue)

I gave up doing resolutions some years ago, in pursuit of something more helpful. I like spending time at midwinter thinking about what I’m doing, where I’m going, and setting intentions for how I want to approach the coming year.

2024 is going to be challenging, and at this point it’s hard to say how challenging – there’s too much I don’t know. My primary intention is to do the best I can with whatever I’m dealt. I’m going to be focusing on what good there is to have, and to make, day by day. 

In terms of the blog, I will be spending more time on everyday Druidry and exploring things that might work for lay Druids. I’ll be talking about spirits of place, and sharing whatever I learn as I’m going along. 

In terms of the rest of my working and creative life, I know I’m going to be spending some time as a book publicist in the spring, working with a lovely author whose book I enjoyed. I’ve got a massive project on with Dr Abbey, and I look forward to being able to talk about that more. I’m going to be investing more time in the viola, nurturing a new singing group, finishing the current novel and hopefully writing a folk horror novel later on. That’s already proving to be an interesting process so I may well talk about the background on that as I go along. I’m hoping for more performance work in the summer, but we’ll see what comes.

I don’t have any particular reading or study goals at the moment, but I do hope to have reasons to develop some new material. Hopefully I’m going to need to learn more medieval tunes and learn more stories for storytelling, but that’s a hope and not a certainty. I’m definitely developing more fairy material for local events, and I will have a short-lived shanty crew later in the year.

I’m also hoping to travel to a few Druid gatherings – I’m waiting to see what’s feasible, but come the summer that might be a thing. 

I’m facing this coming year with mixed feelings – hope and anxiety. I will make the best I can of everything, and seek what joy I can, for myself and for those closest to me.

Midwinter Meditations

(Nimue)

Midwinter is a good time to pause and take stock, if you can. It’s a good opportunity to look back at the year and think about what went well, and what you want to build on. It may be necessary to invest time in making sense of things, and making decisions about what is and isn’t serving you. Sitting in a meditative way can be really helpful, especially if you don’t get the chance to do this regularly.

A lot of meditation focuses on directing the mind in specific ways. However, it’s good to take time to gently unpack your thoughts and to make room for thinking about what’s going on in your life. Living an authentic and considered life depends on making time to reflect in this way. It’s important to know how you feel about things, and to know what you want.

Looking back, we can ask what can be learned from the year. What would you do again? What do you want more of? Less of? What can you change to enrich your life and take you in the directions you want to go in? Gazing into the past is the starting point for looking towards the future. Once we know where we are, it’s easier to think effectively about where we might be going.

Even when the options seem limited, considering them can open up room for choice. Sometimes we don’t get much say in what we have to do, but it’s always worth looking for what options there are, and to consider what it would take to do something well, or in the best way, or the least damaging way. It’s also important to remember that you can’t make good choices when you don’t have any good options, and to cut yourself slack around situations where you have little or no power.

All too often, New Year’s Resolutions are just a way to internalise different kinds of cultural oppression. You don’t need to be a whole new person, or to have some kind of personal revolution. You do not need to beat yourself up inline with other people’s expectations. Set down anything that feels like blame, or shame or misery and ask instead what would serve you. What good things can you bring into your life? What would make you more joyful?

It’s a good time of year to set intentions around things you want for yourself and want to be doing. Pick things that will nourish and uplift you. It’s good to reflect on what you want from life, and what you most need. Ask what would help you grow, or enable you to flourish. Ask what your heart longs for, or your soul hungers for. Give yourself permission to dream wildly and on your own terms.

The lives we live are shaped by everyday choices. The big, dramatic decisions we make can have surprisingly small impacts compared to what we do with our time day by day. If you want to make radical changes it’s more effective to think about the everyday changes you would need to make in order for that to happen.

New Musical Adventures

(Nimue)

I started playing the viola again back in the autumn of 2022. At that point I’d not played for years, having lost too much mobility from both shoulders. It was a fight to get the viola back. At this point I can plausibly get my left hand into the right position for a violin as well, so I may have further things to explore – whether I could get my bow arm round far enough for a smaller instrument I don’t yet know.

Keith inspired me to start playing again, and sharing music with him has been an absolute joy. Thanks to him, I now get to play viola for Jessica Law, which is great fun and we’ve had some lovely gigs.

I’m getting a new bow. This is something I’m doing around taking myself more seriously. The bow is as much the instrument as the box is, and has a huge impact on the sound you can make. The better the quality of the bow, the better the sound and you can spend as much as you want on this. Thanks to my parents I am getting a new bow as my Christmas present. That’ll be happening today.

It’s an investment in the music, in the future and an act of trust that this is worth doing. I’ve come a long way since I picked up the viola again, and much has changed. I’m really enjoying playing and it’s great having such brilliant people in my life to share the music with. I’m enthused about a lot of things, inspired and hopeful and looking towards the future. Where I’ve been doesn’t seem anything like as important as where I get to go from here.

Looking back at 2023

(Nimue)

It’s been a momentous year, with some massive upheavals in my life. I learned a lot about myself. Most importantly I learned that I’d been right all along about who I am and what I need to be happy and to flourish. I’ve gone from being a severely stressed, distressed, anxious and malfunctioning person to being a much happier person who is steadily healing. I’ve become able to sleep properly which has made me a lot more bodily well.

This has been all about life with Keith. He allows me the room to be myself, and it turns out that an unstressed me is an easy going person who defaults to being joyful. With space to explore my own needs and feelings, I’ve become a lot more mentally well. His love is supportive, he’s a co-adventurer and a wonderful accomplice for all kinds of glorious things. He’s also someone I can make happy, and discovering my own capacity to delight, uplift and be a good thing has also been a wonderful experience.

I’ve travelled a lot in the UK this year. I’ve walked more than has been possible for many years. I’ve sung and played at events, having reclaimed the viola. I’ve written a lot of fiction and non-fiction alike, with a new non-fic book published back in the summer, the final Hopeless, Maine graphic novel coming out, and having self-published some fiction as well. I’ve been busy, inspired and productive and am setting up for more good stuff next year. I feel like myself – not lost or hurting any more, but able to live in a much more happy and authentic way.

There have been challenges. It’s hardly been an easy year. There have been a lot of practical things to wrangle with, and assorted things that were difficult. We’ve dealt with those as they’ve come, and nothing has proved impossible. There are more challenges ahead in the coming months, we’ll deal with those, too. 

Ir has, without a doubt, been the happiest year of my life so far. 

My main line of thought this time a year ago was that I wanted to prioritise my own happiness. I’ve done that, and it’s been a very good choice. I’d spent too long being persuaded that my own needs didn’t matter much, and I’m not doing that any more. I have a life that allows me to be well and happy, to feel effective and fulfilled. Happy me is a far more creative and productive person than unhappy me was. My confidence has grown alongside my ability to trust my own judgement, and there’s a lot more I can do from here.